[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[August 18, 1996]
[Pages 1303-1307]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the Democratic National Committee 50th Birthday Reception for 
the President in New York City
August 18, 1996

    The President. Thank you.
    Audience member. Cut cake, but don't cut welfare!
    Audience members. Boo-o-o! Go away!
    The President. Wait, wait, wait. They've had their say. Now, we've 
heard--wait, wait. They got their message. We heard them. Give them an 
applause, and let them go now. Give them a hand, give them applause. 
[Applause] Thank you.

[The demonstration continued.]

    The President. All right, we got you an audience. We did do that 
also. Now please let me talk.
    Audience member. You don't represent poor working people! Stop the--
[inaudible]--against the poor!
    The President. Well, all I know is I just got the minimum wage 
raised. And we cut income taxes on the 15 million poorest working 
families in America. And there are 1.3 million fewer people on welfare 
today than there were the day I became President. So I think we've got a 
pretty good claim on that.
    Let me begin by thanking Chairman Don Fowler. I know he said before 
I came out a word, but I'd like to say another word of respect and 
condolence to the families of those who were on that Government 
airplane, the Air Force plane that was carrying those who work with me 
on my security detail out there in Wyo-


[[Page 1304]]

ming. It's a very sad thing. One of the safest planes we ever had. We 
don't yet know what happened, but tonight I just ask you to be thinking 
about their families.
    And let me also say to the people who provided our music, to Smokey 
Joe's Cafe and to the Cravat's Orchestra, I've been out here listening 
while you all have been in here enjoying it directly, and you know, if 
you're President, when you stand up in front of people, you're always 
afraid that you're not supposed to be on one foot; you're not supposed 
to be snapping your fingers; you're not supposed to be doing all these 
things. So I can really enjoy this music better if I'm out there, and 
you're not looking at me--we're all paying attention to the music. You 
guys were great. Thank you very much, and we're grateful to you.
    I know that Governor Carey is in the audience tonight. And Carolyn 
McCarthy, our new candidate for Congress, is here. I wish her well. I 
believe Mark Green and Judith Hope are here, and I thank you for being 
here. And somebody told me two people I very much admire for their 
different gifts with the English language, Neil Simon and Arthur 
Schlesinger, are here. If they're here, I welcome them, and thank you 
very much.
    Ladies and gentlemen, I feel very grateful tonight to be on the 
verge of my 50th birthday. I don't know why I feel grateful for that. 
[Laughter] I have been getting all of these absolutely hilarious cards. 
I got one card I couldn't begin to figure out. There were nine people in 
black robes on it and Mr. Perot was on it and Diana Ross was on it. And 
it said, ``Happy birthday from Diana Ross and the Supremes.'' [Laughter] 
I got a card today pointing out that as bad as this is, Paul McCartney, 
George Harrison, and Ringo Starr are older than I am. [Laughter] So I'm 
getting all of these cards, trying to put the best face on this event. 
I'm going to be all right until I get my AARP card in the mail. 
[Laughter] And there will be a couple of bad hours there.
    Let me--you know, our friends in the Republican Party that had their 
convention last week--and I didn't watch it because I was too busy on 
vacation, but they've had their say and now we can have ours. I just 
wanted to say to you that when we have our convention in Chicago next 
week, I have told our people that I don't want anybody standing up at 
the platform at the Democratic Convention making demeaning personal 
remarks about any Republican, not their nominee, not their nominee's 
wife, not any of them.
    On the other hand, since they neglected to talk about their record 
for the last 2 years, I think we ought to remind people about that every 
chance we get and remind everyone that this is really a great contest 
between two different visions of the future. There is no status quo 
option. Neither of us believe that we can stay with what we did for 40 
or 50 years. But on the other hand, there are very different 
consequences to where we will go in the future.
    Now, this administration can be proud that, compared to 4 years ago, 
there are 10 million more jobs; there are a record number of new small 
businesses, including businesses owned by women and minorities; there 
are a record number of exports. We've had 4 years in a row where the 
crime rate went down. There are 60,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers 
that could not get handguns because of the Brady bill. And as I said a 
moment ago, we dramatically cut taxes for the 15 million American 
working families with incomes of $28,000 a year or less who are the most 
hard pressed and reduced the welfare rolls by 1.3 million--all that 
compared to 4 years ago. The average closing cost on a home for first-
time homebuyers has been cut by $1,000. We have almost 4\1/2\ million 
new homeowners. Ten million American families refinanced their homes. 
Things are better than they were 4 years ago.
    And the most important thing to know is that the leaders of the 
other party, their nominee for President, their Speaker of the House--
they fought us on the economic program; they fought us on the crime 
bill; they fought us on the Brady bill; they fought us on the family and 
medical leave law; they fought us on the things that we tried to do that 
made a difference for America. The results are in. We're better off than 
we were. We need to keep going where we're going, not take a great U-
turn and go back in the other direction.
    And the second point I want to make to you is that this is not an 
election like most elections where there's a little guesswork involved. 
This is your birthday present. You get a Presidential election where you 
don't have to guess. I mean, if you think about it, there's normally 
some guesswork in any election. You took a chance on me 4 years ago. 
Those of you who knew

[[Page 1305]]

me, maybe it wasn't such a big chance, but most people didn't.
    Well, now people know what we've done for the last 4 years, and they 
know that I'll do everything I can to implement these plans that we put 
before the American people. And they know what the Republicans will do 
because, even though they did not talk about it at their convention, 
apparently, they've already done it once. I just vetoed it the first 
time. [Laughter] And so that's a very happy thing.
    So if you look at these choices, the choice is not the standard 
choice. This is not between, for example, as they would say, cutting 
taxes and balancing the budget. I'm not against cutting taxes. I'm just 
against cutting taxes if to do it, you have to explode the deficit again 
after we took it from $290 billion down to $116 billion a year or if you 
have to cut Medicare and Medicaid, education, and the environment to pay 
for it. That would be wrong. That would be wrong.
    So if you like the budget I vetoed, you will love the next one 
that's coming along with this new plan. If you didn't, stay with us. 
We'll balance the budget and invest in education and invest in 
protecting the environment and protect Medicare and Medicaid while 
reforming them so that we can all preserve them over the long term. And 
we will give the American people the right sort of tax cut, targeted to 
education, sending everybody to college, raising children, and giving 
people incentives to save for their own retirement, their own health 
care, their own educational needs. That is the right thing to do for 
America. We do not want to take a dramatic turn in the wrong direction.
    Finally, let me say that there are a lot of things that have to be 
done in the future, and I want you to think about that. I want you to 
think about what the family and medical leave law has meant to America: 
12 million American families, someone in the family got to take a little 
time off when there was a baby born or a sick parent or a sick child 
without losing their jobs. I'd like to see that extended so that parents 
could go to regular parent conferences and doctor's appointments with 
their children, without losing their jobs.
    If you look at what happened--if you look at the results that we've 
gotten with the Brady bill, the assault weapons ban, and the plan to put 
100,000 police on the street, I'd like to see that expanded so that we 
can ban those cop-killer bullets that have no purpose other than to 
knock our police officers and other innocent citizens out of their 
lives.
    If you look at what we did with the college loan program to make 
more college loans available to people and more scholarships available 
at lower cost, I'd like to see that expanded to give American families a 
tax credit of $1,500 a year so that every single American adult could at 
least get a community college education, and it would be as universal as 
a high school education is today, and we have tax deductions for the 
costs of college education for everybody.
    So there's a lot more to do here. But our country is stronger; we 
are more respected in the world; we are a larger force for peace and 
freedom and decency than we were.
    And let me just say one last thing about this welfare issue. I've 
been working on this since 1980. And about 10 years ago when I was 
trying to write the last welfare reform bill, I asked a woman from my 
State who had moved from welfare to work to come be a part of a panel 
that I had for the Governors. This was nearly a decade ago. And this 
lady was asked the following question, and I did not know--she was being 
questioned by other Governors. I didn't have a clue about what she was 
going to say. I just knew that she had been a successful graduate of our 
experiment.
    And this lady was asked, ``Do you believe that people should be 
required to move from welfare to work if there is a job there and if 
they can take care of their kids?'' She said, ``I certainly do.'' And so 
the questioner said, ``Well, why?'' She said, ``Well, because people 
like me have been treated like we can't do anything for so long, we'll 
just keep on doing nothing unless somebody requires us to do it but also 
gives us the help to do it.'' And then they said, ``Well, what's the 
best thing about having a job?'' And she said, ``Well, the best thing is 
not the check. It's when my boy goes to school, and they say, what does 
your mama do for a living, he can give an answer.''
    Now, what I have done in signing this bill is to give us a chance to 
move everybody from welfare to work, but we're all thinking about this 
in the wrong way. This welfare reform issue is not over, it is just 
beginning. It is just beginning.
    So those folks holding those signs up and everybody else ought to be 
thinking about this: Who do you trust to give jobs to those people?

[[Page 1306]]

Who do you trust to take care of their children? Who do you trust to 
implement this instead of turning around and walking away from it?

    Remember the bills I vetoed that--you know what they did, the bills 
I vetoed? No child care; take away the guarantees of the school lunch 
program; take away the guarantees of the food stamp program; take away 
the guarantees of health care for children with disabilities. That's 
what they tried to do. I vetoed all that. We got that back in. We got 
protections back in.

    The question is now how are we going to embark on this great 
experiment to put jobs in the inner cities and jobs in the isolated 
rural areas and give people something to do? You can't just put people 
in the street. You have to give them work and child care and health care 
to support them. That is my commitment, and that is the decision we 
ought to be facing in this election.

    So let me just say this last point. This is my birthday gift to you. 
I want you to think about it for 79 days. [Laughter] I did an interview 
with one of the most highly watched news programs in the country, 
showing just in a couple of hours here, today before I came up. And the 
questioner said, ``Well, Mr. President, aren't you worried about what 
happened after the convention and this big tax cut promise and the 
movement in the polls, and doesn't that really bother you?'' And I said, 
``No.'' I said, ``I'm not against a tax cut. I just don't want one 
that's too big, that we can't pay for. I don't want one that's big and 
indiscriminate, that will either explode the deficit or force us to 
really hurt people with more cuts in education and the environment and 
Medicare and Medicaid. But we can have a tax cut targeted at 
childrearing and education and family savings, and pay for it. But I'm 
not worried about that.''

    He said, ``Well, what if it causes all these changes in the polls? 
Everybody else that's ever run on one has won.'' I said, ``Well, first 
of all, it's a false choice between a tax cut and no tax cut. The issue 
is, are you going to have a good one that you can pay for?''

    I said, ``You know, Hillary and I used to live around the corner, 
when we were living in Arkansas, from this wonderful place called the 
Community Bakery. I used to go down there all the time, and in the 
morning I'd buy bagels.'' [Laughter] Sometimes on the weekend I'd buy 
other things, but there were wonderful things in the Community Bakery. 
[Laughter] There were cookies, bagels, doughnuts, fruit tarts. And so I 
was telling this fellow, I said, ``You know, every one of them was good, 
but if you bought them all and ate them all at once you'd get sick. 
That's my attitude about this tax cut issue. We can have one, but we 
have to have what we can afford, that's consistent with balancing the 
budget, investing in our future, bringing our people together. That is 
the right decision.''

    And then I said--and this is what I want you to think about for 79 
days--``If the American people want to go back to a failed economic plan 
of the past that quadrupled the deficit, gave us high interest rates, 
increased unemployment, increased welfare, and weakened America, they 
can do it. But that's what the election is for.'' I cannot do that. I 
will not do that. That is the wrong thing for America. There is another 
choice there. I won't do that.

    So my gift to you is to remember that this is a choice. And I'm 
delighted that you're here to celebrate my birthday. And I'm going to 
have a wonderful time tonight. But I want to remind you that we have 79 
more days before we can really celebrate the assurance that America will 
march into the 21st century with the vision I articulated in 1991 that I 
reaffirm to you today. I want us to go into the 21st century with three 
things unquestionably true. I want every child in this country, without 
regard to race or gender or station in life, to be able to live out his 
or her dreams if they're responsible enough to work for it. I want to 
know that our country is the world's strongest force for peace and 
freedom and democracy. And I want to know that with all of our 
incredible diversity--unlike all these other countries that are coming 
apart at the seams because of their racial, their religious, their 
ethnic, their tribal hatred--I want America to be the one country in the 
world that says, we believe in our common humanity, and we are growing 
stronger through our diversity, not weaker. That is my dream, and that's 
the present I want for you.

    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 5:05 p.m. in the Imperial Ballroom at the 
Sheraton New York Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Donald L. 
Fowler, national chairman, Democratic National Committee; Hugh Carey, 
former Governor of New York; Carolyn McCarthy, candidate for New

[[Page 1307]]

York's First Congressional District; Mark Green, New York City public 
advocate; Judith Hope, New York State Democratic Party chair; playwright 
Neil Simon; and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.