[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
[January 12, 1996]
[Pages 52-55]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic Luncheon in Nashville
January 12, 1996

    Thank you so much, Mr. Vice President, Governor McWherter, Senator 
and Mrs. Gore, and Senator and Mrs. Sasser--they'll do a great job for 
our country in China, I know. Senator and Mrs. Mathews, and to 
Congressman Gordon, Congressman Clement, and Congressman Tanner, and 
former Congressman Jim Cooper is here with us. I'm glad to see all of 
you here. To the mayors who are here, my good friend Wayne Glenn, and to 
other people who are here from all over Tennessee and from all walks of 
life. And Marilyn Lloyd, I think, is here somewhere--where is she?--
former Congresswoman.
    And let me say to all of you that I sure liked that speech Al Gore 
gave. I want all of you from Tennessee to know that when the record of 
this administration has been written, the consequences of our actions 
may be only apparent to the American people in their positive aspects 
years from now. But one thing is already clear. In the entire history of 
our Republic, the most effective, the most important Vice President in 
American history is Al Gore.
    He has overseen our efforts to reform our environmental laws so that 
we could be better at growing the economy and preserving the environment 
at the same time. He is developing a plan that will have our country 
work in partnership with the private sector to hook up every student in 
America to the Internet with good software, good computers, good 
training, just in the next few years.
    He has managed a permanent relationship with the Prime Minister of 
Russia which has reinforced the positive direction in which we are going 
and which has helped us to lift the cloud of nuclear threat from the 
American people since we've been here. For the first time since the dawn 
of the nuclear age, there is not a single, solitary nuclear missile 
pointed at an American child, and I am proud of that.
    While our friends on the other side talked about not liking big 
Government, wanting to give more power to States and localities in the 
private sector, in a very quiet and straightforward and effective way 
the Vice President has helped us to reduce the size of the Federal 
Government by over 200,000.
    And when you hear your Republican friends back in your neighborhood 
saying that the Democrats are the party of big Government, ask them, 
``Well, if that's so, why is the Government now the smallest it's been 
since 1965? If that's so, why is the Government, as a percentage of the 
civilian work force, the smallest it's been since 1933? If that's so, 
why are they dismantling 16,000 pages of unnecessary Government 
regulations put in by Republican executives who were there before we 
were? If all that is so, how did this happen?''
    It happened because it's not so, because a big part of what we came 
to do was to give you a smaller, more effective Government. But we did 
not go to Washington to walk away from the American people and their 
future, and we have no intention of doing that.
    Let me say, I know that all the publicity in Washington that's 
coming down here to you is all this debate over the budget. And it's 
being kind of, is it a horserace and who's giving up what and are they 
going to get a deal or not, and all that sort of thing. I understand 
that. I just want to take a couple of minutes to try to put that into a 
larger picture.
    You know, when I leave you I'm going to Bosnia. I will see soldiers 
there from all over America, including soldiers from Tennessee. I will 
go to Hungary to see the basing that we're doing there in Hungary. And 
then I will stop in Zagreb, Yugoslavia--Croatia, in the former 
Yugoslavia, where we have a military hospital, some other actions, and I 
will see the President

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of that country to try to make sure that we continue to work to maintain 
the peace.
    And a lot of people wonder, ``Well, why did the United States send 
soldiers there? I mean, the cold war is over. They're doing well with 
Russia. Why did they do that?'' Well, it's part of my view, at least, of 
where we ought to go as a country. I'd like it if we could just lay down 
all our arms and lay down all our responsibilities. But if you think 
about what the world is going to look like in the years ahead for all 
these children that are here, it really matters if America is the 
strongest force for peace and freedom.
    World War I started in Bosnia. So many troubles are just right there 
around it. If this war was not contained, it could spread and cause many 
of our people to go and lose their lives down the road. Meanwhile, 
hundreds of innocent people, tens of thousands of innocent people, have 
been slaughtered, over a million turned into refugees from their own 
country.
    So we went there to help other countries make the peace. We didn't 
have to go alone, we're only a third of the total force, but it would 
not have happened if it hadn't been for the United States. What I want 
you to think about is, by our being involved with other people, we can 
make a difference in the world for our own people.
    Let me give you another example. We want to fight terrorism. We've 
had terrorism right here in the United States, whether it was homegrown 
terrorism or people coming from other countries to our shores. Because 
we're involved with other countries, we've been able to get some of 
those terrorists arrested in other countries and brought back here to 
stand trial for killing innocent Americans, because we worked with them.
    We know that every day Americans die because of the scourge of 
drugs. Because we work with other countries, just this last year we were 
instrumental with our military and our civilian law enforcement in 
seeing seven members of the infamous Cali drug cartel in Colombia 
arrested, seven--it was unheard of--because we worked with other 
countries.
    Because we worked with other countries to have not only more free 
trade but more fair trade, the exports of American products have 
increased by one-third in the last 3 years to an all-time high. Because 
we work with other countries, people in Nashville and in Tennessee have 
jobs and a better future. And we know if we're going to have a free 
trading system, it has to also be a fair trading system.
    And that's how you need to see this fight over the budget and all 
the accomplishments the Vice President talked about. Our theory is that 
America is a team, that we're going forward together, we're going up or 
down together. If you look at the whole history of our country, you go 
back and read how we got started: We believed in liberty; we believed in 
progress; and we struggled to find common ground, to get together in 
spite of our differences. Those three things are constant in every 
important period in our history. And what we know is unless we get 
together and work together, our liberties can be threatened. And we 
know, unless we get together and work together, we can't make progress.
    I just came from the Peterbilt truck factory here. I'm sure it's a 
source of pride to everyone in Tennessee. They've got backlog orders for 
7 or 8 months. They've added 600 people to the payroll since we came 
into office. I'm proud of that. I'm proud for them. But we didn't do 
anything directly for them. Our job is to give them a framework within 
which they can do well. Why are they doing well? Because they work 
together.
    Now, that's what this budget fight is all about. Should we have a 
country in which our hatred of Government says the market should control 
everything, everybody for themselves, winner take all? Or should we have 
a country that says we love the market system, we love the free 
enterprise system, but we know that winners work together, and we want a 
country where everybody has a chance to win? That's what this is about.
    The congressional leaders now agree that I have submitted to them a 
budget which would be balanced in 7 years, by their scorekeeping. They 
sent me a little letter which I hold up all the time. They agree. The 
issue is not, will we balance the budget; the issue is, how should we do 
it?
    Look, folks, I hate this deficit. Our country never had a permanent 
deficit until the 12 years before I became President. We never had that, 
never. It was in those 12 years when the debt was quadrupled. And our 
friends on the Republican side say, ``Well, the Democrats controlled the 
Congress.'' That's not true. In the first 6 years when most of the 
damage was done, they

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controlled the Senate and the White House, and they had effective 
control of the House of Representatives. And they put us in the hole 
we're still digging out of.
    Now, when we came in, we cut the deficit in half in 3 years. They 
said--you need to know, when you talk to your friends about this budget 
debate, the Federal budget would be balanced today with a surplus--today 
with a surplus--but for the interest payments we pay on the debt run up 
between 1981 and the end of 1992. Only in those 12 years.
    Now, I want to be fair. We have really worked hard together. We 
spent 50 hours together, the Vice President and I, the Republican and 
the Democratic congressional leaders. We found we did agree on a lot of 
things. One of the things we've agreed on is over $600 billion, way over 
$600 billion, in savings over the next 7 years, more than enough to 
bring our budget into balance and enough to still have a modest tax cut.
    We don't have an agreement because of the things we disagree on. 
They think we should cut Medicare more than I think we should cut it. I 
think $400 a couple for elderly people--[inaudible]. If we don't need it 
to balance the budget, I don't think we ought to take it. We don't know 
how much can be taken out of these rural hospitals and rural nursing 
homes without doing damage to them. We have to save some money, but 
we've got to be careful.
    The Medicaid program is not so widely known as Medicare. But there 
are millions, millions of children, poor children, many of them in poor 
working families, who depend upon it. Our middle class families have 
their parents in nursing homes depending on it. A lot of middle class 
families have disabled children who get a little help from Medicaid. It 
keeps them from going broke while they care for their children. And 
people say, ``Oh, you know, the Democrats, they're pandering to the 
elderly.'' Bull! [Laughter] Bull!
    If the savings that the Vice President and I have proposed are 
enacted into law, they will represent the biggest savings ever achieved 
in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. We know we've got to do better. 
We know we can't keep letting health care costs go up at 3 times the 
rate of inflation. We know we have to support these health care 
providers that are giving folks more choices if they want to go into 
managed care networks. We're all for that. But I say we should not do 
more than we know the system can take. We should not hurt any seniors 
that we know we can avoid hurting.
    And keep in mind, this is not just an issue of elderly people. If 
you make it more difficult for people to have their parents in nursing 
homes and they have to spend more money on that, where will the money 
come from to send their children to college? If you make college loans 
more expensive or you have fewer scholarships, where will the strength 
in our economy come from 10 years from now when we know we need more 
young people going to college?
    Look, we're all in this together. That is the central issue. And I 
will say again, my plea to the leaders of Congress--just as I pleaded 
with the Democrats to bend over backwards to meet the Republicans 
halfway, just as we have worked hard to do that--is we need to pass a 
plan to balance the budget because it will drive interest rates down, 
it'll make it easier for business people to go get a loan, easier to 
expand payrolls, easier to keep economic growth going. We need to do 
this.
    But we are going to have some disagreements. What we need to do is 
to agree on everything we can, identify the disagreements and tell the 
American people that it's their business, it's their future, and they 
should resolve those disagreements in the election. But to put off 
balancing the budget because we have some disagreement over the size and 
shape of a tax cut, over changes at the margins in the Medicare program 
that can make huge impacts but aren't necessary to save the money we've 
talked about, over big cuts in education and the environment, that's 
wrong. We should not put this other business off.
    You know, we have a system--this is not a parliamentary system. If 
we were having this kind of fight in Great Britain, for example, we'd 
just call an election 5 weeks from now, and you all would decide what 
you want, and I'd either go home or they'd do it our way or vice versa. 
That's the way we'd do it. This is not a parliamentary system. We can't 
have a work stoppage in Washington until November. It is inexcusable; it 
is unacceptable.
    We ought to go back there and say, ``Look, we've agreed on enough 
money to balance the budget. We've agreed we can provide at least a 
modest tax cut to people for childrearing and education. We can help 
small business some with their pensions and with some other things.

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Let's get after it and do it and get it behind us and then go on and do 
politics.''
    But again I will say, the reason we have to balance the budget is 
because we misplayed this for 12 years. This was misplayed by our 
country. And the politicians, to be fair to them, were more or less just 
doing what the people wanted. Nobody was ready to take any tough 
decisions. We have obligations to each other. We owe these kids a better 
future, just like we owe our parents a decent health care system.
    Now, that's the difference. I do not want to see America become a 
country full of possibility, with record numbers of new successful 
people every year, but more and more people falling behind. I think 
we're better when we're a team. I'm going to go see those military 
folks. Why are you so proud of them? You may not know the name of a 
single person over there, but you know they're going to do a good job, 
don't you? Why? Because they're a team, because they work together. You 
know they're going to do a good job.
    Let me tell you, the only thing that surprised me about the Vice 
President's speech? It took him about 7 minutes to get around to rubbing 
it in about Tennessee winning a bowl game. [Laughter] Now, Tennessee has 
a great quarterback. But they didn't beat Ohio State with their 
quarterback. They beat them with the quarterback, the other 10 people on 
offense, the other 11 people on the defense. Right? If Ohio State scores 
three touchdowns instead of two, your great quarterback loses a game. 
Right? Teamwork! Why do we forget it when it comes to our public 
decisions?
    That's what this whole issue is about, folks. We can balance the 
budget; we can keep this economy going; we can keep the good trends in 
our life going, keep the crime rate and the welfare rolls and the food 
stamp rolls and the poverty rolls coming down, which is what is 
happening now and I'm proud of that. But we can only do it if we 
remember that this country got here because at our most important moment 
we came together. That's what we're fighting for.
    God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 1:25 p.m. at the Opryland Hotel. In his 
remarks, he referred to Ned Ray McWherter, chairman, Tennessee Clinton/
Gore Reelection Committee; former Senator Albert Gore, Sr., and his 
wife, Pauline; U.S. Ambassador to China Jim Sasser and his wife, Mary; 
former Senator Harlan Mathews and his wife, Patsy; Wayne E. Glenn, 
international president, United Paperworkers International Union; and 
Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin of Russia. A portion of these remarks 
could not be verified because the tape was incomplete.