[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.

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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.