    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book II)]
    [October 15, 1994]
    [Pages 1779-1782]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Dinner in Miami,
    Florida
    October 15, 1994

        Thank you very much. There's nothing left for me to say. [Laughter]
    You know, Hillary kind of got into that zone that sometimes you get
    into, and she was just hitting on all cylinders. And I felt very much
    like I did the first time I ever gave a public speech as an elected
    official over 18 years ago. I went to a Rotary Club installation banquet
    in south Arkansas as attorney general. And it was the first time I'd
    ever spoken since I'd been elected, and I was nervous as a cat. There
    were 500 people there; we started at 6:30. Everybody got introduced in
    the whole crowd, except three people; they went home mad. [Laughter] And
    I got introduced to speak about a quarter to 10. And the only guy more
    nervous than me was the guy introducing me, and he said, ``You know, we
    could stop here and have had a nice evening.'' And when I heard Hillary
    hitting her stride, I thought, we ought to stop here, we'll have a nice
    evening. [Laughter]
        Let me say, first, to Hugh and to Carol, thank you, thank you so
    much not only for this evening but for all the days and all the nights
    that you have helped to advance the cause of the Democratic Party and of
    our administration and all the things that you have given to your
    country out of a genuine desire to make things better for other people.
    I thank you so much, and I'm honored to be here in your home tonight.
        I want to thank the Members of Congress who are here, Senator
    Daschle, who was here, and Congresswoman Meek and Congressman Hastings,
    Congressman Torricelli, who's come all the way from New Jersey, and say
    how very glad I am to be here. I want to echo the sentiments of my wife
    about my fine brother-in-law; I may have a little more to say about that
    in a moment. And I want to thank my long-time friend Bob Graham. You
    know, I told somebody not very long ago, someone--I don't even know how
    the conversation came up, but it got around to the fact that I'd known
    Bob Graham a long time. And this person who was talking to me had not
    known him a long time and was marveling about how much money he had
    raised as chairman of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. I said,
    ``Well, it doesn't surprise me because he gets more done than anybody I
    know, and secondly, he's had me at every crossroads in the United States
    at these fundraisers.'' [Laughter]
        I was a Governor for a good long while. Some days I wish I still
    were--[laughter]--but rarely. I served with 150 American citizens, men
    and women, who were Governors. And I can say without any qualification
    that he is one of the 5 ablest people I ever served with as a Governor
    out of that 150. But he has a weakness that I also have, apparently, and
    that is that on occasion, we're better doers than we are talkers.

    [[Page 1780]]

    And the crowd we're running against are a whole lot better talkers than
    they are doers. And part of the reason is, they have more time to think
    about what they're going to say because they spend so little time
    worrying about what they're going to do.
        And I must say, just for example, our friends here in Florida--I
    didn't carry Florida in the last election, but I worked hard to do a
    good job for Florida. We've worked hard not to let Hurricane Andrew be
    forgotten. We've worked hard to get Homestead rebuilt and regenerated
    and revitalized. We worked hard to save the space station and the space
    program, which is so important to central Florida; to settle the
    American Airlines strike, which is very important down here. Florida was
    one of the States that got permission to slash through all the Federal
    rules and regulations to try to find new and innovative ways to control
    health care costs and cover more people without health insurance and to
    reform the welfare system and to move people from welfare to work. And
    that's just a beginning.
        I'd also remind everybody, with Mr. Torricelli here, that until I
    really got behind the Cuban Democracy Act, along with Democrat
    Torricelli and Democrat Graham, we couldn't find the Republicans and
    where they were on that legislation or what they were doing.
        So I don't know if any of that will register in this election,
    because they talk very well. But I want you to think tonight about what
    you can do in the next 4 weeks, maybe in a nonfinancial way, in the
    States in which you live to change the outcome of the election, or in
    the cases where we're winning, to reinforce the outcome of the election.
        You heard Hillary make the case, but the fact is, I ran for
    President to be a different sort of President. I did not expect that the
    environment in Washington would be as partisan as it turned out to be. I
    never dreamed I'd see grown people actually get up and willfully kill
    bills that they themselves were for, just to make sure that nobody else
    got credit for helping. I thought that was something that children did
    in a play yard. I didn't dream grownups would do it, and I sure didn't
    dream that anybody could get away with doing it.
        I wanted to go to Washington to get this economy going again, to get
    our people together again, to make that Government work for ordinary
    citizens again. And I think we've made a good start. We have brought the
    deficit down; we've got the economy up. When Bob Graham cast the
    decisive vote on the economic plan--all the Republicans voted against
    it, and they said, ``If this thing passes, the economy is down the
    tubes; if this thing passes, we'll lose jobs and the deficit will go
    up.'' Well, they've been telling us that fairytale for 12 years. We
    tried it their way for 12 years, and they quadrupled the national debt
    and drove the economy in the ditch. We changed our policy, we reversed
    trickle-down economics, and we've had 4.6 million jobs and 3 years of
    deficit reduction for the first time since Harry Truman was the
    President of the United States.
        When we tried to pass family and medical leave, they wanted to
    filibuster it. They said it would be bad for small business. Well, we
    passed family and medical leave, we joined over 100 other countries that
    had already done it, and guess what? We've had record new incorporations
    of small business and record small business profits. It hasn't hurt
    anything, but it's helped a lot of working people to be home when their
    babies were born or their parents were sick. That's the truth.
        When we changed the whole college loan program to lower the interest
    rates and string out the repayment terms so that every middle class
    person in this country could afford to go to college, not a single one
    of them helped, not a one, zero. But we kept going, trying to make this
    thing work.
        Then we got to our trade initiatives, and we actually had a
    bipartisan effort on NAFTA, and I thought, ``This thing is turning
    around.'' And then late last year, the Senate voted 95 to 4 for a crime
    bill; the Republicans voted 42 to 2 for it. So we finally got it through
    the House, and we brought it back to the Senate, and we were going to
    have a vote on the final crime bill. It was really very much like what I
    campaigned on for President and what they voted for a year ago. But
    instead of being 42 to 2 for it, they were 38 to 6 against it. Why?
    Because it was close to election, and they cared more about defeating an
    administration initiative to make our streets safer than they did making
    the American people safer. So if they had had their way--2 weeks ago I
    signed that crime bill; we have already released funding for 250 more
    police officers for Florida, 95 of them in Dade and Broward County
    alone--if they had had

    [[Page 1781]]

    their way, they wouldn't be here. But they are here; they are here. And
    there will be more.
        So you have to make a choice in this election, not just to
    contribute but what you're going to do in the next 4 weeks. We're
    bringing the economy back; we're making the Government work for ordinary
    people; we're moving into the future. Are there still things to be done?
    You bet there are. There are still jobs to be created. There are still
    people who are working hard and never get a raise. There are still
    problems in our inner cities and isolated rural areas. There is still a
    new trade agreement that we have to adopt. We still have to have the
    Summit of the Americas and try to create a whole new explosion of
    economic opportunity in our backyard. We've still got to pass welfare
    reform. We still have to address the health care crisis. Another million
    Americans lost their health insurance this year; almost every single one
    of them was a worker or the child of a worker. So yes, there are
    problems. But we are clearly moving in the right direction.
        And the alternative is about as stark as it can be. Look at what
    happened in the last week of the Congress. You all know what the
    filibuster is; if a bill gets filibustered it means it takes 60 Senators
    instead of 51 to pass it. In the 1800's, we had an average of one
    filibuster every 6 years. In the 1900's, we've had an average of one
    filibuster a year. In the last days of the Congress, there were four
    filibusters on four different issues on one day. Why?
        They filibustered the Superfund bill to clean up the waste dumps of
    the country. You know, it's the only bill I ever saw that everybody was
    for. The chemical companies were for it, the labor unions that worked
    for them were for it, and the Sierra Club was for it. I thought there
    must have been something wrong with it; everybody was for it. The only
    people in America who were against it were the Republican Senators. Why?
    Because they would have rather denied a Democrat the opportunity to say
    from a platform like this, ``I helped to clean up toxic waste dumps,''
    even if they had to leave the poison in the ground. Nobody else was
    against it.
        They killed campaign finance reform. They killed lobby reform. They
    killed a bill they've been crowing about for years, saying they wanted
    it, that would have required Congress to live under the same laws that
    Congress imposes on private employers. I always thought that would be a
    great thing for Congress to pass. And if ever there was a bill that
    every Republican ought to hallelujah to, that was it. But they killed
    it. Why? Because they didn't want anybody else to say they had a role in
    that.
        Now you have to decide not just where the check goes but what you
    feel in your heart about what you want for your country. I'm telling
    you, it's time to turn the lights on in this country. We've got to get
    people out of this idea that everything's going wrong and things are
    bad. The economy's coming back; we're assaulting our problems; we're
    moving into the future with confidence. The only thing that can derail
    us is rewarding the kind of misbehavior we saw in the last week of this
    session of Congress, and we have to stand up to it. And you have to
    decide.
        What about their Contract With America? Have you seen it? It's a
    trillion dollars in promises: ``We're going to balance the budget and
    increase defense and revitalize Star Wars.'' And when you say, ``How are
    you going to pay for it?'' they say, ``We'll tell you after the
    election.'' It's just like what they did before, a trillion dollars'
    worth of promises. How will it be paid for? You know how it will:
    exploding the deficit, sending our jobs overseas, cutting Medicare, not
    funding those police officers you need here to fight crime and drugs and
    gangs. That's what will happen. And we'll have this economy in a ditch
    again just like they did last time if you ratify the contract, not those
    of you in this room but everybody you know in this country. This
    contract on America is nothing more than the second verse of trickle-
    down economics. We tried it; we saw it; it did not work.
        So the choice is clear: Are we going forward, or are we going to go
    back? Are we going to give in to all this sort of naysaying and
    negativism and all the things they say? You know, they talk about how
    liberal and out of step the administration is. If you had a Republican
    administration that cut the deficit, presided over an expansion that
    produced 4.6 million new jobs, got tough on law and order, and began to
    clean up some of this country's most serious problems, they would be
    asking you to canonize them, wouldn't they? I don't want you to canonize
    me. I just want you to vote for good people for Congress so we can keep
    going forward and facing our problems and moving into the future.
        You know, this is a very exciting time to be alive. Look at what
    happened in Haiti today.

    [[Page 1782]]

    Look at the progress we're making in the Middle East, even in the face
    of the terrible murder of that young Israeli soldier. Look at the
    progress in Northern Ireland. Look at the progress in South Africa. Look
    at the fact that all these heads of democratically elected nations are
    coming here to south Florida to the Summit of the Americas and they want
    to build a new future with us. This is a wonderful time to be alive and
    to be seizing this incredible array of opportunities.
        And what we have to do is just simply to say in the next month: We
    have thought about this; we have seen it. We have a path to the future
    that is working and a ticket to the past that didn't work the first
    time. We will take what works and say no thank you to people who want to
    play on our fears, divide us against one another. While the Democrats
    are seeking to empower people in the new direction we are seeking, they
    just want to grab power. We're going to say, no thank you, let's build
    tomorrow and make it better than today.
        Thank you very much, and God bless you all.
        I want you to clap one more time for Bob Graham. This is a plaque
    which recognizes the fact that he has done a much better job than
    anybody who ever held this job before him. And you've already heard that
    this is the first time we've ever been able to give the maximum
    contribution to 19 of our Senate Democratic candidates. And it's
    because, like everything else he ever did, Bob Graham got the job done.
    Thank you very much. [Applause]

    Note: The President spoke at 10:50 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Hugh and Carol Westbrook and
    Florida senatorial candidate Hugh Rodham.