[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

[[Page 1662]]

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.

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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

[[Page 1664]]

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.