    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [May 7, 1996]
    [Pages 700-705]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic Dinner in Jersey City, New Jersey
    May 7, 1996

        Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank
    you for the warm New Jersey welcome. Whoopi Goldberg, thank you for what
    you said and what you've done and for all the time you have given and
    the time you're willing to give because you never forgot where you came
    from and never stopped caring about how other people are doing who
    aren't as fortunate as you are. Thank you, and God bless you.
        I want to thank all the dinner chairs and Chairman Fowler and your
    State chairman, Tom Byrne, and my former colleagues Jim Florio and
    Brendan Byrne, and Peter Duchin, who I've been enjoying for a year or
    two now, since I was a younger man. I want to say a special word of
    appreciation to Ray Lesniak because it's his birthday tonight, so I know
    we're all glad--[applause].
        I want to thank Senator Lautenberg for what he said and for what
    he's done in Washington, for standing up especially for the environment
    under a period of incredibly intense assault from the majority in
    Congress. [Applause] Yes, you ought to clap for him because he did that.
        And as he leaves the United States Senate, I'd like to thank Senator
    Bradley for his 18 years of service to New Jersey and to America, for
    many, many years of friendship, counsel, and advice to me, and for the
    support that he gave this administration in the last 3\1/2\ years. I
    know we all wish him well, and we know that the next chapter of his life
    will doubtless be just as exciting as the ones that have gone before.
    Thank you very much, Bill, and God bless you.
        You know, there have been a lot of sort of asides tonight about why
    Congressman Torricelli is not here. I think he is here for you, because
    he's down there voting on something you care about. And I have a message
    for those--if there was some designed effort to keep him from coming up
    here tonight, guess what? He's still going to get the contributions, and
    we still know where he is, and we know what's at stake, and we're going
    to elect him in November, so it doesn't make any difference.
        One thing you know about Bob Torricelli is that he will stand up and
    fight for you with every fiber of his being. He doesn't do anything
    halfway; he is full of passion. He will fight for the water you drink,
    the land you live on, the air you breathe, the education of your
    children, the safety of your streets, and the example of your country as
    a beacon of freedom and democracy.
        He's been leading the fight to protect Sterling Forest here, the
    watershed for most of northern New Jersey. He wrote a section of the
    Superfund act that is focused on the chemical sites that are polluted
    here, something I am determined to see us finish the work on and another
    reason I don't want to see any further attempts to erode our investment
    in environmental protection. Bob Torricelli will protect all that.
        So I ask you to do what you can for the next 6 months to send Bob
    Torricelli to the United States Senate. Bill Bradley's shoes may be
    impossible to fill, but the people of New Jersey deserve someone
    fighting for them who is on their side and fighting for their future,
    not someone in the grip of an ideological theory that will only
    undermine our ability to go forward together. So I ask you again, do
    what you can, send him to the Senate. Do what you can for yourselves and
    your children and your future. We need Bob Torricelli, and I'm going to
    depend on you to deliver New Jersey for us.
        Ladies and gentlemen, I don't want to keep you a long time tonight,
    but I want to just give a speech that in some ways is not particularly
    political. And after, I'm going to ask you to do something that is
    intensely political. Usually these fundraisers--we all know that our
    political system wouldn't work without them, but

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    a lot of times I think you come and go and you have your blood stirred,
    but I wonder if, when you leave, you think you have done your part and
    that's all there is to it.
        I want to talk to you tonight about what I believe is really going
    on in this country now, what I think is really at stake in this
    election, and why I hope you believe your financial contributions are
    only the beginning of your responsibilities as citizens for the next 6
    months.
        We are clearly living through a time of change as profound as any
    the United States has endured in a hundred years in terms of the ways we
    work and live. Every so often our country is confronted with huge
    challenges, either to our very existence or at least to the ideals with
    which we started, that all of us are created equal and that we have
    inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and
    that the Government is instituted to promote the general, the common
    welfare.
        We had a lot of trouble getting started in working that out. Then we
    had to fight a great Civil War to hold the country together and to
    redeem the promise of equality by extending it when it had to be
    extended. And then, 100 years ago, we faced a period of change rather
    like today, when we moved from the farm to the factory, from the country
    to the city. There were vast new opportunities, but there was a lot of
    uprooting; a lot of people's lives were dislocated. And the progressive
    era began, with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson saying that the
    power of the United States Government should be used to curb the abuses
    of that era and to make sure its benefits could be extended to all
    Americans. They had the antitrust laws, the child laws, the environment
    protection laws, all designed to let us have the benefits of the new
    industrial age without being broken by it, without having our identity
    as a nation, our character as a people, our ideals as expressed in the
    Declaration of Independence and the Constitution savaged. That's what it
    was all about.
        And then we underwent the Depression and World War II, and President
    Roosevelt and the Congress and the leaders of that time had to, first of
    all, defeat the opponents of freedom who would have killed our way of
    life beyond our borders and rally the American people to overcome that
    profound Depression and find a way to build a safety net under this
    country so that we could manage our economy in ways that didn't permit
    it to crash again and break the lives of so many millions of people.
        Then we had to gird ourselves for the cold war, which we did, and
    wait for our victory to come, because communism was always founded on a
    total misunderstanding of human nature and the human condition.
        Now we are going through another period of change, economic and
    social change and the way we relate to the rest of the world, sort of
    like what happened 100 years ago. Now we've moved from a cold-war world
    to a global society, not just a global economy. Now we've moved from an
    industrial age to one in which all work is dominated by information and
    technology and has vast ramifications which New Jersey has felt for the
    organization of work: big companies dramatically downsizing; new
    companies starting at a rapid rate; a lot of people doing exceedingly
    well; other people left behind; other people feeling uncertain about
    their future.
        When I ran for President in 1992, I got into that race because I was
    convinced we could no longer just sit by and let it happen, that we
    needed an aggressive response. And I said then what I repeat to you now:
    I still believe our vision for the future should be animated by three
    things:
        One, the desire to give the American dream of opportunity to every
    person in this country without regard to their race, their gender, their
    station in life, where they live, and what they're up against. That
    ought to be the first thing.
        Two, the understanding that we cannot achieve that in the world in
    which we are living unless we find a way to come together to respect our
    diversity, to bridge all those gaps of race and religion and region and
    ethnicity. This country now has, more or less, 200 different racial and
    ethnic groups. It's an astonishing thing that we can find ways to come
    together around our core values and our respect for one another's
    differences. And I am sick and tired of seeing elections used as wedges
    to divide people one from another, to try to get people who are in the
    majority to look down on those who aren't, and then hope we can pick up
    the pieces after the election. We should be uniting the American people
    and going forward together.
        And the third thing we have to do is continue to be the world's
    greatest force for peace and freedom and prosperity. And as I have said
    many times, that sounds great and everybody

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    is for that in general, but often in particular they're not.
        When I took the action I did in Haiti and Bosnia, in becoming the
    first President to try to do something in Northern Ireland, all of the
    things we have done in the Middle East, what all the polls said was the
    most unpopular decision of my administration, trying to keep Mexico from
    collapsing, everything I did, I did because I know that our country has
    got to try to be the world's greatest source of energy for peace and
    freedom and prosperity, and because I know that 20 years from now we can
    be the strongest country in the world, but others will grow stronger,
    and we have to work with Russia, we have to work with China, we have to
    work with a uniting Europe, we have to work with emerging countries, to
    have them define their greatness in a way that helps us all to go
    forward in peace and prosperity.
        How will these other countries define their greatness? Will it be as
    we do, by how well they educate their people and what their economic
    achievements are and what their cultural achievements are and whether
    they can help their less fortunate neighbors? Or will it be by whether
    they can bully people just because they are smaller than they are? This
    a big issue. We cannot walk away from this. You cannot live in the world
    we are going toward and pretend to stay within your own borders.
        So that's what I tried to do in 1992. And ever since I have been in
    this office, everything I have done can be explained in terms of either
    trying to create opportunity or to bring us together around our basic
    values and respecting our diversity or maintaining our leadership for
    peace and freedom. And you heard Senator Lautenberg talking about it. It
    is true that we are better off today than we were 4 years ago, 8\1/2\
    million jobs better off. The deficit is less than half of what it was.
    The crime rate is down. The welfare rolls are down. We are moving in the
    right direction. That is true.
        It is also true that there are a lot of challenges out there. In the
    economic arena, we have at least three big challenges, don't we? In New
    Jersey, you know what one of them is. We have to figure out what to do
    about all these people who get downsized from big companies but who
    still have a lot of good years left. And we're working on that. In the
    next few days, I'm going to have a lot of companies in the country come
    in, and we're going to highlight the companies that have been able to
    avoid that and have been able to do things that really help their
    employees if they have to leave.
        We have got to find a way, secondly, to give all of our working
    people a greater sense of economic security. I have heard Senator
    Bradley talk about this. If you can't guarantee somebody the same job
    with the same company for a lifetime, then they have to know if they
    work hard and play by the rules, they will always be able to get new
    training for new work, they will always have access to health care, and
    they will always be able to have a pension they can carry around with
    them, even if they change jobs. They have to be able to know that.
        And lastly, we have to remember that here in New Jersey and
    throughout this country, in spite of the 8\1/2\ million jobs, there are
    vast expanses within our inner cities and in our rural areas that have
    not felt any new investment opportunity. And don't kid yourself, when
    you have new jobs and growth, you also drive down the welfare rolls, you
    drive down the crime rate, you drive down the despair that people feel.
    So we have to find a way to bring free enterprise back to the inner
    cities and back to the rural areas of America. I know we can do it. If
    we can do it for other countries, we can do it for our own.
        If you look at this great country of ours, and you ask, how can we
    come together instead of be driven apart, you have to start with our
    basic values. We need to build up families and the integrity and
    strength of childrearing, not tear it down. That's why I've said many
    times, I'm all for welfare reform that's tough on work if people can
    work, but I don't want to hurt the children. We should be supportive of
    good parenting and work. All of us try to succeed as workers and
    parents. That's what we should want poor people to do, too. Everybody
    should be able to succeed in that way. That should be our goal.
        We have to create an educational system that gives everybody genuine
    opportunity. And that means, among other things, what I was doing here
    in New Jersey a couple of weeks ago, which is ensuring that we hook up
    every classroom and every library, even in the poorest schools in
    America, to the information superhighway in the next 4 years. We can do
    that, and we can revolutionize education if we do it.

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        We have got to continue our work to lower the crime rate by having
    more police on the street, more prevention strategies, being tough in
    keeping the assault weapons ban in the Brady bill and not giving them
    up, and by actually doing something to give our young people something
    to say yes to as well as something to say no to. We can bring the crime
    rate down; we can make our streets safe again; we can make our
    neighborhoods whole again. We know how to do it. The question is whether
    we will.
        We have to continue this fight to protect the environment. It is
    woefully short-sighted to believe that we can walk away from our
    obligations to clean up the messes we've made and protect ourselves from
    making further ones and gain anything economically by it. Yes, we have
    to find smarter ways to do it. Our administration has worked hard to
    find ways to grow the economy and clean the environment. But if we walk
    away from that, we will not go into the 21st century as a country that
    is stronger with stronger families and stronger communities and a
    stronger future. All of these things we must do.
        We have to keep working and reaching out to the rest of the world,
    even when it's frustrating, when there are no easy answers. And to do
    it, we have to have an idea of Government that is fundamentally
    different from that embraced by the congressional majority. If you
    listen to them, what they say is, Government is the source of all of our
    problems; this new world is going to be so wonderful; if we could just
    get Government out of the way, all of our problems would be solved; what
    we need is empowerment defined as more choice and freedom from
    Government.
        If you listen to our crowd, what do we say? We're not for big
    Government anymore where it's not necessary. Just remember, folks, when
    election time comes, they bad-mouth the Government, but we're the ones
    that reduced it. It's 240,000 smaller today than it was the day I became
    President. But we did it in a way that treated those Federal workers
    with dignity. We gave them generous early retirement packages and
    severance packages and time to find other jobs. And we didn't try to
    make some big thing out of it. We just did it because it needed to be
    done. But we believe that there is a different sort of empowerment. We
    believe that real opportunity means not only choice but the ability to
    exercise the choice.
        You remember the great French writer Anatole France said the rich
    and poor are equally free to sleep under the bridge at night. Now,
    that's what choice is without the capacity to exercise it. We believe
    our job in Washington is to give people the ability to make the most of
    their own lives as individuals, workers, as citizens, in families, in
    communities, and as citizens of this great Nation. That's what we
    believe, the power to make the most of their own lives. We cannot
    guarantee results for people, but if we don't make sure everybody has
    got a chance to do the most that they can with their lives and live out
    their dreams, this country will never be what it ought to be in the 21st
    century. That is the main choice you face in 1996.
        And let me say, in terms of the election, why you have to work at
    it. This is a complicated time. There is a lot of kind of paradox out
    there. And you have to talk to people about what the nature of this time
    is, what the nature of this period of change is, and what should we be
    doing. And every one of you who can afford to be here tonight has a
    voice, a mind, a spirit that can be brought to bear on your friends and
    neighbors. And you need to take this opportunity to use this election as
    elections should always be used, as a genuine educational opportunity to
    learn about where we are. And every question then becomes, how do we do
    this in a way that gives everybody a chance to make the most of their
    own lives? How do we do this in a way that brings the American people
    together and doesn't divide them? How do we do this in a way that
    maintains our leadership in the world for peace and freedom?
        So it is not a question of whether we balance the budget. We have
    reduced the deficit more than our predecessors. The question is, how we
    balance the budget, not whether we do it. So in every case, I ask you to
    think about this. And you're quite fortunate now, you don't have to
    guess. You don't have to guess. You know what the choices are. You can
    look at the budget of 1995, which I vetoed, at the environmental
    initiatives, at the differences between us. And you don't have to guess.
        Who is right about family and medical leave? Were we right to say
    that you shouldn't lose your job if you've got to take a little time off
    when a baby is born or a parent is sick or a child is in the hospital?
    Or were they? We said yes, and they said no. We now have gotten

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    a bipartisan study of the family and medical leave law that says one in
    six American workers covered by the law have taken advantage of it, and
    about 90 percent of the businesses say it didn't cost them any money to
    comply and didn't cause them any problems.
        I think that's what we're about. All we did was to empower people to
    succeed at work and at home. That's what we should be doing. I think we
    were right.
        Were we right? Were we right to fight for the 100,000 police and the
    assault weapons ban and the Brady bill? Were we right? I believe we
    were. All I know is that the crime rate is down all across America now
    for 3 or 4 years in a row because of more police and prevention. All I
    know is that no lawful hunter has lost his or her weapon, but there are
    60,000 people who did lose their weapons, the 60,000 people with
    criminal records who tried to buy a handgun and couldn't do it because
    of the Brady bill in the last year and a half.
        Were we right to fight for national service, to give people a chance
    to serve their community, solve the problems, work with people of
    different backgrounds, and earn some money to go to college, or were
    they right to say that's a luxury we can't afford? Were we right to
    change the student loan laws so that more people could borrow money to
    go to college on better terms and pay it back as a percentage of their
    income so that if you have a high tuition cost but you want to be a
    schoolteacher, a police officer, a nurse, or somebody else doing public
    service and you know you're not going to be rich, you still can always
    borrow the money to go to college, and you can still always pay it back?
    I believe we were right about that.
        And in every case, there was no big Government guarantee. All we
    were trying to do was to give people the means to make the most of their
    own lives, to seize the American dream, to come together instead of
    being divided, to stand up for the things we believe in around the
    world. That's all we did, and it makes all the difference.
        So I say to you, this is not like 1992 when the question was the
    status quo or change. There is no status quo option. There are two very
    different views of change. They can be well-known and completely
    understood. The question is, which road will you walk into the 21st
    century? And I tell you, I see pictures in my mind all the time that
    give me the answer.
        The other day I was at Eastern High School in Washington, DC, where
    all of the students are African-American except the Russian exchange
    students, a program you've done a lot of work on. There they were,
    reaching for unity over diversity. There they were, struggling to come
    out of poverty. There they were, asking not for a guarantee, but just
    for a good education and a chance at the American dream. And if I've got
    anything to do about it, they're going to get it. That's what they're
    going to get.
        I got two letters from two married couples I got to know not very
    long ago because they had desperately sick children. I know as the
    father of only one child, there must be no greater pain in the world
    than having a child die before you do. And both these couples lost their
    children, but they got to be good parents because of the family and
    medical leave law that they helped us fight for. I think we were right,
    and I think that's the kind of change we want.
        I got a letter that I signed today back to a man who is now in his
    mid-sixties who lost a job 4 years ago at an aerospace plant, didn't
    know where to turn. But he wrote us, and because we found him the kind
    of training program that others are trying to eliminate, that man
    started his life over again in his early sixties and is working again
    and has dignity and is supporting himself and his family. That's what I
    believe we ought to be doing.
        This is not complicated. It is not about big Government programs. It
    is not about yesterday's ideas. This is about which road we will walk
    into the future. It is about whether we will walk it together.
        Today in Woodbridge, basically your good--anybody here from there? I
    was over there today at the high school. We were at the high school;
    Senator Lautenberg talked about it. We did this antismoking program. And
    I was talking to the mayor on the way in about what kind of community it
    was. He said, it's sort of a standard New Jersey blue-collar community,
    and it was. It was, except they had not only Christians and Jews among
    the student body, they had Hindus and Muslims among the student body,
    even there.
        America is changing. I'm telling you, this business of trying to
    drive a stake between people in this country based on their race, their
    ethnic

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    background, or their religion has got to stop. We have got to stop it.
    We have got to stop it. Now, you don't have to guess about this; look
    around the rest of the world. Which road do you want to walk into the
    future? And I know that either I or my successors will make some
    mistakes in our judgments about what the United States should do around
    the world. But basically, it is right for us to continue to reach out to
    other countries. It is right for us to support peace and freedom and to
    try to expand our own prosperity by expanding that of others. It is
    right for us to be partners with other countries, even when we're tired
    and we want to lay our burdens down, because it's the only way to fight
    terrorism, the only way to fight drug dealing, the only way to fight
    organized crime; it is right to do that. So you get to decide about
    that, which road will you walk into the future.
        And I want to ask you when you leave here tonight to think about
    what else you can do for the next 6 months. I appreciate the money
    you've given Bob Torricelli and the Democratic Party and our efforts. I
    am grateful for that. But it is not enough, because the American people
    are trying to get a grip on this period of change. They're trying to
    understand what's going on, and you can help.
        And it's exciting. You should feel privileged to live in this time.
    Believe me, there's a lot more good than bad in it. Believe me, if we do
    the right things, the children that are here in this audience will have
    the opportunity to live out their dreams more than any previous
    generation of Americans ever has. You should be happy and proud to have
    the responsibility of citizenship at this time.
        And so I ask you as you leave tonight to think about it: What do you
    want America to look like for your children and grandchildren, and what
    are you willing to do to make it happen? And what do we have to do in
    Washington to help everybody have their chance at the American dream in
    a country that's going forward together? That is what is at stake.
        I think I know what road the American people will walk into the
    future if they understand what the choices are. You must help your
    fellow Americans understand the choices.
        Thank you, God bless you, and good night.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:30 p.m. in the Old Central New Jersey
    Railroad Terminal at Liberty State Park. In his remarks, he referred to
    comedienne Whoopi Goldberg; Donald L. Fowler, national chairman,
    Democratic National Committee; James E. Florio and Brendan Byrne, former
    Governors of New Jersey; jazz musician Peter Duchin; and Raymond J.
    Lesniak, chairman, Clinton/Gore Campaign Committee, New Jersey.