[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.