[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
[September 23, 1995]
[Pages 1465-1472]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Dinner
September 23, 1995

    Thank you very much, Congressman Jefferson, for chairing this dinner 
and for being my longtime friend. He has such a nice name: William 
Jefferson. [Laughter] One day we were on a platform together in 
Louisiana, and we both kind of got to ventilating, and he said after I 
spoke, ``It's a good thing you've got a last name or no one could tell 
us apart.'' [Laughter]
    Congressman Payne, the CBC chair; Cardiss Collins, the foundation 
chair; to all the distinguished awardees, General Powell, Congressman 
Lewis, Muhammad Ali, Congressman Ford, Renee Gaters, all very deserving; 
Ms. Gaters for your charity and your generosity over so many years; my 
longtime friend John Lewis for being a living reminder of what it means 
to live by what you say you believe; my friend Congressman Ford, who was 
working on welfare reform before the other crowd knew what it was. I 
thank you, sir.
    Of course, one of your recipients has been on the front page of 
every magazine in this country, deluged with TV and radio requests, 
written a book, and has a name and face in-


[[Page 1466]]

stantly recognized all around the world. I'm honored to share the 
spotlight tonight with Muhammad Ali and with General Colin Powell. 
[Applause] Thank you.
    There are many things to be said about Colin Powell's lifetime of 
service to our country and service to three Presidents on matters on 
national security, but I know he is being honored tonight in large 
measure because just a year ago this week, he played an important part 
in our successful effort to end Haiti's long night of terror. Because of 
America's leadership, backing sanctions and diplomacy with force, 
because of the courage of President Aristide and the Haitian people and 
the support they received from so many of you in this room, today Haiti 
has its best chance in generations to build a strong democracy and to 
tackle the poverty that has been a scourge to those good people for too 
long.
    In this great drama, General Powell answered my call to service. And 
along with President Carter and Senator Sam Nunn, he made sure the 
Haitian dictators understood the message of the United States that they 
had just one last chance to leave peacefully or suffer the consequences 
of being removed by military force. In no small measure because Colin 
Powell delivered that message so graphically, democracy was restored 
miraculously without the loss of a single American life or a single 
Haitian life.
    Tonight is special for all of us because it's the 25th anniversary 
of the Congressional Black Caucus, now 40-strong. I think that we should 
pay special tribute to the founding members here tonight, and especially 
to the five who are still serving: Louis Stokes, Ron Dellums, Bill Clay, 
John Conyers, and Charlie Rangel. And let me say that after watching 
that film and after watching Charlie Rangel stand up for the rights of 
poor children and elderly Americans just the other day, I feel confident 
that they've still got a lot of juice, a lot of energy, a lot of good 
ideas, and a lot to give this country.
    I don't know where our country would be today without the 
Congressional Black Caucus. I want to thank you, all of you, for 
standing up for the values we all hold dear, for freedom and for 
responsibility, for work and for family, for the idea that we are, as my 
friend the Governor of Florida said the other day, a community, not a 
crowd. A crowd is a collection of people occupying the same space, 
elbowing one another until the strongest and most powerful win without 
regard to what happens to the others. A community is a group of people 
who occupy the same space and believe they're going up or down together 
and they have responsibilities to one another. A community is a group of 
people led by people who do what's right for the long run, even if it 
defies the conventional wisdom and is unpopular in the short run. The 
Congressional Black Caucus has helped to keep America a community. Thank 
you, and God bless you all.
    I have special reasons to be grateful to the Black Caucus. When I 
became President, we had a stagnant and suffering economy. The 
Congressional Black Caucus supported an economic policy that in 2\1/2\ 
years has produced 7\1/2\ million new jobs, 2\1/2\ million new 
homeowners, 2 million new small businesses, the largest number of new 
self-made millionaires in any time period in the history of the country, 
and an African-American unemployment rate back down in single digits for 
the first time since the Vietnam war. Thank you for doing that.
    Three years ago, most Americans despaired that anything could ever 
be done about crime. Acting on old values and embracing new ideas, the 
Congressional Black Caucus played an active role in shaping a crime bill 
that had people and punishment and prevention. It put more police 
officers on our streets, punished people who should be, but gave our 
people something to say yes to, some opportunities to live positive, 
good, constructive lives, and to know they were important to someone 
else. And because of that, in every State in this country and in almost 
every major urban area, the crime rate is down, the murder rate is down, 
and people believe we can make a difference. And I thank you for that.
    Because you supported the policies of this administration to advance 
peace and freedom and democracy, from the Middle East to Northern 
Ireland to Russia and the other places of the former Soviet Union, there 
are no missiles pointed at the people of the United States tonight for 
the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age. Peace is making 
progress in the Middle East and in Northern Ireland; democracy was 
restored to Haiti; we have supported South Africa, all because of people 
like you who made it possible. You have been a steadfast partner in 
standing up for America's best interests and America's best values.

[[Page 1467]]

    I want to say a special word of thanks to you for the crucial role 
you have played in expanding freedom and opportunity in Africa. Today, 
two-thirds of the nations of Africa are moving toward democracy and 
market opportunities, with the help of American leadership and American 
assistance. Whether we supported historic elections in South Africa and 
Mozambique, provided dramatic humanitarian relief in Rwanda, assisted in 
the opening of stock markets in Botswana and Namibia, the United States 
has been committed to making a difference in Africa. Much remains to be 
done, fostering peace in Liberia and Angola, standing up for democracy 
in Nigeria, but with your help, America can remain a force for progress.
    And in this debate on the budget, I implore you to remind the other 
Members of the Congress that we must remain a force for democracy and 
progress, not only in Africa but throughout the world. We cannot walk 
away from people who look to us for support and encouragement.
    But this is still a difficult and unsettling time. In each area I 
mentioned, you could have said, ``I heard what you said, Mr. President, 
but--'' For example, if I had told you 30 months ago that this country 
could produce 7\1/2\ million jobs, 2\1/2\ million homeowners, 2 million 
entrepreneurs, a 4,700 stock market, the largest number of self-made 
millionaires in history, but the average wage of the person in the 
middle would go down, not up, it would have been hard to believe, but it 
happened.
    We can say all we want that the crime rate is down, the murder rate 
is down, the number of people on welfare and food stamps are down, the 
teen pregnancy rate is down, the drug use rate among people between 18 
and 34 is down. But the rate of violent crime, death, and casual drug 
use among our teenagers is still going up.
    We can say all we want about all the peace and prosperity that is 
coming to the world and how democracy is sweeping the world, but in 
every country, forces of extremism have a stronger voice than they have 
had in years. And organized groups, committed to destruction, based on 
racial or ethnic or religious or political extremism, have enormous 
capacity to do that destruction. You see it in a school bus blowing up 
in the Middle East. You see it when a fanatic breaks open a little vial 
of sarin gas in a subway in Japan. You see it in a bomb blowing up the 
Federal building in Oklahoma City. And you see it in more subtle ways, 
yes, even in America. Like when five children in an upper class suburb 
in this country write the hated word ``nigger'' in code word in their 
school album.
    What is going on here? How do we account for all the good things and 
all the bad things that are happening at the same time? I've spent a lot 
of time thinking about this, and since last November, I've had a little 
more time to think about it. I believe with all my heart when the 
history of this era is written and people look back on it, they will say 
that this was the most profound period of change in the way the American 
people live and work and relate to the rest of the world in a hundred 
years.
    One hundred years ago, most of our forebears lived out in the 
country or in little towns. Most of us farmed the land or made a living 
because other people were farming the land. Then we began to move to 
cities, and we became an industrial country. A hundred years ago, we 
were keeping to ourselves, but within 20 years we had to get into World 
War I so that the forces of freedom could win. And we began to assert 
national leadership.
    Now, we're moving away from this industrial age to an age 
characterized by information and technology, where people will soon be 
able to do most of the work they do wherever they want to live--in a 
city or in an isolated place in the mountains somewhere. We are moving 
from a cold war in which nation-states look at each other across a great 
divide but still are able to provide most of people's needs, to a global 
economy where there's a lot of integration economically but a lot of 
pressures of disintegration on ordinary working people everywhere.
    And what we have to do is to try to understand this time in which we 
live, embrace the new ideas that we need to embrace to preserve our 
vision of the future, which has to be rooted in the values for which you 
have always stood.
    Don't you want a 21st century in which America is the leading 
opportunity society: growing entrepreneurs, growing the middle class, 
shrinking the under class; where everybody has a chance to live up to 
their God-given ability; where families and communities have a chance to 
solve their own problems; where the streets are safe and the schools are 
good and we have a clean environment and a strong health care system; 
and where we're still a force for peace and freedom in the world? I 
think that's what most of us want.

[[Page 1468]]

    To get it, we need new ideas. We need a devotion to our old-
fashioned values. We need to stop looking for ways to be divided and 
instead seeking common ground and higher ground. And we've got to be 
prepared to stand up for the future, even if it's not popular in the 
present. That's what this budget debate is all about. It's really not 
about money and programs; it's about what kind of people we're going to 
be. What are we going to look like in the 21st century? What are we 
going to look like? What are our obligations to each other? If we're a 
community and not a crowd, what kind of obligations do we have to our 
parents and to our children, to those who aren't as well off as we are, 
to those who through no fault of their own are not doing so well, to 
people all around the world who look to us for leadership? What are our 
obligations?
    I agree with the leadership of the Republican majority in Congress 
that we ought to balance the budget. We never had a permanent structural 
deficit until about 12 years before I showed up. And to be fair to the 
caucus--again, this defies conventional wisdom--but the plain truth is 
that in the previous 12 years, in every year but one, the Congress 
appropriated less money than the executive branch asked for. But we 
wound up quadrupling the debt.
    Next year, if we don't do something about it, interest payments on 
the debt will be bigger than the defense budget. But we have begun, you 
and I, to do something about it because this year the budget would be in 
balance but for the interest we're paying on those 12 years. The deficit 
was $290 billion when we started; it's down to $160 billion now. And 
that's not bad, a 40 percent cut in 3 years, for the first time since 
Harry Truman was President.
    But why are we going to do this? Why should we balance the budget 
anyway? Because we believe it will take debt off our kids. Because we 
believe it will lower interest rates and free up money for the 
entrepreneurs who are here to borrow more money and put more people to 
work and make America stronger. Because we think it will fulfill our 
vision of the future. Therefore, when we do it, we have to do it in a 
way that supports that vision, otherwise there's no point in doing it in 
the first place. It is where we want to go that matters.
    So I say to you, we ought to do this. But we ought to do it in a way 
that is consistent with our values, maintaining our investments in the 
things that make us strong, keeping our commitments as a community. 
That's what we have to do.
    The proposal I put forward balances the budget but increases our 
investment in education. We will never stop the decline in learning 
until we give lifetime educational opportunities to every person in this 
country no matter what their race, no matter what their income, no 
matter what their background. We will never do it.
    We ought to secure the Medicare Trust Fund, but we can do that 
without breaking our contract with the elderly of this country. Three-
quarters of them live on less than $24,000 a year. It's pretty hard to 
charge them several hundred dollars more a year for what they thought 
was already going to be paid for.
    Now, let me just say that a lot of the things that I believed when I 
showed up here, I thought were matters of bipartisan consensus, are 
almost nonpartisan. When a country goes through a great period of 
change, it is important that people try to join hands on those things 
that are critical to its security and its character. That's what we did 
in the cold war. I think education is an important part of our security. 
I think growing the middle class and shrinking the under class is an 
important part of our security. I think reminding us, ourselves, that in 
the global economy of the 21st century our racial diversity is our great 
meal ticket to the future if we can all figure out how to get along and 
how to lift each other up. That's a part of our security. And we ought 
to treat it that way.
    So I say, balance the budget, but don't deprive hundreds of 
thousands of young kids of a chance to get off to a good start in 
school. Don't deprive schools that happen to be poor of the chance to 
have smaller classes or computers in the classroom or high standards and 
high expectations or just the chance to be safe and drug-free. Don't 
raise the cost of going to college at a time when it's more important to 
go to college than ever before just because the people that used to make 
a lot of money out of the student loan program aren't making it anymore. 
Don't do that.
    I want to emphasize this: My goal is to see every young person in 
this country get out of high school and get at least, at least, 2 years 
of further education. That's my goal. That ought

[[Page 1469]]

to be your goal. That's what the economy tells us has to be everybody's 
goal.
    And yet today, because of the rising cost of college, enrollment is 
already dropping for poor people and, therefore, disproportionately for 
minorities. And if you don't believe it's a problem, just look at 
California. They've been through such wrenching problems that the cost 
of education has gone up almost 20 percent and enrollment has dropped 10 
percent. And when a State's in trouble, you need more people going, not 
fewer. This is a big deal, and we don't have to do it to balance the 
budget.
    I believe, as all of you know, in reforming the welfare system but 
not as a way of dividing the American people but as a way of liberating 
people who are trapped in the system. Most people in this country work. 
Most parents work. So it's not unreasonable to say most people who have 
children who happen to be on welfare should move toward work.
    But what we want in America is for every parent to be able to 
succeed at home and, if they must work, at work as well. We don't need 
to tear people down; we need to lift people up. Most people who are poor 
and on welfare would give anything in the world to be somewhere else 
doing something else. We ought to help them do it. And we ought to help 
them succeed as parents and workers.
    We say--everybody says--if you took a poll in the Congress on Monday 
morning, ``Everybody that does not believe in work, please stand up.'' 
Nobody would stand. ``Everybody that believes we ought to encourage 
welfare over work, please stand up.'' Nobody would stand. But their 
budget proposal proposes to cut taxes for nearly everybody in America, 
including upper income people like me that don't ask for it and don't 
want it and sure don't need it. General Powell is about to move into 
that category--[laughter]--with his book.
    They propose that, but you know what? They want to raise taxes on 
some Americans. The 14 million working families that we lowered taxes on 
in 1993, who are working full-time, have children in the homes, barely 
have enough to get by, the Congressional Black Caucus voted to lower 
their taxes. Now this congressional proposal is to raise their taxes by 
$40 billion. This is wrong. Ronald Reagan said that the earned-income 
credit for working families was the best antipoverty program in history 
because it rewarded work. We increased it so dramatically that it was 
the biggest effort to lift the incomes of low-income working people and 
to equalize the middle class in America in 20 years. And now, while 
everybody else's taxes are being cut, those people's taxes are going to 
be raised by people who say they want to get people off welfare and into 
work. That is wrong. It violates our values. It's not about money; it's 
about families and rewarding work and standing up for what's right.
    Medicare, Medicaid--for 3 years we said that health care costs were 
growing too fast, they had to be slowed down. The Congressional Black 
Caucus, with no help from members of the other party, added 3 years to 
the life of the Medicare Trust Fund when nobody was looking and some 
were denying it was there. Now, the Medicare trustees say we need to add 
more life to it, and it costs $90 billion to $100 billion to do it. I 
offered a balanced budget plan to do it, to save the Trust Fund, and add 
a decade of life.
    Under the guise of saving the trust fund and balancing the budget, 
they propose to take 3 times that much out of Medicare and so much out 
of Medicaid that it will endanger the life of urban hospitals and rural 
hospitals, elderly people in nursing homes and getting care in their 
home, and the health care of all the poor children in the country who 
through no fault of their own are poor.
    And so I say to you, let's save the Medicare Trust Fund. Let's slow 
the rate of growth in inflation in Medicare and Medicaid. But let's 
don't pretend that we can just jerk $450 billion out of health care 
system of America without hurting anybody and that we can do it without 
absolutely ignoring our obligations to our parents and our grandparents 
and to the children of this country. It is wrong. We should not do it. 
We can balance the budget without doing it. And we should listen to 
those who tell us that.
    Let me just say one last thing about crime. Earlier this week I had 
the privilege of going to Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville, as a 
united city and county government--got some people clapping back there. 
It's a county that normally votes Republican and increasingly so. But 
they elected an African-American Democrat sheriff. Why? Because he 
promised to make his office the streets. Because he promised to put law 
enforcement officers on the streets in the neighborhood. Because he 
promised to make the safe-


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ty of all the people in the county his first priority. And within 6 
months the crime rate had gone down 9 percent, in only 6 months. And he 
was there with me expressing his thanks to you through me for the crime 
bill and the 100,000 police officers it put on the street.
    The Attorney General was there with me. We had all the children from 
the community there. We were in a poor neighborhood. We walked the 
streets talking to these people who said nobody ever paid any attention 
to their safety before, and they were so glad to see that they could 
have law enforcement officers on the street.
    So this sheriff stood up and said, ``This is working. The crime 
rate's going down.'' The Congress should not abolish the national 
commitment to 100,000 police and say that they're going to meet it in 
some other way by cutting the money they're giving and writing a blank 
check to local governments or to the State. It'll never happen.
    Now, out there in the country, fighting crime is a bipartisan issue. 
There is no constituency anywhere in America for raising the crime rate 
with the possible exception of Washington, DC, and this debate that's 
going on over the crime bill here. That also is not necessary to balance 
the budget, and it is wrong.
    Let me just say one last thing to you about all this. Nobody knows 
how this is going to come out, so I've got a suggestion. We're in a 100-
year period of change. You and I can no more calculate what will be 
popular next week or next month than a man in the Moon. In 1992, I 
wasn't smart enough to figure this out back then; I thought it had 
something to do with my ability. But in 1992, when I was nominated, on 
June 2, I was in third place in the polls. Six weeks later, I was in 
first place in the polls. Who could have predicted that? Nobody.
    It is idle speculation. We have to now go back in these next 2 
months and tell people with whom we disagree, Look, we want to find 
common ground. But we have to balance the budget in a way that is 
consistent with our vision. And we may have to do some things that are 
unpopular just because you think they're going to be right over the long 
run.
    You know, two-thirds of the American people thought I was wrong in 
Haiti, but I'm glad I did it. And I think history will prove us right.
    And a lot of you caucus members will have to say you lost some good 
colleagues out of the Congress because we voted for the Brady bill and 
we voted for the assault weapons ban. But you know, last year alone over 
40,000 people with criminal records were unable to get handguns. And if 
we just take a few Uzis off the streets and out of the schools and we 
have a few fewer kids being shot dead standing by bus stops, having 
their lives robbed from them, it is worth the political price. They 
said, ``Don't you do it,'' but it was worth it. We did the right thing. 
We did the right thing.
    A few weeks ago we were trying to decide how to handle the studies 
of the FDA on teenage smoking. And every political adviser I had in and 
out of the White House said, ``You can do this if you want to, but it's 
terrible politics, because the tobacco companies will get you. And 
they'll terrify all those good country tobacco farmers that are good, 
decent people. They work hard, but they can be scared to death. And then 
they'll wipe out--they'll vote against anybody in your party. And all 
the Americans that agree with you will find some other reason to vote 
against you, but they will stay against you. So don't you be the first 
person in office to take them on. You were already the first person in 
office to take the NRA on; don't do that.''
    But the research showed that for 30 years some of those folks were 
aware of the danger of tobacco. And the evidence showed that there is 
still targeted efforts to advertise to teenagers, even though it's 
illegal for children to smoke in every State in the country. And most 
important of all, the evidence showed that 3,000 young people a day 
start to smoke, and 1,000 of them will end their lives early. And if it 
saves a thousand lives a day for longer, fuller, better lives, then who 
cares what the consequences are? Twenty years from now in the 21st 
century, people will say they did what was right. And that is exactly 
what we ought to do on every single issue.
    Finally, I thank Bill Jefferson for what he said about affirmative 
action. We reviewed every one of those programs. We looked at them all. 
I argued it nine ways from Sunday. It was obvious that the politics was 
one place and the merits were somewhere else. It's obvious that a lot of 
people in our country feel anxiety-ridden about the economy. And the 
easy answer is, ``There's nothing wrong with you; you don't have to 
change in this time of change; we just need

[[Page 1471]]

to get rid of the Government; and they're spending all their money on 
affirmative action, welfare,'' you know, whatever that list is.
    That was the easy answer, but it's the wrong answer, not because all 
those programs are perfect, not because they don't need to be changed 
but because in the heart of America we still, we still, are not able to 
make all of our decisions without regard to race or gender. We ought to 
be able to. I pray to God someday we will. But you know it, and I know 
it; we still need to make a conscious effort to make sure that we get 
the most of every American's ability and we give every American a fair 
shot. That's what this is all about.
    And I will say again, if it were not for our racial diversity, we 
wouldn't be as well positioned as we are for the 21st century. I know 
that it makes a difference in the administration that we have people 
like Ron Brown and Lee Brown and Jesse Brown and Hazel O'Leary. And I'll 
tell you something else, Mike Espy was the best Agriculture Secretary in 
25 years. It makes a difference that we have people like Deval Patrick 
and Rodney Slater and Jim Joseph, who's going to be the Ambassador to 
South Africa. That makes a difference to how America works. Alexis 
Herman and Bob Nash and Maggie Williams and others make a difference in 
the White House. It makes a difference.
    I was so attacked by the conventional wisdom for being committed to 
diversity. But after nearly 3 years, we're appointing Federal judges at 
a more rapid rate than the previous administration. We have appointed 
more African-Americans than the last three administrations combined. And 
according to the American Bar Association, they have the highest 
qualified ratings in the last 20 years. So I don't want to hear that you 
can't have excellence and equal opportunity at the same time. You can, 
we must, and we will.
    Let me say that there is a lot of talk about personal 
responsibility. What we have to do is practice it. There's a lot of talk 
about valuing family and work and community. What we have to do is value 
them.
    Let me close by talking about one particular American citizen that I 
think would be a pretty good role model for the President, the Speaker, 
the Senate majority leader, the Congressional Black Caucus, and 
everybody else that's going to be making decisions about America's 
future in the next 60 days. I got permission from my wonderful wife 
tonight to have a date with another woman to the Congressional Black 
Caucus. Her name is Oseola McCarty.
    At the young age of 87, she is a stellar example of what it means to 
live a life of dignity, service, values, and personal responsibility. 
Before today she had never been to Washington. She had never flown on an 
airplane, and when I invited her to do it, she said she'd like to come 
see me, but not if she had to get on an airplane. [Laughter] So Oseola 
has come all the way from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, by train.
    You may have read about her in the last few weeks. A lot of people 
talk about the dignity of work, but from the time before she was a 
teenager, she worked all her life washing clothes for people. She 
started out charging $1.50 to $2 a bundle. She lived modestly and was 
able to accumulate savings over the years. In fact, while she earned 
what by any stretch of the imagination was a very meager income, she 
saved such an enormous percentage of what she earned, and she and her 
local banker invested it so well that she amassed a sizable sum. Last 
month, after a lifetime of work, this woman, who did that job for 
decades and decades and decades quietly and with dignity and with 
excellence, donated $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi 
for scholarships for African-American students.
    When people ask her why in the world she did this, she said, ``I 
just want the scholarship to go to some child who needs it, to whoever's 
not able to help their children. I'm too old to get an education, but 
they can.'' Well, the University has already given $1,000 scholarship in 
her name to an 18-year-old graduate of Hattiesburg High School named 
Stephanie Bullock. Someday Stephanie Bullock may be a lawyer, a doctor, 
perhaps a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, because of Oseola 
McCarty.
    Our country needs more people like her, people who don't just talk 
about responsibility and community but who live those values. I'm proud 
that she's my guest tonight. Before we came over, I brought her into the 
Oval Office and awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal for her 
extraordinary act of generosity. I'd like to ask her to come up here so 
you can all get a good look at her. [Applause]
    I want to make you a promise, and I want to issue a challenge. My 
promise to you is that

[[Page 1472]]

in the next few weeks when we make decisions that will shape the future 
of our great country into the 21st century, I'll try to keep her example 
in mind. And my challenge is that everyone else do the same. If we do, 
this great country is going to do just fine.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 9:24 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom at the 
Washington Convention Center. In his remarks, he referred to former 
boxing champion Muhammad Ali and civil rights attorney Renee Gaters.