    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
    [September 7, 1995]
    [Pages 1321-1326]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Clinton/Gore '96 Dinner
    September 7, 1995

        Thank you very much. Thank you all for your wonderful welcome. What
    a way to come back from vacation. I want to thank Fred Baron and Larry
    Stewart so much for the work they did to help bring us all together
    tonight. I want to thank all of you for being here and for the

    [[Page 1322]]

    contributions you have made to our campaign. Many of you are old friends
    of mine, and I'm glad to see you again. Some of you I have never seen
    before, and I hope I have a chance to shake a few more hands before I
    leave tonight.
        I thank Terry McAuliffe and his fine staff, all of them, for the
    work they have done, and I want to thank my good friend John Breaux, not
    the least--so many reasons I have to thank him for--for finally giving
    me credit for where he got that joke. [Laughter] Pretty funny, don't you
    think?
        I told him another story he didn't tell tonight, which illustrates
    another point about what's going on in Washington today, which is that
    one of my laws of American politics which people--everybody tends to be
    for change in general but against it in particular. So it's important to
    know what the fine print is in these contracts.
        The same minister he talked about was having trouble getting his
    congregation to exercise, so he worked his heart out on a sermon that he
    thought would finally inflame his congregation. And he was going on and
    on and pumping, and they were saying ``Amen'' and ginning. And finally
    he got to the punch line, and he said, ``I want everybody in this
    congregation who wants to go to Heaven to stand up.'' Everybody leapt to
    their feet, except this one old lady on the front row that hadn't missed
    a Sunday in church in 45 years. And he was crestfallen. He said, ``Well,
    Sister Jones, don't you want to go to Heaven when you die?'' And then
    she jumped up. She said, ``I'm sorry, Preacher, I thought you was trying
    to get up a load to go right now.'' [Laughter] It's very important to
    get the fine print of these contracts.
        I want to tell you, I've had a wonderful experience with the
    American people in the last few weeks. My family and I had the
    opportunity to go to Wyoming, as I'm sure you know, on vacation, and we
    got to spend a lot of time in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National
    Parks. And I had the opportunity there as President to defend the
    national parks and the importance of preserving and maintaining them in
    this budget battle. I wish every young person in our country could go to
    one.
        I also had an opportunity to talk to a lot of Westerners who, you
    know, think that one of their hands would fall off if they ever voted
    for a Democrat, because they're so used to, you know, disliking the
    Federal Government, and they've got us identified with them. You know,
    it's interesting, the Republicans, if they hate the Government so much,
    why do you supposed they've devoted a whole generation to trying to take
    it all over? [Laughter] They lost the White House for 2\1/2\ years, and
    they missed it so much they can't bear to give it up. [Laughter]
        But anyway, I talked to a lot of people, then I went to Hawaii and
    represented our country at the last of the many wonderful occasions
    commemorating the 50th anniversary of World War II. And I got an
    incredible sense of the diversity of this great country, meeting again,
    as--I'm always overwhelmed by this incredible generation of Americans
    that literally saved our way of life and paved the way for all the
    prosperity and the security and the victory we had in the cold war.
        My State had one of those Japanese internment camps in World War II,
    and I met a couple--it's an incredible story--that met and got married
    in the internment camp in Arkansas. And the man had volunteered to join
    the service, and they sent him to Mississippi to train, and he said he
    got hungry for Japanese food. And they said the only place you can get
    anything is internment camp in Arkansas. [Laughter] So he went over and
    met his wife there, he said, ``We're the only two Japanese-Americans who
    actually are glad those camps were set up. We had our marriage there.''
        I met another Japanese-American who came here on his own, was thrown
    into a camp, volunteered to join the military, got out, and by the grace
    of God, the war ended the day before he was about to be sent to an
    island where he would have been in combat against two of his brothers
    who were in uniform for the Japanese. But the atomic bomb had ended the
    war, damaged his own home, injured his mother, and killed one of his
    other brothers.
        This is an incredible country. We come from all different
    backgrounds and all different walks of life. And we've come a long way
    in the last 50 years.
        When I ran for President in 1992, I did it because I thought we were
    not making the changes we needed to make to get ready for the 21st
    century. I did it because I thought that we had not seriously come to
    grips with the economic and social challenges of the time. And I said I
    would try to change the economic direction and the social direction of
    the country, to try to move us forward and bring us together.

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    And virtually everything I've talked about doing, except the fight we
    lost on health care, we've succeeded on.
        The deficit was $290 billion a year when I took office; it's going
    to be $160 billion this year. It's come down for 3 years in a row for
    the first time since Harry Truman was President. For 6 years, there
    had--[applause]--thank you--for 6 years, the American people watched
    Congress condemn the crime problem in America and do nothing about it
    and just fight over this crime bill. We passed the crime bill. It puts
    100,000 more police on the street, has prevention programs to give our
    kids something to say yes to, has stiffer punishment for serious
    offenses, and contained the assault weapons ban that was so
    controversial. A lot of Members of our party laid down their seats in
    Congress for that because their voters were told they were going to lose
    their guns. Next November they'll see they didn't lose their guns, but
    there are a bunch of criminals that don't have Uzis in the schools and
    on the streets, and they did the right thing, and we were glad to do it.
        I was concerned, before it became fashionable up here, about the
    problems of welfare, because I think the welfare system is bad for
    everybody that's involved in it the way it is. It perpetrates
    dependency, but it doesn't liberate anybody. But it's a pretty bad way
    to live.
        And when the Congress did not act on welfare reform under our
    Executive order, we just gave States the authority to do what they
    wanted by getting out of under the existing Federal rules. Now, 34
    States have adopted their own reforms that we've approved.
        The other party and their Presidents often condemned Federal power
    and said they wanted more passed back to State and local government, but
    we gave States and localities more authority to change their welfare
    systems and their health care systems in 2\1/2\ years than they did in
    12 years. And those are important things to do.
        For 7 years, Congress and the President argued about a simple little
    law that 175 other countries had to guarantee people that they wouldn't
    lose their jobs if they had to take a little time off work when their
    families needed it, if they got sick or their children got sick or their
    parents got sick, the family and medical leave law. It was the first law
    I signed as President. We just celebrated the second anniversary of that
    law at the National Institutes of Health with a lot of parents who have
    children with cancer who are struggling along. But those parents at
    least still have their jobs now because of that law, and not a single,
    solitary business in America has gone broke because of it. But the other
    guys said that they would.
        So I'm proud of the fact that the United States has been a leader in
    the cause of peace, from the Middle East to Northern Ireland to Southern
    Africa to Haiti. I met a woman tonight whose got a young son in uniform
    in Haiti. And I'll tell you, that's an amazing story that has never
    fully been told. It's the most totally integrated, planned, and executed
    military operation in the history of this country which, thank God, did
    not require us to fire a shot. But it had an enormous positive impact,
    the ability of the United States to be a force for peace and democracy
    and freedom throughout our hemisphere. And I'm very, very proud of all
    the young men and women who engaged in it. And I am very proud of all
    the young people in uniform who are part of the NATO operation in
    Bosnia, which is going to give us a chance to make a decent, honorable
    peace there and stop the slaughter of innocent civilians.
        And as John Breaux said, the economic consequences of what we've
    tried to do have been, I think, quite impressive. We now have well over
    7 million new jobs in 30 months; 2\1/2\ million new American homeowners;
    new small businesses starting in America at a rate of 750,000 a year, by
    far the highest rate on an annual basis since the end of World War II
    when we started keeping such statistics; the combined rates of
    unemployment and inflation are at about a nearly 30-year low; the stock
    market has hit 4,700, profits at an all-time high. I'm pretty pleased by
    that.
        We've had more new self-made millionaires in America in each of the
    first 2 years I was President than at any time in the history of the
    United States. We are clearly, clearly, the most entrepreneurial,
    flexible, open, forward-looking major country in the world right now.
    And we have the right kind of partnership between business and
    Government. Our Commerce Department, our State Department have worked
    hard to help sell American products overseas. We've expanded trade by
    more than at any time in modern history. These things are going well.
        So you might ask yourself: If that's all true, how come they won in
    the election last November? And I think there are some important an-

    [[Page 1324]]

    swers to that question as we look ahead to '96. And I'd like to talk
    about it very briefly.
        Number one, they talk better than our guys do sometimes. [Laughter]
    They talk about hating the Government. We reduced it. There are 160,000
    fewer people working for the Federal Government today than there were
    the day I became President. We're going to have the smallest Federal
    Government since Kennedy was President if they don't do anything in this
    year. We have abolished thousands of pages of Federal regulations. We
    have abolished hundreds of Government programs. We've begun to make
    Government work again.
        The Small Business Administration cut its budget by 40 percent and
    doubled the loan volume. Business Week wrote an article a couple of
    months ago about evaluating all these major companies that have to use
    the telephone, for who had the best quality telephone service, L.L. Bean
    and Federal Express and all these companies that really depend on phone
    service. You know who they said had the best, most courteous, most
    enlightening telephone service in the United States? The Social Security
    Administration of the United States Government--Business Week--not an
    arm of the Democratic Party--Business Week.
        So they did that. They talk better. They wave the contract. It
    sounded like a good idea. But more importantly, a lot of people hadn't
    felt the positive benefits of the things we've done. There's a time lag
    between when you do something in Government and when people feel it. But
    more profoundly than that, there is a lot of unease and uncertainty in
    our country because we're going through a period of change as profound
    as the change we went through when we became an industrial society out
    of an agricultural society. That is the fundamental lesson of this time.
    And that is why your voice and your work and your convictions are so
    important. This is a time of historic importance for citizenship.
        I've really spent a lot of time trying to come to grips with all the
    things that are going on in this country and in ordinary people's lives.
    I read a significant percentage of the mail I get from ordinary
    citizens. I set up a separate zip code when I became President for the
    people that I went to grade school and junior high and high school with,
    most of whom are ordinary, hard-working, middle class people to write me
    letters so I could know what they were going through.
        And I'm telling you, I believe that the period we're living through
    is the most profound period of change since roughly the time between
    1895 and 1916 when we decided how we were going to respond to the fact
    that we were a great industrial power. And we had to define what the
    role of Government was going to be and what the purpose of our common
    existence as Americans was going to be.
        We started out with dealing with the antitrust laws, because we
    decided we needed competition, not monopoly in America. Theodore
    Roosevelt told us we had to preserve our natural resources. We couldn't
    just develop it all and leave nothing for our children and our
    grandchildren and posterity. We had child labor laws because it wasn't
    right to make kids work in factories and mines 6 days a week, 10, 12, 14
    hours a day. And finally, in 1916 the Congress even adopted an income
    tax so that there would be some proportionally fair way to raise the
    money that had to be spent to further the public interest.
        That 20-year period was a very tumultuous time. And people's lives
    were changing a lot, and they were trying to come to grips with it. The
    elections were kind of close and sometimes inconsistent because we were
    working our way through that. That's what's happening now. The cold war
    is over. We're moving into a global economy where most of the conflicts
    will not be as cataclysmic as the threat of one nation bombing another
    into oblivion. I'm proud of the fact that there are no Russian missiles
    pointed at this country for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear
    age, since our administration came in.
        But don't be fooled. We still have problems. We thwarted terrorist
    attempts to set off a bomb in the Lincoln Tunnel, to blow up a plane
    going across the Pacific. We dealt with the World Trade Center, as well
    as the problem in Oklahoma City. You see what happened to the Japanese
    when they had that religious fanatic explode the--or break open the
    little vial of sarin gas in the subway, or whenever a car bomb blows up
    in Israel--all this is a part of the new security threat as groups,
    distinct groups, begin to break apart from the whole and the consensus
    that binds us together as civilized people.

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        Economically, you see this incredible thing. We've got 7 million new
    jobs. But if I had told you 30 months ago on the day I was inaugurated,
    I said, here's what's going to happen in 30 months: We'll have 7 million
    jobs, 2\1/2\ new homeowners, 1\1/2\ new businesses, the stock market
    will be at 4,700, corporate profits will be at an all-time high, and the
    median wage will drop one percent. So that after 2\1/2\ years most
    hourly wage earners will be working a longer work week for a lower wage,
    once you adjust for inflation. You might not have believed that, but it
    happened.
        So the bedrock middle class people of this country worry whether the
    American dream is supposed to work. They keep reading these great
    numbers, and they say, ``What about me? I don't feel more secure. I
    don't feel more prosperous. I'm concerned.''
        I say this to you not to be down. I'm actually very hopeful about
    the future. If you wanted to bet on the future of any major country in
    the world today for 50 years from now, you'd have to bet on the United
    States, because of our economic strength, because of our diversity,
    because of our creativity.
        But we have two great challenges and alternative explanations at
    work in Washington today about how best to meet those challenges. We
    have to face the future together, because we're going to live in a
    global society, which means we have to get along with people who are
    different from we are--from ourselves--different in terms of their
    religious views, different in terms of their racial backgrounds,
    different in terms of their ethnic heritage, different in terms of their
    politics. We've got to find a way to get along, because teamwork wins in
    the global economy, not division.
        The second thing we have to find a way to do is to always be
    thinking about the future. How are we going to grow the middle class and
    shrink the under class and keep the American dream alive?
        Now, one explanation that we hear all the time is that all we have
    to do is destroy the Federal Government, and everything will be hunky-
    dory. All we have to do to make middle class people's wages grow again,
    if they happen to be white and male, is to get rid of affirmative action
    or get tough on welfare or immigration.
        Let me tell you something--again this is the difference in talking
    and doing. Our administration has done more than the last two to reform
    affirmative action, to fix it, number one; to change welfare; and to
    take on the problems of illegal immigration and the whole problem of
    immigration generally. We are trying to do the things that ought to be
    done. But let's not forget what's really happening to the middle class
    is the global economy, the technology revolution, the downward pressure
    on wages of people who can't command high incomes because of their
    education and skill.
        So if we really want to turn it around, yes, we have to reform the
    systems of Government and all of that, but let's not kid ourselves.
    Average people need protection. Great institutions of power in the
    private sector need accountability. And we need to recognize that we
    have got to work together and work for the future if you really want to
    raise incomes and have a good future for the United States. That's my
    theory.
        And when you see this fight we're going to have over the budget
    here, which I hope will end in reasoned, principled compromise on common
    ground and higher ground, but which cannot, cannot, result in just
    abandoning the ordinary citizens of this country, when we need to
    guarantee that their parents and little kids will have health care; we
    need to make sure that everybody will have access to education to make
    the most of their own lives; we need to make sure that the environment
    and clean air and clean water and public health generally are
    protected--we're going to have a debate. And I believe the answer is,
    we've got to work together and work for the future.
        The alternative vision is, ``What we need to do is keep everybody
    torn up and upset and hating the Federal Government and blaming somebody
    else for their problems.'' Now, those are the two big paradigms here.
    And if you go back to the period between 1895 and 1916, you will see
    exactly the same thing. But you shouldn't be upset about it. You should
    be glad that you were given the opportunity to be an American citizen at
    a once-in-a-hundred-years time of change because it means you are going
    to have a chance to shape the future for another hundred years. You have
    an opportunity to decide what kind of world your children and your
    grandchildren and their children will grow up in. And the next 90 days
    in this budget, not because of how much money is spent on program X, Y,
    or Z but because it will say what

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    kind of people we are. That will help to define it.
        Several of you have told me tonight that you were in Camden Yards in
    Baltimore with me last night when Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig's record.
    Why was everybody so happy about that? Everybody loves seeing somebody
    who was successful that no one could resent. Why? Because here's a guy
    who showed up for work every day, right? [Laughter] Showed up for work
    every day and did it well, and had a good time doing it, but displayed
    the kind of constancy and teamwork that we all respect.
        Did you ever ask yourself, why is it that in our citizenship, in our
    voting habits, we reward the kind of behavior that we would not tolerate
    on a baseball team or in a business or a community organization or a
    church or a family? You think of any operation you are a part of, what
    makes it work? People who are interested in unity, not division; people
    who are looking to the future; people who are optimistic and upbeat; and
    people, if they spent all their time--anybody in any of these operations
    spent their time trying to divide people in the group against one
    another, you would run them off. You would get rid of them. Here, we
    elect them. [Laughter] Now, why is that? Why is that?
        Because every one of us wakes up every day with a little scale
    inside: hope on one side; fear on the other. And sometimes we vote based
    on how the scales are balanced. And we're all for change, but you know,
    the average person is just trying to keep body and soul together, trying
    to do what Cal Ripken does, showing up for work every day. One reason
    that's so popular is most of the people that were in that baseball
    stadium last night are the same kind of people. They show up for work
    every day. They work when they don't feel good. They work when the
    weather's bad. They work to earn money to do right by their children.
    They are the people that keep this country going. But they see the play
    which plays itself out in Washington indirectly, not directly. You have
    to bring it home directly. You can do it because you, every one of you,
    in a different way, touches the lives of those kinds of people.
        And it's not that I'm going to be right on every issue. But I'll
    tell you what, I'm on their side. And I'm thinking about their future
    and their children's future and their grandchildren's future. And I know
    that in a time of change, what makes a country work is the same thing
    that makes a team work, a business work, a church work, a family work.
    You've got to pull together, and you've got to work for tomorrow. And
    you've got to think about everybody, everybody.
        So every issue you're interested in, that's how I am going to
    evaluate it. How is it going to affect the ordinary person? How is it
    going to affect these families that are struggling to hold body and soul
    together? How is it going to affect the dreams people have of the
    future? That's really what we ought to be doing. And I say to you, you
    should be very, very happy. You should think it is a privilege that you
    happen to be alive and at the peak of your influence and energy at a
    time when your country needs your energy, your knowledge, your
    experience, your ability, and your determination. This only happens
    about once every 100 years.
        And we are the longest lasting democracy in history because every
    time it's happened to us before, we did the right thing. We got started
    right. We fought the Civil War, and it came out right. We stayed
    together, and we got rid of slavery. We went through this vast economic
    change, the first big one. Then we dealt with the Depression, World War
    II, and the cold war. Now we're going through our second vast economic
    change. So I say, sign up, saddle up, throw your shoulders back, smile,
    have good time, and we will prevail.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 6:55 p.m. in the Mayflower Hotel. In his
    remarks, he referred to fundraisers Frederick M. Baron and Larry
    Stewart; Terence McAuliffe, national finance chairman, Clinton/Gore '96;
    and Senator John Breaux, chairman of the next majority trust, Democratic
    Senate Campaign Committee.