    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
    [September 26, 1995]
    [Pages 1494-1499]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Saxophone Club
    September 26, 1995

        Well, if I had any sense, I would quit while I'm ahead. [Laughter] I
    believe Terry's about to get the hang of this. [Laughter]
        I want to thank Terry McAuliffe for the magnificent job that he has
    done, along with Laura Hartigan and all of our staff. I want to thank
    Sean, who thought up the idea of the Saxophone Club in his office about
    3 years ago. And it, I think you could say, has sort of caught on,
    thanks to you. And I appreciate that. I thank you. I thank Matt and all
    the people who have worked hard to make the Saxophone Club a success.
        This, in some ways, is my favorite part of the campaign, the
    Saxophone Club, because a lot of you have come here and have
    contributed, and it hasn't been easy for you. But those of you who have
    joined the Saxophone Club who are basically in Sean's generation--some a
    little younger, maybe some a little older--you're the people that I ran
    for President for. I wanted so badly to see our country go into the next
    century still the strongest country in the world, the strongest force
    for peace and freedom and democracy, the American dream alive and well
    here at home, and with people coming together instead of being split
    apart. That's why I ran, and that's why I'm running for reelection.
        I think every day of what I want this country to look like 10, 20,
    30 years from now when your children are coming up and growing up and
    looking forward to their futures. I want

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    this to be a country with great opportunity for entrepreneurs; a country
    where we can, through hard work, grow the middle class and shrink the
    under class; a country with good schools and a clean environment and
    safe streets; a country that is characterized by fairness, not meanness,
    and by unity, not division.
        We're having this great debate in Washington now which is more
    extreme in the options being discussed than has been the case in
    previous times. And part of it is because we're going through a period
    of change, and whenever we go through a period of change, extreme
    debates tend to arise and old alliances tend to get unsettled.
        But the fundamental questions are clear: How are we going to get
    into the 21st century, rewarding the values that made America great with
    the new ideas that are always required in a time of change? How are we
    going to reward both freedom and responsibility? How are we going to
    lift up both work and family? How are we going to empower individuals to
    make the most of their own lives and families and communities to solve
    their own problems? How are we going to honor our obligations across the
    generations to our parents and our children, across our racial and
    ethnic lines, across our income lines?
        Fundamentally, we have to decide, as my friend Lawton Chiles, the
    Governor of Florida, said the other day, whether we're going to be a
    community or a crowd. You think about it. That's what the fairness and
    meanness debate is all about. It's also about whether you believe that
    you will do better in the 21st century if you live in a community or a
    crowd.
        You obviously have decided you want to live in a community, even
    though most of you could do pretty well in a crowd. A crowd is a group
    of people occupying the same space who basically have no rules and they
    can just elbow each other until the strongest prevail and the weak are
    left behind. A community is a group of people occupying the same space
    who believe that their success and meaning and richness in life depends
    upon other people's success as well, that we go up or down together and
    therefore we have certain obligations to one another and to our land and
    to our future.
        I want this country to be a community, not a crowd. I want it to be
    a country where huge opportunity exists for individuals but where we do
    it with fairness and not meanness. That's basically what this debate is
    all about now.
        When I look to the future, I see an economic policy that has worked.
    My friends in the other party, they all said if my economic plan passed
    it would be the end of the world, we'd have the awfullest recession you
    ever saw. I keep waiting for all those fellows who want to be President
    in the Republican primary to be just quoted back what they said about
    our economic plan in '93. [Laughter] Where are they? Sooner or later we
    should stop rewarding people for being wrong, wrong, wrong every time.
        But in spite of everything Terry said, in spite of the fact that we
    had over 7 million new jobs and 2\1/2\ million new homeowners and 2
    million new small businesses and the largest number of self-made
    millionaires than any time period in history that's comparable and a
    4,700 stock market, the median wage dropped. So if we're going to be a
    community, not a crowd, we have to find a way to give everybody a shot
    at the American dream, which means that we should invest more money in
    education and research and development and new technologies, not less.
    We should give everybody a chance to go forward.
        If we really believe in responsibility along with opportunity and
    along with freedom, then we have to believe in safe streets and a clean
    environment; we have to believe in child support enforcement; we have to
    believe in genuine welfare reform which rewards work and parenting,
    instead of punishing children. If we really believe in that.
        I am proud of the fact that, since our crime bill passed--the same
    crowd, you know, they said, ``If the President's crime bill passes, he
    claims there will be 100,000 police in 6 years, but they'll never get to
    20,000.'' Well, in the first year we're over 25,000 and rising. And I
    keep hoping somebody will ask them about what they said. Maybe I'll get
    a chance to one day. But I'm proud of that. I'm proud of the fact that
    we have stiffened child support enforcement. I'm proud of the fact that
    we have cracked down on fraud in the Medicare and Medicaid and food
    stamp programs. I am proud of the fact that we have done the things
    we've done. We've had the first conviction this week under the Violence
    Against Women Act. We've begun to convict people under the ``three
    strikes and you're out'' bill. I'm proud of that.

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        And I am proud of the fact that we seem to be coming back to our
    senses in many ways as a society. In every State just about, the crime
    rate's down, the murder rate's down, the welfare rolls are down, the
    food stamp rolls are down. The teen pregnancy rate is down in America 2
    years in a row now. Even the divorce rate is down. We seem to be coming
    back together.
        But it's just like on the economic side. The drug use rate is down
    for people over 18, but among young children, between 12 and 17, the
    rate of random violence and random drug use is up again. So we have to
    keep doing what works, but we have to also have an agenda for those
    young people, which means we shouldn't abandon a crime bill that is
    working with both prevention and preventive policing. It means we
    shouldn't cut out things like summer jobs and other programs designed to
    give these kids something to say yes to, instead of just something to
    say no to. It means we shouldn't walk away from our commitment to safe
    and drug-free schools and giving these children access to role models
    that give them a chance to make something positive of their lives.
    Because a lot of them are just out there kind of raising themselves, and
    they've been kind of cut loose. And we can't walk away from them.
        If you look at what we have tried to do in the way we run our
    Government--our adversaries, they always talked about big Government and
    how they wanted to do something about it. But there are 163,000 fewer
    people working for the National Government today than there were the day
    I took office. We have downsized the Government. We took 16,000 pages of
    regulation away. We reduced SBA regulations, for example, by 50 percent
    and the budget by 40 percent and doubled the loan volume including an
    85-percent increase in loans to women and a 75-percent increase in loans
    to minorities, without making one single loan below our normal
    standards. We did those things.
        So I'm all for that. But there's still work to be done. We still
    have to say there are some things as a community we do through our
    Nation that we don't want to just leave alone. In the world, I'm proud
    of the foreign policy accomplishments that Terry mentioned. I'm glad for
    what happened here in Bosnia today with the new agreement. And I am glad
    that on Thursday we will have a second signing between Israel and the
    Palestinians, moving forward on peace in the Middle East.
        But we are still vulnerable in our country to the forces of
    organized destruction, from terrorism and religious and ethnic and
    racial hatred and fanaticism. So there's more to do. We've got an
    antiterrorism bill to pass. I was told that bill would pass by Memorial
    Day, and I am still waiting for it. We still have things to do to make
    the world a better place.
        I want a comprehensive nuclear test ban. I want the chemical weapons
    treaty to pass. I want the START II treaty to pass. I want us to have
    ultimate real peace in Bosnia and in Northern Ireland. I want the world
    to be moving in the right direction so that you will have less chaos and
    madness to deal with. And I want the United Nations and NATO to work.
    That means the United States has to lead.
        All those things are issues. But they're all rooted in whether we
    want to be a community or a crowd, whether we want to reward
    responsibility as well as freedom, whether we want to reward opportunity
    for individuals and strength for families and communities. And that's
    really what this debate about the budget is. It's really not much about
    money, it's about what kind of people we're going to be.
        We have proved--I have given the Congress a budget that the Chairman
    of the Federal Reserve says is credible, based on economic estimates
    that have been more accurate than those of Congress in the previous 2
    years. It is a good, solid budget. But this is not about balancing the
    budget. Both parties agreed now we should balance the budget, and we
    should. The Democrats should never be in the position of being for a
    permanent deficit. We never had one until the 12 years before I showed
    up here.
        But let balanced budgeting be a goal in and of itself, done
    consistent with our values. Don't use the balanced budget as an excuse
    to destroy programs that you don't like that will make us more uneven,
    less healthy, undermine our environment, and weaken our community. Let's
    do it in the right way.
        When I learned, for example, that among the proposals in this budget
    is a gimmick to make the cost of college loans more expensive to
    students and to take away options that students have to repay those
    loans so that bankers and other middlemen can get more money back--
    that's not about cutting the budget; that's about our values. If we want
    to grow the economy by cutting the budget, why would we undermine
    economic growth by taking college out of the

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    reach of more and more Americans? It doesn't make sense. It's not
    consistent with our values.
        Why would we make it harder for little poor children to get off to a
    good start in school or for districts that don't have so much money to
    have smaller classes and more computers and higher standards? Those
    children may not be your children, but they'll be a big part of your
    future, because when those of you who are young or my age, they will be
    who you'll be looking at to care for you, to strengthen your country, to
    drive us forward. We have to be thinking about 20 years, 30 years down
    the road. This is not a smart thing to do. And it violates our values as
    well as our interests.
        If you look at the environment, my idea of balancing the budget does
    not include gutting the EPA so they can't enforce the Clean Air Act.
    This administration--not the previous Republican administration, this
    administration--has gone to big industries and said, ``Look, if you can
    meet the standards of the Clean Air Act and you're willing to be tested
    for it, you can throw the rule book away. We're tired of over-regulating
    America. We just want a clean environment, and we'll look for ways to
    get it.'' Our administration has gone in partnership to Detroit and
    other automotive interests and said, we will work with you to develop a
    clean car, but we have to triple the auto mileage that we're going to
    get out of our automobiles. And we have to do it soon, otherwise the
    greenhouse gas emissions from all this automobile driving around the
    world is going to choke the future.
        We have to do it. But we did it in a partnership. I could give you
    example after example after example. But to jump in the tank and claim
    that the environment doesn't matter anymore? You see, just last week, we
    had a new scientific report that said now there is virtually unanimity
    among all the established scientists in the world that the globe is
    heating up, that the hole in the ozone layer is bigger than we thought,
    that if we could--we could see the temperature of the Earth grow up to 8
    degrees in the next hundred years. If you do that, you'll have the polar
    ice caps breaking up; you'll have the water level rising; you'll have
    temperature extremes going wacky. And the world will be a very different
    world for your great-grandchildren.
        We cannot let that happen. We don't have to let that happen. We owe
    it to our country to preserve our heritage. And we sure don't need a
    commission on closing the national parks, which is another part of their
    budget. It's wrong.
        I grew up in one of those little national parks they say they want
    to close. And I can tell you we had a lot of elderly people coming down
    and retiring in our hometown from the Middle West, living in little
    rooming houses, barely had enough money to live on. They came there
    because of the national park, because of what it offered, because they
    could for no money be in 5 minutes from downtown in peaceful, beautiful
    surroundings. And they can have access to the sulfur springs and all the
    other things that were there. And that story is replicated all over
    America.
        When our family went to Yellowstone and Grand Teton this summer, and
    we drove through there for 10 bucks--for 10 bucks, our family could go
    through there and visit the national park, just like any other family.
    For $25 you can get a year pass, and your car can get into any national
    park in America. [Laughter] Now, listen, we're laughing, but there are a
    lot of Americans who haven't had a pay raise in 15 years; they can still
    have the dignity and the rest and the exhilaration of seeing the most
    beautiful places on God's Earth at an affordable price because your
    country has the national parks.
        My idea of balancing the budget does not include a Medicare program
    where, as they told us in both Houses in the last week, ``We want to
    double the deductibles, double the premiums, not give anybody Medicare
    until they're 67, and, oh, by the way, in Medicaid we're going to
    abolish all the national standards for nursing homes''--signed into law
    by Ronald Reagan, hardly a liberal Democrat--[laughter]--``we're going
    to get rid of all them, and we're going to adopt a rule that says before
    an elderly person can get any help, if they're married, the State has
    the right to make their spouse sell the car, the house, and clean out
    the savings account and live in abject poverty.''
        That is not the America I want you to live in in the 21st century.
    It is wrong. I don't want you to live in that America. I don't want you
    to be living in Maryland making a living and have your parents in
    Indiana or some other place out there in the country and worried to
    death because there are no national quality standards for nursing homes
    if your parents have to be there. I don't want you to have to work

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    that way. That's not right, and it's not necessary. I don't want that.
        And I'll tell you something else: Look at what happened to working
    families this week in this budget. They proposed to cut my taxes but to
    just erode the working family tax credit that we put in, so that they're
    going to raise taxes on families with incomes of less than $25,000 a
    year to lower mine. No thank you. That's not right. That's not pro-work.
    It's not pro-family. It's not good for America. It is not right. It is
    not right. How can you do that?
        I'm telling you, there are a huge number of American families out
    there where there's one or two parents, where people are working full-
    time, where they have children in the home and they're living on
    $11,000, $12,000, $13,000, $15,000, $16,000 a year. It is all they can
    do to educate their children and put clothes on their back and make sure
    they get to the doctor if they're sick. It is all they can do.
        And in 1993, when we passed our economic plan, we lowered taxes on
    14 million of those families--with 50 million Americans in them--because
    we wanted always to encourage work over welfare and because we wanted to
    have an elemental principle in our country: If you're a parent and
    you're trying to be a good parent and you're willing to work 40 hours a
    week, you should not be in poverty. That is right, and we should say
    this.
        And let me tell you something else that you may not know about their
    budget. They voted this week to say that a company keeping a retirement
    plan can deposit money into workers' retirement funds and then take it
    out and spend it for whatever they want, for whatever they want. As long
    as they leave a minor and inadequate cushion there, you can put money
    into your workers' retirement and then take it out and spend it on
    whatever you want.
        Is there no memory? Just last December, just last December, I signed
    a bill to strengthen our national pension benefit guaranty system. It
    saved the pensions of 8\1/2\ million Americans. It secured the pensions
    of 40 million other Americans. Have we no memory? We just saw people
    losing their whole retirement. Now they propose to let people loot their
    workers' pension plans for whatever reason, take it out of the pension
    and give it in dividends, take it out of the pension and give it to
    managers in extra pay, for a third home or something.
        Let me say this: I want people to do well in this country. I am
    proud of the fact that under our administration we've had record numbers
    of new businesses and record numbers of self-made millionaires. And I
    want every one of you who wants to be a millionaire or a successful
    entrepreneur to do it. But we don't have to hurt the rest of America.
    This is a middle class country with middle class values, committed to
    families and children and their parents and doing right by everybody. We
    don't have to hurt people to do that. We don't have to.
        So I say to you, it is about values. And it's also about leadership,
    and leadership includes making policies like this based on principle,
    not mere politics--based on principle, not mere politics--and being
    willing to do certain things that are unpopular. You heard Terry reel
    off a few of them. The conventional wisdom was that we shouldn't take on
    the NRA over the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. You all clapped
    and cheered, but the Democrats lost the House because of it; don't you
    ever forget it. There were a lot of people who laid down their careers
    so that last year, 40,000 people with criminal records would not be able
    to get handguns. And they did because there were actually people out
    there who were willing to frighten good, God-fearing Americans who owned
    guns and engage in sporting contests and actually convinced them that
    that threatened their weapons. It didn't, and they knew it, but they did
    it anyway. And yes, they won a short-term political battle, but there
    are more people alive today because of that. There are more people alive
    today because we're going to take those assault weapons out of the
    schools and off the streets. And nobody's going to lose the right to
    have a hunting weapon or a sporting weapon.
        And everybody says that this tobacco thing is going to be chapter
    two of the same thing. They'll terrifying all those good, God-fearing
    tobacco farmers into thinking that we're going to put them in the
    street. They'll try to convince people that Big Brother, the
    Government's going to take over these decisions. And maybe it's bad
    politics, but let me tell you something, folks. You know what the 14-
    month study by the FDA showed? It showed that, number one, there were
    some people in the industry who had known for decades about the dangers
    of tobacco and how addictive it was; number two, that there was
    advertising still having a heavy attraction for children. And since they
    lose a

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    certain number of customers every year, they've got to get a few more.
    [Laughter] And number three--you're laughing, but it's true. Number
    three showed that of the 3,000 young people a day who begin to smoke,
    1,000 will have their lives shortened. Now, if we can give 1,000 kids a
    day, for the next however many months I've got to be President--you
    know, whether it's 64 or some less--1,000 people a day--it's worth the
    political consequences. For the long run, it is the right thing to do.
        But there are lots of other examples where I have to do what I think
    is right. I knew the Haiti thing was unpopular, but it was right. And
    we're in better shape in Latin America and the world, and democracy's in
    better shape because we restored democracy to Haiti, and because of the
    way we did it without having to kill a bunch of them or our people as
    well. It was the right thing to do, even if it wasn't popular in the
    moment.
        I can see it now building up. In Bosnia, people say, ``Well, we like
    the fact that now our allies decided to go along with our strategy, and
    we did the strong and right thing in Bosnia and now we have a chance to
    make peace. But if we make peace, because we're the world's leader and
    because we're the leader of NATO, we'll have the same obligation here we
    had when Egypt and Israel made peace in the late seventies. We have to
    help enforce that.''
        We never lost a person in the Sinai as a result of the Middle East
    peace. And if we have a good peace agreement here, in all probability
    none of our soldiers will be put in harm's way. But there will be people
    who try to stir folks up and say it's a bad thing to do. But if you want
    your country to be a leader for peace and freedom, we cannot say,
    ``We're the leader; here's what you should do; now, you go do it.''
    We've got to--we have to show up for work in the morning. We have to.
        I could give you lots of other examples. I knew, when I gave my
    affirmative action speech, I know what the politics of that is. But I'm
    nearly 50 years old. I have lived through the worst of racial
    segregation in this country. I was raised by a working grandmother and a
    working mother, and I have seen women's opportunities expand and
    discrimination continue. I know in my own mind that we are not yet able
    to fully make decisions, all of us, totally disregarding the gender and
    race of the people with whom we deal. Now, that doesn't mean that we
    don't have to fix affirmative action, there weren't a bunch of things
    wrong with it that we need to clean up and deal with. And I'm trying to
    do that.
        The popular thing is just say get rid of it. But it's not the right
    thing. The right thing is for us to band together and to grow together.
    Our ethnic diversity and the fact that we are willing to give all of our
    people, regardless of their gender, a chance to live up to the fullest
    of their God-given abilities, is our meal ticket in the global society
    of the 21st century, if we can live together instead of using cheap
    politics to drive each other apart. It is our meal ticket.
        So I say to you, when people ask you why you're involved in this
    campaign and why you're fighting for my reelection, say, ``I'm not
    fighting for the President; I'm fighting for myself and my children and
    my future and my country. That's what I'm interested in.'' When people
    ask you why they should support this campaign, you can tell them what
    Terry did about our record. And I hope you will become familiar with it.
    And I hope you will be able to say that.
        But the real thing is, what are we going to do tomorrow to make it
    better? We've got to have a strong economy. We've got to have strong
    families. We've got to have good individual opportunity. We have to have
    a Government that is leaner and makes more sense. We have to be leaders
    in the world.
        But most important, if we want the 21st century to look right, we've
    got to stand up for responsibility as well as freedom, for family and
    for work, and for the elemental proposition that the reason we're around
    here after more than 200 years is that at all critical junctures we have
    deepened our understanding and our willingness to act on what it means
    to be a community instead of a crowd.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:05 p.m. at the Omni Shoreham Hotel. In
    his remarks, he referred to Terry McAuliffe, national finance chairman,
    and Laura Hartigan, national finance director, Clinton/Gore '96; and
    Sean Foley, chairman, and Matt Gobush, director, Saxophone Club.