[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[July 22, 1996]
[Pages 1181-1185]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the Asian-American Democratic Dinner in Los Angeles, 
California
July 22, 1996

    Thank you very much. Please be seated. Thank you. Thank you for the 
wonderful warm welcome. Thank you for being here in such impressive 
numbers.
    I'd like to begin by saying a special word of thanks to our emcees 
Steve Park and Amy Hill. I think they did a wonderful job, and I think 
we ought to give them a round of applause. [Applause] I also thought the 
East-West Players were terrific, and I thank them and the other 
entertainers who were here earlier tonight for taking their time to come 
here and make this evening more enjoyable for all of us. Thank you. A 
great job.
    If I could learn how to beat those sticks like that I think I could 
intimidate the Congress by doing it, you know. Maybe I should take some 
instruction.
    I'm honored to be here with the chairman of the Democratic 
Committee, Don Fowler; the chairman of the California Democratic Party, 
Art Torres, thank you for being here, sir. And thank you, March Fong Eu, 
for being a wonderful public servant and a great friend and a wonderful 
supporter. Thank you, Bob Matsui, for your leadership in the Congress 
and in the Democratic Party. I should say also that one of those 197 
Asian-Pacific Americans in my administration is Bob's terrific wife, 
Doris, who's also here tonight. And thank you, Doris, for your work. 
Thank you.
    And I'd like to thank my longtime friend John Huang for being so 
effective. Frankly, he's been so effective, I was amazed that you were 
all cheering for him tonight after he's been around--[laughter]--in his 
aggressive efforts to help our cause.
    Ladies and gentlemen, in 1992 when I ran for President, I had a very 
clear reason for doing so and a very definite idea about what it was I 
wanted to do. I ran because I thought our country was in danger of 
drifting divided into the 21st century in a way that would undermine the 
American dream at home, split up our sense of community, and weaken our 
ability to continue to lead the world in a positive way. And I wanted to 
see the United States go into the next century in an aggressive, united 
way with the American dream alive for all people who come here from 
wherever, who are willing to work for it; with this country coming 
together celebrating our diversity instead of being divided by it; and 
with America still the world's strongest force for peace and freedom and 
security and prosperity.
    That is why I ran. Many of you in this room helped me in that 
election. And I have worked as hard as I could to achieve that vision by 
working to create opportunity, by working to build an inclusive American 
society, and by working to maintain our positive role in the world in 
this period of enormous change as we move from the cold war to the 
global village, as we move from great industrial societies to a period 
when the entire world economy will be dominated more and more by 
information-based technology.
    I am proud of the work we have done, first of all, to build the 
American community. Bob mentioned that we had 197 members of the Asian-
Pacific-American community in our administration. I'm proud of that. 
It's more than any other previous administration by far. But if I get 4 
more years, I intend to do better, because they have all served very 
well. When I took office, it had been 14 years--14 years--since the last 
Asian-Pacific-American was nomi-


[[Page 1182]]

nated to the Federal bench. I have already nominated four, and I intend 
to do better.
    I have also tried to position the economy of the United States in a 
way that will enable us to take maximum advantage of what is happening 
all over the world. When I took office, we had quadrupled our debt in 
only 12 short years. And I asked the American people to let me serve so 
that we could reduce our deficit, invest more in our people and our 
technology, and expand trade. Many of you have been personally involved 
in the efforts we have made together to expand trade by Americans all 
over the world.
    Now, for 3\1/2\ years we have had a chance to see the results of 
that. Mr. Matsui will remember when we adopted our economic plan in 
1993, it passed by only one vote. And our friends in the other party 
said that it would bring on a recession. One of them even said he'd have 
to join the Democratic Party if my plan worked. That was Mr. Kasich, the 
budget chairman from Ohio. We're saving a seat for him at the Democratic 
National Convention in Chicago. I wish he would come and take it; he'd 
be welcome there.
    Well, anyway, 3\1/2\ years later, the United States has 10 million 
new jobs; the deficit's gone from $290 billion a year all the way to 
$117 billion. We would have a surplus today and would have had a surplus 
last year if it weren't for the interest we have to pay on the debt that 
was run up in the 12 years before I took office. We have turned that 
situation around. We have concluded 200 separate trade agreements with 
countries in all parts of the world. Our exports are up 35 percent to an 
all-time high. We concluded 21 trade agreements with Japan alone, and in 
those areas our exports have increased 85 percent.
    We did, as Bob said, embrace NAFTA and the GATT world trade 
agreement. But perhaps equally important, we tried to build more 
constructive relationships with our trading partners around the world, 
with the Summit of the Americas, with all the Latin American and Central 
American and Caribbean countries, and with regular meetings of the 
Asian-Pacific Economic Council nations leaders, something that I'm proud 
we started in our administration in Seattle. Then we went to Indonesia, 
then in Japan, and now we will be meeting this year in the Philippines. 
And I'm very much looking forward to that. It's helped us to make 
commitments to work together toward freer and more open trade, in a way 
that I believe also helps to reduce hostilities between countries.
    I worked very hard to help to remove the threat of North Korea's 
nuclear program from the Asian-Pacific area, and I'm very encouraged by 
the response that we received from the Chinese just this week supporting 
the initiatives to get the Chinese, the Americans, the North and South 
Koreans together to try to resolve this problem once and for all so we 
can go forward together into a more peaceful and prosperous world.
    We have worked hard to develop the sort of relationships with China 
that would enable us to have a fair, strategically calculated, positive, 
long-term, constructive relationship and would enable us to continue the 
relationships we have enjoyed with Taiwan in anticipation of an ultimate 
peaceful resolution of the difficulties between those two countries. Our 
commitments, which precede me by a long ways, I will reiterate--we 
support a one China policy, but we support a peaceful, and only a 
peaceful, resolution of the differences between Taiwan and the Republic 
of China. And we believe it can be done.
    Now, if you look at where we are and where we need to go on the 
economy and on our relations with the rest of the world, I would just 
make a couple of observations. First of all, the Asian-Pacific community 
knows as well or better than any group of Americans that education is 
the key to advancement in this country. The good news about America's 
relationship to the global economy is that we can create more jobs than 
any other wealthy country in the world more quickly because we have so 
many entrepreneurs. In the last 3 years we've had more new small 
businesses started than at any time in American history. I'm very proud 
of the fact that the Small Business Administration in our term has 
doubled the number of small business loans while cutting the budget and 
has spread the activities to all different groups of Americans.
    But if you look ahead, what we want is for everybody in America who 
works hard to have a chance to do well. And therefore, we are going to 
have to do more to expand educational opportunity and to get more people 
the chance to go on and get a college education. Therefore, I have 
proposed two things I want to especially emphasize tonight. First, we 
should hook up every classroom in the United States of America,

[[Page 1183]]

every single one, to the Internet by the year 2000 and make sure all 
classrooms have teachers trained to teach the young people to learn 
whatever can be learned in that vast storehouse of knowledge. That will 
equalize educational opportunities among rich, poor, and middle class 
school districts all across America, and we must do that.
    The second thing we should do is to open the doors of college 
education to all Americans. In my first term we reorganized the college 
loan program to cut the cost and to change the terms of repayment so 
that more people could afford to go to college. If I am reelected I want 
to give American families a tax deduction for the cost of college 
tuition and a tax credit for 2 years of community college so we can make 
at least 2 years after high school in this country just as universal as 
a high school education is now. Every American ought to be able to go 
back and go to a community college.
    Let me mention one other issue. There are many things I could speak 
about tonight, but I want to talk about one other issue. The Asian-
Pacific community has done so well in America and has enriched our 
country so much because you have found a way to preserve strong families 
and still work incredibly hard. I think the biggest challenge facing 
most American families today is how they can succeed at work and still 
succeed at home. They worry about their children being alone too many 
hours a day. They worry about whether they'll have destructive 
influences and see too much violence on television, for example. And I 
applaud the entertainment industry for developing this rating systems 
for TV programs that will go with the V-chip in the new televisions of 
the future. They worry about the fact that they may not be able to take 
a little time off from work if they really need to without losing their 
jobs.
    I have worked very hard to make it possible for people to have 
strong families and strong work records, to succeed at home and at work. 
That's what the family and medical leave law was about. Twelve million 
people since 1993 have been able to take some time off when a baby was 
born or when a parent was desperately sick without losing their jobs. 
And it has helped the American economy; it has not hurt the American 
economy. And I want to do more things like that to help.
    The last point I want to make is this: If you think about what is 
truly special about America as we move into the 21st century, it is that 
this is the only country that has people from everywhere else in it. 
It's the longest lasting democracy of any major country in the history 
of the world. We're 220 years old, but we have people from everywhere 
here. We are defined not by the race of our citizens but by our 
willingness to adhere to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the 
Declaration of Independence, and tolerance and mutual respect and equal 
opportunity for all people. And it is a priceless resource.
    I have struggled and worked as hard as I know how to keep us coming 
together and not let us drift apart. Think of what the new security 
problems in the world are. As the cold war fades away, if we can secure 
a comprehensive test ban treaty, if we can continue to reduce the 
nuclear arsenals of the major powers, if we can secure nuclear materials 
from smuggling, we can let the nuclear threat edge more and more and 
more into history. What then are the new security threats? They are 
threats that cross national lines: terrorism, organized crime, drug 
smuggling, the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons, and 
sophisticated conventional weapons that can be misused. And a lot of the 
problems caused from these things stem from prejudice based on race, 
ethnicity, religion, and tribe.
    Look at the hot spots of the world. Why do the Hutus and the Tutsis 
butcher each other in Rwanda and Burundi? Why did the people in Bosnia, 
a little country where the Muslims, the Croats, and the Serbs are 
biologically indistinguishable--why did they live in peace for decades 
and all of a sudden fall into a slaughter? Look at the heartbreaking 
agony in the Middle East and the fact that every time we make progress, 
there are those that try to kill the peace. Look at what happened in 
Northern Ireland where they had peace after decades for a year and a 
half, and the people desperately wanted it, and irresponsible leaders 
let it slide back into violence.
    And we still deal with it here in a different way. If you look at 
what was alleged to have occurred in Arizona recently where our Federal 
authorities, working with State officials, uncovered a massive weapons 
cache with a militia group that was alleged--and I say alleged, because 
they haven't been convicted yet--but alleged to have had plans to blow 
up a whole lot of Federal buildings. If you look at the

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charges in the trial involving the destruction of the Oklahoma City 
Federal building, if you look at the burning of all these black churches 
in America and the defacing of some mosques and synagogues, what do all 
these things have in common? People are defining themselves by their 
ability to look down on someone else because they are of a different 
race or of a different religion or a different creed.
    What is America's great strength is that we don't look down on 
people because of that; we embrace people. We say if you follow the law, 
if you work hard, if you play by the rules, if you're a responsible 
citizen you can have a home in the United States, you can do well. We 
want you to succeed and our country will succeed. That is America at its 
best.
    That is why I have said when it comes to affirmative action I think 
we ought to fix it, not end it. That's why I've said we have got to get 
to the bottom of these church burnings. That's why I have asked the 
Congress to support stronger initiatives against terrorism, to stand up 
to people who would put us against one another.
    And let me just say this in closing: As most of you know, Hillary 
and I went to the Olympics, to the opening ceremony on Friday. And 
before that we were privileged to go through the Olympic Village and 
meet with a lot of the athletes from other countries and to meet with 
the American Olympic team. And we both got to speak to them. And I was 
looking at them, just as I'm looking at you, and it struck me that if 
our Olympic team just wasn't--if they weren't all in the same room 
together, if they were just wandering around in the village, you know, 
with the other athletes, we might think they were from Asian countries 
or from African countries or from the Middle East or from Latin America 
or from Scandinavia. They could be from anywhere, because they are from 
everywhere, bound together only by their shared values and their 
commitment to work. And they represent what is right about America. And 
that is what we have to strengthen if we want to take this country into 
the next century as the kind of nation it ought to be and the kind of 
model for the world that it ought to be.
    And if you think about the Olympics, one of the reasons we love the 
Olympics is that people have to win on their own merits. They don't win 
by criticizing their opponents. Nobody can get a medal--no runner could 
win a medal by breaking his opponent's legs before the race. [Laughter] 
Nobody is more respected by telling everybody what a bad person his 
opponent is.
    In other words, in the Olympics people don't lift themselves up by 
putting other people down. They lift themselves up by bringing out the 
greatness that is within them. And that is what we should want for all 
Americans. We shouldn't want a single person in this country to be under 
the illusion that he or she is a better person because they're not of a 
certain race or they don't have a certain religious conviction or they 
happen to be born better off than someone else.
    I believe the best days of this country are before us if we find a 
way to fight back our security problems, if we find a way to give 
everybody a chance to participate in the new economy, if we find a way 
to build strong families and strong communities. But the number one 
thing we have to do is to make up our mind we are going into the future 
together and that America is the best positioned nation in the world 
because we have people from everywhere in the world in America. That 
should color every decision we make about how we treat each other, not 
only through our Government programs but in our everyday relations.
    Now, the election is 3 months, 2 weeks, and one day away. [Laughter] 
And I want to ask every one of you in the next 3 months, 2 weeks, and 
one day not to believe that coming here tonight to this great event--
which has helped us very much, and I thank you for your generosity--but 
I ask you not to let your citizenship lapse now. I ask you to go back 
into your communities, talk to your family members, talk to your 
friends, talk to those with whom you work, talk to friends in other 
parts of America, and tell them what this election is all about. The 
result of the election can be determined by what people believe the 
election is about.
    I believe the election is about what America will look like when our 
children are our age. What kind of country will we be? Will we go 
storming into the next century as a united and strong country and a 
great force for peace, or will we fall back into division and drift? If 
people vote for how they want this country to look when their children 
are their age, I'm not worried about the outcome.
    You can help that occur. Most of you have come to this country and 
enjoyed great success because you have worked like crazy, because you 
have developed your gifts, because you have kept your family strong. If 
everyone in America

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could just do that, this would be an even greater nation. So I ask you 
to work with us and walk with us and remember tonight is a wonderful 
night, but we want 3 months, 2 weeks, and one day from now to be a 
wonderful day. And you can help to make it so.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:30 p.m. in the Los Angeles Ballroom at 
the Century Plaza Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to March Fong Eu, 
U.S. Ambassador to Micronesia; and John Huang, deputy finance chair, 
Democratic National Committee.