[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
[October 16, 1995]
[Pages 1606-1610]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Luncheon in Dallas, Texas
October 16, 1995

    Thank you very much. Lloyd Bentsen already said this, but I want to 
reemphasize that in my opinion, when the history of our administration 
has been written, even those who disagreed with a lot of things I did 
will say that, unquestionably, Al Gore was the most important and 
influential Vice President in the history of the United States of 
America. No other person has been given so much responsibility, and no 
other person has fulfilled it so well, whether it was in the reinventing 
Government movement or in setting environmental and technology policy or 
dealing with our attempts to work more closely with the Russians across 
a wide range of issues--and I tell you now there are no Russian missiles 
pointed at the people of the United States for the first time since the 
dawn of the nuclear age because of the things that we've been doing--or 
working with Secretary Cisneros on our community empowerment strategy. 
Right across the board he has made a terrific difference, and besides 
that, he gives great introductions. [Laughter]
    I want to thank Frank and Debbie for doing such a wonderful job, 
along with all of you on the steering committee. Thank you very, very 
much.
    I thank Secretary Bentsen for being here, for his remarks and for 
his remarkable service to our country. This country has had very, very 
few Treasury Secretaries in its long and distinguished history that have 
had anything like the impact that Lloyd Bentsen had on the economic 
policy of the United States, as you can see from what others have said 
about the statistics, to very, very good effect. And a lot of the things 
we had to do were not easy at the time. I'll say a little more about 
that in a moment. But I want to say thank you, and I miss you.
    I look around this room and I see some people in this room, like my 
dear friend B. Rapoport who spoke with me at the University of Texas 
this morning, and Jess Hay and Audrey and Betty Jo, people I've known 
more than 20 years and others that I just met since I have been running 
for or become President. Perhaps there are a few people here I have 
never met before. I'm going to try to correct that before I leave this 
office--all over the country. But I want to thank all of you for coming 
here, and I hope you're coming here in common cause.
    This is a remarkable day for our country. In Washington, DC, there 
may be as many as one million black men actually marching even as we 
speak here today. And they are doing it, I believe, for the same reasons 
and based on the same values that the people of Dallas elected Ron Kirk 
the mayor. They are saying that we have to do two things in this 
country: We have to see people who are in difficult circumstances 
reassert their own discipline and dedication to personal responsibility 
for themselves, their families, and their communities; and then we have 
to bridge this foolish racial divide that continues to plague us, even 
30 years after President Johnson saw through the passage of the Voting 
Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, because we tend to see the world so 
differently through our different experiences and lenses. And that's 
what I went to the University of Texas to talk about today. I don't want 
to reiterate what I said there, except to say that I think there is 
fault on both sides and merit on both sides.
    I think that the better part of wisdom now is to do two things, 
first of all, to really have every citizen seek out someone of a 
different racial or ethnic group and engage in the kind of conversations 
people think they have but don't really, in which people can be frank 
and brutally honest about what they honestly feel but in which they have 
the discipline to listen and open their ears and their minds and their 
hearts and hear others. I find so often in Washington, DC, perhaps 
especially in Washington, DC, people say a lot, but they don't listen 
very

[[Page 1607]]

well. And I've taken to calling the Speaker of the House once a week and 
just trying to listen, whether I need to or not--[laughter]--just 
because I think that it's important for us to listen to one another, for 
people of different views to actually hear and be able to say what 
someone on the other side of an issue really believes.
    The second thing I think we have to do is to follow people like your 
mayor or our wonderful Secretary of Housing and Urban Development who 
actually bring people together to get things done.
    I'm deeply indebted to Texas for so many reasons, for Lloyd Bentsen 
and Henry Cisneros and, of course, for Bill White, who until recently 
was the Deputy Secretary of Energy. And my lifetime friend Mr. McLarty 
has a car dealership in Texarkana. I don't know if that counts or not, 
but I think it does. [Laughter] We're still trying to sell Ross Perot 
down there. [Laughter]
    We've tried to work hard with the people of Texas, and one thing 
that I've been really proud of is the support that we've been able to 
maintain through both Congresses--one in Democratic hands, one in 
Republican hands--for the space program, something that I strongly 
support and believe in, and the Vice President does as well. And I thank 
the Members of the Congress who are here for representing Texas so well 
and for helping us to move this country forward.
    I'd like to--there's hardly anything left for me to say because 
everybody who's spoken before did so well. And maybe I ought to sit down 
while I'm ahead. But what I'd like to do today is just to make a few 
points that I hope you can make to others in the days and weeks and 
months ahead, because I think the election in 1996 and the budget debate 
we are having now in 1995 will shape the kind of people we're going to 
be well into the 21st century.
    Let me begin by saying that I am very upbeat about where we are and 
where we're going, not only because the economic news--although it's 
good; we do have the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation 
we've had in 25 years, and I'm proud of the work that everyone did on 
that. Of course, there's still things to be done. We're going through a 
period of profound change from an industrial to a technology-based, 
information-based economy, from the cold war to a global village. And 
whenever these kind of big changes happen and the shakeout is occurring, 
there are a lot of people who kind of fall behind, and we have to catch 
them up.
    We have to not only create jobs, we have to figure out how to raise 
incomes. That's why we are trying, even in this Congress, to pass the 
``GI bill'' for America's workers that would permit people who lose 
their jobs to get a voucher from the Federal Government to take to the 
nearest community college to immediately begin job training. That's why 
we want the tax cut to emphasize giving families a deduction for the 
cost of education after high school, so people can continue to 
strengthen their ability to earn good incomes.
    But basically, this economy is going in the right direction. And the 
most important thing is that we permit those of you in the private 
sector to succeed by following good, sound policies on the deficit, on 
trade, on investment in education, on research and development, on 
technology, on helping the communities that have been left behind to 
attract investment and to put people to work.
    The Vice President talked about our successes on the social front. 
There is a real reawakening today. What you see in this march in 
Washington is really not confined, by any means, to black men, or black 
men and black women. What is going on today in Washington is a 
manifestation of a sweeping feeling in the country that the time has 
come for everyone to assume a higher measure of personal responsibility, 
to try to come to grips with the incredible dimensions of the social 
problems that we have allowed to foster and fester in this country over 
the last generation.
    And I believe our policies have played a role. I believe our welfare 
reform policies, I believe our crime bill, I believe a lot of the things 
we have done have played a role. But the American people are leading the 
way to bring the crime rate down. The welfare rolls are down. The food 
stamp rolls are down. The poverty rate is down. The teen pregnancy rate 
is down in America.
    Now, they're all still too high, every one of them. But the point is 
that we are at least gaining on it for a change. And what we need to do 
is to keep gaining on it. There will be problems in this old world as 
long as people like you and me inhabit the planet because we're not 
perfect. But the issue is, are we gaining on it, are we getting closer 
every day to living by the values we believe in, to lifting up the

[[Page 1608]]

potential of every person, to giving everybody the chance to be the kind 
of person that they ought to be? The answer is, we are. And what we 
ought to do is to continue that.
    We still have some troubling problems. For example--can you explain 
this--drug use is down among young adults, but casual drug use is up 
among juveniles. The crime rate is down among young adults, but random 
crime is up among juveniles. Why? We're gaining on it, but there's still 
too many kids out there raising themselves. And we have to keep working 
on that.
    We know now that we can make progress. For years, I heard people 
talk about social problems in almost hopeless terms. Now we know we can 
do something about this. And now there is no excuse for our not doing 
it. But we can do this.
    There is a lot of talk--I don't want to be too political today, but 
we all know every time I come to Texas a hundred of my friends say, 
``You know, if you just spend more time down here, we could carry this 
State.'' Then I leave, and all the Republicans say, ``Oh, you know, he's 
just another one of those Democratic liberals.'' And I hate to say it, 
but every one of them that wants to replace me, except one or two, has 
spent a whole lot more time in Washington, DC, in the last 20 years than 
I have. [Laughter]
    But next time you hear that, ask them, of the last three 
administrations which one reduced the deficit more, which was the only 
one to produce a balanced budget, which one reduced the size of the 
Government, the number of regulations more, which one gave more 
authority to State and local governments and the private sector and 
reduced it from the Government, which one passed the toughest crime 
bill? The answer to all of that, obviously, is our administration.
    I say that not to be political myself but to say that the political 
attacks on this administration may be helpful at election time, but they 
actually cause a lot of voters to do something that's not in their own 
interests. And sometimes the conventional wisdom just kind of gets a leg 
up and people just keep on repeating it. So I want you to go out and 
help refute the conventional wisdom, not because I think anything I've 
done in the past justifies reelection--I think people should be 
reelected based on what's going to happen in the future--but because it 
is evidence of the values this administration has and the record of 
performance we will make if we continue into the future.
    And you should confront people. You should talk to people. Just in 
the way I want us to bridge the racial divide, we have to bridge the 
political divide. The thing I think that surprised me most when I got to 
Washington was how intensely partisan the place was and how people got 
away with doing that. Because mostly in a State capital around the 
country or in a city hall, you'd just collapse; people would just get 
rid of you if you were so intensely partisan you never worked with 
anybody else. You'd never do anything else.
    And it's one of the reasons we had to make some tough decisions. 
I'll just give you one. Lloyd Bentsen will vouch for me on this. When I 
went to Washington, I knew from talking to Alan Greenspan and a lot of 
economic experts that if we could get the deficit down at least $500 
billion over 5 years, we'd have a big drop in interest rates and a big 
boom in the economy--we knew that--and that the $500 billion, as 
Secretary Bentsen said to me over and over and over again, was sort of a 
psychological barrier. If we could just get by it, boy, we could get 
this economy going again. So we decided that come hell or high water, 
that's exactly what we were going to do.
    And after I'd been in Washington about a week, I was informed by the 
then minority leaders of the Senate and House, now the Senate majority 
leader and the Speaker, it didn't matter what I did, I would not get one 
single, solitary Republican vote for deficit reduction for my budget. 
And one of them was candid enough to say, ``It's great because this is a 
free thing for us. If it works, we'll deny that it worked and claim it's 
a tax increase. If it doesn't, we can blame you. You won't get any votes 
from us, not one.'' And they were as good as their word. They didn't 
have a single one for it. [Laughter]
    Now what did that mean? Since--and you ask your Members of the House 
here. What it meant was, since we had to pass the budget with only 
Democrats and we had to reduce the deficit $500 billion, we had to raise 
taxes on a lot of you more than we wanted to, and we had to cut spending 
less. In the end, Lloyd Bentsen said, ``We have to do this because all 
the people that pay more in taxes will make even more in income if we 
get this economy

[[Page 1609]]

going again.'' And so we did it. He didn't want to do it. I didn't want 
to do it. We wound up with a budget that was not ideal but was still 
right for America in an intensely partisan atmosphere.
    I had never been in anything like that before, and I still think 
it's not good for America. I think there's enough differences between 
Republicans and Democrats to run 500 elections, much less just this one 
coming up in 1996. So there ought to be some argument for just getting 
up tomorrow and trying to work something out so the country's interest 
will be served and still let people make their decisions. That is what I 
am committed to doing. But I am not, I am not going to do anything as 
President that I believe will make the America of the 21st century, that 
the children that are here in this luncheon today will grow up and live 
in, less than it ought to be. That's what this whole budget debate is 
about.
    Don't let anyone tell you this is a debate about balancing the 
budget. Every outside credible source says both these budget plans are 
good plans to balance the budget. Every one. Every one. Our plan gets a 
balanced budget in 9 years; theirs does in 7. Our plan has a smaller tax 
cut more targeted toward education and childrearing. Our plan uses 
conservative economic forecasts that are consistent with our historic 
performance, even though we're going to grow more, I think, if we do 
this right.
    But their plan, I believe, violates our most basic values. I believe 
this is really a contrast between those who really think that winner-
take-all is all right, let the market decide everything, and those of us 
who believe that America is a place where everybody ought to have a 
chance to win. It's a contrast between a plan that is committed to 
growing the middle class and shrinking the under class and a plan that 
would certainly shrink the middle class and grow the under class. That's 
not the 21st century I want to live in. It's a contrast between a plan 
that would continue to honor our obligations to our parents and to our 
children, especially the poorest children among us, and one that would 
say that's somebody else's problem. That is the difference.
    Everybody knows we have to slow the rate of growth in medical care. 
But their plan would impose great new burdens on some of the poorest 
elderly people in this country. They would say to all of these people 
out there living on $300 or $400 a month that you have to pay more for 
your Medicare and Medicaid, even if you can't afford to pay it. They 
would say to medical centers and urban hospitals that we're going to cut 
way back on your Medicaid payments, and we hope you don't have to close, 
but if you do, it's too bad.
    We have to slow the rate of medical inflation, but we have to do it 
in a disciplined way so that we understand the consequences to the 
University of Texas Medical Center, to the urban hospitals throughout 
Texas, to the rural hospitals that provide the only health care people 
have out in the country, and to elderly people, many of whom barely have 
enough to live on, not to mention the fact that 1 in 5 children today--
more than 1 in 5, 22 percent, are eligible for help from the National 
Government to deal with their health care needs. And they're our 
children, too, not just the kids that can afford to be at a luncheon 
like this because their parents have done well. But they're our 
children, too, and they're our future, too. And we owe them something.
    So, yes, I propose to slow the rate of medical inflation, but I 
don't want us to go plumb off the side of a mountain before we know 
where we're going. It is not prudent, and it is not consistent with our 
values.
    I don't support one incredible provision of that budget of theirs 
which would actually raise taxes on families making about $20,000 a year 
with two kids by cutting back on the working families tax credit, a 
credit signed into law under President Ford, a credit expanded under 
President Bush, a credit President Reagan said was the best antipoverty 
program ever devised because all it does is to cut taxes and give tax 
credits to working people who don't have enough money, even though they 
work full-time, to get above the poverty line because they've got kids 
at home.
    And Lloyd Bentsen and I designed a program that, over a period of 
years, would enable the United States of America to say, if you will 
work 40 hours a week and you have children in your house, you will not 
be taxed into poverty by your Government; your Government will lift you 
out of poverty. We want people to work, not be on welfare. And we want 
people to be successful when they're doing their best to work and raise 
their children. Why in the world we would do that is beyond me.

[[Page 1610]]

    I don't think it's smart to cut back on our environmental 
investments. The Vice President could have told you, but he's too modest 
to say this. He told me, the first time I ever met him, that all this 
scientific dispute about whether the globe was warming up was bogus, 
that it really was, and we were going to be in trouble. Just a couple of 
weeks ago, we see a whole new raft of scientific evidence and almost 
unanimity of opinion now that global warming is real, that there is a 
hole in the ozone layer that is going to affect the whole future of the 
planet, including the future of the United States. I don't believe 
eliminating the modest amount of money we invest in studying global 
warming and what our response ought to be to it is a very good way to 
balance the budget.
    And at a time--we just came to the University of Texas, which every 
Texan is proud of--I don't think on the edge of the 21st century there's 
a single business person in this audience who would knowingly cut a 
corporate budget for education and training, research and development, 
or technology. The idea that we would consider on the edge of the 20th 
century cutting back our investment in helping poor kids get off to a 
good start in school or providing scholarships and loans to people going 
to college is a mystery to me, since we don't have to do any of that to 
balance the budget. And you don't have to take my word for it, ask Lloyd 
Bentsen. We do not have to do any of that to balance the budget.
    So don't be fooled. This fight over the balanced budget--when you 
see your Representatives go back to Washington, it is not about 
balancing the budget. We can balance the budget, cut taxes, protect 
Medicare without destroying the social contract and forgetting about our 
obligations to one another. That is what this is about.
    So I ask you to leave here doing two things: One, go out and talk to 
people who are different from you, just like I asked the people at the 
University of Texas today, tell them what you heard here and listen to 
what they think; two, tell the people of Texas we can balance the budget 
without stepping on our values and trampling on our future and walking 
away from our obligations to one another.
    And that is what we are determined to do. I go back to Washington 
with that determination because I believe that we're going in the right 
direction economically, we're going in the right direction socially, we 
are better positioned for the next century than any country on the face 
of the Earth, if we will simply face up to our responsibilities and deal 
with them with common sense and good values instead of turning them into 
some sort of ideological fight that will tear the American people apart. 
I want to bring us together and move us forward.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 1:20 p.m. in the Plaza Ballroom at Le 
Meridien Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Debbie and Frank Branson, 
luncheon cochairs; Bernard Rapoport, chairman, board of regents, 
University of Texas, and his wife, Audrey; and Democratic fundraiser 
Jess Hay and his wife, Betty Jo.