    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [June 24, 1996]
    [Pages 971-976]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Reception in New York City
    June 24, 1996

        Thank you very much. I want to--I sort of want to quit while I'm
    ahead. [Laughter] I've had a wonderful time. Thank you, Wynton Marsalis,
    and thank you, all you musicians. You were magnificent. Mr. Marsalis,
    you know, is probably the only great musician today who has basically
    proved himself a genius at both classical and jazz music. And he's a
    great American treasure. I'm honored to have his support and to have him
    here tonight. Thank you very much.
        Thank you, Senator Moynihan. I never fail to learn something from
    Senator Moynihan. And shoot, I didn't know that no other President had a
    long economic expansion with very low unemployment and high inflation. I
    knew it was the best in 27 years; I didn't know it never happened
    before. [Laughter] They accuse me of overstatement. [Laughter] Senator
    Moynihan's my dictionary of established truth and fact in America. We
    have been understating the economic achievements of this administration.
    Thank you very much.
        I always love being with Al Franken, but when I close my eyes I
    sometimes think that--I have this eerie experience that I'm on the same
    stage with Al D'Amato. [Laughter] He sounds more like Senator D'Amato
    than Senator D'Amato. [Laughter] You know, when Al got up here--I never
    know what he's going to say; that makes two of us. [Laughter] He made
    that crack about the White House not making any mistakes. I thought to
    myself, we're about to see one unfold right here on the podium.
    [Laughter] But if you haven't read his book, you ought to read it. It's
    shameless for me to say, but it's a good book for our side. If you read
    Al Franken's book and James Carville's book, ``We're Right and They're
    Wrong,'' you know all you need to know to take you all the way to
    November. They'll get you through there.
        I'd like to just take a few moments to speak somewhat seriously
    about this election. I have to speak seriously. I used to be funny, and
    they told me it wasn't Presidential, so I had to stop. The other day I
    was at one of these--an event rather like this, and there was a young
    boy there who was 10 years old. His father brought him. And this young
    man walked up and shook my hand. And just as mature as you please, he
    said, ``Mr. President, I imagine once you become President it's rather
    difficult to find a joke you can tell in public, isn't it?'' [Laughter]

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    Didn't crack a smile, dead serious. I said, ``Well, now that you mention
    it, it is.'' He said, ``Well, I've got one for you.'' He said, ``Do you
    want to hear it?'' I said, ``Sure.'' He said, ``Being President with
    this Congress is like standing in the middle of a cemetery. There's a
    lot of people under you, but nobody is listening.'' [Laughter] He is now
    the youngest member of the White House speechwriting staff, and he's
    cranking them out every day.
        Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to ask you to think back just a
    moment to where we were 4 years ago, how we felt and where we were. The
    country was drifting. We had been in the midst of a long recession.
    Unemployment was high. We had the slowest job growth since the Great
    Depression. And we seemed to be coming apart as a people. I mean, look
    around this room. Our country is a place of fabulous diversity, and it's
    an enormous asset for us as we move into the global society if we figure
    out how to manage it. But if we don't manage it, you can see the
    consequences of people not getting along all over the world, can't you?
    Every place in the world, virtually, where there's a significant
    conflict today, it's based on race or ethnicity or religion or some
    combination of all of them, where people insist on defining themselves
    by who they aren't, instead of who they are.
        And so all these things concern me greatly. And I got into the race
    for President because I felt that we needed to go full steam into the
    21st century with three things clearly in mind: That we ought to keep
    the American dream alive for every person willing to work for it. That
    we ought to be a country that is coming together, not being driven
    apart; we ought to stop using political campaigns for cheap ways to
    divide us one from the other, but we ought to keep coming together. And
    we ought to maintain the leadership of the United States as the world's
    strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity. And at the end of
    the cold war no one else can play those roles.
        And so when I was elected with this vision, I thought that the way
    to do it was to use the power of Government not to guarantee results but
    to try to make sure we gave people the tools they needed to make the
    most of their own lives if they were willing to be good, responsible
    citizens; and to look for ways to keep drawing us together, pushing us
    forward, and maintaining our leadership.
        Now, you've heard a little about that, but as we go into this
    election season it seems to me there are three central arguments for the
    case we have to make. Number one, we came into this job with a plan, it
    was executed, the results were good, and the other side fought us every
    step of the way. Number two, you don't have to guess in this election,
    unlike most. You know what I'll do, and you know what they'll do. They
    already did it once; I just stopped them with a veto pen. If there's no
    veto pen, they'll just do what they tried to do in 1995. And number
    three, and most important of all, we are better off than we were 4 years
    ago, but we can't say that our problems are solved, that we don't still
    have challenges. This country's transition to the 21st century, to the
    new economy, to the new world we're living in is a work in progress. And
    we need to do much more.
        And just let me take those three things each in turn. It was clear
    to me that we needed a new approach to economic opportunity that avoided
    this dichotomy about whether the Government could create a recovery or
    was the problem and had to get out of the way. What we tried to do was
    to reduce the deficit; to expand trade dramatically; to continue to
    invest in education, technology, research, and the environment; and to
    do those things that would help us to support those places that had been
    left behind and people that had been left behind.
        So we lowered taxes for 15 million working families because we
    didn't want them to fall back into welfare. We said, if you work 40
    hours a week, you have children in the home, you ought to be lifted out
    of poverty by the Tax Code, not put in it. And we had an empowerment
    zone concept for places like the distressed area of New York City that
    got one to encourage people to invest private capital to put people back
    to work.
        Now, you heard the economic results. It's important to emphasize
    that this program did not receive a single vote from the other side and
    that the leaders of the House and the Senate in the Republican Party
    fought it all the way. They said it would bring on a recession. They
    said it wouldn't reduce the deficit. John Kasich, the budget chairman
    from Ohio, said, ``If this program were to work, I'd have to become a
    Democrat.'' I'm saving a seat for him at the Chicago convention this
    year. [Laughter]

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        So that's very important, because 9.7 million new jobs is nothing to
    denigrate. To emphasize what Senator Moynihan said, I'm about to leave
    in a couple days to go to France for the annual meeting of the seven big
    industrial powers of the world. In the last 3\1/2\ years, those 7
    nations have, in total, created 10 million new jobs, 9.7 million of them
    in the United States of America, a quarter of a million in New York
    State where the unemployment rate has gone down by 2 percent.
        We tried to take a serious approach to crime, to do what was already
    working in New York City and to try to accelerate it, 100,000 more
    community police, the assault weapons ban, the Brady bill, prevention
    programs. And by the way, the Brady bill has now kept 60,000 felons,
    fugitives, and stalkers from getting handguns. It was the right thing to
    do, and it is working in this country.
        And Senator Moynihan will remember, there was bitter opposition from
    the leadership of the other party, primarily in the Senate where they
    tried to kill this crime bill with a filibuster. They tried to keep it
    from happening. They said it would never work; it was a waste of money;
    it wouldn't lower the crime rate. We're about to have the 4th year in a
    row where the crime rate in America is going down, led by big drops in
    our big cities like New York, where there's been an intelligent
    application of police resources in the right way doing other things that
    work. Don't let anybody tell you that we cannot do much, much better
    with the crime problem. But the strategy is working; we need to build on
    it. And don't forget, we did it with the opposition of the leadership of
    the other party, and it was bitter and strong. We were right, and they
    were wrong.
        Let me just mention one other area, the sort of buzzword area now in
    Washington, welfare reform. To hear them talk about it, you'd think they
    discovered it. Senator Moynihan discovered the welfare problem three
    decades ago, and I've had the privilege of starting to work with him on
    it about a decade ago. In 1988, the Congress gave the President the
    authority to let States experiment to move people from welfare to work.
    While they've been talking about welfare reform, we've approved 62 of
    those experiments for 40 of the 50 States. More than three-quarters of
    the American people on welfare are already under welfare reform where
    they have to try to move to work. And there are 1.3 million fewer people
    on welfare today than there were the day I became President. And we
    didn't have to punish immigrant kids to get there. We did the right
    thing.
        They say, ``Well, President Clinton doesn't care about welfare
    reform; he vetoed our bill.'' I did veto their bill. I vetoed their bill
    because it was tough on children and weak on work. I don't have any
    problem, none of us do, with requiring people to move from welfare to
    work, but you don't want to hurt the kids. They should have child care.
    They should have health care. And there has to be a job there if you're
    just going to cut people off. So that's what I believe very strongly.
    That's what we need to do.
        There's been a lot of talk for years in Washington, justifiably,
    about family values. People are concerned about the stresses families
    feel. But we tried to do something about it. The family and medical
    leave law--12 million American families have now benefited when they had
    a sick child, a sick parent, or a newborn, from the family and medical
    leave law, and the leadership of the other party fought us on it. And if
    you look at all the family initiatives--requiring the V-chip, and the
    voluntary rating system that Hollywood is developing for television to
    help parents with young children; the initiative to try to discourage
    the advertising and dissemination of cigarettes to young people, which
    is illegal in every State in the country. But 3,000 kids a day start to
    smoke; 1,000 will die early because of it. It's the big health problem
    of the country.
        In each of these three cases we tried to do something to promote and
    strengthen the family in America; the leadership of the other party
    fought us. We were right; they were wrong. We need to keep going in this
    direction. This is very important to the United States.
        The next point I'd like to make is--I just want to say it one more
    time--you don't have to guess about this election. Every election,
    there's a little bit of guesswork. You know, when I was running in '92 I
    knew a lot of the Members of Congress, they looked at me. I'd never
    served in Congress before. Some of them probably barely knew where my
    home State was on the map. We only had six electoral votes. It was a
    guess; they took a chance. The American people took a chance on me. The
    people of New York took a chance on me. I'm grateful for that.

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        But now you don't have to guess. You have two known quantities, two
    known programs. You know what I'll do, and you know what they'll do.
    They already did it. Like I said, I just stopped them with a veto pen.
    So you take the veto away, the budget I vetoed will be law within 6
    months. The antienvironmental measures will be law within 6 months. The
    end of the commitment to put 100,000 police on the street will be law
    within 6 months. The abolition of the national service program,
    AmeriCorps, which has given--by the end of next year, will have given
    96,000--or 69,000, excuse me--young people a chance to earn college
    credit by serving their communities and helping people solve problems at
    the grassroots level--it will be gone within 6 months.
        So you don't have to guess. And that's really good. Do we have to do
    something about the entitlements problem? You bet we do. Do we have to
    balance the budget in a way that keeps the budget balanced in the short
    run and in the long run controls health care costs? Of course we do.
    That does not mean we have to turn Medicare into a second-class citizen
    and have two classes of Medicare. It does not mean we have to remove
    Medicaid's guarantee to children with disabilities in middle class
    families that would go broke if they didn't have Medicaid help or people
    in nursing homes or poor children or their pregnant mothers. It does not
    mean that. It does not mean to balance the budget you have to cut
    education spending when education is more important than any time in
    history. And it certainly doesn't mean that you have to wreck the
    environment. So we should remove the guesswork of this, and don't let
    the people of New York or any of your friends or family members anywhere
    in the country pretend that the future will be anything other than you
    know what the roadmap is.
        They passed their program once, and we stopped them. If there is no
    veto pen and they keep the Congress and have the White House, you don't
    have to guess what they'll do. You know what I'll do. You know what
    they'll do. Hallelujah, we know. Let's show up and make our voice heard
    and stand up for that.
        But let me also say, as you go toward the 21st century, there is
    more to do. There is more to do. One of the things that our economy has
    finally begun to do, we've finally begun to see average wages go up for
    the first time in 10 years. And that's very encouraging. But there's
    still a lot of inequality in this country. The only way to deal with it
    is to give people the tools they need to lift themselves through
    education.
        If we are returned to office, our administration, working with the
    Congress, will finish our commitment to hook up every classroom and
    library in this country to the Internet by the year 2000, to democratize
    educational opportunities all across America. If we're returned to
    office, I will do everything I can to see that we are very prudent in
    budgeting but we do give people a tax cut for the cost of college
    tuition and we give a tax credit to guarantee access to community
    college to every American citizen. Everybody should have 2 more years of
    education after high school. It should become universal.
        I will do what I can to make health care available and affordable so
    that people don't lose it when they lose their jobs or when someone in
    their family has been sick, to provide for access to retirement for all
    these people that are going into small businesses now and are having a
    terrible time getting it, to do what I can to extend the effort to make
    people able to succeed at home and at work.
        Today in Nashville, Tennessee, at the Vice President and Mrs. Gore's
    annual family conference, I proposed that we enact a family leave law
    II. Today, the family leave law applies to people when there's a genuine
    medical emergency for a parent or a child or an immediate family member
    or when there's a baby born. I think it should be extended for up to 24
    hours a year for routine medical visits with a parent or a child and for
    going to school to a child's teacher-parent conference. I think people
    ought to be able to go to school and see how their kids are doing in
    school and see their teachers. These are basic things that will enable
    the working families of this country to succeed at home and not to have
    to choose between being parents and being successful employees. These
    are the kinds of things I think we have to do. I also proposed today a
    way to give workers more option to have flexible time, to convert their
    overtime into cash or into time at their own choice, if it helps them
    with their families, but in ways that also gives greater protections to
    the overtime of working people.
        These are the kinds of things we ought to be thinking about. And
    there are a lot of other issues we have to face. We've got to do
    something about all these toxic waste dumps. The

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    present Congress is not permitting us to go clean them up. We need to do
    it. We need a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. We need to continue
    the fight against terrorism. We've got important legislation in the
    Congress today which will enable us to take a stronger stand against
    Iran which is very important. We've got a lot of things out there. And
    what I want you to do is to go out in this next 4 months and 3 weeks and
    say to people, ``Hey, this is an important election.''
        In '92, remember what the thing was? Are we going to have change, or
    are we going to have the status quo? The good news in this election is
    there is no status quo option. The bad news is, from my point of view,
    is one of the change options is not very attractive. You know, their
    argument is that Government is the problem. If you just get it out of
    the way, everything will be fine. If you were just on your own, left to
    the tender mercies of the global economy, to float out there in
    cyberspace, you'd do great.
        I believe no great nation has ever done well without giving more and
    more people the opportunities to succeed if they're willing to be
    responsible for it. I believe we cannot do well unless we have a
    commitment as a nation to coming together across the lines that divide
    us, instead of allowing ourselves to become more divided. And I know we
    cannot do well unless we're continuing to stand up for peace and freedom
    and decency around the world. I believe these things. So you get to
    decide which road we're going to walk into the 21st century.
        And I'll just leave you with this image. In the last 2 weeks my life
    and Hillary's life and Al and Tipper and all of our administration,
    they've sort of been dominated by flames--that and conversations with
    Eleanor. [Laughter] But I want you to think about--well, at least she's
    from New York, you ought to draw some pleasure from that. [Laughter] I
    want you to think about this, because this is what we've done the last 2
    weeks. We've worried about church burnings, and we've celebrated the
    Olympics. You saw it. I mean, I went down to South Carolina to dedicate
    a little church. It was way down a country road. The church gets burned
    down; they rebuild it a mile away. I really identify with that. My
    great-grandparents are buried 5 or 6 miles down a country road in
    Arkansas in a little country churchyard almost exactly the size--the
    church is almost exactly the size of that little church that burned down
    I saw in South Carolina. And I would be ripped out of my mind with anger
    if anybody had burned that little church down where my great-
    grandparents, with whom I often stayed as a little child, are buried.
        We've had a tripling of church burnings in the last year and a half,
    a lot of synagogues desecrated, two or three Islamic centers burned. And
    even, believe it or not, there's been a big uptick in the burning of
    white churches, although not nearly as many have been burned as African-
    American churches.
        And I don't think it's a conspiracy. But I think it manifests, in
    the extreme behavior of some people, a trend in the society to become
    more intolerant of people who are different from us and to believe that
    people who are really different from us are sort of subhuman and it's
    okay to do just about whatever you want. I mean, after all, this country
    got started by people looking for religious liberty. It is the first
    amendment. The idea of desecrating a church, a synagogue, a mosque, a
    Hindu temple, any religious institution in America, violates the core of
    what it means to be an American. And it can only be done by people who
    really believe that the people they're burning out are basically lower
    than they are in the human food chain.
        On the other hand, we welcomed the Olympic torch to the White House,
    where it burned overnight and then left the next morning. The Olympic
    torch was carried by thousands and thousands of Americans of all races
    and ages and walks of life, the able, the disabled. And they were all
    picked for one reason. Every one of them had one thing in common: They
    were good citizens of this country; they represented the best of this
    country.
        In Nevada, a 74-year-old woman, who took 100 children who had been
    abandoned by their own parents into her home, carried that torch for a
    kilometer. When the torch came into the White House, it was carried
    first by a Catholic nun who devoted her life to serving the poor and the
    disadvantaged, and then by the first deaf president of America's deaf
    university, Gallaudet University in Washington, Dr. I. King Jordan, who,
    just a few days after he delivered the Olympic torch to me at the age
    of--I think he's 56 or 58--was going to run a 100-mile race.
        The next morning we sent the Olympic torch on its way to Atlanta,
    first with a man named

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    Lang Brown and 12 children. He's African-American, but these children
    were African-American, Hispanic, and white, all troubled kids, all had
    really had difficult lives. This man is devoting his life to rescuing
    them one by one. He gave the torch to me, and I gave it to Carla McGhee,
    a woman who is on our Olympic basketball team. She was recruited for the
    University of Tennessee, was in a terrible wreck, was almost dead. Her
    body was broken and destroyed. And her will was so strong to come back
    that she wound up, against all medical predictions, returning to her
    team and helping it to win a national championship.
        Now, you've got to figure out which torch America's going to be
    identified with. So I leave you with that. I think this is the country
    of the Olympic torch where citizens who are real citizens are the heroes
    of America. I believe that the 21st century will give the young people
    in this audience more possibilities to live out their dreams than any
    time in human history. But we have to make the right decisions. More
    opportunity for people who are responsible, a deeper commitment to
    bringing our people together, an understanding that we have to continue
    to stick up for peace and freedom in the world, those are the decisions
    I ask you to make sure we make in November.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 7:37 p.m. at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. In
    his remarks, he referred to comedian Al Franken. A portion of these
    remarks could not be verified because the tape was incomplete.