    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
    [September 21, 1995]
    [Pages 1421-1427]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Clinton/Gore '96 Luncheon in San Francisco
    September 21, 1995

        Well, Mr. Vice President, you convinced me. [Laughter] I think I'll
    just play you a tune on Clarence's saxophone and leave. [Laughter]
        I want to thank you all so much for being here, for the support that
    you have given to me and to Al Gore and to our family and our
    administration. I wish that Hillary could be here today, but we've been
    gone all week, and she had to stay in Washington to receive an award a
    couple of days ago from the Save the Children Foundation. So we're sort
    of out here on our own, but--[applause]. I thank Dick Bloom and Walter
    Shorenstein and Ernest Gallo and Sean Lowe and my friend Susie Tompkins,
    all of you, for your leadership on this very outstanding event and all
    the rest of you who have done

    [[Page 1422]]

    so much to help this administration to continue to do the work that we
    are about. I thank Reverend Cecil Williams for being here to pray over
    us and get us off to a good start. And I thank Clarence Clemons who,
    whenever I played saxophone with him, I loved it, because he was big
    enough and loud enough and good enough to cover all my sins. [Laughter]
    I loved that. And I thank the Glide Memorial Ensemble from your gospel
    choir for being here. You were wonderful today. Thank you so much. They
    put me in the proper frame of mind for what I want to say to you. You
    know, my first exposure to Reverend Williams and Glide Memorial was on
    Mother's Day in 1992 when I was running for office. And I got to talk
    about my mother. And at the time, I couldn't have known it, but I just
    had one more Mother's Day with her. And I never will forget the way I
    felt in that magnificent church with all those people coming together.
    They were all so different. Some were very wealthy, and some were living
    on the street. They were of all different backgrounds and all different
    dispositions toward life, but they were united there. That's what
    America is when we're at our best, when we're getting together and
    working together.
        It is no secret to anyone who lives in California and who's been
    through all the tumultuous ups and downs of the last few years that we
    are living in a time of profound change. And we have to decide how we're
    going to respond to that change. The challenge that I issue is more
    complicated because it requires all of us to do something. The other
    prevailing vision just tells you the Government's the problem, and if
    you get rid of it, everything will be all right.
        I understand from long experience why that's more attractive. One f
    Clinton's laws of politics is that everybody's for change in general,
    but they're against in particular. [Laughter] And I have one famous
    story that comes out of my own political heritage in the South about
    Huey Long during the Depression when he was going around telling
    everyone in Louisiana they should share the wealth because 30 percent of
    the people were out of work and the rest of them were poor, and he could
    always get elected on his share-the-wealth platform in the Depression.
    And once he was out on a country crossroads, and he was giving his
    speech. And he identified a farmer in the crowd that he knew, who he
    thought was absolutely certain that he could make the point he wanted to
    make. And he said, ``I see Farmer Jones out there.'' He said, ``Now let
    me ask you something. If you had three Cadillacs, wouldn't you give us
    one of them to go around on all these country roads and gather up the
    children and take them to school during the week and take them to church
    on the weekends?'' He said, ``Of course I would.'' He said, ``And if you
    had $3 million, wouldn't you give us a million dollars so that we could
    put a roof over every family's head in this county and feed every
    family?'' He said, ``Of course I would.'' He said, ``And if you had
    three hogs--'' And the farmer said, ``Now, wait a minute, Governor, I've
    got three hogs.'' [Laughter] So every one is for change in general, but
    when you get particular, then it's another thing altogether.
        And what I want to say to you is, we have no choice. I believe when
    the history of this era is written, people will say that the period from
    about--well, the--sometime around the mid-1980's until the first decade
    or so of the next century was the period of greatest economic and social
    change, the biggest changes in the way we live and work that America has
    experienced in 100 years, since roughly 1895 to 1916 when we moved from
    being an agricultural and rural country to a more urbanized and more
    industrial nation.
        That's the depth of the change that is going on. We're now moving
    into, as all of you know in California, an age dominated by information
    and technology, even in agriculture and industry. We're moving out of a
    cold war environment, where the world was largely organized among
    nation-states and two big camps into a global economy, where the world
    is often disorganized, and where all the forces are toward economic
    unity and global trade but political and social disintegration. In its
    sharpest sense, you see it manifested in racial and ethnic and religious
    hatred, whether it's a war in the Balkans or the horrible things in
    Rwanda and Burundi or a bus blowing up in Israel or sarin gas breaking
    open in the subway in Japan or the awful bombing of the Federal building
    in Oklahoma City.
        It is, in short, a world that is full of possibility, the most
    exciting period the world has ever known and full of challenge. And it
    is clear that we have to bring to this new world a flexibility, an
    openness, a willingness to embrace new ideas and new approaches. It is
    also clear that we have to have a clear idea about where we want to go.
    My vision for this country in

    [[Page 1423]]

    the 21st century is of a high opportunity nation, where we grow a lot of
    entrepreneurs every year and we expand our middle class and shrink our
    under class, where we empower individuals to make the most of their own
    lives and families and communities to solve their own problems and where
    we define ourselves in terms of what we can do together, not how we can
    divide one another.
        The Governor of Florida was with the Vice President and me a couple
    of days ago, and he said--in another fast-growing, multiethnic State--he
    said, ``We have to decide whether we are going to be a community or a
    crowd. A crowd is a collection of people in the same place who swarm all
    over each other seeking their individual interests, and the fittest
    survive and the others don't do very well. A community is a collection
    of people that band together and think they'll all do better if they all
    do well. And so they have obligations to one another which they
    recognize.''
        That's my vision. To get there, we've got to a have a lot of new
    ideas, but we have to be faithful to our fundamental values, to
    supporting freedom and responsibility; to helping families raise their
    children; to helping all people make the most of their own lives; to
    holding people accountable for what they do that is destructive of our
    common purposes; to standing up for America here at home and for our
    best values and our better selves around the world; to finding common
    ground instead of cheap, short-run, partisan gain; and to doing what is
    important for the long run, even if it's unpopular in the short run.
        I say that because there are a lot of perplexing problems that
    require us to do this. And I'll just give you two. If I had told any of
    you the day I was inaugurated that within 30 months we would have,
    working with the American people, created conditions which would produce
    7\1/2\ million new jobs; 2\1/2\ million new homeowners; 2 million new
    small businesses with entrepreneurs growing in America; businesses at
    three-quarter of a million a year, a rate never before achieved; the
    largest number of new self-made millionaires in our history; a stock
    market at 4,700; that all of these things would occur, but the earnings
    of the guy in the middle would go down one percent, you'd have a hard
    time believing that, wouldn't you? But that's what's happened, because
    in the global economy, those in wealthy countries, not just the United
    States but in all wealthy countries, who are not plugged in to the
    growth and opportunity of the future will be punished, will be rendered
    more insecure. And within their family lives, their community lives,
    their aspirations for the future, their ability to impart the American
    dream to their children will be impaired.
        So we have to figure out how to keep these good things going but how
    to bring the rest of America on board. That's why this computer
    initiative being undertaken by these major California companies was so
    important. I looked at those schoolchildren that we had gathered today,
    from all their different backgrounds, from all walks of life; I saw the
    Asian children and the Hispanic children and the white children. And
    then I ran up to a little girl, and she said, ``Mr. President, I was
    born in Stevens, Arkansas, and I'm living here in California with my
    grandmother.'' Stevens is a little country town full of people who go to
    church every Sunday and sing songs like you just heard. All this is a
    very different country. We've got to get everybody on board.
        I'll give you another example. The Vice President talked about our
    crime bill. America is, believe it or not, is actually making progress
    in the war against crime and in the war to reassert social
    responsibility. In virtually every major area in this country, the crime
    rate is down. The murder rate is down. The welfare rolls are down as the
    economy improves. The food stamp rolls are down. Almost everywhere this
    is so. Drug use among people between the ages of 18 and 34 is down.
    That's the good news. Against this background, it is shocking that the
    rate of violent crimes committed by juveniles between 12 and 17 years of
    age is up. And casual drug use among people between the ages of 12 and
    17 is up. This is a perplexing thing. Too many of these children are out
    there raising themselves. Too many of them get out of school too early
    with nothing else to do. Too many of them have problems that are treated
    only with the kind of harshness that may be appropriate for some but
    won't save anybody from getting in trouble in the first place.
        And nobody has all the answers. So we have to be open to new ideas,
    rooted in old values, because we want this to be a strong country, but
    we've got to get these kids on board. We can't lose a whole generation
    of Americans. We can't have people think that life is only about power
    and money.

    [[Page 1424]]

        Did you see the story the other day that said two-thirds of kids
    between--who belong to gangs who are under 18 think it's okay to shoot
    somebody who disrespects them? And then about a week later you had a 16-
    year-old in New York kill a 12-year-old because he thought he'd been
    disrespected. It turned out the kid had a great sense of humor and was
    just--made fun of everybody. It cost him his life. What about counting
    to 10 before you do anything? What about, ``Sticks and stones will break
    my bones.'' Or the family, you know, that was subject to the hail of
    bullets because they lost their way in Los Angeles the other day? It's
    not just violence--we have come to see children as a class of people as
    something to be marketed. What I said yesterday in Denver--maybe I'm
    just getting old-fashioned, but I just came out of my shoes when I saw
    those teenagers depicted the way they were in those Calvin Klein ads. I
    thought it was wrong. I thought it was wrong.
        But the main point I want to make is, we've got to realize that
    we're making progress on these big problems, but we have these problems
    underneath. So we need to keep doing what we're doing, but we need to be
    humble about it and recognize that we've got to have new ideas rooted in
    old-fashioned values. That's what this budget debate is all about. It is
    not fundamentally about money. Fundamentally it's about whether we're
    going to be a community or a crowd and what our obligations to each
    other are.
        And I just want to mention one or two things. I favor balancing the
    budget. We never had a permanent deficit in our budget that was
    structural until 1981. We quadrupled the debt of this country in 12
    years. It's so bad that the budget would be in balance today, and we'd
    have more money to give California for defense conversion, but the
    interest rate we pay on the debt run up between 1981 and the day I
    became President has thrown us into a deficit this year. That's the only
    thing putting us in deficit. And if we don't do something about it, next
    year interest payments on the debt will be bigger than the defense
    budget.
        So no one has a stake in this kind of permanent spending. But the
    question is, how are we going to do it? We know how important education
    is to our future. And we know that we have programs that give young kids
    a chance to get off to a better start in life, that make for smaller
    classes and more computers and higher standards in our public schools;
    that give young people who don't go to 4-year schools the chance to get
    good training opportunities; that offer opportunities like AmeriCorps,
    to work and serve your community and earn money to go to college; that
    provide for more scholarships for poor children and provide for better
    loans at lower cost for other young people to go to school.
        We know that if you raise the cost of a college education, you'll
    drive down the enrollment. Look at California: college enrollment down
    10 percent in the last 2 years in the face of a bad economy. It should
    have been exploding in the face of a bad economy. So I say to you, it is
    a violation of our solemn obligation to give people the chance to make
    the most of their own lives, to have a budget in the name of balance
    that takes children off Head Start, raises the cost of going to college,
    abolishes AmeriCorps, and takes the American dream away from millions of
    Americans. It is wrong. It is a violation of our basic values.
        It is not necessary to balance the budget. We have given a balanced
    budget plan that increases our investment in education. You heard the
    Vice President talking about the environment. Hillary and Chelsea and I
    spent a wonderful summer vacation in Grand Teton, in Yellowstone
    National Park. I want you to know one thing, that any family in America
    that can get in an automobile can go in that national park for 10 bucks
    a car. That's an incredible thing. It's a priceless wonder.
        There are people who think we ought to close a bunch of the parks or
    we ought to have no restraint on whether you can have a diamond mine
    next door or who actually have the idea that it is oppressive for us to
    try to preserve clean air, clean water, and safe food; people who tried
    to stop us from implementing new regulations on food safety after all
    those people died from E. coli. And believe it or not, until we
    developed these new standards, when I became President, we were still
    inspecting meat the way dogs do. [Laughter] You laugh about it--we were
    looking at it, touching it, and smelling it. [Laughter] And we've
    finished with all that. We want to put in these new regulations. People
    are trying to stop us. It is funny, but you're really laughing to keep
    from crying. It's inconceivable that anybody would say, don't do that.
    Cryptosporidium killed all those people in

    [[Page 1425]]

    Milwaukee--do you remember that--polluting the water supply. We don't
    want it to happen to San Francisco. There were people who wanted to stop
    us from implementing them, who want to take away from the EPA the budget
    they need to enforce these things.
        Now, we want to reduce Government regulation, but America needs
    clean air, clean water, safe food, and a devotion to our natural
    resources. That is a part of our moral obligation to our children and
    our future as well.
        There are those who want us to take away our commitment to put
    100,000 police on the street and just send a smaller check to local
    governments. We were in Jacksonville, Florida, the other day--a
    Republican county with an African-American Democratic sheriff. Why?
    Because out there where people live, crime and preventing it is a
    bipartisan issue. Out on the streets of America there's not much of a
    constituency for raising the crime rate. I'm having a hard time finding
    anybody for it. [Laughter] But back in Washington there are people who
    are perfectly prepared to do things that will lead to an increase in the
    crime rate in the name of a balanced budget. But it is not necessary.
        If you look at the Medicare and the Medicaid issues, we have to slow
    the rate of growth in these entitlement programs. They're growing faster
    than the rate of inflation. We have to do something about that. Our
    budget does it. Their budget says, ``In order to get a $250 billion tax
    cut and a 7-year balanced budget, we'll just take $450 billion out of
    the health care system over the next 7 years.'' Well, how did you arrive
    at that number? Was there a study done? ``No. It's how much we have to
    take out to have the $250 billion and a balanced budget in 7 years.''
    Well, what about a little smaller tax cut and take another year or two
    to balance the budget? ``No, no, no. The most important thing is 7 years
    and $250 billion.''
        Well, what about our obligation to elderly people? Three-quarters of
    them are living on less than $25,000 a year. How much can they pay in
    Medicare premiums? ``It doesn't matter; we've got to do this.'' Well,
    what about the fact that inner city hospitals here in San Francisco
    can't operate without Medicaid funding for poor children or poor elderly
    people? What are all these folks with HIV going to do if--[inaudible]--
    not for Medicaid, trying to keep them alive in some dignity so they can
    continue to work and be productive members of society but have some
    access to Medicaid? And then when they really get sick, how are they
    going to get the care they need without it? ``It doesn't matter, we've
    got to have 7 years and a $250 billion tax cut.''
        These are choices, folks. These are ethical choices. We can balance
    the budget in a credible way, in a short time. We can actually have a
    modest tax cut directed to childrearing and education and still fulfill
    our fundamental obligations to one another. But this is not
    fundamentally about money; it's about whether we're going to be a
    community or a crowd, whether we're going to have common ground or
    division.
        I think I know where you stand. What I want to tell you is, I thank
    you for the contribution, but the contribution won't amount to much if
    we don't also have the contribution of your time, your effort, your
    passion, your willingness to engage your fellow citizens in saying that
    we have to have common ground, and we can have a balanced budget and we
    can have a good economy and we can have a good education system, we can
    have it all, but only if we proceed based on our rooted values that have
    taken America to this point in time. That's what I want you to do from
    now until November of 1996.
        I want to close now with two brief points that I want you to think
    about. America has a lot of problems to face that require us to make
    difficult choices. And whether we make the right decision depends as
    much as anything else on our attitude and on whether we're willing to do
    the right thing for the long run. We have to find common ground. We need
    to reform the welfare system, but we need to do it because people on
    welfare will be better off if they can raise their children and get an
    education and be successful workers.
        It's not a lot of the budget, but it's good for our values to do
    that. Therefore, when we reform welfare, we should do it in a way that
    lifts people up, not that divides people and tries to--[inaudible]--
    ethnic background. It's no longer necessary to make a conscious effort.
    I say to you, I'm against quotas. I'm against reverse discrimination.
    We've brought lawsuits against people for practicing reverse
    discrimination. But when Federal law enforcement officials who happen to
    be African-American get discriminated against in a restaurant that's
    part of a national chain, that is just one single example of the fact
    that we have not yet succeeded in

    [[Page 1426]]

    creating an environment in this country where there is no more
    discrimination. So let's keep making the efforts and fix the program
    without doing away with it. That's what I think we ought to do. I feel
    the same way.
        Immigration--do we need to make some changes in immigration? Of
    course, we do. We have spent more money in California trying to stop
    illegal immigration and return illegal immigrants than any previous
    administration. Congresswoman Jordan--former Congresswoman Jordan from
    Texas, a very distinguished American--has made some strong
    recommendations on what the volume of immigration of the United States
    should have on an annual basis so that we can have a stable economy. But
    let's not forget one thing: Except for the Native Americans, all the
    rest of us came from somewhere else. We are a nation of immigrants. And
    we should be proud to be a nation of immigrants. Our gateway to the 21st
    century resides in the fact that we are the most diverse, successful big
    country in the world, and we need to keep it that way and remain
    committed to it.
        The last point is this: I'll bet you anything that I have done at
    least one thing and probably a half dozen things that everybody in this
    room has disagreed with in the last 2\1/2\ years. And that's because a
    lot of our decisions that come to me are hard ones and because we are
    always pushing the envelope of possible change. But what I want you to
    know is that at least every day I am trying to do what I think is right.
    And I know that a lot of times it will not be good in the short run
    politically. There's hardly anybody that thought we were in our right
    mind when I sent our forces to Haiti to restore President Aristide and
    to remove the military dictators. But I would remind you that those
    people, those dictators, came to our country and promised on our ground
    in front of our Statue of Liberty that they would go and that democracy
    would be restored, that every country but one in all of Central and
    South America is--in the Caribbean--is a democracy. We had to do that.
    The United States--if people can't look to us to make sure people keep
    their word to us and to freedom, we would be in terrible shape. And it
    was the right thing to do.
        I had all these people tell me that Hillary should not go to China.
    On both sides, they'd say, ``Gosh, if she goes, it'll be like saying
    everything that happens over there in human rights is all right,'' and
    others who said, ``If she goes and she says what she ought to say, it
    will ruin our developing relationship with China.'' But I knew that she
    would be able to say what was in the heart of every American about what
    we believe ought to be the condition of women and young girls, not in
    China but in the United States, in India, in every other place in the
    world. And she did a great job. It was the right thing to do.
        I had lots of people tell me--and they turned out to be right in the
    short run--that if we did what we ought to do and we passed the Brady
    bill and we passed the assault weapons ban and I became the first
    sitting President ever to publicly clash with and prevail against an
    organized effort by the National Rifle Association, that it would be a
    political disaster, because the people who disagreed with me about that
    would be against everybody who supported what I believed in. And the
    people who agreed with me would find some other reason to be against
    those people.
        And I can tell you today that one of the reasons that my party lost
    the House of Representatives, perhaps the main reason, is that people in
    close race, after close race, after close race in rural areas were
    stampeded and scared into believing we were trying to take away their
    right to hunt and to own weapons and to protect themselves. It wasn't
    true, but they prevailed.
        So they said, don't do it. But I kept thinking to myself, you know,
    sooner or later somebody's got to stand up and tell the truth. There are
    tens of thousands of people who could not get weapons since the Brady
    bill became law because of their criminal backgrounds. And if we can get
    a few more Uzis out of a few more high schools and off of a few more
    streets and stop a few more innocent kids from being shot down standing
    on the street corners, it is worth the consequences. We've got to stand
    up for what will be right 10 and 20 and 30 years from now. That's what I
    want to say to you. I want all of you to believe that.
        The Vice President and I sat in meeting after meeting when they
    said, ``Don't do this teenage smoking thing. Oh, everybody will tell you
    it's a great idea, but the tobacco companies will gut you. They will
    terrify all those tobacco farmers that are good, fine, honest people.
    They will convince them that you're trying to bankrupt them. They will
    mobilize people against you, and everybody in America that agrees with
    you will find some other reason not to be for

    [[Page 1427]]

    you. Don't do it. It's a terrible mistake.'' They would say, ``There's
    got to be some reason no other President ever did this.'' Every other
    President always made a deal, made an agreement, did all this. But you
    know what? After 14 months of study, they came back and said two things.
    These people have known for 30 years that what they were doing was
    addictive and dangerous. They are marketing to children. They are trying
    to sell to children. And every day 3,000 children start smoking, and
    1,000 of them will die early because of it. And it just seems to me that
    if we can give 1,000 more kids a day a chance at a full, good American
    way of life, it is worth whatever the near-term political consequences
    are.
        That is how we all have to begin to think about our future. That's
    the way I want you to think about our future. And I want you to go out
    of here just remembering with all of our difficulties, with all the
    problems California's been through, there's a reason we're still around
    here after 220 years nearly. This is a very great country. And when we
    remember our basic values and when we work together and when we look to
    the future, we always do all right.
        So I just want you to remember that. You stay with us, stay with
    what you know is right, and the best is yet to come.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:27 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom at the
    Fairmont Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to luncheon cochairs Richard
    Blum, Walter H. Shorenstein, Ernest Gallo, Chang Lo, and Susie Tompkins.