    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
    [September 19, 1995]
    [Pages 1393-1397]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1393]]

    Remarks at a Fundraiser in North Miami Beach
    September 19, 1995

        The President. Thank you. This is the quietest this has been all
    night. [Laughter]
        Audience member. Four more years, Mr. President!
        The President. Thank you. I want to thank Governor Chiles and
    Lieutenant Governor MacKay and your attorney general and the other State
    officials, the State legislators and local officials and others who are
    here. Mostly, I just want to thank all of you for coming here to support
    our candidacy.
        This has been a wonderful day in Florida for me. I started the
    morning in Jacksonville with the sheriff there, looking at some police
    officers who were hired under our crime bill who have already
    contributed to lowering the crime rate on the streets of Jacksonville.
    And then I flew down to North Miami Beach and had a wonderful meeting
    with some senior citizens about Medicare and Medicaid. And then I came
    on here.
        I know that this is sort of a festive occasion. You're all packed in
    like sardines in a can, and we're all standing up instead of sitting
    down. And I won't keep you here very long, but I want you to understand
    that as profoundly grateful as we are to you for your contributions to
    this campaign and to all of you who did so much to organize this event,
    it is even more important that you make a personal commitment tonight to
    do what you can to make sure that we carry the State of Florida next
    November.
        And the Vice President was talking to you about some of the things
    that are important. This administration has been good for Florida. We've
    tried to be good to Florida, and our general policies have helped the
    economy in Florida. We have also fought against those things that we
    thought would hurt you. We have represented your State in our Cabinet.
    We have tried to be sensitive to your concerns. We are trying to work
    through this budget process in a way that will be fair to the incredible
    diversity and richness and growth that is Florida.
        I feel deeply, personally committed to you because of the fact that
    I have family members here, my wife's brothers, Hugh and Tony, and their
    wives, Maria and Nicole. And now I have a little nephew whom I was just
    holding upstairs. He doesn't think I'm too charismatic. He goes to sleep
    every time I pick him up. And because our campaign--my campaign really
    got started here in December of 1991 at the Florida Democratic caucus--
    first election I ever won in the Presidential campaign.
        But more importantly, we all got a big stake in the future, and a
    great deal of how we live for the next 20 years will be determined by
    the outcome of this Presidential election. So let me try just in a
    couple of minutes, after which the Vice President and I will come down
    and try to finish shaking hands with everybody and visit and laugh, just
    ask you to take a couple of minutes to be serious about what is at stake
    here.
        When I ran for President in 1992 and I asked Al Gore to join with me
    to form what is clearly the most unique partnership between a President
    and a Vice President in American history--Al Gore is clearly the most
    influential, effective, important Vice President in the history of the
    United States of America--we basically agreed that we were in a time of
    profound change and that we needed a clear vision of the future. We
    needed a commitment to new ideas. We needed a commitment to old-
    fashioned American values. We needed a commitment to seeking common
    ground to going beyond the kind of partisan politics that is eating
    Washington, DC, alive. And maybe most important of all, we needed to be
    willing to do what is right for the future of this country, even if it's
    unpopular in the short run. And that is exactly what we have tried to do
    in Washington for the last 2\1/2\ years.
        My vision is that in the 21st century this country will be a high-
    opportunity place, where we are growing entrepreneurs and growing the
    middle class and shrinking the under class, where we have good schools
    and good health care systems and safe streets and a clean environment,
    where people have the opportunity to make the most of their own lives
    and families and communities have a chance to solve their own problems
    and America is a force for freedom and prosperity and peace throughout
    the world. That is my vision.

    [[Page 1394]]

        To achieve that, we need old-fashioned values: freedom and
    responsibility, work and family, community, excellence, accountability,
    and a real devotion to the American dream and a willingness to stand up
    for this country. But to get there we need some new ideas. We can't keep
    doing business as usual. That's the only reason I ran for President in
    1992.
        We are going through a period of change as profound as anything
    that's happened in this country in a hundred years. This is like when we
    moved from being a rural agricultural country into being an industrial
    urbanized country. Now we're going from being an industrial economy to a
    high-technology, information-based economy. We're going from the cold
    war relationships in our global foreign policy to a global economy,
    where we're becoming integrated economically and there are all kinds of
    pressures for disintegration, disintegration of families, of
    communities, of national economic policy, and the growth of extremism
    all over the world, political and religious and ethnic extremism. You
    know it. You see it when a bus blows up in Israel. You see it when
    radicals run for office or stop elections in other secular Islamic
    countries. You see it when the sarin gas explodes in the subway in Japan
    or when, God forbid, the Federal building blows up in Oklahoma City.
        So this is a confusing world. There's a lot of wonderful things
    happening and a lot of troubling things happening. We cannot continue to
    do things the way we always did.
        Our administration has a clear economic policy for this global
    economy, reduce the deficit but increase our investment in people, in
    education, in technology, in research, in things that will grow the
    economy. Look at the places that are left behind. Help the places who
    need help because of defense cutbacks. Help the places who need
    incentives for people to invest in inner cities and rural areas. And
    don't forget that the people come first.
        What are the results? In 2\1/2\ years, the good news is, 7 million
    jobs, 2\1/2\ million homeowners, 2 million new businesses, a record
    number of self-made millionaires, the stock market's at 4,700, corporate
    profits at an all-time high. But guess what? The median income has
    dropped one percent. Why? Because we still have a lot of people who
    can't do very well in this new global economy. And I'm telling you, go
    back to our values. Everything we do, everything we do, has to be
    directed toward helping people who are willing to work hard and do their
    best to be good workers, good parents, and successful in this global
    economy. That's what we have to do.
        Look at our social problems. Believe it or not--you couldn't tell it
    maybe from the daily press, but in this country in the last 2 years, the
    crime rate is down, the murder rate is down, the people on welfare's
    numbers are down, the food stamp rolls are down, the divorce rate is
    down, even the abortion rate is down. But we still have some terrible
    problems. Why? Because young people feel like nobody's looking out for
    their future. The juvenile crime rate is up. Casual drug use among
    people under 18 is up. And so we have to find ways to work together.
        That's what our crime bill was all about that the people in Congress
    are trying to undo. We put 100,000 police on the street, not just to
    catch criminals but to prevent crime and to give our young people some
    role models and some people they could relate to, people who would be
    standing up for their future and telling them there are things you ought
    to be saying yes to as well as saying no to crime and violence and
    drugs. And we need to do more of that, not less. We need a different
    approach that recognizes that we have to do both things.
        Today, finally, the Senate moved away from partisan extremism and 87
    people voted in the Senate, 87 of 100, for a welfare reform bill that
    has the elements that I've been advocating now for 2\1/2\ years. It
    encourages work. It provides child care for people on welfare so they
    can go to work without worrying their hearts out about their kids. And
    it is very tough in collecting child support that is owed by people;
    even if they cross State lines, you ought not to be able to run away
    from the obligation to take care of your own children. That's what we
    did today.
        The point I want to make about all this is that we need to try new
    and different approaches. And when we do, we can get results. When we
    fall back into these old patterns of turning everything in Washington
    into a partisan fight, all it does is turn the American people off and
    doesn't do a single, solitary thing to move the American people into the
    future.
        Now we have a chance with this budget to find real common ground. I
    want to balance the budget. The leaders of the Democratic Party want to
    balance the budget. I have presented

    [[Page 1395]]

    a balanced budget plan. But the question is, can we balance the budget
    consistent with our values and with these new ideas? Why are we
    balancing the budget? To take the debt off these kids here, to free up
    money to be borrowed at lower interest rates, to create jobs, to stop
    spending your tax money paying interest on the debt and start spending
    it educating our children or taking care of our health needs or fighting
    crime. That's why we want to balance the budget.
        Therefore, I say to you, I don't have to take a back seat to them in
    balancing the budget. When I took office--I've only been in Washington
    2\1/2\ years, and most of them had been here forever and a day, and we
    cut the deficit from $290 billion to $160 billion in 3 years. I want to
    do it.
        But I do not believe that the way to cut the deficit is to cut the
    number of children in Head Start, cut the number of young people in
    national service, increase the cost of student loans. That is wrong.
    That is cutting off our nose to spite our face. Cutting the education
    budget today would be like cutting the defense budget at the height of
    the cold war. In the global economy, education is our national security
    weapon, and we dare not cut it.
        Al Gore has done a lot to give this country a different kind of
    Government. You heard him say we've cut the size of the Government,
    we've abolished 16,000 pages of regulation. Carol Browner from Florida,
    running the EPA, has cut by 25 percent the paperwork burdens of the EPA.
    But I'll be darned if I think the way to move into the global economy is
    to wreck the environment or the public health of this country in the
    name of balancing the budget. That is not necessary, and it is not
    right.
        I've already said, I was up in Jacksonville with the magnificent
    sheriff there talking about the crime bill today. There are those who
    say in the name of balancing the budget, they want to stop the effort to
    put 100,000 police on the street and send less money in the form of a
    blank check to local governments. I say we know how to lower the crime
    rate; there is no constituency in America for raising the crime rate.
    Why in the wide world would we seek to balance the budget in ways that
    will raise the crime rate when we know how to lower it? Let's keep
    lowering the crime rate, put the police on the street, put the
    prevention programs out there, put the prison programs out there. Let's
    don't wreck the crime bill. Let's keep bringing the crime rate down.
        I'll give you just two other ideas that are out there to balance the
    budget. One of the most important things we did that we got next to no
    credit for in 1993 was cutting the taxes of 15 million working families
    with 50 million Americans in them, including 10 times as many people in
    Florida as paid a tax increase. The reason for this was very simple in
    my mind. I really believed the biggest problem in America today is the
    stagnant wages of middle class people who are working harder for less. I
    really want people to go to work off welfare. I believe if you tell
    people you want them to work, work has to pay.
        Most parents today have to work. We have no higher duty than to make
    sure that people who work and have children can be both successful at
    work and successful in the raising of their children, our most important
    job.
        So what do we do? We expanded the family tax credit to give all
    those people a tax cut so there would never be an incentive to be on
    welfare. What do they want to do in Washington? They want to raise taxes
    on the lowest income working people and give everybody else a tax cut.
    It doesn't make sense; that is not the way to balance the budget.
        And finally, let's talk about Medicare and Medicaid. The discussion
    has appalled me in Washington. The people who are proposing $450 billion
    worth of cuts in Medicare and Medicaid act like if you're not for their
    plan, you don't want to save the Medicare Trust Fund; if you're not for
    their plan, you must be some greedy, wealthy older person who just
    doesn't want to pay your fair share.
        Let me tell you something, folks. One of the most important
    decisions we have to make as we change this economy is what our
    obligations to each other are. Lawton Chiles said we needed a country
    that's a community, not a crowd. Are we going to be a community or a
    crowd? Are we going to define ourselves by what we can do together, or
    what we can do cut alone as a bunch of isolated individuals?
        Now, the truth is that most elderly people in this country are more
    than willing to do what's right, have already done what's right all
    their lives, and care a great deal about the welfare of their children
    and their grandchildren and the future of this country. And it is a bum
    rap to say that those of us who have questions

    [[Page 1396]]

    about whether we should just jerk $450 billion out of Medicare and
    Medicaid don't want to balance the budget and don't care about our
    country. That is not true, and it is not necessary to balance the
    budget.
        I want you to tell people that. When you hear people say we've got
    to cut all this money out of Medicare because of the Trust Fund, you
    just remember one thing: Not one red cent that senior citizens pay in
    medical bills will go into that Trust Fund, not a penny. It's all going
    to fund the budget program and the tax cut. Don't ever forget it.
        So I say to you, let's balance the budget, but let's do it in a way
    that reflects our shared values and what we owe to each other. We can
    balance the budget without cutting education. We can balance the budget
    without endangering the environment. We can balance the budget without
    letting the crime rate go up again. And we can certainly balance the
    budget, slow the rate of health care inflation, fix the Medicare Trust
    Fund without soaking the elderly people of this country, 75 percent of
    whom are struggling to get by today on less than $24,000 a year. We can
    do these things.
        The last thing I want to tell you is--I thought about it today a lot
    because I was up in Jacksonville--if you are President of the United
    States at a time when everything is kind of going haywire and changing,
    you cannot always do what is popular and be right. Sometimes you have to
    do what's going to be right in 10 or 20 years. That's what you have to
    do.
        Now, I am well aware that I hurt myself terribly in north Florida
    when I became the first President in the history of the United States,
    while he was in office as opposed to after he left, to say to the
    National Rifle Association, ``You are wrong about the Brady bill. You
    are wrong about assault weapons. We need to make our children safer.''
    I'm aware of that.
        And believe you me, I am aware that every political adviser I had
    said, ``Look at the States you won last time. You're crazy if you take
    on the tobacco companies over teenage smoking.'' But I tell you, folks,
    3,000 children a day begin to smoke, and 1,000 of them every day will
    shorten their lives because of doing that. And I say who cares what the
    political consequences are if we save 1,000 lives a day from now on. It
    is worth doing. It is worth doing.
        When I sent the United States military to liberate Haiti from its
    dictators, everybody said I was crazy; there was no political support
    for it in the country; it was impossible. But I said the United States
    was promised by those military dictators that they would go. They gave
    their word to us, and we must keep our word for freedom's sake. We did,
    and we were right. Unpopular, yes. Right, yes. You have to do what's
    right over the long run.
        I'll give you a more mundane example. When the Vice President and I
    decided to invest massive amounts of his time and the most talented
    people we could find to work in the White House to reinvent the
    Government, my political advisers said, ``This is nuts. No President has
    ever made a single vote on management. No one will ever believe the
    Government runs well anyway. No one will ever believe the Government
    gets smaller anyway.''
        Well, let me tell you something, folks, that may all be true, but we
    cannot do what we need to do for the United States in the new
    information age unless we have a smaller, less bureaucratic, more
    efficient, less costly, better Government. So it's going to be the
    smallest it's been since John Kennedy, and it's going to put out twice
    as much output, and we're going to have more examples like the Small
    Business Administration where we cut the budget by 40 percent and
    doubled the loan volume to create small business in America. You're
    going to have a lot of that. There may not be any votes in it, but it's
    the right thing for America.
        When I stuck up for the elemental principle that we should reform
    affirmative action because there were some problems with it but that
    there was still discrimination in this country and we ought to reach out
    and try to make sure everybody was considered without regard to their
    gender or their racial or ethnic background, not given quotas, not given
    reverse discrimination, but at least given consideration for equal
    opportunity, I was told, ``This is dumb politics. Look at the polls.
    You're crazy.'' All I know is, look around this room, we're going up or
    down together, folks. Our ethnic diversity is the greatest resource we
    have if we use it in a sensible way. So we should amend affirmative
    action but not end it.
        The Vice President said something I'm really proud of. He will tell
    you, we were told by expert after expert after expert about politics
    that the First Lady should not go to China. They said, ``Oh, it's a no-
    win deal. If you go

    [[Page 1397]]

    over there, people that are concerned about human rights will attack her
    and attack you. And whatever you say, if you say anything strong, well,
    you'll put our relationship haywire. It's a lose-lose deal.'' But you
    know what? Somebody needs to speak up on behalf of the United States for
    the principles of freedom and liberty and decent treatment for women
    here at home and throughout the world. What happens to women and little
    girls throughout the world will have a great deal to do with the world
    we live in. And I'm proud of what she did, and we did the right thing to
    send her there.
        Well, you get the idea. So what I want you to do is to go out of
    here and say, ``Look, you may not agree with everything Bill Clinton and
    Al Gore do.'' [Laughter] ``I don't agree with everything Bill Clinton
    and Al Gore do. They make mistakes. But you've got to give them one
    thing: They've got a clear vision of what they want America to look
    like, they've got new ideas and old values, they are committed to
    working with Democrats and Republicans to find common ground based on
    those values, and they're doing what's right for the next generation,
    even if it is politically unpopular. And in a time of change, that's
    what we've got to do.''
        I want you to take that out to every person in Florida. We need to
    win Florida. But more importantly, America needs to stay on the right
    course: more jobs, higher incomes, safer streets, a cleaner environment,
    an opportunity to lead in a world that is safer and better, and to come
    together. If we do that, the best is yet to be.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 7:35 p.m. at the Sheraton Bal Harbour.