[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book II)]
[September 25, 1994]
[Pages 1620-1626]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Dinner in New 
York City
September 25, 1994

    Thank you very much. Congressman Fazio, thank you, first of all, for 
the absolutely wonderful job you have done in the leadership of the 
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. That is very often a 
thankless task. It requires a Member of Congress to travel a long way 
from home, even when he or she may need to be home. And Vic has done it; 
Judy has worked hard; they have been brilliant. And I am very, very 
grateful for what they have done. I'd also like to thank Sumner Redstone 
and Phyllis and all the rest of you who have done your part to make this 
night a success. And I thank all the Members of the Congress who are 
here who are my partners in this effort to change our country and move 
it forward.
    I want to talk a little tonight about why this election is important 
and why we need not simply your contributions but your commitment to 
work and to talk and to reach your friends in the next several weeks.
    Two years ago, I was involved in a campaign for President that 
started almost 3 years ago now. Up until that time, I was living at 
home, doing my job as Governor of my State, serving my fifth term. Our 
economy was finally beginning to grow much more rapidly than the 
Nation's, after a decade of working to turn it around. I was as happy as 
I had ever been, personally and professionally, and I felt immensely 
committed to the work I was doing.
    I left that job and embarked on what a lot of people thought was a 
fool's errand. The incumbent President was then at 70 percent in the 
polls or more. I did it because I did not believe our country was facing 
up to the challenges of the post-cold-war world. I did not believe we 
were doing what we needed to do to move into the 21st century the 
strongest and greatest country in the world, keeping the American dream 
alive for our children. I thought the leadership of the other party was 
taking us in the wrong direction.

[[Page 1621]]

    I watched for 12 years while we talked about how terrible Government 
spending was and quadrupled the national debt. I watched people talk 
about how they wanted term limits and then be willing to say anything in 
the wide world to get elected so they could keep drawing a Government 
check. I watched people talk about the idea of America and then try to 
divide Americans by race, by region, by religion. I watched people say 
they represented the interests of ordinary Americans and then raise 
taxes on the middle class, lower them on the wealthiest Americans, and 
still not invest in our country, in fact, reduced investment in 
education and training and the things that will enable ordinary 
Americans to compete and win in the global economy.
    And I also believed there needed to be some change in the way both 
parties worked in Washington. I would, like most Americans do, get a lot 
of my news by sitting at home at night and looking at the television 
news or reading the newspaper. And I would often think that the sound 
bites, the clips that came across the airwaves, didn't bear much 
relationship to the world I live in and the people I lived around and 
the concerns that the people I represented had.
    Politics in Washington seemed to me to be unduly negative, unduly 
partisan, and frankly, unduly abstract and divorced from the way people 
are. I thought that we needed a conception of the role of our National 
Government in our lives that was somewhat different than the debate 
often seemed to be. I didn't think that Government could answer all the 
problems or be a savior, but neither did I think Government could sit on 
the sidelines or just sort of enter the game when there were particular 
interests that needed to be protected.
    It seems to me that we ought to learn to believe in our Government 
again as an extension of ourselves, as our partner, that in a world that 
is properly and thankfully dominated by private sector and free markets, 
the Government ought not to do things that others can do as well or 
better. But there are some things the Government has to do to ensure 
opportunity for Americans, to enable Americans to assume personal 
responsibility for their own welfare and that of their families, and to 
rebuild this almost mystical thing we know as the American community.
    We're going into a period of profound change, and the dimensions of 
the future are not fully clear to anybody. But it is obvious to me that 
the success of this country will depend as much as anything else on our 
spirit, on our attitude, on whether we believe we can make change our 
friend and not our enemy, on whether we believe that our diversity is a 
source of strength and unity and not weakness and division, and on 
whether we are willing to have the discipline as well as the courage and 
vision to pay the price of time, because many of the conditions with 
which we must deal did not arise overnight and cannot be erased 
overnight.
    After 12 years in which I thought this country was not led very 
well, because we were divided instead of united and because we weren't 
going forward, we were going backward economically, I thought we could 
change all that. So I ran for President. And I got elected. And I have 
to tell you that if you ask me to evaluate how well we've done in the 
last 20 months, I think we have done an excellent job of moving the 
country forward. But I still haven't figured out how to bring the 
country together given the obstacles to honest, open, clear debate and 
the obstacles of people even getting the information about what is going 
on.
    If on the day I was inaugurated President I had given an Inaugural 
Address that said, 20 months from now, folks, consistent with my 
campaign commitments, we will put our economic house in order; we will 
have cut the deficit by a record amount, over $500 billion, much more 
than it was going to be cut under the previous administration in their 
plans; we would have way over $250 billion in spending cuts; we would 
abolish scores of Government programs outright; we would raise taxes on 
the wealthiest 1.2 percent of Americans, including virtually everybody 
in this room--thanks for sticking with us--[laughter]--but we would 
lower taxes on more than 10 times as many Americans, 15 million of them 
living in families where people are working and raising children just 
above the poverty line, and we don't want them to give up on work and go 
on welfare, we want them to succeed as workers and parents; that we 
would make 90 percent of the small businesses in this country eligible 
for a tax cut; that we would reduce the Federal bureaucracy to its 
smallest size since John Kennedy was President--the other guys always 
talked about hating the Government, but it got bigger

[[Page 1622]]

under them--we made it smaller; and that we would have 3 years of 
deficit reduction in a row for the first time since President Truman was 
in office, if I had told you that 20 months ago, you'd say, ``There's 
another one of those politicians making promises that he can't keep.'' 
But that is exactly what we have done. That is the record of this 
administration and this Congress.
    If I had said, in 20 months we will have more expansion of world 
trade than at any time in the last 35 years; the Federal Government will 
get back on the side of American business and American workers in trying 
to compete and win in the global marketplace; we'll have a strategy for 
aerospace, a strategy for shipbuilding, a strategy for automobiles, a 
strategy for high tech; we will take $30 billion off the list of things 
we can't sell overseas and start selling them; we will sell in 
California everything from rice to apples in Japan for the very first 
time; we will pass NAFTA and trade will increase to Mexico 17 percent in 
one year alone, we'll actually be adding autoworkers in America because 
of our expansion of trade with our neighbor to the south; if I had told 
you all that, you'd say, ``Well, that sounds good, but you can't do 
it.'' But that is in fact the record of this administration, and that is 
what has been done.
    And the result has been--if I had told you this, you'd have really 
thought I was nuts: 4.3 million new jobs in 20 months, over 90 percent 
of them in the private sector in contrast with the record of the 
previous decade; 8 months of manufacturing job growth in a row for the 
first time in 10 years; and for the first time in 9 years America was 
voted in the Annual Review of International Economists as the most 
productive economy in the world, the number one economy in the world, 
for the first time in 9 years. That is the record of the last 20 months 
that this Congress has helped this administration to make, working with 
the American people.
    If I had said that in 20 months we will pass more education and 
training reform legislation than in any comparable period in the last 20 
years--200,000 more young people in Head Start; the Goals 2000 bill 
which establishes national standards for the performance of our schools 
and promotes grassroots reforms to achieve them; a national program to 
help every State have a system for moving the kids who don't go to 
college into high-wage jobs with extra training and apprenticeships; a 
dramatic reform of the student loan program which has made 20 million 
Americans eligible to refinance their college loans at lower fees, lower 
interest rates, and longer repayment terms; 100,000 young Americans over 
3 years in national service solving the problems of America at home and 
earning money against their college education--if I had told you that, 
you might not have believed it, but that is the record of this Congress. 
That's exactly what they've done in just 20 months, and the American 
people need to know it. And when they do, they will reward them for 
having done it.
    Now, if I had said, while we weren't doing those other things, we 
broke 7 years of gridlock and passed the family and medical leave law so 
people can have a little time off from work when their kids are born or 
when their parents are sick without losing their jobs; 7 years of 
gridlock and passed the Brady bill; 6 years of gridlock and passed a 
crime bill that had, almost to the specifics, everything I recommended 
in the campaign of 1992: 100,000 more police on the street--there are 
only 550,000 of them there today--100,000 more police on the street, 
100,000 more prison cells for violent criminals, prevention programs to 
give kids something to say yes to, drug treatment, drug education 
programs, alternative punishments for first offenders like drug courts 
and boot camps; if I had told you all that, and I said, ``Oh, by the 
way, we're going to ban juvenile ownership of handguns, and nobody 
thinks that anybody can ever beat the NRA in the Congress, but we will 
actually pass an assault weapons ban,'' if I had said that, you would 
have said, ``Nice try, but it's another bunch of political promises.'' 
That is exactly the record of this Congress and this administration in 
the last 20 months.
    And let me say again, we did this by making the Government smaller. 
Our White House is the most active in a generation. We cut the White 
House staff when I came in office to set an example. We are cutting the 
Federal bureaucracy over 6 years by 272,000 people and giving every last 
red cent of the money back to communities to pay for the crime bill. We 
have really reinvented the Government. The other guys always talked 
about the terrible Federal bureaucracy.
    When I became President, the most unpopular agency in the Federal 
Government was the Emergency Management Agency because every

[[Page 1623]]

time there was a disaster, they made it worse. [Laughter] It is now the 
most popular agency in Federal Government because I appointed somebody 
to run it who'd actually dealt with disasters before. And you can talk 
to the people in California, the people in the Middle West, the people 
in the Southeast, everybody who's dealt with it.
    They're supposed to be the party of small business. Now, because 
I've put somebody in the Small Business Administration who had actually 
spent 20 years starting small businesses instead of losing elections, 
which is how it's usually filled, you can now go to the SBA and fill 
out--if you want a loan, you fill out a one-page form, and you get an 
answer, yes or no, in 3 days. That is stuff they talked about, but we 
did.
    And I could give you lots of other examples. Vic's from California. 
When they had that earthquake in southern California and the busiest 
highway in America was shattered, right, what did we do? We had an 
innovative contract out there. We said, ``If you can beat the deadline 
and you will work around the clock 7 days a week, we'll give you a 
premium.'' And we beat the deadline by more than half of what they said 
it would take to finish it. We opened it months early, the highway. The 
American people who have to ride on that road in California know that we 
are delivering.
    So this is a very different image, right, than you hear when our 
adversaries talk about this administration. And while we were doing all 
this, we made a remarkable partnership for democracy and economic growth 
with Russia. We've worked with them as the Russian troops have been 
withdrawn from the Baltics and Eastern Europe for the first time since 
World War II. We've got 21 new nations in a new security partnership 
with NATO, trying to unite Europe for the first time since nation states 
have existed there. We are working with the Irish and the British on 
peace in Northern Ireland. We worked to help conduct free and fair 
elections that produced Nelson Mandela's miraculous victory in South 
Africa. We have worked hard to make dramatic steps forward on peace in 
the Middle East and, I believe, in what we are doing tonight in Haiti.
    Now, that is the record of the last 20 months. Do we have a lot of 
work to do? Sure, we do. We've still got a lot of things we could do 
back in Washington now: pass the GATT worldwide trade agreement, pass 
campaign finance reform, pass the lobby reform bill. There's a whole 
spate of environmental legislation still waiting to be passed in the 
Congress right now. And I will never give up until we have finally 
joined the ranks of other nations and found a way to provide health care 
to all Americans and to bring the cost in line with inflation, because 
if we don't do that the deficit will start to go up again, and being in 
Congress will be a matter of writing health care checks for the same old 
health care with no money to invest in America's future.
    Yes, there is work to do. But the fact is, the economy is stronger, 
the deficit is lower, taxes are fairer, trade is greater, working 
families and communities have a chance to be secure and safer. That is 
the record of this Congress and this administration in the last 20 
months. The American people don't know it, but thanks to your help, they 
will by election day, and the results will be there.
    Now, you might ask, ``Well, Mr. President, if you're so smart, why 
don't they know it?'' First of all, many people--let's deal with the 
real world--many people have not felt these changes in their own lives. 
When they have, I can tell you who they're voting for--when a person 
comes up to me and says, ``I have doubled my business in international 
trade; thank you. I never thought I'd be a Democrat, but I am now.'' And 
a man in the White House came up to me on a Sunday morning several 
months ago and he was going through a tour, which is very unusual on 
Sunday morning, with his three children, and I noticed one was in a 
wheelchair. This man came up and grabbed me and he said, ``I want to 
tell you something. My little girl here is sick, and she's probably not 
going to live. And her wish was to see the White House. But because of 
that family leave law, which your predecessor vetoed twice, I can take 
time off from work and spend this precious time with my daughter without 
losing my job and hurting my other children and my wife. Don't you ever 
think what you do up here does not make a difference; it does.'' But 
most people haven't felt it.
    And look at the problems of the country. We have social problems 
that we have had now developing for 30 years, the crime, the drugs, the 
family breakdown. We have economic problems that working people feel in 
the form of stagnant wages and fragile benefits that have been devel-


[[Page 1624]]

oping for 20 years. We had a political climate that said that the 
Government would mess up a one-car parade, that Democrats were aliens, 
and that tried to divide us and frighten us for 12 years.
    We've just been here 20 months, folks, but we are going in the right 
direction. And the thing that we must not permit to happen is to have 
the American people, out of their frustration and out of our failure to 
tell them what we've done, vote for that which they are against. That is 
why your presence here is important tonight.
    Also, let's face it, the guys we're running against are good at 
talking. And they have a simple system: rule or ruin. They've not much 
interest in doing. So they're not only good at talking, they've got more 
time to work on it than we do. We show up for work every day; they show 
up for talk. You think I'm kidding? Every single Member of the other 
party in Congress, every last one, voted against that economic program. 
And you say, ``Well, maybe they just didn't like it.'' No, no, no, no, I 
was told the first week I was President by one of the Republican leaders 
that there would not be a single vote for the economic program, no 
matter how we changed it. He said, ``We want to be in a position to 
blame you if it doesn't work. And if it doesn't work, we'll still blame 
you, and we'll convince people that you taxed them even if you didn't.'' 
That's what I was told the first week I showed up.
    So when we gave the 15 million working people a tax break, every one 
of them said no. When we made 90 percent of small businesses--supposed 
to be their constituents--when we made 90 percent of them eligible for a 
tax break, every one of them said no. When we gave 20 million Americans 
a break on their college loans and all the middle class kids to come, 
not just poor kids, middle class kids, every one of them voted no, every 
single one of them. When we made the first big cut in the size of the 
Federal Government in three decades, every one of them voted no. George 
Mitchell, our Democratic leader, said that if you took the word no out 
of their vocabulary, a bunch of them would be stone mute. [Laughter]
    Then, we moved to the crime bill. When we banned assault weapons, 
passed a dramatic bill to deal with the problems of violence against 
women and children in the homes, passed a bill that protected the rights 
of victims in the criminal justice process, put 100,000 more police on 
the street, put 100,000 more prison cells out there, toughened the 
penalties, all their leaders and most of them voted no. And the ones 
that didn't were absolutely excoriated for putting their country ahead 
of their party.
    Now, these are facts. When I showed up in Washington, I really 
believed that we would be able to do what we did with just a few 
Republicans on the crime bill and more on trade. I thought we would be 
able to have a more nonpartisan or bipartisan spirit of governance 
because so many of these problems are new problems. They don't fit 
within the proper categories of Democrat and Republican that you could 
tell right off in the forties, fifties, or sixties, well, who would vote 
which way. These are new and different problems. So I said to myself, I 
will reach out to them. But I already gave you one example. On the 
budget bill they told me in advance.
    On the crime bill, let me tell you what happened. Last year the 
Senate passed the crime bill with the assault weapons ban and a vote 
among the Republicans was 42 to 2 for the crime bill. My ratings in the 
polls were high at the time. It was a long way from the election at the 
time, and they never dreamed the House would pass the ban on assault 
weapons because they knew they'd have to vote on it separately. Lo and 
behold, the House, stunning me, passed it by two votes. I thought that 
the NRA would beat us like a yard dog in the House on that. Lo and 
behold, they passed it. So the bill goes to conference. And it comes 
out, and then all of a sudden they start making all these speeches about 
pork.
    Let me tell you something, when the Senate passed the bill, it was 
4\1/2\ years long. When we passed it, it was 6 years long. We put more 
money in it for 100,000 instead of 50,000 police and a little more money 
in it for prisons, but the prevention programs were actually slightly 
higher on an annual basis in the bill the Republicans voted for 42 to 2 
than they were in the bill they voted against 6 to 38. Nothing had 
changed except the politics. In their conference, they were told, ``Our 
job is not to lower the crime rate and make the American people more 
secure. Our job is to stiff anything that the other party and that 
administration tries to do.''
    I'll give you a third example, health care. When I introduced our 
health care bill, I said, ``Look, this may not be a perfect bill. It's 
the

[[Page 1625]]

best I can do. But what we ought to do is do what other sensible 
countries have done. We ought to find a way to cover everybody in a way 
that brings cost more in line with inflation. And we ought to do it by 
keeping the system as private as possible, private health care 
providers. And I don't want to eliminate private health insurance, and 
this is my idea.'' I was so happy; there was a bill introduced in the 
Senate by 24 Republican Senators that did the same thing, provided 
coverage for everybody and controlled costs, universal coverage and cost 
control. It wasn't the way I would have done it, but I was elated. I 
thought, this is what I came to Washington to do. We're going to have a 
debate, and they'll say, you know, they'll characterize my plan 
unfairly, they'll brag on theirs, and we'll get together and work it 
out. We'll solve this problem for the American people and everybody will 
share the credit. By the time our bill got to the floor, do you know how 
many Republican Senators were left on that bill to provide universal 
coverage? Zero. Not a single solitary one. Why? Politics. One of them 
was quoted in your local paper here the other day saying, ``Well, we 
killed health care. Now the trick is not to have our fingerprints on 
it.''
    I just gave you a list of all those things that are back in 
Washington awaiting action. In the House where all these folks work, you 
can't delay action. We may or may not get any of those things voted on 
now because for the first time in the history of the Republic--never has 
this happened before, ever--the Republican Senators are requiring the 
Democratic majority to jump through procedural hoops that take 30 hours 
just to get a vote on procedural things to take up bills. And then when 
they run through this exhausting 30 hours, half of them jump on the 
bandwagon and vote for it so they won't get caught doing what they did. 
It has never happened before, ever.
    Those are just four examples. I'm telling you, I came here running, 
saying the Democrats had problems, too, we had to change the partisan 
environment. But I want the American people to know that the no-sayers 
in this crowd are the leaders of the Republicans in Congress.
    There are a lot of good Republicans in the Congress that would like 
to work with us on a lot of issues, and most of the time they are 
threatened with their very lives. You see the Congressman from Iowa was 
threatened; he was told, under no circumstances could he cooperate with 
any of us on health care.
    Now, the American people need to know that. Why? Because this is a 
time of change. We're moving away from the cold war into a new era. I am 
convinced the 21st century can be the best time this country ever had. I 
believe that. I believe that. But we have to be able to face our 
challenges in an open and honest way. We have to be able to make change 
our friend, and that requires a certain level of security.
    And all the American people here with this sort of partisan, 
negative stuff pounding on them day in and day out, they do not know 
what we have done. We haven't had time to talk; we've been busy doing. 
So we're going to go out now and talk. But if you think about your 
organization, whatever it is, we live on people-power today. And people-
power depends on spirit as well as it does brains. You cannot get 
anything done in a world where people determine the course of history 
unless people are in a good frame of mind. You think about whatever it 
is you do and wherever it is you work, and how well would you do if two-
thirds of the people showed up every day convinced what you were doing 
was in the wrong direction and nothing good could ever happen; they were 
in a deep funk. Wouldn't be very pleasant to go to work, would it?
    That is what our political adversaries actually try to create every 
day in the minds of the American people. They say no; they play on their 
fears; they try to turn us into aliens. And frankly, they do a very good 
job at it. And when we can't get out there and talk to them, they do it. 
But the bad thing is not what happens to me or whether I get reelected 
or Vic gets reelected. In the big line of history, that's not as 
important as whether the American people face the future with confidence 
and hope and are willing to take on their challenges and are willing to 
find strength in our diversity. That is what we have to do.
    And I am telling you, that's what this election is all about. It's 
not about seats in Congress and everything else, except as they reflect 
whether we are going into the future with fear or hope. If you think 
about this time in our history, it's most like the times at the ends of 
the wars. At the end of the First World War, the American people were 
tired, distracted, they got inward looking. They said, ``We're just 
going to walk away from everything.'' What happened?

[[Page 1626]]

We elected three Presidents, starting with Mr. Harding who promised us 
normalcy, whatever that is. What was normalcy? Normalcy was the rise of 
the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Scare, and a global depression.
    Then at the end of the Second World War, Harry Truman found himself 
as President. He was at 80 percent approval in the polls the day after 
he dropped the atomic bomb that ended the war. Two years later, when he 
sent national health reform to Congress for the second time, he was at 
36 percent in the polls. Why? He was an instrument of change, and it was 
disruptive to the established order of things. But, he said, ``We've got 
to rebuild Japan and Germany and rebuild Europe and have international 
mechanisms for growth.'' He carried through on Roosevelt's vision of the 
United Nations, where I will speak tomorrow. He said, ``We have to stand 
up to the Communist threat and limit it, and we have to rebuild America 
at home.'' And it required change, and it was difficult and 
uncomfortable. But when he finally got out there on that train and told 
the American people the truth, they stuck with him. And now most people 
think Harry Truman ought to be on Mount Rushmore.
    But I'll tell you something. I come from a family that was for him 
when he was living, and it wasn't so simple back then. Because when 
countries go through periods of change, they are just like people. You 
think about every period of change you've been through in your life, 
when you went off to college, when you got married, when you had your 
first child, when you took your first job, when you started your first 
business. Every period of change is marked by hope and fear, isn't it? 
And when you're going through the change as opposed to the beginning or 
the end of it, when you're going through it, every day you wake up and 
it's like there are these scales inside, and some day hope's winning and 
some day fear's winning. Right? In your personal life.
    That is what our country is going through today. And all these dire 
predictions about the election and all these polls showing how sour and 
frustrated the American people are--let me tell you something, the 
people of this country are good people. And if you give them a chance, 
they will do the right thing 99 times out of 100. And they desperately 
want to believe in the future of this country, but they have been 
bombarded with everything that's wrong. They have not heard what is 
right. And there are real objective problems still out there. Our job is 
not always to win but to be the party of hope over fear, to be the party 
of big over little, to be the party of change over the status quo, to be 
the party of the children's future, not yesterday's vision. And I 
believe, since this is a time of change, that also, in the end, is the 
right thing to do politically. The right thing to do morally for our 
kids and their future is the right thing to do politically.
    And I want you to look around this room. Every Member of this 
Congress that's here--there were bills that we won by one vote, by two 
votes, bills that passed by the narrowest of margins--they deserve 
credit for stepping up to the plate and voting for the future of this 
country and for our children instead of for their momentary interests, 
and they deserve to be rewarded in this election. And if you want the 
changes for this country to continue until all Americans feel them, then 
I ask you not to quit with your check tonight but to keep speaking for 
them and working for them and talking to your friends and getting them 
to help all the way until election day, because they are about the 
future of this country.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 8:45 p.m. at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. In 
his remarks, he referred to Representative Vic Fazio, chairman, and his 
wife, Judy, finance director, Democratic Congressional Campaign 
Committee; and Sumner Redstone, chairman, Viacom, and his wife, Phyllis.