    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
    [September 21, 1995]
    [Pages 1440-1447]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Clinton/Gore '96 Dinner in Los Angeles, California
    September 21, 1995

        Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, Mr. Vice President, you sure
    convinced me. [Laughter] One down; 110 million to go. [Laughter]
        I want to thank all of you so much for being here. Thank you, Tom
    Hanks, for introducing Al Gore. Thank you for not introducing me.
    [Laughter] Somebody's talked to Al Gore about playing Tom Hanks in an
    autobiography. [Laughter] I want to thank young Ashley Ballard. She
    looked so beautiful up here, and she sang so well. I wish her well. I
    thank the chairs and the vice chairs and the executive committee and the
    host committee, everybody who is responsible for this, this very
    wonderful night. I thank you all for being here. A lot of you come to a
    lot of these things, I know, and they may get old to you, but you know
    it's important.
        But I want to say something rather unconventional tonight about this
    dinner. We're doing our best to finance our campaign early and in a
    disciplined way so that I can spend the maximum possible time doing the
    job the American people elected me to do in 1992, being President. And
    it's very important. But the most important thing you can do is to take
    the little article and the summary of the record and leave here and make
    up your mind that between now and November of 1996, you're going to take
    every opportunity you can to talk to the people you come in contact with
    about what's really at stake in this election.
        And I was trying to think if there was some simple and halfway
    hilarious characterization I could give you about what's really at stake
    here. I think it's fair to say that everybody has figured out this is a
    time of great change, and the people who would like to see someone else
    be elected President have an enormous and psychological advantage
    because they're telling you,``All you have to do to change this country
    is to destroy the Federal Government. It's all their fault. You know,
    it's just their fault. Nothing wrong with the rest of us, it's just
    them, those slugs in Washington.'' It's interesting, because nearly all
    of them have been in Washington a lot longer than I have. I still have a
    hard

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    time finding my way in from Andrews Air Force Base when I--[laughter].
    But you know, ``It's just them. And they're taking all of your money,
    and they're squandering it on welfare and immigration and they're just
    throwing it away and just get rid of them. But you don't have to do
    anything.''
        I have a harder burden because I think we all have to do things. I
    think we all have to change if we're going to make this country what it
    ought to be, and that's a very big burden to carry.
        And I was making this little speech to my senior Senator, Dale
    Bumpers, a couple of months ago, who is one of the funniest people I
    ever heard. And he said, ``Now, don't you forget about that story I told
    you about years ago, before you go out and try to convince people we've
    all got to change.'' I said, ``What's that?'' He said, ``You remember,
    the one about Huey Long in the Depression.'' Those of you who are old
    enough to remember this know that when Huey Long was the Governor of
    Louisiana and later Senator and a thorn in Franklin Roosevelt's side,
    his whole theory was share the wealth, that if we could just share the
    wealth, we wouldn't have 25 percent unemployed, we wouldn't have people
    poor as church mice, everything would be fine. But we'd have to share
    the wealth. And he was giving a speech one day in a country crossroads
    and trying to find someone to illustrate his point. And he saw a farmer
    in overalls out there and he recognized him, and he said, ``For
    example,'' he said, ``Farmer Jones, if you had three Cadillacs, wouldn't
    you give up one of them so we could go around here on these country
    roads and take all these kids to school every day, take them to church
    on Sunday?'' He said, ``Sure I would, Governor.'' He said, ``And if you
    had $3 million, wouldn't you give up $1 million just so we could put a
    roof over every kid's head and feed them three good meals a day?'' He
    said, ``You bet I would.'' He said, ``And if you had three hogs--'' And
    he said, ``Now, wait a minute, Governor, I've got three hogs.''
    [Laughter]
        So you get the point. The problem is that in this case the hard side
    of the argument is the right one. I mean, I believe, I believe much more
    than when I became President, that when the history of this era is
    written, people will look back on this period and they will say this was
    the most profound period of change in the way Americans live and work
    that we had experienced in 100 years. That not since the late 1800's, in
    the early 1900's, when we moved from being a rural agricultural society
    to being a more urbanized industrial society, when we moved from being a
    country in splendid isolation, the one that had to assume the burdens of
    world leadership in World War I, not since then has there been such a
    change in the way Americans live and work; as we move from our
    industrial age into a post-industrial, information-technology-based
    society of which many of you are the world's most glittering embodiment;
    as we move from a cold war period when the world is more or less
    organized around functioning nation-states that are divided into two
    opposing camps but all more or less capable of delivering basic services
    and sustenance to their people, into a global economy characterized by
    free markets and openness and rapid movement of money and management and
    people and technology, where there are all kinds of pressures to have
    global integration and a lot of pressures of economic disintegration on
    individual workers and families and communities throughout the world, of
    a world in which we think we're moving toward peace but we still see
    madness everywhere. In other words, there's a lot of good and a lot
    that's troubling.
        And we need a vision for what we want America to look like, because
    all the good things and all the troubling things are occurring in this
    great diverse cauldron we call the United States, every day. And my
    vision is that we ought to build an America for the 21st century that's
    a high-opportunity place where hard-working entrepreneurs can live out
    their dreams, where we grow the middle class and shrink the under class,
    where we do what is necessary to help individuals make the most of their
    own lives and help families and communities to solve their own problems
    and where we come together across all these lines that divide us, these
    income and racial and regional and religious and other lines that divide
    us so that the 21st century can still be an American century, so that we
    can be the world's force for freedom and peace and human rights and
    prosperity. That's my vision.
        And I think to get there we have to have a lot of new ideas, but I
    really believe they have to be rooted in old-fashioned American values,
    things that sound corny like freedom and responsibility and work and
    family and community, seeking the common good instead of the

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    short-term wedge issue that divides us politically and being willing to
    do things that are unpopular in the moment because you know that when
    your children are grown and look back, they'll look like the right
    decisions. That's what I think we have to do.
        And just let me give you a couple of illustrations why. The Vice
    President talked about the economy, and I'm very proud of our economic
    record. We've had a very serious strategy, the first time the United
    States has had one in a long time. We wanted to reduce the deficit while
    increasing investment in defense conversion to help California and other
    places, in new technologies, and in education and training. We wanted a
    vast increase in trade. We wanted to be for free but also for fair
    trade. And we thought we could do some good economically.
        But if I had told you on the day I was inaugurated President that
    after 30 months the following things would happen, would you have
    believed it? That we would have 7\1/2\ million new jobs, 2\1/2\ million
    new homeowners, 2 million new small businesses, a record number of self-
    made millionaires, the stock market would be at 4,700, but the guy in
    the middle had an income that dropped. It has never happened before in
    the history of the Republic. More than half the people are working
    harder for the same or lower wages. Why? Because that's the way the
    global economy affects us today. And if we want a future where we grow
    the middle class and shrink the under class, we have to figure out how
    to deal with that.
        Or look at our social problems. You heard the Vice President say
    it's true. In every State in the country, the crime rate is down, the
    murder rate is down, believe it or not, notwithstanding the rhetoric in
    Washington, because the economy is better, the welfare rolls are down,
    and the food stamp rolls are down.
        People are actually trying to hang together more; the divorce rate
    is down. Drug use among people between the ages of 18 and 34 is down.
    Sounds great. But underneath it, just like on the economy, in spite of a
    falling crime rate, the rate of random violence and crime by people
    between the ages of 12 and 17 is up, and the rate of casual drug use by
    children between the ages of 12 and 17 is up. So we've got to figure out
    what to do about that. We've got a lot of heart-wrenching publicity, and
    everybody was moved by that terrible encounter in which the child lost
    his life here just a few days ago. But we've become inured to all the
    children that lose their lives every day in these violence-ridden places
    in America.
        The other day we had a study come out of the Justice Department that
    said that two-thirds of the gang members in America felt justified in
    shooting someone just because they treated them with disrespect. And
    within a week, blaring headlines in the East of a 16-year-old boy who
    shot a 12-year-old, then ran over and stood over him and emptied his gun
    into him because he thought the 12-year-old treated him with disrespect.
    It turned out the 12-year-old was the neighborhood wit who made fun of
    everybody and lost his life for it.
        Whatever happened to ``Count to 10 before you say, much less do,
    something''? Whatever happened to ``Sticks and stones can break my
    bones, but words can never hurt me''? I joked to somebody in the White
    House the other day that if I took that approach, everybody treated me
    with disrespect, there would be no ammunition left in America.
    [Laughter]
        It's funny, but it's not. It isn't funny. You've got a whole
    generation of kids out there raising themselves, getting out of school
    an hour or two earlier than any of us ever got out of school, no place
    to go, nothing to do. We have to figure out what we're going to do to
    help them, too, because I believe we are a community. And I think we're
    going up or down together. So I'm proud of the fact that the crime rate
    is going down. But I'm really worried about these kids because when they
    all get grown, if enough of them do this and the next generation of 12
    to 17-year-olds keep doing what they're doing, then the strategies we
    have for driving the crime rate down won't work anymore. It will go up
    again.
        In foreign policy, the Vice President litanized all the things we'd
    done. I'm proud of the fact there are no Russian missiles pointed at our
    kids for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age. I'm proud of
    what we were able to do in the Middle East and Northern Ireland and
    Southern Africa. I'm proud of the fact that in Bosnia we may be on the
    verge of a breakthrough because good people now in all those factions,
    the Muslims, the Croatians, and the Serbs, I think, have seen it is time
    to make a decent peace and quit killing each other. I'm proud of that.
        But don't you forget: The real threat to the world today is that in
    an open world where

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    you have to have free movement of people and technology, where the
    Internet is full of wonderful things that we celebrated today, we all
    are more vulnerable to the forces of organized evil. And there are
    people that are preying on hatred and paranoia, rooted in religious or
    ethnic or racial bigotry. And they can still do bad things. They can
    blow up buses full of kids in Israel. They can break open vials of sarin
    gas in subways in Tokyo. And yes, they can find out on the Internet how
    to make a simple bomb that will blow up a Federal building in Oklahoma
    City.
        So until we have a way of dealing with that, we have to celebrate
    our progress, but we have to realize that there have to be some changes
    in the way we look at ourselves and our responsibilities to get to where
    we want to go. I believe with all my heart that the best days of the
    United States are ahead of us if, but only if, we face these changes and
    if we do it with new ideas rooted in old-fashioned values.
        Now, the big news in Washington today is the fight about the budget.
    The budget is more about values than it is about money. Both parties now
    agree we ought to balance the budget. I say, high time. We never had a
    structural deficit in the United States of America until 1981. Never. We
    quadrupled the debt of the country in the 12 years before I showed up.
    It's so bad that the budget would be in balance today but for the
    interest we pay on the debt run up in the 12 years before I became
    President.
        We've got to quit this. Next year interest on the debt will be
    bigger than the defense budget. If we weren't paying so much interest on
    the debt, we could invest more money in California to help you overcome
    the big defense downsizing and what has traumatized your economy so.
        So we should balance the budget. The question is how? And are we
    interested in balancing the budget consistent with our values? I told
    you what my values are. Their argument is, the people who disagree with
    us, is that you don't have to believe in all that, you don't have to
    change anything, all you've got to do is get rid of the Government.
    Therefore, the differences.
        We ought to balance the budget, but we don't have to cut education
    to balance the budget. You want to know what will happen if we stop
    giving little kids a chance to get off to a good start in school; if the
    Federal Government walks away from its responsibility to help with
    smaller class sizes, more computers, and higher standards; if the
    National Government walks away from its responsibility to give kids the
    opportunity to serve in national service programs, the AmeriCorps
    program, to earn their way to college, or get more Pell grants if
    they're poor or have better access to lower cost college loans like
    we've done? Look at California. You raised the costs of higher
    education. You made it less accessible. And in the teeth of a bad
    economy, enrollment in higher education went down here when it should
    have gone up. We cannot let that happen to the United States. It is not
    necessary to balance the budget, and it would be wrong. It would be
    wrong.
        There ought not to be a constituency in this country for ignorance
    and building a second-rate economy and building a two-tiered society.
    And that's exactly what walking away from our responsibilities in
    education is.
        You look at this debate over the environment--under the guise of
    balancing the budget, gutting the ability of the EPA to enforce the
    clean air law, putting on the budget all these riders, these limitations
    on our ability to protect our natural resources. You know, Hillary and
    Chelsea and I went to the West, to Wyoming, and we went to the Grand
    Tetons and Yellowstone National Parks this summer. We got lucky; we got
    to do one or two things that most people couldn't do. We got to feed the
    wolves in Yellowstone because we happened to be there at feeding time.
    But basically, everything we did there, any American family could do.
    They could drive a car up there and fork over 10 bucks. And all across
    America we have this network of parks preserving our natural heritage.
        Some of these people say that in order to balance the budget we need
    to close half the parks or that it's okay to put a big mine right next
    to Yellowstone, even if we don't know how we're going to protect the
    water quality. Or it's okay, now that we created a California Desert
    Protection Act, just not to fund it and hope it will go away and die.
        Now, I know that sometimes we make mistakes with the Nation's
    environmental laws. I thought it was kind of crazy to see that guy
    indicted for killing a kangaroo rat on his farm. But that stuff happened
    for a long time before we showed up. And under Al Gore's leadership,
    we've actually reduced the burden of crazy regulation. But I'm telling
    you something, the world

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    is not free of environmental problems. The world is not free of public
    health problems. People died just a couple years ago in Milwaukee
    because their water supply was poison. Children died just a couple of
    years ago in the Pacific Northwest from poison meat from E. coli, partly
    because the Government still inspects meat, as I said yesterday, believe
    it or not, the way dogs do. That's how your Government inspects meat.
    They touch it, they look at it, and they smell it. But we wanted to put
    in new regulations using high-technology equipment to stop E. coli, and
    there were people that actually voted not once but twice in the House of
    Representatives under the guise of cutting Government spending to stop
    us from doing that.
        So, yes, let's balance the budget, but don't tell me that we should
    sacrifice the clean air, clean water, and natural heritage of the United
    States. It is the rightful, rightful legacy of every American to do it.
    It's wrong.
        Look at the crime bill. The Vice President talked about the crime
    bill. We did some important things in the crime bill because people in
    law enforcement told us to do it. They said, ``Don't spend all your
    money on prisons; spend some money to keep these kids out of trouble.
    Spend some money to give kids something to say yes to, something to
    believe in. And put 100,000 police out there on the street so they can
    help prevent crime as well as catch criminals.''
        I started the week in Jacksonville, Florida, on Tuesday morning with
    an African-American Democrat who was elected sheriff in an
    overwhelmingly white Republican county. Then he got elected sheriff
    because people thought he'd be a good sheriff and because there was no
    partisan constituency for crime.
        Out here in the country, I can't find anybody for raising the crime
    rate. It's only in Washington that people say, ``Well, that's what the
    Democrats put in the crime bill; we've got to gut the prevention money,
    and we've got to kill the 100,000 cops. And we'll just give the cities
    and the counties and the States a little less money and we'll give it to
    them in a block grant, and we don't care how they spend it. Now, we know
    what lowers the crime rate, but we're going to stop doing it anyway.''
        Well, I'm sorry, we ought to balance the budget, but there is no
    constituency and no conscience in doing things that you know will
    interrupt the fight to lower the crime rate. That's one of the great
    triumphs of the last 5 years, America proved we could lower the crime
    rate. Before, people didn't think we could do it. Let's stop trying to
    undo it, stick with what works, and balance the budget and still do our
    justice to the streets of Los Angeles and the other places in the United
    States. It's the right thing to do.
        I could give you a lot of other examples, but let me just mention
    one. There's a lot of talk about Medicare and Medicaid. And you've heard
    all this, and the numbers are so confusing it probably makes your head
    hurt. Let me tell you what the basic facts are. Medicare is a program
    that provides health care to people over 65. Part A of Medicare is
    hospital care; it's funded by a payroll tax. Part B is all of the other
    things you get on Medicare, and it's funded by general tax money and
    what elderly people pay out of their own pocket. Medicaid is a program
    that takes care of old people on low incomes and disabled people who
    need nursing home care or get care in their homes, and it provides
    medical care for all these poor children and their parents. You know,
    it's not fashionable to stick up for the poor anymore, but those kids
    are going to grow up and be part of our country. Why do you think the
    Los Angeles health care system's in trouble? Because they've got a lot
    of poor kids to care for.
        Now, we need to slow the growth of both those programs. They've been
    growing too fast, and they're crowding out our ability to invest in
    education and technology and the future. Everybody knows it. And we need
    to make sure that the so-called Medicare Trust Fund that guarantees
    hospital care for the elderly is secure. And everybody knows that. But
    that's not what's going on. The congressional majority has made a
    decision that in order to balance the budget in 7 years and get $250
    billion in tax cuts, they have to take $450 billion out of the health
    care system over the next 7 years that we thought they were going to
    have to spend.
        Now, we should take some money out. But I'm telling you, we cannot
    take that much money out without charging elderly people more than they
    can afford--and keep in mind, three-quarters of the people in this
    country over 65 live on less than $24,000 a year--we cannot do that
    without risking closing rural hospitals and urban hospitals, and we
    can't do it without hurting all those poor kids. We can't do it.

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        So I say, of course, let's slow the growth in medical inflation. But
    don't say, ``The most important thing is my 7-year target, my economic
    assumption, my $250 billion tax cut. I do not care what happens to the
    health care system, this is how much I am going to jerk out.'' That is
    inconsistent with our values. This is not about money. This is about our
    values.
        Yesterday in Denver I was with the Little Sisters of the Poor, an
    order of Roman Catholic nuns who spend their whole life serving in ways
    that most of us could never even dream of doing. And they run a home
    there for elderly people that you could eat breakfast off of any
    morning. You'd be proud to have any member of your family there. And
    they are giving their whole lives to do this. But with all of their
    sacrifice, they cannot do it unless the rest of us chip in a little
    money through Medicaid to keep those folks there. And I don't know about
    you, but I'm glad they do it. And if we can balance the budget without
    gutting them, we ought to. And we can and we will, if I have anything to
    say about it.
        I just want to make two more points because California is on the
    forefront of both these issues. The first is that our meal ticket to the
    future is our diversity. If we can learn to live together and work
    together and respect each other, that is our meal ticket to the future.
    In a global economy, who is better positioned than the United States to
    take advantage of the blizzard of interconnections that will be the best
    of tomorrow? Nobody.
        So I say to you, when we have issues that are troubling, we need to
    solve them in ways that bring us together, not use them as wedges used
    to drive us apart. I'll just give you three: Welfare reform. I led the
    fight to reform welfare. While the Congress has been fighting for 3
    years, we've given 70 percent of the States permission to get rid of
    Federal rules to figure out how to move people from welfare to work. I
    did it not because it's costing you a lot of money. The welfare budget
    is a tiny part of the Federal budget. I did it because it's inconsistent
    with American values for people to be trapped in dependency when they
    want to be free, because most parents in this country have to work and
    people on welfare should be able to work, but they ought to be able to
    be good parents as well. So I want to change the welfare system, and I
    don't mind being very tough on requiring people to work. But you have to
    give them education and training and you have to give them child care,
    and we ought to collect the child support enforcement that people owe
    them as well. That's what I believe.
        So we should do this together. We shouldn't look for some way to put
    people down; we should look for ways to lift people up. You look at the
    affirmative action issue, this affirmative action issue. There are
    problems with affirmative action. We have to fix some. We've already
    fixed some. But let me tell you, I have hired hundreds of people in my
    life. I have worked with all kinds of people. I've been in all kinds of
    different circumstances. And I believe with all my heart we have not yet
    reached the point in our country when we are totally oblivious to our
    gender and racial differences. And as long as we are not, as long as we
    see troubling reminders of what may lurk in the hearts of people that
    they never say, I think it is appropriate not for Government to practice
    reverse discrimination, not for Government to have quotas, not for
    Government to guarantee anything to somebody who is unqualified to
    receive it but for the Government to say you should be conscious, you
    should be aware when you make decisions of the abilities and the
    potential of all the people in the community without regard to their
    race or gender. So I say fix affirmative action, but don't throw it away
    for a short-term political gain until we have solved this problem.
        And I feel the same way, as all of you know, because of what I said
    2 years ago about immigration. I knew we had immigration problems, and I
    had never dealt with them before 2\1/2\ years ago. So I asked former
    Congresswoman Barbara Jordan to set up a commission to deal with
    immigration in a forthright, humane, hard-headed way to just try to talk
    sense and not to use it for political benefits. And we have done more
    than any previous administration to try to close the borders and send
    illegal immigrants back. We have recommended a disciplined reduction in
    the annual quota of immigration until we get our own low-skill workers
    back in the work force and until we can manage our own economy better.
    But let's not forget something: Except for the Native Americans that are
    here tonight--and I thank them for being here--everybody else here came
    from somewhere else, and we should never, ever forget that.
        The last thing I want to tell you is this: I'll bet you everybody
    here has disagreed with five

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    or six things I've done in the last 2\1/2\ years. But one thing I have
    learned is that when things are really changing fast, you can absolutely
    not calculate what is the popular thing to do because what's popular
    today may look terrible 6 days from now. And what I try to do is figure
    out what this is going to look like when my daughter's my age. What's
    the 21st century going to be like for the United States? And so I do a
    lot of things that aren't popular. But when we do things like that, if
    you agree that we should keep leading, then you have to step into the
    breach as well and be heard.
        All the political advice I got was, ``Don't you be the first
    President in American history to take on the NRA over the Brady bill and
    assault weapons. Don't do it, because what will happen is they will gut
    you, and they will gut your Congressmen who stand with you. And all the
    people who agree with you will find some other reason to vote against
    them.'' And sure enough, last fall in '94, that's what happened.
        I can tell you today that the Democrats would still be in the
    majority in the House of Representatives if they had not fought to ban
    assault weapons and for the Brady bill. I don't care what anybody else
    said. I've looked at those votes district by district, and I know what
    I'm talking about. That's why they lost. There were other reasons for
    the gain, the promise of the tax cut and all that; the Christian
    Coalition's great outpouring, they had a lot to do with it. But in the
    close races, the NRA took them down, the people that stood up for taking
    Uzis off the street and Uzis out of the schools, for making people check
    to see if they had a criminal or a mental health background. And there
    are thousands and thousands of people who now have not gotten guns
    because the Brady bill passed. There are people who are alive. There are
    children who are going to live because of the assault weapons ban. It
    was the right thing to do. And you ought to stand up for those people
    who did it. It was the right thing to do.
        Same thing happened with Haiti. People said, ``You've got to be out
    of your mind.'' Al Gore and I were 50 percent of all the people in
    Washington, DC, that thought it was a good idea to send our forces to
    Haiti. [Laughter] They said, ``You'll never be able to explain this to
    the American people; everybody knows our national security is not at
    stake.'' You know what we said? Those military dictators came to the
    United States, to New York City, stood in the shadow of the Statue of
    Liberty, and promised to leave and let President Aristide come back.
        If the United States can be lied to on its own soil in the shadow of
    the Statue of Liberty when we say we want every country in our
    hemisphere to be a democracy, how can we turn away the hoards of people
    who are risking their lives and dying in the seas from Haiti. How can we
    ever say we are the force for freedom and democracy? And so we did it.
    And we did it without firing a shot. And we were right. But it wasn't
    popular.
        When Hillary was trying to decide about going to China, everybody
    said, ``This is a really dumb idea. If you go, the people who are
    against their human rights practices will say you have legitimized them
    just by going. And then if you say what you need to do, the people that
    want to have stronger trade relationship will say you are wrecking our
    relationship.'' But you know what we decided? All over the world the
    kind of future we have depends in large measure on how we treat women
    and their little children, especially their little female children. Do
    you know--[applause]--just for an example, in all of Asia today, there
    are now 77 million more boys than there are girls, because little girl
    children are still being killed because they're not supposed to be worth
    anything?
        I can give you a lot of other examples. And so we decided that she
    ought to go because she could stick up for the women and the children
    and especially the girl children of this world, and she could talk not
    only about China and not singling China out but about what's happening
    in other countries including our own country that isn't right. And now
    it looks like a great decision. But the reason it was is because it was
    the right thing to do, not because it was the political thing to do.
        I could give you a lot of others, but I'll give you one more,
    because the Vice President had a lot to do with this. We were trying to
    decide whether to go forward with our campaign to try to stamp out, or
    at least dramatically discourage, illegal smoking by teenagers. And all
    the political advice was, ``Wait til the next election is over. These
    tobacco companies never lose in court; they never lose anywhere. They
    got a double ton of money, and they will gut you, not because they will
    get on television and run ads saying we think kids ought to smoke but
    because they have mailing lists, they can write

    [[Page 1447]]

    people, they can inflame people. There are all these wonderful,
    wonderful Americans who grow tobacco like their families have been
    growing it for 100 and 200 years. But they can terrify them, and they
    will give them all kinds of propaganda about how you're going to drive
    them into the dirt, and those people will become a political force
    against you. And all the Americans who agree with you, they'll find some
    other reason to be against you. That's why people don't ever take on
    organized interests. So don't you be--you've already been the first
    President to take on the NRA; for goodness sakes, don't take on the
    tobacco companies, everybody else gave that one a pass.''
        But we knew 2 things after 14 months of study. We knew, number one,
    that for 30 years some of these companies have known that tobacco was
    addictive and dangerous and that they were consciously marketing it to
    children. And the second thing we knew was that 3,000 kids a day begin
    to smoke, and 1,000 of them will end their lives early.
        So finally, we decided, how in God's name can we walk away from
    this? A thousand kids a day living a better, fuller, longer life is
    worth any amount of political sacrifice. It is the right thing to do.
        There's so many other things like this that I could tell you about,
    but you get the idea. This is a great country. I do not want you to be
    upset about what you think is going on in Washington; I want you to be
    determined to do what you think is best for America, consistent with our
    values.
        This debate was inevitable, as inevitable as the sun coming up in
    the morning, because of the depth of the changes that are going on.
    Because we're changing the way we work, we're changing the way we live,
    we have to change the way we do government. This was inevitable.
        Don't you forget--we've been around for nearly 220 years now because
    most of the time when the chips are down, the American people do the
    right thing. And we come out pretty good.
        I was born nearly 50 years ago to a widowed mother in a State where
    the per capita income was barely half the national average. My
    granddaddy raised me til I was 4. He had a sixth grade education. And I
    got to be President, not because I was so smart or so good or because I
    worked like crazy--because there are hundreds of people like me in this
    country and hundreds of people all over the world. America made that
    possible. America said, no matter who you are, here's a chance at an
    education. No matter who you are, here's a chance at a job. No matter
    who you are, you can run for office. No matter who you are, you can go
    anywhere and stand up for what you believe in. This is a very great
    country, and every one of you should be happy and proud that you happen
    to be alive at this period of profound change. If we do our job, the
    best is yet to come.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:32 p.m. at the Century Plaza Hotel. In
    his remarks, he referred to actor Tom Hanks and Ashley Ballard, who sang
    the national anthem.