[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
[February 15, 1996]
[Pages 265-271]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic Dinner in New York City
February 15, 1996

    Thank you so very much. I told the Vice President when we were 
outside and James Earl Jones was speaking that we ought to go out here 
and smile and quit while we're ahead. [Laughter] And I did tell him, I 
confess, that I thought it was kind of a bad deal that he got to be 
introduced by James Earl Jones and he introduces me all the time. But 
James Earl Jones fails the first test of Presidential introductions that 
the Vice President passes with flying colors, which is, whenever 
possible, always, always be introduced by someone you have appointed to 
high office. [Laughter]
    Don't you think it's wonderful what a sense of humor the Vice 
President has developed? I think--I actually resent it myself. 
[Laughter] I used to have a sense of humor, but they told me it wasn't 
Presidential. So, like everything else that's really enjoyable, in this 
administration the Vice President gets to do it. [Laughter]
    Let me say to all of you who are here, to the people who cochaired 
this dinner and all those who sold tickets and all of you who have come 
out on this third-time's-the charm--[laughter]--to the leaders of the 
Democratic Party who are here; to James Earl Jones, who I admire so very 
much, I thank you for being here and for your wonderful words and for 
your support. To Lesley Gore and to the orchestra, all the musicians, I 
thought they were terrific. And I think it's okay if Lesley Gore tells 
people she's kin to Al. After I became President, I found out I had all 
kinds of relatives I didn't know that I had. And it makes for 
interesting reading. [Laughter]
    I want to thank Mayor Dinkins and the members of the New York City 
government, the Members of Congress who are here, the borough presidents 
who are here, and all of you who have come to be a part of this evening.
    You know, I guess that because this is in all probability my last 
campaign, unless someday I run for the school board--[laughter]--I'm a 
little bit nostalgic. And I was in this hotel at a fundraiser almost 4 
years ago to this week. Some of you were here that night. And I'm

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thinking tonight--and I ask all of you to give your prayers to our 
wonderful friend Paul Carey, who is battling an illness but is doing 
better. And he can't be here, but I want to think about him because he 
was here with me in that campaign. And so I'm kind of counting my 
blessings tonight and remembering that.
    The Vice President has graciously bragged on me because it's 
unseemly to do it for yourself, even in an election year. What I would 
like to talk about tonight is the--kind of the time in which we're 
living and why the things that we have done commend us for reelection, 
but why we don't deserve to be reelected just based on our record 
because there is so much more to be done.
    What are the fundamental facts of this time? A democratic system can 
only work if it preserves the freedom and liberty of all citizens and is 
flexible enough to adjust to the challenges of every time. It is no 
accident that we're the longest lasting democracy in human history. It 
isn't easy to keep meeting the challenges. It's no accident that Haiti, 
which the Vice President mentioned, after being a nation, an independent 
nation for almost 200 years, just had its very first transfer of power 
from one democratically elected President to another.
    This is a wonderful system of government, but it's not always easy 
to get a majority of the people, first, to zealously guard their own 
freedoms and those of their neighbors and to respect those who are 
different from them, and secondly, to make the decisions necessary or to 
let their leaders make the decisions necessary to keep meeting the 
challenges of each moment.
    I believe, as I have said on many occasions, that we are living 
through the period of greatest change in the way we work and live and 
relate to each other in a hundred years; that this moment represents the 
most fundamental change since we moved from being primarily a rural 
people to being primarily a people who lived in towns and cities, since 
we moved from being primarily an agricultural economy to an economy 
primarily based on industry.
    This information age represents dramatic changes in the nature of 
work. There's more muscle--excuse me--more mind and less muscle in work. 
And as people in New York read every week, it represents dramatic 
changes in the nature of work organizations. There are more small 
businesses, and big businesses keep getting smaller. There are fewer 
levels between the people at the top and the people actually 
implementing decisions. There has been an enormous growth in small 
business, as the Vice President said, but an enormous downsizing of 
bigger companies.
    This era represents an enormous, dramatic change in the way 
information is communicated. Bill Gates in his recent book said that the 
information age, based on the digital chip, represents the most profound 
revolution in communications since Guttenberg printed the first Bible 
500 years ago. And, obviously, when you're dealing with changes this 
profound, which also include the change in markets--money markets, 
markets in goods, and markets in services--to global markets, it is 
clear that there must be changes in Government. It is also clear that 
there will be changes in the patterns of people's lives.
    And whenever in our history and, I believe, whenever in any society 
in human history there has been a great uprooting, you always see 
enormous opportunity for the gifted, the clever, the understanding, the 
lucky, and the well-prepared. But you also see a lot of people feeling 
insecure and disoriented because they feel that they're working hard and 
playing by the rules and their future seems to be drifting away. And 
that represents the remarkable paradox of the present moment.
    Overwhelmingly, this is an age of possibility. The Vice President 
recited the economic statistics; I need not repeat them. But what we 
know is that this is an unusual time because in these 3 years we've seen 
our economy produce 8 million jobs, a record number of new small 
businesses, a record number of self-made millionaires--a remarkable and 
very good thing, not people who inherited their wealth but people who 
went out and made it with the opportunities that this country provided. 
And yet, still, about half our people have not gotten a raise in terms 
of real purchasing power in a decade or more.
    We know that these entrepreneurs are exploding. We know, for 
example, that businesses owned by women alone, just businesses owned by 
women, have created more new jobs than the Fortune 500 have laid off in 
the last 3 years. But that's not very helpful if you're one of the 
people my age who is, you know, 49 or 50 years old and your kids are 
ready to go to college and you're one of the ones that got laid off, and 
all you've ever been is a middle manager in a very big company, and you 
can't

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imagine how you can ever find another job making what you made doing 
roughly what you used to do. What are you to do now? So that is the 
paradox we're trying to come to grips with.
    If you look at the other great challenge I think we face, which is 
to live up to our values and to come together as a country instead of 
being driven apart by this change, you see the same sort of thing. We 
should be ecstatic. The crime rate is down; the welfare rolls are down; 
the food stamp rolls are down; the poverty rolls are down; the teen 
pregnancy rate is down. This country is coming together. The 
commissioner of police of the city of New York was on the front page, 
the cover of one of our major news magazines with a serious question 
implying we may have turned the corner in our efforts to whip violent 
crime. That is something to be celebrating about. And yet, we all know 
that all those things that are going down are still too high. So our 
work is not yet done.
    If you look at the role America has played in the world, we should 
be rejoicing for the reasons the Vice President has said and for others. 
There are no more nuclear missiles pointed at any children in the United 
States. I'm proud of that. If the Russians follow the lead of the United 
States Senate and adopt a START II treaty, we will reduce by two-thirds 
the nuclear arsenals of both countries. We have gotten almost 180 
countries to agree to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty and promise 
never, never to develop nuclear missiles. This year I believe we will 
get a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty for the whole world. This is 
a remarkable thing.
    And I am profoundly grateful for what this Nation has been able to 
do, to work with other countries, to fight terrorism, and to fight 
organized crime, and to fight drugs. I am profoundly grateful for the 
role we played in the liberation of South Africa, and the role we played 
in Haiti, in the Middle East, in Northern Ireland, and Bosnia. But you 
know as well as I do that this work is ongoing; that even though the 
nuclear cloud is not hanging over us as it once did, we still face 
serious, serious obstacles to doing everything we need to do.
    There's a lot out there to do when one fanatic can break open a vial 
of sarin gas in a subway station in Tokyo and kill hundreds of people; 
when one fanatic in the United States can get on the Internet and find 
through high-tech means the very low-tech way of making a bomb, like the 
bomb that destroyed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. When our open 
borders can lead terrorists into our country and allow them to come 
here, and they do their mischief and then leave and go to countries from 
which we cannot have them returned, we still have security challenges.
    Now, I would say to you, on balance, you should be pleased with 
where this country is and where we're going. The economic direction is 
right. The social direction is right. The national security direction is 
right. We are opening the American dream to more people. We are coming 
together around our basic values. We are still the world's leading force 
for peace and freedom, but we have a very challenging agenda for the 
future. And it is that agenda on which I hope this election campaign 
will be waged, not the cheap, silly, divisive, distractive issues that 
will undermine our ability to unleash the potential of every American 
and do right by this great country.
    In my State of the Union I said there were seven great challenges 
facing this country. I don't want to talk about all of them tonight; I 
want to emphasize one or two. But I want to talk about one or two and 
remind you of all of them. We must--we must continue to fight for 
stronger families and better childhoods for all of our children. We must 
open up the opportunities of the 21st century to every American by 
giving everybody a world-class educational opportunity, based on high 
standards and high expectations and high technology and high 
opportunity. We must find a way to capture and maintain and even 
accelerate the dynamism of this wonderful new economy and at the same 
time provide a higher measure of economic security for every American 
family willing to work for it.
    We must continue the fight against crime until we meet the real test 
of any civilized society, which is not a zero crime rate--there will 
never be a time when we won't have crime and violence--but there is a 
test that you can apply in your own home, to your own personal 
experience. We will have done what we should do in crime when you feel 
in your bones that it is the exception, not the rule; when you turn on 
the evening news and you read about the latest murder, the latest rape, 
the latest madness, you think it is the exception and you're surprised, 
not numb to it. And until we reach

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that point, we have to keep working on it as one of our highest national 
priorities.
    We must continue the fight to preserve, maintain, and even enhance 
our natural environment. We must reject once and for all the totally 
destructive notion that we can only grow this economy if we continue to 
destroy the environment. That is a terrible idea. It won't work. It will 
undermine our economy. It will destroy our quality of life. And it's 
nice to have the Vice President at work every day reminding me of that 
ultimate truth.
    We must maintain our leadership for peace and freedom. In New York, 
we have a lot of people who deal with the rest of the world. You have a 
lot of wonderful Jewish-Americans and Americans of Arabic descent who 
want me to continue to fight for peace in the Middle East. You have a 
lot of people involved in world trade who want me to continue to reach 
out to Latin America and to Asia. But many of our fellow Americans are 
so burdened by the moment that I get the feeling when they see me on 
television talking about Ireland or Bosnia or whatever, they look and 
they say, ``Well, you're doing all right and as long as you don't mess 
up I'll let you do that, but I really kind of wish we didn't have to 
fool with that.'' But let me remind you, we do have to fool with that.
    If you want those countries in Latin America to cooperate with us in 
breaking the drug gangs--and remember, in the last 3 years, 7 of the 8 
leaders of the Cali drug cartel have been put behind bars, thanks to 
that kind of cooperation--if you want that to happen, we have to be good 
neighbors with the Latin Americans. They, after all, are risking their 
lives. At least we have to have good trade partnerships and other 
partnerships.
    If you want Europe to grow as an open community instead of a closed 
community, if you want Americans to have a fair shake at selling our 
goods, our services, and growing our economy in partnership with the 
Europeans, we have to be partners in the common security of democracy 
and freedom there. And that's part of what Bosnia is all about, apart 
from the fact that it is the right thing to do. So I ask you all to 
support that, to support your country when we stand up for peace and 
freedom.
    And finally, our last challenge is we have got to give the American 
people again a Government that does more, costs less, and most 
important, is worthy of their trust. But we also have to have a group of 
Americans who understand what their responsibilities are at this time. 
People can't be looking down their nose at the Government if they don't 
do their part to raise their kids, if they don't do their part to 
educate their kids, if they're not willing to do their part to work with 
their local police officers or their part to demand grassroots 
environmental reform or their part to show up and vote. So we have to 
have this kind of balance.
    In this new era, we will change the way the Government works. You 
heard the Vice President say it. I heard our friends in the other party 
for years lambast and rail against big Government. All I know is, it was 
still pretty big when we showed up, and now it's the smallest it's been 
since 1965. I heard them rail against Government regulation. All I know 
is, when we showed up there were 86,000 pages of Government regulations, 
and we're getting rid of 16,000 pages of them. I heard these things, but 
I never saw anything done. We are trying to give the American people a 
Government that's not so big, that's not antiquated, that's not some 
dinosaur of the age we used to live in instead of the one we're moving 
toward. But that does not mean we need a weak Government. It does not 
mean we can go back to the time when people were left to fend for 
themselves.
    If you were to ask me, ``What is the one lesson you have learned in 
the last 3 years, Mr. President?'' I would say to you, I have learned 
that when this country is together, America never loses. And we have to 
solve our problems together. That means the Government has a role. That 
means citizens, that means families, that means community institutions, 
that means the private sector, that means the churches and synagogues, 
that means all of us have to do something together. And we all have a 
role to play. And to pretend otherwise is ridiculous.
    And let me just give you a couple of examples of what I think we 
ought to be doing and one example that affects New York that shows you 
what is still wrong with things in Washington. And I believe there are 
laws we ought to change. I still--I can't understand why Congress won't 
pass a campaign finance reform bill. They all say they're for it, but 
they won't do it. [Applause] And actually, most of you in this room 
should be clapping louder. It would save you a lot of money if we passed 
it. [Laughter]

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    I can't understand why they won't pass the line item veto. They said 
they thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread until they 
took over the Congress. I'd like to have it. I'll use it, and it will 
help to bring the deficit down.
    But the way we operate is fundamentally important, and let me just 
give you one example. This telecommunications bill reflects the way our 
country ought to work. It will create tens of thousands, perhaps 
hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs. It will dramatically increase 
Americans' access to information, to education, to entertainment. And it 
will be done in a way that brings us together because it protects the 
ability of all the players in telecommunications to have their fair 
chance to compete, the small as well as the large. It protects the 
ability of people to know that there will be a diversity of opinions 
still available to them. And it gives a preference to our schools and to 
our libraries and to our hospitals, so they can be on the information 
superhighway no matter where they are and all our children have a chance 
to go into the 21st century.
    Let me say this: We did an event in Union City, New Jersey, today 
which the Vice President talked about, which is the antithesis of what 
everybody worries about in the economy. All this anxiety in the economy 
really is rooted in the fact that people are afraid that there's 
something about this technological revolution that mandates inequality 
in wages and stagnant wages and people being permanently dislocated. But 
if you saw these kids today--kids that came from immigrant families, 
kids that were poor, kids that never would have been able to dream of 
this before--all of them fluent in the use of their computers, all of 
them being able to go home and have access to computers at home, all of 
them having taught their parents how to use computers so that their 
parents are E-mailing the principal and finding out back and forth how 
the kids are doing, you would see that the answer is not to go back or 
put up walls around this country, the answer is to see this 
technological revolution through until it benefits every single American 
and gives us the future that we need.
    And that is an example of how we ought to do it. We fought very hard 
for those public interest provisions of the telecommunications bill. But 
in the end, the bill passed almost unanimously. And it is a good thing 
for America, and it hooks us into the future. Now, that's an example of 
what should be done.
    An example of what should not be done, that most people in this room 
are familiar with, was the outrageous political treatment of my 
intention to nominate Felix Rohatyn to be the Vice Chairman of the 
Federal Reserve. And he is here tonight. I think we all ought to give 
him a hand. Felix, where are you? Stand up there. Let's give him a hand. 
[Applause]
    If you believe that we should give everybody a raise when the 
economy does better and you don't want to engage in class warfare; if 
you believe all these people that are inevitably downsized when big 
corporations become smaller should have the opportunity to go on with 
their lives and you don't want to engage in class warfare; if you are 
perplexed by how we can generate 8 million new jobs and record numbers 
of new businesses and still have half the Americans not get a raise, one 
clear area where we ought to debate is whether the conventional wisdom 
about how fast this economy can grow is right. That ought to be debated. 
It ought to be debated within the commitment to deficit reduction and a 
balanced budget. I think we've established our commitment to that. It 
ought to be debated within a commitment not to let inflation get out of 
hand.
    But the truth is, nobody but nobody knows for sure that this economy 
can't grow any faster in the information age than it did between 1970 
and 1995. The truth is, if you want to get jobs into Brooklyn, into the 
Bronx, into the Mississippi Delta, into the rural areas of America; if 
you want to see people who work hard and work harder today than they did 
25 years ago, on the average, get the rewards, one of the most obvious 
things you have to do is to see whether or not this economy can grow a 
little faster. I'm telling you, if this economy grew at an average of 
2.7 percent instead of 2.5 percent, all the arguments we are now having 
in Washington over balancing the budget would be gone like that--two-
tenths of a percent--over, history, out.
    I believed, based on repeated conversations I have had with business 
leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, in this country over the last 3 
years, talking about the very rapid growth and productivity in our 
manufacturing sector, the increasing growth in productivity in our 
service sector, and the fact that we have such an open economy, that 
competition is an incredible

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pressure against inflation, far more than ever before--and I'll just 
give you one example. When we put out our deficit reduction plan in `93 
and the interest rates dropped, there was a housing boom. And what 
always happens when there's a housing boom happened; lumber prices went 
up because they got tight. Except lumber prices this time did not lead 
to a new inflation. Why? Because we got flooded with lumber from other 
countries because we have an open economy. So we had our housing boom 
and no inflation.
    Now, it seems to me a good thing for the President to do to say, 
wouldn't it be nice to have a debate within a controlled framework, with 
serious people with a lifetime of achievement, to see if we can't give 
Americans a raise who are working hard; to see if we can't minimize 
inequality as we move to this new economy; and to see if we can't do it 
the old-fashioned American way, with opportunity and not class warfare?
    That's what I wanted to see done. And that's why I wanted to put 
Felix Rohatyn on the Federal Reserve. But the politics of Washington 
said, no, we insist on the conventional wisdom; we insist on holding 
people down; we don't even think it's worth debating. Over and out. That 
is wrong, and we must end that kind of thinking if we want this country 
to grow and prosper and become what it ought to be.
    The last thing I want to say is this: The most important thing about 
this election is that you and everybody like you in this whole country 
remembers that it's not about me or whoever the Republicans decide to 
nominate when they get through with their business. This election is 
about you and people like you. It's about all those people that served 
your food tonight. It's about everybody in between. And this country is 
still here after all this time, still doing well, still the envy of the 
world because most of the time most of us do the right thing.
    And one of the things that I have a hard time dealing with is this 
alleged cynicism and skepticism among our people. Now, skepticism is a 
healthy thing at one level. But you tell me why the American people 
should be cynical when we have the lowest unemployment rate, the highest 
growth rate, the lowest deficit, and the brightest prospects of any 
advanced country in the world?
    People from other countries ask me all the time. They would give 
anything to have our problems. Of course we've got problems; problems 
are endemic to the human condition. But we see them as challenges and 
opportunities. And cynicism is a cheap, bogus, inadequate excuse for the 
inaction of our fellow citizens. And we've got to get rid of it.
    The other thing we have got to stop doing as a people--and I want 
you to pledge to me that as our supporters you will carry through this 
whole year doing this--we have got to stop using these elections to 
divide the American people in ways that benefit some politician at 
election time but cripple the ability of the United States to come 
together as one country. We have got to stop doing that.
    Tonight I looked up at my table and when the gentleman came to ask 
if we wanted any wine, and I saw a man serving me that I met in this 
kitchen 4 years ago last week. And some of you may remember the 
circumstances I faced 4 years ago last week. We were dropping like a 
rock in New Hampshire. My obituary had been written by every elated 
editorial writer in the country who always wanted one hide in every 
election. Everybody said we were going to single digits in New Hampshire 
and the whole thing was over. And Alan and Susan Patricof and I were 
laughing around the table. We had 700 people here; I thought we'd be 
lucky to have 70 people here after what I had been through the last few 
days.
    And I walked through the kitchen coming here, and I was feeling 
pretty sorry for myself, I'm ashamed to say. I was feeling pretty sorry 
for myself. And the man that came to my table tonight to serve us 
stopped me. And some of you heard this story, but I want to tell you--
he's still here, he's still working for his family and for this hotel. 
And he said, ``Governor, my 10-year-old son is studying the Presidential 
elections. He has studied all the candidates, and he says I should vote 
for you.'' Well, that made me feel better. I didn't know there was a 10-
year-old in all the State of New York who knew who I was. [Laughter]
    He said, ``But let me tell you something.'' He said, ``I'm an 
immigrant, and where I came from, we were very poor. And we're much 
better off here economically. But where we lived before, we were free.'' 
He said, ``Here we have a park across the street from our apartment, but 
my boy can't play in that park unless I go with him. We have a school 
down the street from our apartment; my boy can't walk to school

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unless I go with him. So if I do what my boy wants me to do and I vote 
for you, will you make my boy free?'' And I thought to myself, ``What 
have you been thinking about? This election is not about you. It's about 
him and people like him.''
    And let me tell you something: When we passed that crime bill and we 
put another 100,000 police on the street, and I see the crime rate going 
down in city after city after city in this country because we did that; 
when we passed the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban, and the 
Democrats lost the House of Representatives probably because so many of 
them sat up and voted for that one bill--but I could go to New Hampshire 
and say, we just had a great deer season in New Hampshire, and the air 
was full of ducks in Arkansas and every hunter I know shot them with the 
same gun they had last year, so the people who told you we were going to 
take your gun away were not telling you the truth. But I'll tell you 
something, there's over 40,000 crooks that couldn't get a gun because we 
passed the Brady bill.
    And I saw him tonight, I saw Dimitrios standing there, and I said, 
``Your son is about 14 now?'' ``Yes.'' ``How's he doing?'' ``Fine.'' And 
I said, ``You got a message for me?'' He said, ``Yes. Keep fighting for 
the working people; it's still pretty tough out here.''
    This election is about you. It's about him. It's about our country. 
And yes, we have some challenges. But I'm telling you, these are high-
class problems because this country is moving in the right direction. 
And don't let anybody tell you that your Government is inherently bad.
    James Carville's new book, which I commend to all of you, points out 
in the last 30 years we spent half of your tax money on three things: 
defense, Social Security, and Medicare. What did you get for it? We won 
the cold war. We cut the poverty rate among elderly citizens in half. 
And if you get to be old enough to be on Medicare, seniors in the United 
States have the highest life expectancy of any group of elderly people 
in the world.
    This is a very great country. If you do your part and we do ours, 
we're going to be just fine. Let's do that in 1996.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:45 p.m. at the Sheraton New York Hotel. 
In his remarks, he referred to actor James Earl Jones; entertainer 
Lesley Gore; David Dinkins, former New York City mayor; Alan Patricof, 
former Chair, White House Conference on Small Business Commission, and 
his wife, Susan; and waiter Dimitrios Theofanis.