[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[July 23, 1996]
[Pages 1192-1199]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic Dinner in San Francisco, California
July 23, 1996

    Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, the mayor can lay it on, can't 
he? [Laughter] When Willie Brown was elected mayor of San Francisco, 
Hillary and I were sitting at home waiting for the returns to come in. 
She said, ``Well, exactly what do you think it means?'' And I said, 
``Well, if there were any doubt, San Francisco will never be bored 
again.'' [Laughter]
    You know, the mayor talked about how I had to go around the country 
and meet with all different kinds of groups. I remember once going into 
the back room where the members of the Democratic caucus and the 
California general assembly would meet with the speaker, and a lot of 
its members didn't even interrupt their card games to say hello. 
[Laughter] But most of them couldn't have found Arkansas on a map 
probably, anyway.
    But Willie humored me along. He thought I might amount to something 
some day. [Laughter] And I remember after I talked to Willie Brown about 
politics I felt the way the late, great actor Richard Burton felt. You 
know, he--in the early sixties, some of you may remember a movie called 
``A Man for All Seasons'' which won the Academy Award. You remember 
that, where Paul Scofield played Sir Thomas More in one of the great 
performances ever in the history of film. Richard Burton said, ``When I 
saw Paul Scofield I knew I'd never be that good, so I decided to go for 
the money.'' [Laughter] And when I met Willie Brown I knew I'd never be 
that good, so I decided I might as well run for President and get out of 
politics.
    I want to thank Shirley Nelson and Brooke and Sean Byers and George 
Chu and Jim Hormel and all the people at the head table and all the rest 
of you that helped to make this dinner a success tonight. I'd like to 
thank my friend Lieutenant Governor Gray Davis for being here tonight, 
the council members, the supervisors that are here. Senator Bill Lockyer 
is here, the leader of the Democrats in the California State Senate.
    I'd like to introduce a friend of mine who's come a long way, who is 
right now supervising the celebrations for my 50th birthday--something 
I'd just as soon ignore, but this being an election year, I don't 
suppose I can--the former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and former Governor 
of the State of Mississippi, my longtime friend and colleague Ray Mabus 
from Mississippi, who is somewhere. I thank him for being here.

[[Page 1193]]

    I want to thank Peter, Paul, and Mary. They are always wonderful. 
They never lose the light in their eyes, the lilt in their voice. And 
they remind us that all those terrible things that our adversaries say 
about the sixties are not entirely true. [Laughter] Thank you very much, 
and God bless you.
    I thank you for coming here tonight. I thank you for your 
contributions and for your support. I ask you to leave here and do more, 
to go out and use your voice, your energy, your spirit, and try to reach 
others and engage them in a serious conversation about this election. In 
3 months and 2 weeks from this day, the American people will make a 
decision about the future of our country and what path we will walk into 
the 21st century. It is partly about who gets to be President. It's 
partly about whether Chairman Fowler, the chairman of the Democratic 
Committee, who's here with me tonight, and our finance chairman, Marvin 
Rosen, feel like they've been victorious, or the Republicans feel that 
they have won again. But that's not mostly what it's about.
    Mostly what it's about is what this country will look like when we 
set foot into a new millennium and what our country will be like when 
our children and grandchildren are our age. I believe elections are 
determined fundamentally by what questions people ask and answer. First 
of all, is it worth my voting? And if I vote, for whom shall I vote? 
Those questions will be determined by what people think the election is 
about.
    When I ran for President in 1992, I did it because I was afraid our 
country was going to go into the 21st century just drifting along, 
increasingly divided; weakened instead of strengthened by the changes 
going on in the world. And I believed, and I believe more strongly today 
after nearly 4 years as President, that we can charge into the 21st 
century if we are more united and if we are focused on what we have in 
common instead of what divides us, if we are looking to the future 
instead of being chained to the past, and if we are committed to doing 
the things that have to be done to lift everyone in this country. That's 
what I believe.
    When I became President, I had a simple vision. I wanted to serve 
for 8 years so that when I left and the country went on into a new 
century, the American dream would be alive for every single man and 
woman, boy and girl in this country without regard to their station in 
life; this country would still be the world's strongest force for peace 
and freedom and prosperity and security; and we would be coming together 
in our community, celebrating our diversity instead of being divided and 
weakened and torn apart by it as are so many around the world today. 
Those are the three things I wanted. And those are the three things that 
I want tonight.
    I believe to do it we have to create more opportunity for people, we 
have to expect more responsibility from people, but we also have to 
challenge all Americans to take responsibility not simply for themselves 
and their families but for their communities and for our country. We 
have a responsibility to go forward together.
    And tonight, just before I came down, I saw the women's gymnastics 
team for America take the lead in the contest for the first time in the 
history of the Olympics. Never has an American gymnastics team ever been 
in first place after the first of the final four events. And I was 
looking at that team, and there was an Asian-American girl there, there 
was an African-American girl there. I don't know what the ethnic 
backgrounds of the other young women on the team were, but it occurred 
to me that there they were, working together, representing the best of 
our country.
    And I thought to myself, why is it that we get such a kick out of 
the Olympics? Part of it is that people really do win by working 
together and by just being their best. You don't win by bad-mouthing 
your opponent. You can't win a medal if you win a race because you break 
the other person's legs. Nobody gets interviewed on television because 
they say, ``These people from another country are simply no good.'' In 
other words, the thing we hate about our politics and the thing we 
really dislike about what goes on in other parts of the world that are 
destructive are totally purged in the Olympics.
    And that's really the way we ought to approach this election. When 
Hillary and I got to go down there and meet with the team, it struck me 
that if that Olympic team of ours were to walk out into the Olympic 
Village and then separate and sort of start wandering around, you 
couldn't possibly know where they were from. You could see one of our 
athletes and say, well, there's someone from Africa; there's someone on 
a Caribbean team; there's

[[Page 1194]]

someone on one of the Asian teams; there's someone on a Latin American 
team or a Middle Eastern team; there's someone from India or Pakistan; 
there's someone from the Nordic countries. They could be from anywhere 
because they're from everywhere, because America is not about a 
particular race or creed. America is about the Constitution, the Bill of 
Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and believing everybody is 
equal under God and should have the same chance to be treated with 
dignity and pull together and work together.
    I ran for President because I did not think we were running our 
country in that way, and I didn't think we were running our communities 
in that way. And I could see people struggling all over the country to 
come back together at the grassroots level, to do things that made 
sense, to reach across the lines that divide us, and struggling against 
having wedges driven into the heart of our society. And I knew that 
there were changes we need to make, but we needed to make them together.
    Now my contract is just about expired, and I'm trying to get a 
renewal. And what I would like to do tonight is to tell you the three 
things I'd like you to tell anybody who is willing to listen between now 
and November. Many of you can afford to be here tonight; you have the 
ability to influence other people, and I want you to use that ability.
    I want you to say first, we came in with the idea of changing the 
course of America based on opportunity, responsibility, and community. 
We had a strategy, we implemented it, and the country is better off than 
it was 4 years ago. And our opponents fought us on every--not everything 
but nearly everything we tried to do. I'll just give you a few examples.
    When we presented a plan to reduce the deficit but continue to 
invest in education and the environment and technology and research, to 
spend more money in the treatment of people with AIDS, for example, and 
cut other things, every person in the other party opposed it and said it 
would bring on a recession. We said it won't bring on a recession, it 
will lower interest rates, cut the deficit in half, and produce 8 
million jobs.
    Well, they were wrong, but to be fair, so were we. We cut the 
deficit by more than half, and the economy produced over 10 million 
jobs. We were right, and they were wrong.
    And when we presented an anticrime strategy that, yes, had some 
tougher penalties like ``three strikes and you're out'' but also said 
what we really need to do is put 100,000 more police on the street, 
concentrate on community relationships, getting citizens involved, 
preventing crime, banning assault weapons, and passing the Brady bill, 
they said, no, that's a terrible idea. Well, 4 years later we've had 
some experiments in that--we've had some experience; we're in a position 
to make a judgment.
    As I say every time I go to one of the rural areas of our country 
where people value their hunting, not a single hunter has lost his rifle 
in the last 2 years in spite of what people were told in the '94 
election. But 60,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers have not gotten 
handguns because of the Brady bill. It was the right thing to do. And 
for 4 years in a row, the crime rate has come down.
    I've heard a lot of talk about welfare, a lot of talk in Washington 
today about welfare reform. I'll say a little more about that in a 
minute. But under a law passed in 1988, that as Governor I had the 
privilege to help write, the President can give States permission to 
move people from welfare to work as long as they take care of the 
children in the process.
    Forty of the fifty States have gotten permission to experiment in 
moving people from welfare to work. Seventy-five percent of the people 
in this country are already under welfare reform experiments. And today, 
without hurting the children of America, there are 1.3 million fewer 
people on welfare than there were the day I took the oath of office. It 
is the right sort of welfare reform. And I might add, child support 
collections are up 40 percent to $11 billion a year.
    Now, do we need national legislation? You bet we do. The reason we 
do is we still don't have the power we need to really collect all the 
child support that is legally owed and could be paid across State lines. 
And if everybody paid what they owe and could pay, we could reduce the 
welfare rolls by another 800,000 women and children tomorrow morning. So 
we need that.
    And there needs to be some more flexibility in the law. But the key 
is not to hurt innocent children. What we want for poor families and for 
immigrant families as well as citizen families--[applause]--what we want 
is the same thing we want for middle class families and rich

[[Page 1195]]

families. What we want is for people to be able to succeed at home and 
at work.
    Ann Richards, the irrepressible former Governor of Texas, gave a 
very funny speech in Washington the other night that said she disagreed 
with the folks in the other party. They seem to have a curious position. 
They say that the country's in trouble because people on welfare want to 
stay--women on welfare want to stay home with their children instead of 
going to work, and then they say the country's in trouble because middle 
class women want to go to work instead of staying home with their kids. 
[Laughter] And she said she was having a hard time figuring that out.
    Well, what I want our party to do, instead of getting into that 
fight, is to say that's the wrong way to ask it. What we really want is 
to face the fact that most parents are at work. And if this country's 
going to be what it ought to be, we have to create conditions in which 
people can go to work and then succeed at work without having to lose 
out as parents. We want to succeed in both ways, and I think that's what 
we need to do.
    I will tell you this, there were two very, very important positive 
amendments adopted by the United States Senate today, and we're moving 
to try to make that bill better. But the test should be, will it help 
people succeed at work and at home, will it promote independence and 
good parenting? That is the test.
    Let me give you one or two other issues. When it came to families, a 
lot of people talk about being pro-family. I've never heard a candidate 
stand up and say, ``I am anti-family and proud of it.'' [Laughter] The 
question is, what are we going to do about it? I believe the role of 
Government is to create conditions in which people have a chance to be 
good parents while providing for their children. That's why, for 
example, I can't understand why anybody would oppose the minimum wage, 
when if we don't raise it, it's going to go to a 40-year low. We ought 
to do that.
    We passed the family and medical leave law, and the leadership of 
the other party opposed us. They said, ``This will be a job killer; this 
is going to be a terrible thing; oh, it's worse, it's awful.'' Well, we 
now know who was right and who was wrong. After 3 years, 12 million 
Americans have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law. 
Because there was a baby born or a sick parent, a family emergency, they 
got up to 12 weeks off without losing their job. And a recent survey 
said that 90 percent of the employers said it imposed no problems on 
them whatever. [Applause] Thank you. You can clap for that if you'd 
like--12 million people.
    The 7 largest economies in the world have created 10.3 million jobs 
in the last 3\1/2\ years, 300,000 in the other 6 countries, 10 million 
in America. They were wrong. The family and medical leave law was good 
for America because it strengthened families, and in the process it made 
the workplace more productive, happier, and more profitable for the 
employers of America. It was the right thing to do.
    We said we think that there ought to be a V-chip in the new 
televisions, and we challenged the entertainment industry to set up a 
rating system for TV programs like they do for movies. Most kids spend 
more time in front of the TV's than they do at movies. And we said this 
will help parents to control things their young children see. We had 
another survey last year, the 300th, I think--literally, there have been 
300, that documented the cumulative impacts of excessive violence on 
young children when they see it for hours and hours and hours and hours 
from early childhood--and almost every single study says that it deadens 
children to the impact, the horror, and the moral wrongness of violent 
behavior. And a lot of them thought that was a lousy idea. But I think 
we were right.
    So I could go through issue after issue after issue like this. We 
reduced the size of Government, but we said, let's don't reduce the size 
of Government in a way that undermines our values. Let's reduce the size 
of Government to make it less bureaucratic, but let's keep a strong 
Government where we need it to be strong. When you had all these natural 
disasters in California, you didn't want a weak emergency management 
agency. When you had these problems with businesses going broke, it's a 
good thing that we've had a Small Business Administration that increased 
loans to women by 90 percent, that almost doubled the total loan volume, 
even though we cut the budget. That was a good thing.
    It's a good thing that the Food and Drug Administration is approving 
drugs more rapidly than ever before, particularly for life-threatening 
illnesses like HIV and AIDS. It's a good thing that we cut back on the 
deficit, but it's also a good thing that we're continuing to spend

[[Page 1196]]

money on things that make a difference. We have dramatically improved 
research and medical programs, for example, breast cancer research, 
tests on women for all kinds of health care problems, a big increase in 
research into HIV and many other critical areas.
    Just today, because of the recent evidence that putting certain 
drugs together really helps to deal with the problems of HIV and AIDS 
and to dramatically prolong life, I've asked the Office of Management 
and Budget and the Department of Health and Human Services to increase 
my 1997 budget request for State AIDS drug assistance programs by 
another $65 million.
    Think about this when people tell you how bad the Government is. 
These programs alone are helping almost 70,000 low-income people who are 
HIV-positive to buy drugs that were recently discovered and that can 
extend their lives. The budget will more than double the amount we are 
now seeking for these life-saving drugs. Now, is this an area where we 
want a weak or nonexistent Government? Is this an area where the 
Government is a problem? I don't think so. This is an area where we're 
furthering our common objectives.
    So the first argument I want you to make is, they had a plan, they 
implemented it, we're better off than we were 4 years ago. And the other 
folks didn't think it was a very good idea. The record is in.
    The second argument I want you to make is, this is a very good 
election for the voters because there's no guesswork. [Laughter] You 
heard the rhapsodic introduction of Mayor Brown. But the truth is, you 
folks were taking a chance on me 4 years ago. I mean, you didn't know 
me, and you were taking a chance. And if you remember the campaign of 
1992, the other side went to a lot of trouble to make you scared about 
the chance you took, to make you afraid to take the chance of change.
    Now you don't have to worry about that. You know what I'm going to 
do, and you know what they're going to do. You know. I'm sure there will 
be attempts in the next few weeks to blur that knowledge you have, to 
make it seem warm and fuzzy. But you know what they're going to do 
because they've already done it, it's just the first time when they did 
it, I vetoed it and stopped it.
    But if you want the 1995 budget, if you believe the way to balance 
the budget is to wreck the environmental protection fabric of the 
country and cut back on education at a time when education is more 
important than ever before or walk away from the guarantees Medicaid has 
given to little children and poor pregnant women and seniors and 
families with members with disabilities in them for 30 years, we can 
have that. You just need to vote for them. They'll give it to you. They 
gave it to you once; we just stopped them. If you give them both 
branches of Government, they'll give it to you again within 6 months of 
the new year.
    This is a very--you're laughing and everything, but not everybody 
has thought about that. The most severe anti-environmental measures 
proposed in my adult lifetime were proposed in that last Congress. 
Basically, measures that--the takings bill would virtually strip the 
National Government of the ability to protect the common heritage of 
this country.
    And so there's no guesswork here. You do not have to guess. And 
that's good. Neither is there a status quo option, because both of us 
have very dynamic ideas about how to get into the future. We will choose 
a path: What road are we going to walk into the 21st century? And not 
voting is a choice.
    So if some young person says, oh, they're all the same and it 
doesn't matter, tell them they're not all the same for the tens of 
thousands of young people that won't be in Head Start, the hundreds of 
thousands of people that will lose access to the direct college loans, 
the countless millions of people that will be endangered if we end the 
guaranties of Medicaid, the poorest, the sickest, and the oldest seniors 
on Medicare that will get a two-tiered, second-class system of care. 
They're not the same for those who care about the environment. They are 
not the same. To say that there is no choice is to ignore the lessons of 
the last 2 years. So I hope you'll say that to people.
    But the final thing I hope you'll do is to make the most important 
argument of all. We do have a good record. But you might argue that 
that's what I got hired to do. The most important argument is that it's 
a record not to reverse but to build on. And there's a lot more to do 
before this country will really be ready to go into the 21st century.
    If you look at the area of peace and freedom and security and 
prosperity, I'm proud of the fact that there are no nuclear missiles 
pointed at the United States for the first time since the dawn of the 
nuclear age. But I'm worried

[[Page 1197]]

about the fact that we still need the disciplined support of our allies 
and a real system for dealing with the threats of the proliferation of 
dangerous weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, and the 
proliferation of terrorism around the world.
    I want help, and I want to leave this country with a system, a 
regime, a disciplined way to stop the testing of nuclear weapons, to end 
chemical weapons production, to stop biological weapons production and 
sale and transfer, and to move swiftly and aggressively across national 
lines against terrorism, organized crime, and drug running. Those are 
the threats of the future, and we have to have them there.
    If you look at our society, there's a lot more to do to help people 
succeed at home and at work. I've been going to communities all over the 
country celebrating the things that are driving the crime rate down. But 
we have more to do. I've been trying to think of things we can do to 
help families more. And I just would mention three or four things.
    First, we ought to pass the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill that says you 
can't lose your health insurance if you change jobs or if someone in 
your family gets sick.
    Second, we should make it easier for people who work for small 
businesses or who are self-employed to take out and keep a pension even 
if they're unemployed for a period in their lives so they'll always have 
something else for their retirement.
    The third thing we ought to do, and in many ways by far the most 
important, is to continue to expand the quality and the reach of 
educational opportunity. The Vice President and I came out here not so 
long ago and announced the first NetDay where we hooked up over 20 
percent of the classrooms in California to the Internet. This is 
sweeping the country. But I want to explain the significance of this. 
We're determined to hook up every classroom and library in America to 
the Internet by the year 2000. We're also determined to make sure that 
in every classroom there will be a qualified teacher there who 
understands how to make use of that incredibly important tool.
    Right now, this summer, we have 100,000 teachers teaching 500,000 
others how to maximize the use of the information superhighway for their 
children. What this means is that when we do this in the poorest urban 
neighborhoods or the poorest rural communities in Appalachia or the most 
remote Native American reservation in America, our children will have 
equal access to all the knowledge in the world. This is a phenomenally 
important thing, and we must keep at it until the job is done for all of 
our children.
    And I want to say, standing here so close to Silicon Valley, I will 
be indebted for the rest of my life to the members of the 
telecommunications industry who worked with us in the telecom bill to 
get a bill that would protect the rights of access of poor schools in 
urban and rural areas and hospitals in urban and rural areas and 
libraries all across this country to all this information so that we do 
not use the Internet to create a two-tier society but instead to be an 
instrument to bring us all together and to move forward together.
    Now, the final thing I want to say about education is, my view is 
the most important thing we could do in the way of tax cuts now would be 
to give every American family a tax deduction for the cost of college 
tuition and to guarantee access to every American for at least 2 years 
of community college after high school through a tax credit that's 
refundable.
    Now, let me explain what this means. It's universal now, more or 
less, in America for younger people to have a high school diploma. It's 
not good enough. Younger workers with a high school diploma have had 
precipitous drops in their earnings in the last 15 years. The single 
most significant determinant of increasing inequality in America is not 
the policies that the previous Republican administrations--which I don't 
agree with and which aggravated inequality--but the single most 
significant determinant of increasing inequality is the difference in 
levels of education and skills and what people know and what they're 
capable of learning. We need to make at least 2 years of education after 
high school as universal in America immediately as a high school 
education is today. And we'll begin to grow this economy in a fair way 
again and bring the American people together again.
    The last thing I want to say about the future is--and maybe the most 
fundamental lesson we'll have to teach ourselves in this election, 
because we'll make this decision clearly, consciously, or 
inadvertently--is that we have got to make a decision to go forward 
together. I think the most touching moments in the Olympics opening for 
most of us was when they called all those athletes up on the stage and

[[Page 1198]]

the Olympics let Greg Louganis stand up there as a hero and said we're 
not excluding people because they're HIV-positive or because somebody 
may not like them. They brought a 97-year-old man up who was dancing a 
jig, and they wanted to make the point that being healthy is a good 
thing for older people and maybe even better than for younger people. 
And then they let Muhammad Ali--purging the ghost of the Vietnam war and 
his conversion to Islam and everything he ever did that was 
controversial, standing there in the courage of dealing with his disease 
with dignity--light the flame. And just about everybody I know had a 
tear in their eye when that happened. But that whole show was about how 
we're stronger when we're together than when we're looking for ways to 
be divided.
    You just think about what's wrong with the whole world today. What's 
the matter in Bosnia? Three groups of people that are biologically 
indistinguishable have been taught to kill each other with reckless 
abandon and had to ask people to come in from the outside to stop them 
from killing each other even though they lived for decades in peace. It 
didn't take any time for them to fall into it.
    Look at Northern Ireland. For a year and a half they lived in peace. 
Their economy was booming. They had the lowest unemployment rate in 15 
years. When Hillary and I went to Northern Ireland last year, the 
streets were lined, the Catholic streets, the Protestant streets, all 
together, people cheering and yelling, happy with the peace they had 
won, proud that the United States had played a role in it. And then, 
boom, in the flash of an eye, against the wishes of over 99 percent of 
the people, a series of bad decisions by leaders plunged the country 
into violence again. It's an outrage. They're still looking down on each 
other because of a religious fight that's 600 years old.
    You know the story in the Middle East as well as I do. We had 13 
Arab countries condemn terrorism in Israel for the first time as well as 
in every other country in the Middle East. But there are still those who 
so desperately have to have the fighting continue to preserve their own 
position, to search for their own priorities, that terrorism is still 
alive and well there.
    And it's not just there. That's also what was behind, apparently, 
the political hatred that led to the bombing in Oklahoma City. That is 
what is alleged to be behind the breakup of the vast weapons cache with 
the alleged plans to destroy Federal buildings in Arizona. That's what's 
behind a lot of these black church burnings and mosque burnings and 
synagogue defacements.
    The other day at the center of our military strength at Fort Bragg, 
African-American Special Forces soldiers had swastikas put on their 
doors. What were these people thinking about? Do you know who those men 
are? They're people I can send anywhere in the world tomorrow on a 
moment's notice to undertake the most difficult imaginable task, who are 
willing to put their lives on the line for you and die if necessary, 
immediately, and somebody thinks they can put a swastika on their door? 
Why? Why?
    Because even here there are people who believe somehow their life is 
elevated only when they can look down on somebody else, only when they 
can feel superior to somebody else, only when they can be forces of 
division. Those are the questions that ``Blowin' in the Wind'' was 
about--that's what the song Peter, Paul, and Mary sang about--and it's 
important. You may not think everything about the sixties was right, but 
that song asks the right questions, and we'd better not forget that.
    And you know, if you look at our diversity and you imagine the world 
we're going to live in, where everything is closer together, there is no 
nation in the world as well-positioned as the United States to reap the 
benefits of the 21st century, of the explosions of the information age, 
if we can learn to deal with the security threats; if we can learn to be 
more responsible not only for ourselves but for our families, our 
communities, and our country; if we can have the ability to develop our 
own capacity so we can live out our dreams.
    But none of that will happen unless we first decide that we're in 
this together and we have to go forward together. And you know, 
fundamentally, all these other issues can almost be submerged into that.
    So I ask you to go out in the next 3 months and 2 weeks and talk 
about it. Tell them about the record, and tell them we were right and 
they were wrong. Tell them about the choice, and tell them not to forget 
that they've seen it once, it just got stopped. But most importantly, 
talk to people about what they want this country to look like when we 
stand on the edge of a new millennium--it only happens once every 
thousand years--and what they want

[[Page 1199]]

America to be like when their children and grandchildren are their age. 
If those are the questions the voters ask, then they'll give the right 
answers, and our best days are still ahead.
    Thank you, and God bless you all. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:17 p.m. in the Continental Ballroom at 
the San Francisco Hilton. In his remarks, he referred to folk singers 
Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers, and former U.S. Olympians 
Greg Louganis and Muhammad Ali.