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



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

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

[[Page 949]]

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

[[Page 950]]

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

[[Page 951]]

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


[[Page 952]]

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

[[Page 953]]

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

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