    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book II)]
    [September 29, 1994]
    [Pages 1661-1665]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Reception for Senator Edward M. Kennedy in McLean, Virginia
     September 29, 1994

        Thank you so much. Senator and Mrs. Kennedy, the Kennedy family,
    Senator Mitchell and Members of the Senate, Congressmen, Congressman-to-
    be Patrick Kennedy, and Marvin Rosen, and all those who made this night
    possible, I thank you so much for your help for

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    our friend. Chevy Chase, thank you for making us laugh.
        I'll tell you a story about Chevy Chase. I never told this story in
    public before. Don't get that excited, it's not that good. [Laughter] I
    had never met Chevy Chase in my entire life, except on a movie screen.
    And in 1988 or '89, I went up to Long Island in the summertime. Hillary
    and I were up there visiting our friend Liz Robins, who's here tonight.
    And every summertime there's a softball game to raise money between the
    artists and the writers. And they asked me if I would be an umpire in
    this game. And once I realized there were some members of the press
    there and I'd be able to give them grades instead of the other way
    around, I eagerly accepted. Now, at that time--a lot of you won't
    remember this; I hope, at least, you won't remember it, and I hope
    you'll forget after I tell you tonight. [Laughter] I had given a speech
    for Governor Dukakis at the Democratic Convention, which I intend to
    complete here this evening. [Laughter] Anyway--I can't believe I said
    that. [Laughter] The announcer for the ball game was Jim Brady, the guy
    that does that ``Brady's Bits'' in Parade magazine every Sunday, you
    know? He's a delightful man, but when he saw me out there on the mound
    about ready to call balls and strikes, he said--he introduced me--he
    said, ``This is Governor Clinton from Arkansas. He's up here visiting,
    and if he takes as long to make the calls today as he did to speak in
    Atlanta, we'll never get out of here.'' [Laughter] I really appreciated
    that. [Laughter] Anyway, so the game starts, and the next time the sides
    change, I look up in the stands, and this tall guy stands up and walks
    down, comes out to the pitcher's mound, shakes my hand, and says, ``I'm
    Chevy Chase.'' And he said, ``I may be the only person in America
    besides your mother who feels this way, but I liked that speech. Tell
    him to go to hell.'' [Laughter] That's verbatim what he said. [Applause]
    You just applauded for the next ambassador to Great Britain. [Laughter]
        Ladies and gentlemen, you know we all do a lot of these events, and
    a lot of you are the backbone of our party. And sometimes we do them
    with great energy; sometimes we do them with interest; sometimes we do
    them because we know it's the right thing to do and we do them. I am
    here tonight because there is no place else in America I would rather be
    tonight than here in this cause for this good man.
        You know, before I got here I really didn't understand how things so
    often came across in the country so different than they are up here. I
    was another alienated American, even though I was the Governor of my
    State. And I was terribly worried that this country was going in the
    wrong direction, that the people that were running our country were just
    telling the voters what they thought they wanted to hear and avoiding
    all the tough problems--we had had profound social problems building up
    for 30 years, we'd had serious economic problems building up for 20
    years--that we had finally come to the end of the cold war, a time when
    we had an opportunity to take a fresh look at both the opportunities and
    the difficulties of this country at this time, and that we had a window
    here in which we could either secure the American dream for our children
    and our grandchildren and the strength of this country as we move into
    the 21st century, or we could walk away from the responsibilities of our
    generation.
        When I talked to Hillary about running for President, I--in a very
    personal way, I didn't really want to do it. First of all, most of my
    friends thought it was a fool's errand because the incumbent President
    was at over 70 percent approval. Secondly, things were going pretty well
    for us at home, with our family, our friends, and our work. But I did it
    because I thought that we all have an obligation to try to make a
    difference and that we had to change the direction of the country.
        Tonight we come here to honor someone who has always fought to keep
    us going forward in the right direction, who has always fought for hope
    over fear, for reconciliation over division, to bring out the best in us
    instead of to bring out the worst in us. Well, when I came here I knew
    it wouldn't be easy, but I was determined to see that we work together
    to move this country forward, to address our problems, to get things
    done for ordinary Americans.
        Well, it hasn't been easy. There have been some tough times and some
    really brutal fights. But you know, we've made a good start. And now, as
    always happens in these midterm elections, with the issue hanging fire,
    the American people will have to decide whether we will continue this
    rigorous transition into tomorrow.
        Every time we reach a point in history where we're going through big
    changes and the future is not clear, we fight a battle within ourselves.

    [[Page 1663]]

    In that sense, our Nation is very much like a person. If you think about
    your own life, whenever you did anything really different and took on a
    new challenge, it was always with a mixture of hope and fear, when you
    went to school the first day or first went off to college or had your
    first job or first sought elective office or married or had your first
    child. No matter how good a thing is, if it is really big, it is also a
    little scary. Countries are the same way. A delicate balance always has
    to be maintained between hope and fear. And every day we all get up and
    we see things that are happening that we don't like or we're unsure what
    will happen to us. And it's almost as if we have a scale inside us, with
    blind justice holding it, and hope is on one side and fear is on the
    other. And each day it may take a little different balance.
        The job we have between now and election day is to make sure that
    when people wake up on election day, they vote their hopes instead of
    their fears, they vote for tomorrow instead of yesterday, they vote to
    keep going forward, and they vote for Senator Ted Kennedy for reelection
    in Massachusetts.
        We still have a lot to do, but we've made a good start. And we've
    done some very important things by putting our economic house in order,
    giving the American people their first serious attack on crime in a long
    time, and beginning to make this Government work for ordinary citizens.
        If you look at the last 20 months, this Congress--I might add,
    without one single, solitary vote from a member of the other party--the
    Democrats, who were so often attacked as being for big Government and
    spending, voted for a budget that cut $255 billion in Federal spending,
    that reduced the deficit by more than any plan ever adopted in the
    history of the country, that gave us 3 years of deficit reduction in a
    row for the first time since Harry Truman was President. I might add,
    they did it by raising tax rates on only the top 1.2 percent of
    Americans, including most of you in this room tonight. And we thank you
    for staying with us. [Laughter]
        This administration--and it's a great rebuke to those who think
    people only vote their own short-term self-interests; all of you are.
    And I honor you for your presence here tonight and for caring about your
    country and the long-term health and discipline and economic direction
    of what we're trying to do.
        Our administration expanded trade by more than any in the comparable
    time period in the last 30 years. Exports are up, sales are up, and jobs
    are up in export-related areas. And what has all this produced: 4.3
    million new jobs, 93 percent of them in the private sector, unlike the
    ratio in previous years when it's been mostly Government jobs created to
    try to help people deal with the problems of economic fallout. We've had
    8 months of manufacturing job growth in a row for the first time in a
    decade. And just last week, at the annual vote of International
    Economists, for the first time in 9 years, it was the United States of
    America that was voted as having the most productive economy in the
    world. We've got a long way to go, but we've made a good beginning.
        Senator Biden is here. And Senator Kennedy for years has been
    interested in this whole crime issue from his service on the Judiciary
    Committee. But Joe Biden will tell you they talked about crime around
    here for 6 years, but we finally passed the crime bill that is tough
    with punishment, tough in terms of putting 100,000 police on the street,
    but also smart in providing prevention and giving people a chance to
    turn away from lives of crime and giving our young people a chance to
    have something to say yes to. Also, for the first time in my memory we
    put together back-to-back victories with the Brady bill and the assault
    weapons ban, in spite of the ferocious opposition of the NRA. That's a
    pretty good beginning. We've got a long way to go, but it's a pretty
    good beginning.
        If you look at what was done to make Government work for ordinary
    people, in the economic plan, we reformed the college loan program--the
    Secretary of Education is here tonight--making 20 million Americans,
    including over 840,000 in the State of Massachusetts, eligible for low-
    interest loans at longer repayment terms, a stunning benefit for middle
    class kids, not just poor kids, so that no one need ever walk away from
    the challenge of paying for a college education again--you can clap for
    that; Ted Kennedy was for it. [Applause] We have 200,000 more children
    in Head Start; hundreds of thousands of people in Massachusetts alone
    affected by the family leave law which says that if you've got a sick
    parent or you're about to have a child, you can take a little time off
    work without losing your job. We are going to have 2 million

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    more children immunized by 1996, so that all the kids under 2 will be
    immunized and parents can go to work not worrying about whether their
    children are going to be safe from preventable childhood diseases.
    Fifteen million working people and their children are going to get
    income tax cuts because they work hard and they raise their kids but
    they're hovering just above the poverty line, and we do not want them to
    fall into the poverty line and quit working and go on welfare. This is a
    pro-work, pro-family administration making this Government work for
    ordinary citizens again. And it's a good start.
        Finally, let me say to our friends in the other party, I sat out
    there in the heartland of America as the Governor for years and years
    and years, and I heard them talk about how terrible the Federal
    Government was and how big and bloated it was. But we, the Democrats,
    voted to reduce the size of the Federal Government by 272,000, to make
    it the smallest it's been since President Kennedy was in office. We have
    already done over 70,000 of those reductions. And every last red cent of
    reduction in the Federal Government is going to local government and to
    local communities to help them fight crime. That is the record of the
    Democrats in the last 2 years.
        Now, if you compare that to what our opponents have done and what
    they have said, it's a pretty big difference. In the name of
    partisanship, they tried to stop the crime bill. They voted entirely
    against the economic program, a program that gave college loan breaks to
    millions of kids, a program that made 90 percent of the small businesses
    in this country eligible for tax cuts and gave tax reductions to 15
    million working families. They have done everything they could to keep
    us from addressing the health care reform issue in a serious way. You
    needn't take my word for it, only listen to them: Congressman Grandy
    from Iowa saying that they had all been ordered not to cooperate and
    compromise on health care; a Republican Senator quoted in one of our big
    newspapers the other day saying, ``We killed health care, now if we can
    just not get our fingerprints on it''; their political adviser, Mr.
    Kristol, telling them the one thing they must not do is to cooperate to
    bring down health care costs, make health insurance secure for those who
    have it, and cover those who don't because that would be a political
    benefit for the other party. That is their record.
        Now we know what they wish to do if they get the majority. They put
    out their Contract With America, and you know what they did? It looks
    like a contract; it looks like they took out a contract against the
    deficit, a contract against Medicare, a contract against paying for the
    crime bill, a contract against all the gains we have made for ordinary
    Americans in the last 2 years. They want to go back to the way they did
    it before, explode the deficit, tell people what they want to hear, and
    stick it to ordinary Americans. We can do better than that. We have to
    go forward. We have to reelect the people and elect the people who want
    to keep going forward.
        If you just look at the things that Senator Kennedy has been
    involved in just since I have been President--the Head Start program,
    200,000 more children; reforming the education loans; working on
    changing the whole unemployment system to a reemployment system,
    something we haven't finished yet; the Goals 2000 bill, which for the
    first time in the history of America commits us as a nation to world-
    class standards of educational excellence and commits the Federal
    Government not to have a bureaucracy but to give help to local
    grassroots efforts at reform; the national service program, which this
    year has 20,000 young Americans and 2 years from now will have 100,000
    young Americans earning their way to a higher education by serving their
    communities at the grassroots level, not in a bureaucracy but in people
    power that can truly change the course of our country's future--he led
    the way in all of those endeavors. And he deserves a lot of credit for
    it.
        But elections are about the future. If we do a good job, it's just
    what we were hired to do. So why should he be reelected? Because if you
    ever want this country to be able to bring the deficit down without
    breaking the backs of our senior citizens; if you ever want to see a
    time when working people will be secure in their insurance, instead of
    the situation which exists today--this is the only advanced country in
    the world where working families are losing ground in insurance
    coverage. There are 5 million Americans in working families today who
    had health insurance 5 years ago who do not have it today, even though
    we spend 40 percent more of our income than any other country on health
    care. If you want to preserve the integrity of our great medical
    institutions of higher learning, if you want to see health

    [[Page 1665]]

    insurance for all Americans and stability in our economy long-term and
    in our Federal budget long-term, we have got to address the health care
    issue.

        So what if we couldn't do it in a year. Look what's happened since
    I've been here. It took 7 years to pass the Brady bill, 7 years to pass
    family leave, 7 years to pass motor voter, 6 years to pass the crime
    bill. I signed a banking reform bill today that they've been working on
    longer than anybody can remember. We can do this. We will do this. The
    people of Massachusetts, I don't believe, want to send a signal to
    Washington, DC, that they have abandoned health care. I think they want
    to tell us to keep at it until we get it right. And the only way to do
    that is to say, ``Senator Kennedy, stay on the job; keep doing it until
    we get it right.''

        My friends, you will see this election everywhere in America played
    out. Look at Patrick Kennedy's race in Rhode Island. He's running
    against someone who signed the contract, a contract against health care
    reform, for cutting Medicare, for exploding the deficit, for putting the
    Federal budget in a place where they won't even be able to fund the
    crime bill--the same old promises, tell them what they want to hear,
    bad-mouth Government, bad-mouth the people who are the instruments of
    change, and hope you don't get caught. I think the American people are
    smarter than that.

        You know, Ted Kennedy said tonight that he was not the youngest man
    in the Senate race. He was once the youngest man in the Senate for quite
    a long time. Well, I was once the youngest Governor in America by 9
    years. Time has a way of curing those problems--[laughter]--and of
    changing your perspective. But I would like to say something about
    Senator Kennedy and about the United States. He's made enemies in his
    life because he has fought for things. But the things he has fought for
    are things that would help people who are very different from him.
    Ninety-five percent of the people that would have been given the things
    that he was given in life never would have spent their life trying to
    get all that for everybody else in the country. Most of us, given the
    opportunities he had, would have enjoyed them in a very different way.
    They wouldn't have put themselves on the line day in and day out, year
    in and year out.

        This country is also very old as a democracy, but it is forever
    young. When people say they worry about whether we've still got it as a
    country, I say to them: Why do you think the Israelis and the Arabs want
    to come here and have us work with them to end the decades of horrible
    fighting in the Middle East? Why do you think that after literally
    hundreds of years of fighting, the Catholics and the Protestants in
    Northern Ireland, and the British and the Irish wish the Americans to be
    involved in the peace process? Why did Mr. Mandela and Mr. de Klerk want
    the United States to spend a few million dollars of our tax money to
    help them develop an election that would really work? Even in the 11th
    hour of our crisis in Haiti a little over a week ago, when the
    delegation was down there meeting with the military leaders and they
    realized finally that we meant business, one of them said, ``Well, if
    the President is determined to do this and the United Nations is
    determined to act, at least we want the United States here; we trust
    them, we know they can be trusted. We know what they represent.'' Why?
    Because the right things, my fellow Americans, never get old.

        And I was sitting here looking at Ted Kennedy give that speech
    tonight, and I saw it literally moving his entire being. And I said to
    myself, let the people who disagree with him disagree. Let the people
    who say he's wrong on the issues say that. But let no one doubt that he
    may be the youngest person running for the Senate in any State this
    year, because he believes in things that are forever young.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 9:30 p.m. at the Kennedy residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to host Marvin Rosen and comedian Chevy Chase.