[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
[May 17, 1996]
[Pages 769-773]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Dinner for Representative Richard A. Gephardt in St. Louis, 
Missouri
May 17, 1996

    Thank you very much. August Busch, thank you for that introduction. 
Thank you for your friendship and support. Thank you for all you do for 
this community.
    To Representative Bill Clay and Representative Karen McCarthy, Mayor 
Freeman Bosley, your county executive, Buzz Westfall, ladies and 
gentlemen. I am delighted to be here today. I have been here all day. I 
have been to a wonderful high school. I have talked to a lot of 
wonderful young people. I have been with Congressman Gephardt and Mrs. 
Gephardt as we have stormed a bocce ball--or you say bocce here--a bocce 
ball arena, where I think I better go back to golf. But I loved playing.
    In my public life I've had an opportunity to do a lot of things, but 
I have never given a speech in a domed football stadium before. I feel 
that I'd be better off passing or punting or something else. But I still 
feel like it's first down instead of fourth, so I'm going to try to get 
through the talk.
    I know that St. Louis has done a lot of remarkable things in the 
last few years, including build this magnificent facility and attract 
the Rams here. I know you're looking forward to celebrating the 
centennial of the World's Fair and the bicentennial of the Louisiana 
Purchase. I'm always excited when I come here to the heartland, and I 
want to congratulate you for what you have done.
    I feel deeply indebted to the people of Missouri for many things, 
and the people of this fine city. But I want to say a special word of 
thanks to those of you who met with my wife on her recent trip here. She 
had a wonderful time; she loved the reception. She sold a few of her 
books, and she came back in a very good humor. And that's something I 
was very grateful for. Thank you.
    I'd also like to say a special word of thanks to you for keeping 
Dick Gephardt in the United States House of Representatives and enabling 
him to help to lead our Democratic Party, the Democratic caucus in the 
House, and this country. I told a group of people earlier this evening 
that Dick Gephardt had done a lot for this country, and whenever I met 
him he always wanted to talk about issues of great national concern 
after he has twisted my arm for one more TWA route to somewhere. And 
believe me, even though I said ``somewhere,'' I have the list in my 
pocket; I know exactly what I'm supposed to be lobbying for. [Laughter]
    I had a wonderful time talking with Dick this afternoon about the 
weekends he comes home and just goes into neighborhoods and knocks on 
doors to talk to his constituents and ask them what they think. I must 
say that one of the things that I miss about public life since becoming 
President is that I don't get a chance to do that sort of thing so much 
anymore.
    When I sought this office, some of the people on the other side used 
to make fun of me for being the Governor of a small Southern State. 
Well, I was, and I'm proud that I was. One of the great virtues of that 
is you got to know your people. And they felt they could call you by 
your first name, and they felt they could share their real feelings with 
you. And that's what helps to make democracy work. And I hope all of you 
appreciate just how rare it is to see a person who has years of national 
leadership experience like Dick Gephardt but never forgets the folks 
back home and always puts their concerns first. That's what makes 
American democracy work, and I am very grateful for him And I know that 
you are, too.
    I want to ask you to take just a few minutes tonight not so much to 
listen to me but to kind of listen to yourself. We're just 4 years away 
now from a new century, indeed a new millennium. We're going through a 
period of astonishing change in how we work, how we

[[Page 770]]

communicate with each other, how we live, how we relate to the rest of 
the world.
    At a period like this, when everything is changing, the role of your 
Government in Washington has to change as well. And for the last 3\1/2\ 
years I've been trying to find ways to make those changes work for all 
the American people, as August said, in a way that creates more 
opportunity and brings us together as a country.
    But tonight I want to ask you to answer these questions that I have 
to ask of myself all the time. Because in this country the people are 
still in the saddle. That's what a free country is. That's what 
democracies mean. That's what elections are for. And in order to make 
really good decisions, I think you have to know the answer to that 
question. Here this great country is, more than 200 years old, the 
longest lasting great democracy in human history, standing on the brink 
not only of a new century but a whole new era in the way human beings 
work and relate to each other. What do you want your country to look 
like in that new era? Most of us in this room tonight are adults. We 
have lived most of our lives in the 20th century, and we will leave the 
21st century to our children and our grandchildren. What kind of America 
do we want to leave for them? Those are the great questions before the 
American people today.
    When I look ahead into this next century and I see that the nature 
of work is changing and the nature of American life is changing more 
than any time in a hundred years, since the beginning of our own century 
when we moved from being primarily a rural people to being more a city 
people, when we moved from most of us making our living on the farms to 
most of us making our living either in the factories or around 
factories. Now we're moving from a national economy to a global economy, 
indeed, a global society. We're moving from an industrial economy to one 
dominated by information and technology in every form of human endeavor, 
including agriculture. I don't know how many farmer friends of mine at 
home know more about computer technology than I do, because that's how 
they have to make their judgments about what to plant and how to bring 
the crop in.
    The great computer genius who is the head of Microsoft, Bill Gates, 
says that the transformation in technology we're undergoing in 
communications is the greatest in 500 years, that the digital chip is 
the most significant thing to happen in the way people communicate with 
each other since Gutenberg printed the first Bible in Europe 500 years 
ago.
    Now, when I think about that, what I think is that this is an 
incredible age of possibilities. Most of us have been able to benefit in 
some way or another from this age of possibility; otherwise you couldn't 
afford to be here for Dick tonight. And we owe it to ourselves, to our 
children, our grandchildren, and to our country to think about what kind 
of age we want to pass on to our children.
    I have three simple things I want for America in the 21st century. I 
want every child in this country, without regard to their race, their 
religion, their gender, where they grow up or how much they start out 
with in life, to have a chance to live out their dreams if they're 
willing to work for it. I want this to be a country that relishes in all 
of its diversity. Today I was in an Italian-American neighborhood in St. 
Louis, the Hill. I went to a high school where there were children of 
many different racial and ethnic groups. The other day I was in New 
Jersey, in what used to be primarily a white ethnic neighborhood; it's 
still primarily that, but there were African-American children there, 
there were Hispanic-American children there, there were children from 
the Indian subcontinent who are Hindus, there were children from the 
Middle East who are Muslims. And they were all there in this American 
school.
    All over the world people are consumed with fighting each other and 
keeping each other down because of their racial, their ethnic, or their 
religious differences. I have done what I could to end those tragedies, 
from Northern Ireland to Bosnia to South Africa to the Middle East. But 
I know that this country has always had a legacy of battling within its 
own soul, when we look at our brothers and sisters who are different 
from us and ask, do we have more in common, or are our differences more 
important?
    Now, if you look at this global society in which we are going to 
live, the diversity of America--all these different kinds of people with 
different languages, different cultures, different backgrounds, 
different experiences, different ties to other countries, every country 
in the world Americans have ties to--that is a meal ticket to the future 
if we make up our mind we're going into the future together, we're going

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to be bound together by the values we share, not divided by the 
differences among us. That is my second dream for the American people in 
the 21st century.
    The final thing is, I hope and pray that we will not lay down the 
mantle of leadership in the world that is on us now. I know it is 
burdensome. I know many of our fellow Americans think that we should not 
do it. But America has to remain the world's strongest force for peace 
and for freedom, for prosperity and for security. I am proud of the fact 
that in the last 3 years there are no more nuclear weapons pointed at 
the children of America for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear 
age.
    But there are still security threats to the children of America. 
There is terrorism. There is organized crime. There is drug running. 
There is the proliferation of weapons of destruction, chemical and 
biological weapons. There is the threat of global environmental 
destruction. And we have to work with our neighbors. And we have to try 
to get other great, strong countries to define their greatness in the 
way we try to define ours, not by whether we can push people around 
beyond our borders but by what we stand for and what we believe in and 
what we believe free people can do when they work together. And this is 
very important. We cannot walk away from that.
    So that's what I want: opportunity for all, a country that is coming 
together instead of being divided, and a country that is leading the 
world to peace, freedom, and prosperity. If we do that, our children 
will live in the greatest age of possibility in all human history.
    So the question is, what's that got to do with Dick Gephardt? What's 
that got to do with the House of Representatives? What's that got to do 
with the future we all hope to share? I can just give you a couple of 
examples.
    When I became President, the deficit was like a lot of problems that 
a lot of us have in our personal lives: we all say we ought to do 
something about it, but we never got around to it. It's kind of like 
that diet I keep meaning to go on. And there was no popular way to 
reduce the deficit and still keep America's values intact and fulfill 
our responsibilities to education, to investment in technology, to the 
environment, to the elderly, to those with disabilities, to people who 
had legitimate needs.
    We couldn't find a perfectly popular way, but we did pass a deficit 
reduction plan. And now the deficit in America is less than half of what 
it was 4 years ago. It's the first time the deficit has gone down 4 
years in a row since Harry Truman was President. And if it hadn't been 
for Dick Gephardt and the Democrats in Congress, it would not have 
happened. And he deserves the credit for it.
    The unemployment rate in Missouri when I took office was 6.2 
percent. The last time I checked it was under 4, because we got the 
deficit down, interest rates down, and growth up again. In this country 
we have 8\1/2\ million more jobs than we had 4 years ago; 
homeownership's at a 15-year high; we've had an all-time high of new 
business formation--self-made, not inherited, millionaires--self-made, 
it's a good thing--and an all-time high in the sales of American 
products around the world.
    People told me when I became President we could never work out a 
fairer trade relationship with Japan. We've negotiated 20 separate 
agreements. In those areas, our exports are up 85 percent in 3 years. If 
it hadn't been for the support I had in the Congress demanding not only 
free trade but fair trade--that would not have happened if it hadn't 
been for Dick Gephardt and his friends in the Congress and what they 
stood for. I appreciate that. America is stronger and better because of 
those efforts.
    Four years ago, the Congress had spent 6 long years bickering about 
the problem of crime, and our country was being gripped by a wave of 
crime. But people were learning what to do to bring the crime rate down, 
and a lot of it was pretty old-fashioned: going back to community 
policing, getting the police out from behind the desks and the cars and 
on the streets again, in the schools again, talking to people again, not 
only catching criminals and closing crack houses but preventing crime 
from occurring.
    And we passed a bill that put 100,000 more police on the street, 
that took a serious position against domestic violence for the first 
time and gave the communities of this country the resources to help deal 
with that. It stiffened our abilities to break the serious gangs and to 
deal with the international threat of drugs. We passed the Brady bill. 
We passed a ban on 19 kinds of assault weapons. And a lot of this was 
very controversial.
    But here's what has happened. The crime rate is down in America for 
3 years in a row--and this year it will be down for 4 years in

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a row--the murder rate is down, the robbery rate is down, all serious 
categories of crime are down. Contrary to what people said who fought us 
in the crime bill, there is not a single hunter in Missouri or Arkansas 
who lost a weapon that they used in duck season or deer season or 
hunting anything else in the wide world. But I'll tell you who did lose 
weapons: 60,000 people with criminal records and bad mental health 
histories couldn't buy handguns because we passed the Brady bill. And it 
wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for Dick Gephardt.
    So it makes a difference. What you do tonight in helping Dick 
Gephardt and his allies makes a difference. They've made America a more 
prosperous place. They've made America a more secure place.
    We have a lot more to do. We're working in Washington now on a whole 
range of things to strengthen families, to increase economic 
opportunity, to say to the working people of this country in this global 
economy maybe there won't be quite as much ability to say, ``I know I'll 
have this particular job for my whole work life,'' but at least we owe 
you the right to get a lifetime access to education, lifetime access to 
affordable health care, and lifetime access to a pension you can carry 
around with you if you move from job to job or if you lose your job. 
That's the way we can keep the dynamism of the American economy, grow 
the jobs, and help people who work still raise stable, strong families. 
Those are the kinds of challenges we have to meet.
    We have to do more to ensure the education of our children, its 
quality, and its opportunity. We have to do more to protect the 
environment in ways that grow the economy. We have got to do more to 
ensure our position in the world. We've got to do more, as I told the 
children today here, to fight crime. And to do it we need a different 
kind of Government.
    Let me tell you something you may not know. Under legislation that 
we passed when Dick was the majority leader, we have reduced the size of 
the Federal Government by 240,000. It is the smallest it has been since 
Mr. Johnson was President. By the first of the year, the Federal 
Government will be the smallest it's been since John Kennedy was the 
President of the United States of America. We have reduced the size of 
Federal regulations by 16,000 pages.
    But you haven't heard anything about this, probably because we did 
it in a decent way. We did it in a decent way. Less than one percent of 
the people in that 240,000 had to be separated involuntarily from the 
Federal Government; everybody else we got an early retirement. We did it 
by attrition. We gave them a generous severance package. We found other 
jobs for them. We did it in the way that we ought to handle transitions.
    So, yes, we've got a smaller Federal Government. But when they had 
the 500-year floods along the Mississippi River, in Missouri and Iowa 
and other places, nobody wanted a weak Federal Government, they wanted a 
strong Federal Emergency Management Agency to come in here and help to 
rebuild Missouri and help to rebuild all the other places that were 
devastated.
    With most of the new jobs being created in small business, nobody 
wants a weak Small Business Administration. So we cut the budget by 25 
percent, but we doubled the loan volume of the Small Business 
Administration. I am proud of that. That's the kind of Government we 
need. You're getting more for less, helping America to grow stronger.
    We rewrote the student loan laws of America so that young people who 
want to go to college and are afraid they can't afford it can now get 
student loans at lower cost on better repayment terms. And if they get 
out of college and they want to do something that serves the rest of us 
but doesn't earn them a lot of money, if they want to teach school or be 
nurses or work as law enforcement officers, they can now pay those loans 
back as a percentage of their income, so that no child should ever not 
go to college or drop out of college because they are afraid they can 
never pay their loans back. That is a change that we made thanks to Dick 
Gephardt, and it made a difference in the United States of America.
    So I ask you to think about these things. There is so much more to 
do. I honestly believe that even in this year, we've still got a chance 
to pass the right sort of balanced budget; to pass a good welfare reform 
plan; to pass the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill that will say to people, if you 
lose your job or someone in your family gets sick, you can still keep 
your health insurance. I believe we can do these things. I sure hope 
we'll get a chance to pass an increase in the minimum wage, so it 
doesn't fall to a 40-year low.

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    But the main thing I want you to keep in mind is the big picture. If 
you want more opportunity for people who show responsibility, if you 
want us to come together around our shared values instead of being 
divided in the old ways, if you want your country to lead the world, 
then we need a Government that is smaller and less bureaucratic, yes, 
but one that is still strong enough and committed to a central goal, not 
giving things to people but giving them a chance to make the most of 
their own lives as citizens, as workers, as members of families, as 
members of communities, as citizens of this great country. That's what 
we need. And that's what we're working on. And that's what's at stake.
    So when you go home tonight, think about that. Yes, I have worked 
hard for the economy because I think people need to have a chance to 
make a decent living and because I think that when people work hard they 
ought to believe they can do a little better every year. But this is 
about much more than economics. As I have said many times, if we're 
fortunate enough, any of us, to know in advance, as a gift from God, 
when the last time we ever put our head on the pillow is, before we end 
our life on this Earth, I'll bet you anything we won't be thinking about 
finances. We'll be thinking about what we really loved, our families, 
our friends, our children, what we cared about, what we did that made us 
proud. I want this to be a country where everybody can feel those things 
are within their grasp. That's what I want. And we can achieve it. But 
in our system, the President doesn't do that alone. In our system, it 
requires people in the United States Congress who share a vision and 
share a strategy for achieving it.
    And I can tell you that I have worked with Dick Gephardt for years 
now, and what you see is what you get. We spent 50 hours together in 
budget negotiations in the quiet of the Oval Office with the Republican 
leaders of Congress. He never raised his voice. He never lost his 
temper. He never did anything that you wouldn't have been very proud of. 
But he was always, always sticking up for the idea that we had to 
balance the budget, but we had to do it in a way that would grow the 
economy, enhance opportunity, bring this country together, and leave us 
all stronger. You would have been proud of that. There was never a 
reporter, never a camera, never anything public about it. But his quiet, 
determined strength impressed me more even than I had been in the past.
    So you think about that when you go home tonight. I hope you'll be 
proud you came here. I hope you'll think your investment was worth it. 
And I hope, for the rest of this year, for the rest of this decade, 
which is the rest of this century, you'll be asking this question of 
yourself and answering it, because America, in all probability, will 
wind up looking like your vision of it, especially if you work to 
realize it.
    Thank you, God bless you, and goodnight.

Note: The President spoke at 7:25 p.m. at the Trans World Dome. In his 
remarks, he referred to August Busch IV, chairman of the board, 
Anheuser-Busch Co.