    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [June 21, 1996]
    [Pages 948-953]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Houston, Texas
    June 21, 1996

        Thank you. You know, after all these speeches, if I had any sense I
    would just quit while I'm ahead--[laughter]--say, ``Thank you very much.
    Everything they said is true; please show up in November.'' [Laughter]
        I am delighted to be back in Texas. I am very grateful for what
    Secretary--Senator Bentsen said. I told Lloyd when he was leaving the
    State, I said, ``You know, I really miss you.'' It was always a delight
    for me to see Lloyd and B.A. They were a part of our family, and he did
    a magnificent job as Treasury Secretary.
        I want to thank Chairman Fowler for the vigor and energy that he has
    brought to this job, the passion. And he is absolutely tireless, and he
    has done a fine job, and I am grateful to him. And I want to thank Bill
    White for leaving our administration--not for leaving our
    administration--[laughter]--but for coming home to Texas to be the chair
    of the Democratic Party. I wish he hadn't left, but he's doing the right
    thing now that he's here.
        I want to thank Bob and Elyse Lanier who have been such good friends
    to me and came to the airport to meet me today. And I think, since I
    have said it in other States, in other places, I might as well say it in
    Houston: I doubt very seriously that there is a mayor anywhere in
    America who has made as much difference in as little time and been more
    effective than Bob Lanier has. And it's a real credit to him.
        I thank the Members of Congress who are here, Ken Bentsen and Jim
    Chapman and my good friend Martin Frost, who is going to give us a
    Democratic House again if we can just keep everybody rocking and
    rolling--Gene Green and Eddie Bernice Johnson and Sheila Jackson-Lee.
    And I'll just say one thing: You know, Supreme Court decisions are the
    law of the land and all that, but it would be a real shame if we lost
    Sheila Jackson-Lee or Eddie Bernice Johnson or Martin Frost or anybody
    else who could be affected by that redistricting decision. And I hope
    they'll have a chance to run and win in November.
        I want to thank all the former Governors who are here. I want to
    thank Dolph and Janie Briscoe for being so wonderful to Hillary when she
    came down to Uvalde to meet them. And I want you to know, Governor, I'm
    still wearing those socks you sent me that are made from your wool down
    there in Uvalde. And I'm--every time I go to the golf course I've got
    them

    [[Page 949]]

    on, and I show them to the other golfers. And I'm a one-man marketing
    agent for you. [Laughter] I expect income to double for all those folks
    down there in no time at all.
        I want to thank my good friend Mark White. Mark was making fun of me
    for wearing boots tonight. He gave me a pair of boots in 1984 at the
    Governors conference here; I've still got them, too. I thank Lieutenant
    Governor Ben Barnes. I want to say a special word of thanks to Ann
    Richards, who has been a constant source of inspiration to me and to
    Hillary throughout these last 3\1/2\ years, who's always out there on
    the stump speaking up for our values and our causes, and who is still
    incredibly admired all around this great country and for very good
    reason.
        I was glad to see Victor Morales here tonight and glad to see the
    hand you gave him and his family. And I want you to send him to the
    United States Senate. We need him there. I thank the other State
    officials who are here, Dan Morales and Martha Whitehead. And I want to
    say a special thanks to my longtime friend Garry Mauro for that very
    personal statement he made. It may have bored the rest of you, but I
    relived the last 25 years with every word he said. I don't think it
    could have--it was an eloquent statement, not of my life but of his
    commitment--and his commitment to public service and to the people of
    Texas. And the thing I liked about listening to the speech is I've heard
    him say the same thing in private 100 times. He is a great resource for
    you, and I hope the people of Texas understand what they have in Garry
    Mauro.
        I want to thank Speaker Jim Wright for coming tonight. I was
    delighted to see him, and I thank him for being here. I know I'm leaving
    some people out. I'm sure Liz Carpenter is here. If she's not, I'm mad
    at her. [Laughter] And I know my good friend Billie Carr is here. She
    says she got up out of bed to come, and I thought that was the right
    thing for her to do. [Laughter]
        I'm sure there may be some other candidates for Congress here, but I
    can't help mentioning one, Nick Lampson, who's running to recapture Jack
    Brooks' seat. Boy, do we need a change there, and I want you to help him
    get elected.
        And there's just one other thing--one other person I'd like to
    acknowledge who was and is about to become again a member of our
    administration: former Congressman and Commissioner Bob Krueger, who is
    about to go to Botswana but was in Burundi. And I want everybody here to
    know he put himself at not inconsiderable personal risk to save lots of
    people from the slaughter that went on in Burundi. And the people of
    Texas can be very proud of what he tried to do. And we thank you, sir.
    Thank you. [Applause]
        Now let me say, most of what needs to be said, I guess, has been
    said. But this is a profoundly important election, and I want to just
    make three or four brief points. Four years ago when I came to Texas and
    I asked a lot of my friends to help me get elected--and Texas gave me a
    huge vote in the Democratic primary and propelled me on to the
    nomination, and we nearly won the general with a shoestring campaign--
    and let me just say, I've got to say this for the political writers.
    Normally, I never talk about the polls, but if anybody here thinks that
    I'm about to write off Texas, they need to think again, because I intend
    to fight for the electoral votes and the support of the people of Texas.
        And I think we've got a pretty good case to make to the people of
    Texas. I've stood up for the things that mattered to the people of
    Texas. I fought for NAFTA; I fought for the space program; I fought for
    a fair resolution of the super collider after I lost my fight to keep it
    alive. And the people of Texas are better off today than they were 4
    years ago, and they're a lot better off than they would have been if the
    other folks' policies had prevailed. That's a pretty simple case, and I
    think it's right.
        I would say, too, of Governor Briscoe, we've had a good farm policy.
    Unfortunately, even a good farm policy can't make it rain. So I had to
    come down here to do that. [Laughter] But I'm glad we've rounded it out
    tonight, and we're going in the right direction.
        I was reliving all this today coming in because I knew I'd see a lot
    of my friends. In the middle of 1991 I was home in Arkansas, having a
    wonderful time being Governor. My State was finally getting in pretty
    good shape economically, and Hillary and I were having a great time. Our
    daughter was doing wonderfully well in her school and with her friends.
    And I really didn't know whether I wanted to make this race. And I
    finally decided to do it because I thought the country was drifting
    toward the future.
        I had had a good relationship with President Bush and the White
    House; it hadn't been a

    [[Page 950]]

    particularly partisan thing. I had had the honor of representing the
    Democratic Governors in the education summit. I'd done a lot of work
    with them. But it just seemed to me that we could not drift into the
    21st century, that we couldn't just assume that things would happen that
    would be good for the country. And we were having the slowest job growth
    since the Great Depression. We had quadrupled the debt of the country in
    12 years, and we were getting more divided racially and ethnically at a
    time when we plainly needed to come together. There was even some
    question of the support in our country for America's continued
    leadership in the world.
        And I had three simple ideas that I thought we ought to take with us
    into the 21st century. First and most important, I thought that we had
    to keep the American dream alive for everybody who was willing to work
    for it. Secondly, I believed that we had to make a virtue of our
    diversity, we had to celebrate it, we had to come together in a stronger
    sense of community instead of being divided, because it's plain that if
    we work together we'll do better than if we drift apart. And thirdly, I
    wanted to see our country continue to be the strongest force in the
    world for peace and freedom and prosperity.
        And I thought if we had a strategy that said America's basic bargain
    is this: We'll work together to give everybody the opportunity to make
    the most of their own lives, and they have to assume the responsibility
    of being good citizens, and then we'll work together to bring this
    country together instead of being divided--and if we did it, I thought
    it would work.
        In the economy, as Secretary Bentsen said, we had a simple strategy,
    to organize ourselves for the future. We said, we're going to cut the
    deficit in half; we're going to expand trade dramatically; we're going
    to invest in the people of this country; and if we did it, we'd reduce
    the deficit in half in 4 years and create 8 million jobs. And as all of
    you remember, it was a very brutal fight to pass that economic program.
    It passed with the barest of margins. The Vice President had to vote for
    it in the Senate. Al Gore always says, ``You know, whenever I vote, we
    win.'' [Laughter] So, sure enough, we did.
        Well, now we've had 3\1/2\ years of that program. After we passed
    the economic program, we passed NAFTA in a heated fight. We passed the
    GATT bill in a heated fight. Our trade ambassador's negotiated 200
    separate trade agreements. We have continued to invest. We've increased
    our investment in the infrastructure of America. We've increased our
    investment in technology and research and made educational opportunities
    more available to our people, even while reducing the size of the
    deficit.
        Now, I just want to read you something. I had my staff give me this
    today; I thought you might find this interesting. When we voted on this
    strategy of ours back in 1993, the majority leader of the House, Mr.
    Armey, said of our plan, ``Clearly, this is a job killer.'' The Speaker
    said, ``This will lead to a recession next year, I believe.'' The head
    of the Budget Committee, Mr. Kasich, said, ``This plan will not work. If
    it was to work I'd have to become a Democrat.'' [Laughter] I'm saving a
    seat for him in Chicago. [Laughter]
        The Senate majority leader, Senator Dole, said, ``The American
    people know this plan does nothing to tackle the deficit head on.'' And
    your Senator, Mr. Morales' opponent, said, and I quote--now, don't use
    this in a campaign, Victor--here's what he said. ``I want to predict
    here that if we adopt this bill,'' our economic program, ``the American
    economy is going to get weaker, not stronger; the deficit 4 years from
    today will be higher than it is today, not lower.''
        Well, 3\1/2\ years later, we didn't cut the deficit in half, we cut
    it by more than half; the plan has not helped to create 8 million jobs,
    we've got 9.7 million new jobs. We were right, and they were wrong. And
    you ought to tell that in Texas. That's a fact. We also have nearly 4
    million new homeowners, all-time high in the sales of American products
    abroad, all-time high for 3 years running in the creation of new
    businesses, the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation in
    27 years.
        So I say to you, we have not solved all the problems of the 21st
    century, but we're sure moving in the right direction. And if you
    compare where we are now to 4 years ago, we're better off. And if that's
    the test, we need to keep going in this direction and not change.
        We had similar debates over what it meant to be responsible. One of
    the things that has driven me as long as I've been in public life, but
    especially these last few years, is that we've got to do something to
    lower the crime rate. You cannot have a democracy in which people are
    terrified anytime they are not locked behind

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    their own doors. And yet, I know that a lot of people believed that it
    couldn't be done. I believed that it could be. I saw what the mayor did
    here in his campaign when he put more police officers on the street. I
    went to communities in other cities where the crime rate had gone down
    when they put police officers back on the street and did the right
    thing.
        And so we had a crime bill and we said, ``This is not real
    complicated; we're going to put 100,000 police on the street because
    crime's tripled in the last 30 years and the police force has only gone
    up by 10 percent. But the police have to be deployed in the
    neighborhoods where the crime problem is, not behind desks. And we're
    going to ban 19 kinds of assault weapons, and we're going to pass the
    Brady bill. And we're going to pass the violence against women law to
    try to do something about the problem of domestic violence in this
    country.'' And we did.
        Now, they made a lot of votes out of all that with all the fear and
    talk in 1994, because there hadn't been enough time to see whether it
    would bring any results and because there was so much turmoil. But you
    know something, since 1994 we've had two deer seasons, two duck seasons
    in Arkansas--[laughter]--and everybody who wants to kill deer or ducks
    has done it with the same dad-gum rifle they had before the Brady bill
    and the assault weapons ban passed. They've still got their guns. And
    all the old boys I grew up with who were mad at me 2 years ago now know
    that they were fed a line of bull. They feel they're just like where
    they were.
        But I'll tell you one thing. There are 60,000--60,000--people with
    criminal records--stalkers and other serious problems--who have not been
    able to get handguns because they're ineligible when we went through the
    checking period of the Brady bill. That's who doesn't have a gun. The
    sportsmen and the hunters, they've still got them.
        And we are going into--1996 will mark the 4th year in a row when the
    crime rate goes down in America. Now, is it low enough? Of course it's
    not. Of course it's not. I'll tell you when it will be low enough. We'll
    never get rid of crime because we can't transform human nature; that's
    not within our power. But you will know that we're on the right side of
    this issue when you turn on the evening news at night and you see a
    report of a crime, and instead of yawning and waiting for the next
    story, you're shocked again--you don't feel numb, you actually are
    surprised. We need to make crime the exception, not the rule. And we can
    do it if we follow smart policies.
        If you look at this record, it is very important to remember that
    there was, unfortunately, especially in the leadership, a sharp partisan
    divide. And I think the evidence is that our approach was right and they
    were wrong in what they said about it.
        If you look at the welfare debate, everybody is for welfare reform.
    And yes, I vetoed a bill that had that label on it--that label on it.
    But what do you want out of somebody on welfare anyway? Don't you want
    them to be like you? Don't you want people with children to be able to
    work and support themselves and be independent, to succeed at work and
    also--but don't you also want them to be able to succeed at home? I
    mean, isn't that the struggle that all working families are facing
    today? They want to be good at work, but they want to be good at home.
    Isn't that one of the major issues facing America today? If we have to
    choose between success at work and success at home, we have lost before
    we start. Isn't that right?
        If you're so torn up and upset about your kids you can't function at
    work, that's going to hurt the economy. If you work like a demon and you
    neglect your children, what are we working for in the first place? So I
    said to them, I said, ``You want to be tough on work? You cannot write
    the rules too tough for me. But make sure these people have jobs and
    child care and make sure their kids have medical care. And don't use the
    welfare reform bill to punish immigrants.'' And I want to thank the
    people of Texas, by the way, Democrats and Republicans alike, for having
    a more enlightened view on that than a lot of people in the Congress do.
    I appreciate that.
        Well, we've had 3\1/2\ years of this now. We never could get a bill
    worked out. I still hope we will. We need one. So we just went out under
    authority given the President in 1988 and gave 40 States permission to
    have 62 experiments, which put 75 percent of the people on welfare under
    welfare reform anyway--moving people from welfare to work. Now, what
    have been the results? We got a 40 percent increase in child support
    collections. We got a million fewer people on food stamps. We have 1.3
    million fewer people on welfare. I think the evi-

    [[Page 952]]

    dence speaks for itself. Our approach is working. We don't need to
    change it; we need to bear down and build on it. That's the way to do
    it.
        We hear a lot of talk in Washington about family values and about
    character. Well, one of the political tests is, do you have the
    character to fight for my family's values? [Laughter] Now, we had a
    fight over whether the United States would become the 173d country or
    something like that--anyway, over 150 had done it before we did--to tell
    people they could have a little time off if they had a baby born or a
    sick parent without losing their jobs when we passed the family and
    medical leave law. Unfortunately, the leadership of the other party even
    fought us on that.
        Well, we just had research done by a bipartisan group that said in
    the last 2 years over 12 million Americans had taken advantage of the
    family and medical leave law. Over 90 percent of the businesses said it
    cost them nothing or nearly nothing to comply. It was no hassle at all.
    And they certainly can't make a case that it cost jobs, since we've
    produced 9.7 million jobs through the American free enterprise system in
    the last 3 years. What a different world it would make.
        Hardly a week goes by that I don't meet somebody, if I'm out and
    around seeing folks, that has taken advantage of the family and medical
    leave law. And I'll tell you, of all the stories I hear, when a person--
    when a father comes up to me, as it happened the other day in the White
    House--we had all the kids in the Children's Miracle Network there, you
    know, the kids from the children's hospitals telethons in each of the 50
    States and their parents. And two sets of parents, as I shook hands with
    these kids and I was on the way out, stopped me and said, ``My kid was
    desperately ill, and if it hadn't been for the family and medical leave
    law, I would have lost my job to care for my child.'' And that's wrong.
    And I am glad that that's the law of the land. We were right about that.
    We were right about that.
        Now, I could go on and on. The same story applies to the V-chip and
    the new cable systems and giving parents more control over what their
    young children see. The same story applies to whether we should restrict
    advertising of tobacco products directed at young people. I know that's
    controversial. No President ever took that on before. But let me tell
    you something, it's illegal in every State in America for children to
    smoke. Three thousand kids start to smoke every day illegally. One
    thousand of them will die sooner because of it. I think it's time the
    country took a position on it, took a stand on it, and made itself
    heard. I believe that.
        So the second point I'd like to make, in addition to the fact that I
    think our approach has been right, is that you don't have to guess in
    this election. I mean, usually there's some guesswork involved in the
    election. You know, you know one person, you don't know the other. Maybe
    you don't know either one of them. People took a chance on me in '92,
    thank goodness. [Applause] Thank you very much.
        But look, this is great. You don't have to guess at all. You know
    what will happen. If they have the White House and the Congress, within
    6 months of that occurring, the budget that I vetoed in 1995 will be the
    law of the land. And if that's what you think ought to be the law of the
    land, you've got a good way to get it. If you really believe we ought to
    have a two-class Medicare system; if we ought to walk away from the
    guarantee we've given for 30 years to parents and children with
    disabilities, to poor children, to the elderly in nursing homes--stop
    guaranteeing that they'll have health care, even if they can't afford
    it; we ought to start cutting education funding instead of investing
    more in education; we ought to walk back on our commitment to a clean
    environment or a safe workplace, you can do that.
        It's clear now. You don't even have to guess. It's great. There's no
    guesswork involved. You know what I'm going to do. You know what they're
    going to do. It would already be the law, but I vetoed it. So if you
    take the veto away, you can have the budget of 1995. I don't think
    that's good for America, and I think you ought to take the clear course
    and stay on the course we're on. And that's what I want you to tell the
    people of Texas. I don't think it would be good for Texans.
        The final point I want to make is this: We have not solved problems.
    We have made them better. We are moving in the right direction. There's
    still a lot to do. If you imagine what the future is going to be like,
    young people today will have more possibilities to live out their dreams
    than any generation of Americans has ever had. But there will be
    significant new challenges. The world will change much more rapidly.

    [[Page 953]]

        There are young people in this audience today that 10 years from now
    will be doing jobs that have not even been invented yet, jobs that some
    of us cannot even imagine. And with the world changing, we need to do
    some things that we haven't had to do in the past. We need a system to
    guarantee that people have lifetime access, for example, to education,
    to health care, and to pensions. That's a very important thing, even if
    they're in very small businesses, even if they're self-employed. That's
    what this fight for the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill is about. That's what the
    recommendations I've made to Congress to give self-employed people and
    small-business people the opportunity to take out pensions, and people
    the opportunity to keep their pensions even if they lose their jobs for
    a while.
        These are important changes because the world is changing. The most
    important thing I've asked is that Congress change the law to give
    families a tax deduction for the cost of college tuition and to
    guarantee that every American can get a tax credit equal to what it
    costs to go to community college so we can make universal not just a
    high school education but 2 years of education after high school. These
    are the kinds of things we need to be looking to the future for.
        So we had a plan. We've implemented it. The results were good. You
    don't have to guess in the election; there are two very different
    choices. I believe you know that the alternative would not be good. And
    most importantly, we're going to run a positive campaign with good ideas
    for the future of the United States.
        Let me ask you to think, as I leave, about this choice and these
    terms. If you were lucky enough to know right before you leave this
    Earth, the last time you put your head on a pillow that it was your last
    time, what would you be thinking about? You wouldn't be thinking, I wish
    I spent more time at the office. [Laughter] And frankly, you probably
    wouldn't be thinking, I wish I'd spent more time on politics. You'd be
    thinking about your children and the people you love and the people you
    cared about, the things that really mattered in your life. The purpose
    of politics is simply to give people the space they need to make those
    memories, and to remind people that you can't really make those memories
    unless you give other people the same chance and accord them the same
    respect, even if they're really different from you.
        Now, that's really the purpose--and to stop countries and other
    destructive forces from taking advantage of us and killing the innocent
    and snuffing out their dreams. That's really what it's all about. And I
    believe with all my heart. I don't care about the voting patterns of the
    past or history and everything. If on election day the American people
    go into the polling booth thinking about that, what is the purpose of
    this whole exercise, they'll do the right thing.
        The best days of this country are ahead of us. The next century will
    contain untold possibilities. But we have to meet these challenges and
    protect our values, and we've got to do it together. That's what this
    election is all about. And I just want to ask you to commit to spend
    some time, as much time as you can between now and November, talking to
    your friends and neighbors about it, because we are going to take a path
    of change into the 21st century. There is no status quo option. And I
    want us to walk across a bridge that will take us all there together,
    better and stronger than ever.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 7:12 p.m. at the J.W. Marriott Hotel. In
    his remarks, he referred to B.A. Bentsen, wife of former Treasury
    Secretary Lloyd Bentsen; Donald L. Fowler, national chairman, Democratic
    National Committee; Mayor Bob Lanier of Houston, TX, and his wife,
    Elyse; Dolph Briscoe, Mark White, and Ann Richards, former Texas
    Governors; Janie Briscoe, wife of Governor Briscoe; Dan Morales, State
    attorney general; Martha Whitehead, State treasurer; Garry Mauro, State
    land commissioner; former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives
    Jim Wright; Liz Carpenter, Democratic activist; and Billie Carr, Texas
    Democratic Party executive council member. A portion of these remarks
    could not be verified because the tape was incomplete.