[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book II)]
[October 19, 1994]
[Pages 1803-1807]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Dinner for Governor Mario Cuomo in New York City
October 19, 1994

    You've still got it, Mario. [Laughter]
    Among the many things I admire about Governor Cuomo is his 
remarkable family. And here was his wife saying you should vote for him 
because he's strong and slim. Can you imagine what would happen to 
anybody else if someone got up and said, ``You should vote for this 
person because he's got a good body''? I mean, it was great. [Laughter]
    His son tells him today, Andrew says in the economic conference, 
``Don't speak very long, Dad.'' So Mario gets up and announces it and 
then gives his speech at twice the normal speed. [Laughter]
    I watched him tonight, and I was thinking, why is this a race? Why 
is it even close?
    I don't know how many of you saw my friend Ken Burns' magnificent 
series on baseball, but Mario was in it, and he hasn't seen it because 
he's been out campaigning. I'm not up, so I stay home and watch 
``Baseball''--[laughter]--the only baseball we have right now. One of 
the things that is in this series is the scouting report from the 
Pittsburgh Pirates on the promising young center fielder from St. Johns. 
This is what the scout said about Mario Cuomo: ``Potentially the best 
prospect on the club; could go all the way if he improves his hitting to 
the point of a respectable batting average. He's aggressive; he plays 
hard; he's intelligent, not easy to get to know but very well-liked by 
those who succeed in penetrating his shell.'' Let me tell you something, 
he's still the best prospect on the club, and he ought to be sent back 
to the playing field. And his batting average is very, very good.
    You know, when Mario was talking about how--all of his immigrant 
roots and doing all that, I just was virtually transported. I never get 
tired of thinking about that sort of thing about our country. In a much 
more blunt and less eloquent way, Boris Yeltsin said the same thing to 
me the other day when he was here--really, it was the time before last 
we were together. Yeltsin grew up in a house literally where the farm 
animals shared the living room with the children. He was in a very 
difficult way as a child, and he had read somewhere that I had once 
lived in a house without indoor plumbing. So about halfway through this 
banquet he looked at me one night and he said, ``You know, guys like us 
don't get to be President very often.'' [Laughter] The truth is, guys 
like us do get to be President or Governor or other things in this 
country because this is a very great country, because we've had leaders 
like Mario Cuomo.
    I've had a lot of time to think about this Governor's race in New 
York. You know, I admire your Governor so much, I like him so much, I 
feel that he is my real partner. I think that he has given you strong 
and disciplined and responsible leadership, and he's still full of new 
ideas and energy. But I also understand what the issues are.

[[Page 1804]]

    You know, I was the Governor of my State for a good, long while, and 
I loved it better than anything. And my State was smaller, but it was 
the same sort of deal. My people had been there since about the time of 
the Civil War. I knew every country crossroads. I could still walk into 
counties and remember the percentage of the vote I got in 1974. Some 
people thought that was a character flaw, but I thought it showed I was 
good at math. [Laughter] And I want to tell you this story because it 
was told on me, but it's something every New Yorker ought to think about 
before this election.
    You know, in rural States--and New York, by the way, is a big rural 
State with a huge agricultural sector--the State fair is about the 
biggest thing that happens. I'll tell you how big it is, the guy who was 
my chief cabinet officer left my administration and--well, he worked for 
my successor a while--and he left to become the head of the State fair. 
He got a promotion. [Laughter] It's a huge deal in a country place. And 
so I used to go out to the State fair every year and have a Governor's 
Day, and I'd just sit there. And people would come up and talk to me and 
say whatever was on their mind, which often burned my ears. And after I 
had completed my fourth term about--I had served three 2-year terms and 
one 4-year term--and I was trying to make up my mind whether I would run 
for 14 years and would serve longer than anybody ever had in my State. 
At the end of the Governor's Day, when I had heard all this stuff, this 
old fellow in overalls came up to me, clearly in about his seventies. He 
looked at me and he said, ``Bill, are you going to run for Governor 
again?'' I said, ``I don't know. If I do, will you vote for me?'' He 
said, ``Yes, I guess I will. I always have.'' I said, ``Well, aren't you 
sick of me after all these years?'' He said, ``No, but everybody else I 
know is.'' [Laughter] And I looked--I swear he did. And he said, 
``But,'' he said, ``what do you expect? All you do is nag us to do 
better. You're on us day and night, talking about what we've got to do 
to get jobs, talking about what we've got to do to get schools, just 
nag, nag, nag.'' He said, ``Nobody could live with that all the time.'' 
He said, ``It just wears us out. But,'' he said, ``you know something? I 
think it's beginning to work.'' That's what I want to tell you. It's 
beginning to work. Don't walk away from it when it is beginning to work.
    We have a partnership now. In the last 21 months, New York State has 
over 110,000 new jobs; about a 1\1/2\ percent drop in the unemployment 
rate; 3.1 million families in this State protected by the family leave 
law; 2 million people eligible for lower interest college loans. Nine 
hundred thousand families got tax cuts because they work full time, they 
have kids in the house, they're just hovering above the poverty line; 
they shouldn't go into poverty. If people work and raise kids, they 
ought to be able to succeed as parents and workers. That has happened. 
There's a 20 percent increase in the number of kids in Head Start. 
You're going to get 6,100 police officers under the crime bill. That's 
what we can do.
    But you know something? A President cannot do anything that changes 
the lives of people unless there are partners in the governorships, in 
the mayoralties, in the private sector, on every street, people who care 
about people, who know their people, and who will get things done. Now, 
that is why you should reelect this Governor. It is clear that we have a 
partnership that can make a difference for the people in New York.
    A Governor is at his best or her best if the Governor embodies the 
real qualities of a State. When I see Mario Cuomo talking, I think that 
is New York. And I like it. And America likes it. You know, even his 
opponents could not have heard this speech tonight without wanting to 
kind of tighten their coats and sit up a little straighter and throw 
their shoulders back and be proud to be an American. And that's very 
important. So if a man has a good record, if he's got a good program for 
the future, if he understands how to get things done, and if he really 
knows his State, and if he embodies the character, the strength, the 
courage of the State, that's a pretty good ticket.
    It's interesting today when we spoke at his conference on growth, I 
said something I was embarrassed I didn't know. There's a lot of things 
I don't know about your Governor. I was embarrassed I didn't know this. 
I said that no matter what the President did, no matter what the 
Governor did, no matter what the mayor does, no matter what the people 
who are supposed to be heads of great organizations do, we had to change 
the spirit of this country. And we had to challenge more people to take 
responsibility for their own children, their own friends, their own 
neighbors, or for somebody else's children or friends and neighbors if 
no

[[Page 1805]]

one else was doing it. And I said when I saw that transit policeman come 
home from the hospital after being so horribly beaten by those nine 
kids, I thought, what in the wide world were those kids doing on the 
street at that hour of the night? And why didn't somebody give them some 
better place to go to or try to teach them right from wrong or stand up 
for what was right and wrong? And then, when I saw today in the paper 
that there were two people who put their lives on the line to help that 
poor guy at the teller machine last night in New York, I thought, that's 
what this country's all about. And more people ought to do it.
    Now, after I gave this speech where everybody was clapping, a friend 
of the Governor's came up and said, ``He did the same thing 3 years ago. 
He got out and chased a criminal, trying to do the right thing.'' That 
is the sort of person he is, and he would do it again tonight. He would 
walk through a wall to do the right thing, and you ought to do the right 
thing and reelect him Governor.
    You know, I had 17 pages of notes, and I came up here with this--
because Mario already told you what I did the last 2 years. [Laughter]
    I want to say something else, too, about this election. It's not 
just--the difficulty is not just that all the stuff we've been talking 
about. Why is there a sort of a tight anxiety-ridden negative mood in 
the country today, when we're plainly better off than we were 21 months 
ago? I mean, we have more jobs and a lower deficit; we've got a 
Government that's finally doing things for ordinary people, like middle-
class college loans and family leave and immunizing all the kids in the 
country under the age of 2. We're moving toward peace and prosperity. 
We've had more advancements in trade in the last year than we have in 30 
years. And we have all of the movements toward democracy and freedom 
that the United States has been involved in, supporting the election in 
South Africa, the peace process in Northern Ireland, what is going on in 
Haiti, what is going on in the Persian Gulf, and, of course, the 
incredible story of peace in the Middle East against all the odds. This 
is a good time, and we are plainly moving in the right direction. So 
what is the beef? Why is there this anxiety, this tension in the 
country? There are a number of reasons, but I'd like to tell you a few, 
because dealing with them may hold the key to how this election comes 
out and whether people can hear the song that your Governor sang 
tonight, America's song, the song we always respond to when we're at our 
best.
    First of all, we are dealing with the accumulation of enormous 
problems that have been ignored for a long time. All these social 
problems that we see that just tear our hearts out, when we see that 5-
year-old kid hung out the window and dropped to die because he knew it 
was wrong to steal candy, that didn't happen overnight. This stuff has 
been developing for 30 years, for 30 years, what's happened to the 
families and the communities and the loss of hope and the vacuum that 
has been created. Drugs and gangs and guns, that stuff just fills a 
vacuum. There's a hole inside people's lives, and it just goes in there, 
because there's a vacuum just sucking it into people.
    The economic anxieties people feel has been developing for 20 years, 
where most wage earners who earn hourly wages have not gotten a raise. 
The average working person is working a longer work week today than 20 
years ago. And the global economy requires people to change jobs six or 
seven times in a lifetime. Those of us who have knowledge and skills and 
can learn new things and can stay on top and dance on our toes, well, 
we're pretty secure. Other people are just scared.
    And for 12 years, we tried a different approach. We basically had--
we were governed by people who tried to convince us that we should hold 
our Government in contempt, that the Government would mess up a one-car 
parade, and that we should just sit on the sidelines and let things 
happen. And it takes time to turn that around. And it takes time for 
people who have been disappointed a long time to scrape away all that 
and begin to feel as well as think again that things can be better.
    And there's another big issue here: We are going through a period of 
historic change. At the end of the cold war, the changing of our 
economy, moving into a new century where all the rules will be 
different, I honestly believe, for the reasons Mario said, the 21st 
century will be America's best time. All this diversity we have--if we 
learn to enjoy it, celebrate it, reinforce it, it is our meal ticket to 
the future, because the world is a small place.
    But every time we go through a period of change, our democracy is 
tested, because people's hopes and fears are at war. Think about your 
own life. Think about the first day you went to school, the first day 
you went off to

[[Page 1806]]

college, the day you got married, the day you had your first job. Think 
about only things that had more good than bad in them but were radically 
different--you were scared to death. One of those movies always work, 
where the guy walks down the aisle or the woman walks down the aisle and 
they say, ``I don't''--[laughter]--because everybody thinks about it, 
that's why it works. And because anytime you put yourself on the line 
and try a new thing, it might not work, and it's frightening.
    So you fight this battle all the time inside, between hope and fear. 
Countries are the same way when they go through big changes. At the end 
of World War I, America had done a great thing. It was the first time we 
had ever gone abroad to fight for values and other people without our 
own existence being at risk. It was a great thing. It exhausted us. And 
what happened? We came home, and we shrunk up, and we had the rise of 
the Ku Klux Klan. We had the rise of the Red Scare. And we walked away 
from the rest of the world and brought on an international economic 
collapse that gave rise to fascism and nazism and brought the Second 
World War.
    At the end of the Second World War, we didn't do that. But there 
were lots of pressures to do the same thing, Joe McCarthy, the loyalty 
program, a Communist behind every bush. But we had strong leadership. It 
was tough. Harry Truman's popularity was at 80 percent when he dropped 
the bomb and ended the Second World War. Two years later, when he sent 
national health insurance to Congress for the second time, it was at 36 
percent by the time people got through working on it. All of the people 
in the 80-to-36 crowd, they all think he ought to be on Mount Rushmore. 
Well, I was in one of those families that was always part of the 36. We 
were always for him, and we know. I was raised being told about this. It 
was inevitable. People were afraid. Things were changing.
    And now, you just think about what life's like for the average 
American today and how they get their information and how they 
communicate about public things. What we have to do in the next 3 weeks 
all over the country is go out and say, ``We've turned that situation 
around. The economy's coming back. The government's working for ordinary 
people. The world is more peaceful and secure. The opportunities are 
great. We have to vote our hopes and not our fears. We have to vote for 
tomorrow, not yesterday.'' That's what we have to do. If on election 
morning in New York State, most people in this State wake up and the 
scales inside of them are tilted toward hope instead of fear, it will be 
a rout for Governor Cuomo. You know it, and I know it. That is our job.
    Eleanor Roosevelt once said, ``You know, you can spend a lot of time 
fighting the darkness, and there's a lot of dark things to fight, but 
the quickest way to beat it is to flip the light switch on.'' You think 
about that. You think about that.
    What we need is more Americans who will go take up for the people 
that are getting mugged at the teller machine. What we need is more 
Americans who will put a hand on those little 5-year-old kids and give 
them somebody to look up to. What we need is more Americans who will 
reach out to those 10- or 11-year-old kids when they're 5 so their 
hearts don't turn to stone before it's too late.
    What we need is everybody saying that this is a very great country. 
If you have any doubt, if you have any doubt, just remember what 
happened last weekend when President Aristide went home to Haiti. 
President Aristide went home to Haiti, and all those people were holding 
those little old signs in the street that said ``Thank you, America'' in 
Creole, and they were looking at these young men and women in uniform, 
our kids who are black, white, brown, yellow, Lord only knows what. A 
lot of them are Haitian-American; we got every Haitian-American soldier 
we could find and sent them down there so somebody could speak Creole to 
those folks. It was unbelievable. And just look at their eyes, and they 
knew that this was a good country, standing for something good, doing 
something good, bringing out the best.
    That's the way of the rest of us have to be. In our minds, we have 
to put on a uniform every day. We have to say we are not going to let 
this country go down; we're going up. And we are certainly not going to 
let this country go back; we're going forward. And if we have that 
feeling, that spirit, then all the facts will fall into place. And our 
story will be credible. And our Governor will be reelected. He is a 
national treasure, but he really is New York's treasure. Every one of 
you know. Every one of you know.
    I kind of promised myself I wasn't going to mention this, but I'm 
going to. Every one of

[[Page 1807]]

you know that he could have had another job with longer tenure. 
[Laughter] Every one of you know that he stayed here because he loves 
you, he loves that neighborhood he grew up in in Queens. He cannot 
imagine walking away from this fight until we have had a chance to do 
every last thing we can to give every kid in this State a chance at a 
better future. You take care of it and make sure he's reelected.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 9:09 p.m. in the Imperial Ballroom at 
Sheraton Centre.