[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[May 20, 1994]
[Pages 965-969]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Fundraiser for Senator Dianne Feinstein in Beverly Hills, 
California
May 20, 1994

    Thank you very much to my friend Willie Brown and to Sally Field for 
those wonderful comments, to Ron and Jan Burkle for inviting us here to 
their beautiful place, to Dick Blum and all the other supporters of 
Senator Feinstein's campaign.
    There are two remarkable things about this evening for me. The first 
is, this is the third time I have been here, and every time I come, when 
I go back to the White House, I feel like I'm in reasonably nice public 
housing. [Laughter] The second thing is that I want Dianne Feinstein to 
be reelected so badly that I have spoken at two of her fundraisers, but 
this is the first one where she's showed up. [Laughter] It's a humbling 
job I've got. [Laughter]
    You know, Hollywood discovers stars all the time, and now America is 
beginning to discover Dianne Feinstein. [Applause] You can clap for 
that. She's sort of replacing Tommy Lasorda as the person people think 
of when they think of California. [Laughter] You know, before I started 
running for President, that's what I thought of in California. I'd see 
Tommy Lasorda getting smaller and smaller and smaller on television, 
saying he'd shrunk himself with that Slim-Fast. That's what we're trying 
to pour into the Federal budget. [Laughter] Now the deficit is down; the 
Dodgers are in first place. I've asked Lasorda to take over the lobbying 
for health care reform. [Laughter]
    I don't know--before we get to Dianne's main event we'll have to 
watch this primary with Bill Dannemeyer and Michael Huffington, who 
spent $5\1/2\ million of his own money in the last election. And now 
he's spent $2 million to go on television to review Bill Bennett's book. 
I don't know how she can hope to meet and defeat a person who is 
foursquare for virtue. But I want to say a little more about that in a 
moment. I think Dianne Feinstein works for virtue and embodies virtue, 
and I hope she will be returned on that basis.
    I want to say something serious, if I might. This is a, actually, 
kind of tough day for me to give a speech. I had the opportunity, as 
Senator Feinstein said, to go with her and Senator Boxer and others to 
the Inland Empire today to talk about how we could revitalize San 
Bernardino after the Norton Air Force Base closure and what is being 
done there, which is truly astonishing, and then to go to UCLA and speak 
to some wonderful young people at their

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convocation. But this is a sad day for Hillary and for me because Jackie 
Kennedy Onassis passed away last night, and she was not only a great 
symbol of courage and grace and dignity for our country, but she was a 
real friend of ours and a special friend of my wife and very kind to our 
wonderful daughter. And like many of you, when I heard last night that 
she had lost her fight, my mind began to race over the last 30 years, 
back to how it was then, back to how it is now, back and forth, what 
happened in between.
    One thing that Jackie and John Kennedy surely did was to make us all 
believe that somehow together we could make a difference, that what we 
did mattered, that our role as citizens was important, and that if we 
gave ourselves to public service, that was the sign of good judgment and 
compassion. It was a fine thing to do. In other words, we lived in a 
time then when there was much less cynicism and pessimism and skepticism 
and in which public discourse was a thing of honor, not a shouting match 
bent on destruction and division and distraction.
    I honestly believe that our ability to bring this country into the 
21st century as strong as it needs to be and as united as it needs to be 
depends perhaps more than anything else on our uncommon strength of 
purpose which we have mustered in times past, this time to muster on our 
own state of mind, to fight against all the forces that seek to drag us 
down and pit us against one another, and to somehow elevate our sense of 
common purpose.
    It isn't easy, and there are lots of folks who hope it won't happen 
for all kinds of reasons. But if you think about this race in which 
Dianne Feinstein is involved, it is an example of what we plainly have 
to do. I'll never forget last fall when she was fighting for the assault 
weapons ban. And she called and she said, ``Now, you said you were for 
this, Mr. President, and I want you to help me.'' And I said, ``Well, 
Dianne, we're probably not going to win, but I'll work like crazy for 
it.'' So, she gave me my list to call, and call I did. [Laughter] And 
then, that incredibly sensitive Senator on the other side of the issue 
said that--[laughter]--she needed to become a little more familiar with 
firearms and their deadly characteristics. You all remember what she 
said in return. She recalled how she became the mayor of San Francisco, 
how she tried to find the pulse of her slain colleague, how she had been 
trained in the shooting of a firearm when she had terrorist attacks, 
with a bomb in her house when her husband was dying, when her windows 
were shot out.
    Well, I don't know if that other guy's made a speech on the floor of 
the Senate since then. [Laughter] But I do know that speech had 
something to do not only with the passage of the assault weapons ban but 
with changing the tone and tenor of the debate in the United States 
Senate over an issue of immense national importance.
    When we were trying to get the assault weapons bill passed in the 
House--same song, second verse--Charles Schumer, a wonderful Congressman 
from Brooklyn, had carried this bill and had been defeated by 70 votes 
in 1991. Some significant changes were made in the bill; it was 
clarified and tightened up a bit. And we even did something that had 
never been done before, we listed several hundred purely hunting and 
sporting weapons that were protected under this law. And Senator 
Feinstein went to work and Chuck Schumer went to work. And so Chuck 
called me, and he said, ``Well, Mr. President, we really need your help. 
We're probably 40 votes behind and we can't get there, but we ought to 
try.'' And I said, ``I'd be happy to lose in this cause, but don't be 
too sure that we can't make it.''
    Well, you all know what happened. But I wish I could tell you all 
the stories that produced that 216-to-214 vote victory. One of the 
clearer reasons was that a conservative Republican from Illinois who is 
very much respected among his party members, Henry Hyde, was undecided 
when Dianne Feinstein sent him a big, fat briefing book which included a 
list of the assault weapons shootings in Illinois since 1991. Henry Hyde 
stunned the entire Congress by announcing that he had changed his 
position, he was going to vote for the ban. And he credited Dianne 
Feinstein for providing him with convincing information.
    When that happened, then other things started to happen. First one, 
then another person would announce for the bill. A Congressman from 
Michigan in a hunting area, who had never in 20 years in Congress, never 
cast one vote against the NRA, changed his position. Two Democrats from 
difficult constituencies, one of whom was an ex-police officer, changed 
their vote walking down the aisle to cast their ballot, people knowing 
they were putting their careers

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at risk because they grew weary of the shouting and pushing and the 
division and the rhetoric and they wished something to happen. And in 
doing that, they ennobled the whole public enterprise again. They made 
us all believe that, yes, we can, together, make a difference.
    I ran for President, as I told those young people at UCLA today, 
because I thought my generation did not finish its work for America, 
because I did not want to see my daughter grow up to be part of the 
first generation of Americans to do worse than their parents in a 
country that was coming apart when it ought to be coming together, 
because I always felt that we could restore the purpose of America and 
the promise of America if we committed ourselves together to create 
opportunity, to insist upon responsibility from our citizens, and to 
reestablish the common bonds of community in this country.
    That's what I think Dianne Feinstein is doing. You know, she's been 
criticized lately on the television for voting for our economic plan 
last year. Let me tell you why that was such a tough vote. It was such a 
tough vote because in Washington for so long we had heard nothing but 
hot air rhetoric instead of reality about what it took to get the 
deficit down.
    My fellow Americans, there are only three ways to get the deficit 
down. One is to raise taxes; the other is to cut spending; the third is 
to grow the economy. We did all three with that economic program. And it 
was the right thing to do. In the first 15 months of this administration 
there have been 3 million new jobs, one million alone in the first 4 
months of this year. We will have, when the Congress passes this year's 
budget, 3 years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since 
Harry Truman was President of the United States of America. At the end 
of 5 years, we will have reduced the size of the Federal Government to a 
point where it is below 2 million people for the first time since John 
Kennedy was President. And all the savings will be put into a trust fund 
to pay for the crime bill to make our streets safer. That is what we 
have been doing in Washington.
    Yes, Senator Feinstein voted for the bill, and so did Senator Boxer. 
And I guess you could say if either one of them hadn't, we wouldn't have 
had it. Then we would have had what we've been having for 12 years: a 
lot of rhetoric, no reduction in the deficit, no reduction in interest 
rates, no growth in the economy. But people would still be able to make 
speeches. You have to decide whether you want real progress and tough 
decisions made or more of what you had before. It wasn't very good for 
the California economy, and we're beginning to turn that around.
    You know, one of the things we have to decide is what standard we 
are going to require in our public discourse. I know when I see an 
advertisement running against a Senator like Dianne Feinstein, saying 
that this program was just a tax bill--well, let me tell you, 300,000 
people or a little more than 2 percent of your taxpayers, including 
nearly everybody in this room--[laughter]--paid more.
    You need to know that 100 percent of that money, 100 percent of it, 
went to bringing the deficit down. You also need to know that 2 million 
of your fellow citizens actually got an income tax cut, 15 percent of 
the Californians. Why? Because they're low-wage workers with children 
who are hovering just above the poverty line, and we want to encourage 
them to stay in the work force instead of going on welfare. I think most 
Americans think that's a good investment.
    Ninety percent of the small businesses in this country qualified for 
tax cuts under the bill. California was helped by the capital gains tax 
for investments in new enterprises, by the research and experimentation 
tax credit, by--now because your college costs have gone up--the 
availability of lower cost college loans with longer repayment terms. 
That's what was in that economic program that Dianne Feinstein voted for 
that had the most deficit reduction in history. I don't think it's fair 
to characterize it as a tax bill, and I don't think it furthers the 
public debate. All it does is further the present state of high rhetoric 
and division.
    I made a remark a few moments ago about the publicity about Bill 
Bennett's book. Some of you probably haven't read it, but it basically 
quotes other people on virtues. You can't run a democracy without an 
addiction to truth and to fairness. What Dianne Feinstein deserves is 
truth and fairness. If she gets it, she'll be overwhelmingly reelected.
    Senator Feinstein talked a little about breaking gridlock. That's 
one of the things I was hired to do. It took 7 years to pass the Family 
and Medical Leave Act, 7 years to pass the Brady bill, 5 years to get a 
crime bill. That's

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how long it takes to get things done in Washington. It's taken us about 
a year to 15 months to get a lot of these things done. We are turning 
these things around.
    I'd also like to say that Dianne Feinstein is one of the most 
effective lobbyists of anybody in Congress. I said today--lobbying the 
President, that is--[laughter]--I said today when she and Barbara Boxer 
come after me at the same time, it's sort of like Mutt and Jeff, you 
know. [Laughter] And it's like--I feel almost as if they've got this 
gigantic fingernail file that they're putting on my head and rubbing it, 
you know. And if I will just say yes, they will stop. [Laughter] I mean, 
``Just Say Yes,'' that's what they want me to do. This is a serious 
issue. You don't know how I've suffered from this. [Laughter] It is 
literally true that no Member of the Senate has called me more 
persuasively, more frequently for projects that would create jobs, deal 
with the crime problem, or deal with the immigration problem in a 
responsible way than Dianne Feinstein, nobody in the Congress. She's 
helped me to change the whole approach of the national bureaucracy on 
defense conversion and base closings so that we can turn closed bases 
into economic oases for the 21st century.
    She has helped me to pass a crime bill that has not just this 
assault weapons ban but a bill to provide 100,000 more police officers 
for our streets, not only to catch criminals but to keep crime from 
happening by working with the children and the neighbors and the people 
in the community; that has not only tougher punishment with the ``three 
strikes and you're out'' law but also more prevention to give our kids 
something to say yes to and a chance to turn away from a life of 
violence and to turn away from resolving their differences in a 
destructive way toward finding constructive ways of dealing with 
problems and frustrations and anger. This is a very important piece of 
legislation.
    You heard Sally talk about the California Desert Protection Act. 
That also has been bottled up for 7 years. And after she came to the 
Senate, it passed 69 to 29. You wonder what it was doing for the last 7 
years.
    On this immigration issue, you're going to hear a lot about it 
during this campaign, and you'll probably hear the incumbent Governor 
putting a lot of pressure on me to do more. I don't mind that. I don't 
think the States have been treated fairly who have had large immigration 
problems, not just California, but Florida and New York and New Jersey 
and other States. They have not been treated fairly or adequately. But 
I'll tell you this, in the last year we got more money for California in 
education, health care, and border patrol officers dealing with the cost 
of immigration than had been the case in the previous 4 years. We are 
doing better. We are moving in the right direction, thanks to the fact 
that Dianne Feinstein has taken a responsible, constructive approach, 
not just a rhetorical, pressure-oriented approach. She is doing 
something that makes sense, that will actually make a dent in this 
problem. And she ought to be rewarded for it.
    So I say to you, this Senator, in a remarkably short period of time, 
has established herself as a national leader on the economy, on crime, 
on the environment, on immigration. That's an amazing record in no more 
time than she's been there. And she's had the courage to challenge her 
colleagues and her President to produce, to lower our guards, to trust 
each other, to talk through these problems.
    One of the things that I felt very strongly, having been a Governor, 
was something I know Dianne felt, having been a mayor, and that is that 
most of our problems that we face now as a country and as a people, do 
not fall easily within the past labels of partisanship.
    You know, I'll just tell you a story that just tore my heart out. 
Last week I was on my way to what I thought would be a wonderful day in 
Indianapolis to dedicate a site for a statue honoring Martin Luther King 
and Robert Kennedy on the site where Robert Kennedy spoke in 
Indianapolis on April 4, 1968, the night Martin Luther King was killed. 
And some of you may remember that magnificent speech which calmed the 
crowds in Indianapolis and made it one of the major cities in America 
where there was not a riot after Dr. King's assassination. And I was so 
excited. And Ethel Kennedy went with me, and two of Martin Luther King's 
sons went with me. And they had just come back from South Africa. And 
they were ebullient, and we were all so happy. And it's a wonderful 
thing, this statue's going to be made out of metal melted down from guns 
turned in by gun buy-back programs sponsored by the Indiana Pacers. It's 
very exciting. And I picked up my notes and read yet another story of 
another human tragedy. A 13-year-old boy in Greenbelt, Maryland, right 
outside Washington, had just won a scholarship to a prestigious school, 
stand-


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ing on a street corner waiting for a bus, shot dead when he got caught 
in the crossfire between two groups of warring youngsters, neither of 
whom knew him or gave a rip about him. He just happened to be in the 
way.
    Now, when I hear that story, or when I get yet another letter from 
somebody telling me they can never change jobs because they've got a 
child with a terrible illness and their preexisting condition won't 
allow any other employer to give them health insurance, or when somebody 
talks to me like they did in San Bernardino today about whether there 
are going to be enough jobs for their children there after the base 
closings, it just seems to me that those are the things that our public 
discourse ought to be concentrated on. When I looked at those kids at 
UCLA today, that's what I thought.
    You know, in this country today--it's going to be a great test for 
Willie Brown with his new talk show--most people--I'm serious, I'm 
serious--he's a delightful man with a wonderful personality, he'll pull 
it off. But the truth is that most people who talk sense and try to 
bring out the best in folks today are not great commercial successes. If 
you want to immediately become a popular culture figure, just bad-mouth 
somebody; they'll give you a talk show. You think about it. We have to 
fight against that.
    I want to end where I began. If you think about what the Kennedys 
meant to us a generation ago, they were able to do that because we had 
inside a willingness, a willing heart, a listening ear, a willingness to 
be summoned to higher purposes, a willingness to believe that we could 
come together, a willingness to believe that we could make a difference. 
You all still have that here. You can feel it here tonight. Those kids 
at UCLA--62 percent of the student body now minority students, they're 
in the majority, just as they will be in many States within a very few 
years--you could feel it there. What we owe to our country is to change 
the heart of the country. We just simply cannot be, with all these 
challenges before us, all of which, by the way, can be met with 
sufficient effort and thought and constancy, we cannot afford to be 
divided, diverted, distracted. We cannot.
    We have to have our hearts and our ears and our eyes open. We have 
to stop shouting at each other and start talking with each other. And we 
surely have to make a beginning by retaining in public life those people 
who have devoted themselves to actually doing something that makes a 
difference.
    You will rarely find anybody who has served in the United States 
Senate for 6 or 12 years who has been involved in so many things that 
make a difference as has Dianne Feinstein in her very short tenure 
there. I hope you will renew it and extend it. The Nation needs it, and 
it will be good for the spirit of California and the feeling that we 
have to bring back to our whole country.
    Thank you very much, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:20 p.m. at the Green Acres Estate. In his 
remarks, he referred to Willie Brown, California State Assembly speaker; 
actress Sally Field; Ron and Jan Burkle, fundraiser hosts; Richard Blum, 
Senator Feinstein's husband; Tommy Lasorda, manager, Los Angeles Dodgers 
baseball team; Bill Dannemeyer and Michael Huffington, candidates for 
the Republican senatorial nomination; and William Bennett, former 
Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.