[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[September 26, 1996]
[Pages 1686-1689]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Reception
September 26, 1996

    Thank you so much. Thank you, Senator Kerrey, for that uncommonly 
generous introduction. [Laughter] And I thank you and Senator Kennedy 
for being on your best behavior tonight. [Laughter] And I thank you for 
giving me the chance to be the warmup act for Don Henley. [Laughter]
    Ladies and gentlemen, I very much wanted to be here tonight with 
Senator Daschle and Senator Lieberman and Senator Kerrey and all the 
others who have talked and who are here because this is an important 
evening. I'd like to personally thank the retiring Senators who are 
here; many of them I have known for a long, long time.
    I thank my friend Bill Bradley, and I thank Jim Exon who always gave 
me such wonderful, sage advice. If I had taken all of it, I'd be better 
off today. [Laughter] I thank Howell Heflin whom I first met over 20 
years ago when neither one of us were even close to our present 
positions. I thank my neighbor Bennett Johnston for his friendship and 
his guidance. I thank Sam Nunn for his many contributions to our country 
and to me personally. I thank Claiborne Pell for always standing up for 
what is noble and good in politics and human nature. I thank Paul Simon 
for being a force for reform down to the last day of his service in 
public life. And I thank my friend David Pryor, as good a friend as I 
ever had in public life. I will miss them all, and they have served our 
Nation well.
    I do believe that Senator Kerrey and others who were involved in 
this, and maybe just the civic impulses of the candidates themselves, 
have given us an unusually attractive group of candidates who are 
running for the United States Senate this year. And I know that I have 
the names of 12 who are here, and I'm going to, at the risk of--if I 
miss anyone, this will be a good test for how you'll do in the Senate. 
You must stand up and make sure you are recognized. [Laughter] But I'd 
like to introduce those whom I know are here.
    Steve Beshear from Kentucky. Steve, are you here? Where are you? 
Stand up. Come out here so we can all get a look at you, if you're over 
there in the crowd. Come on up here. Come here; come and stand here. 
Thank you. Fritz Hollings certified that he looked like a Senator--
[laughter]--and I can tell you he'd be a fine one. My friend and former 
colleague Governor Joe Brennan from Maine and your former Congressman 
from Maine. Come on up, Joe. I know he's here somewhere. Come on up. I 
know Joe didn't leave. Jill Docking from Kansas, I saw her. She's right 
here. Come on up, Jill. Congressman Dick Durbin from Illinois. Where is 
he? Where is Dick? Congressman Tim Johnson from South Dakota, come on 
up. Come on up, Joe. Mary Landrieu from Louisiana, is she here? Mary, 
are you here? Jack Reed from Rhode Island, Congressman Jack Reed from 
Rhode Island. Dick Swett from New Hampshire. Tom Strickland from 
Colorado. Come on up, Tim. Sally Thompson from Kansas, she's right here. 
Come on, Sally. Congressman Bob Torricelli from New Jersey. Mark Warner 
from Virginia. If anybody else is here who is running for the Senate, 
come up here so we can see you. If it looks so exciting and you have an 
uncontrollable impulse to start now, come on up here so we can see you. 
[Laughter]
    Ladies and gentlemen, I've had the honor of being in the States of 
most of these candidates and doing what I could to speak a word for 
them. They are truly outstanding. They would serve our country well. 
They would be worthy successors to those whom we honor tonight. I wanted 
you to see them, and I want you to remember, as Bob Kerrey said, we have 
just 40 days, and they have a lot of hurdles to overcome and a lot of 
rain to walk through to get to the sunshine on election day. I hope 
you'll stick with them and do what you can

[[Page 1687]]

to help them. Thank you very much. Give them a hand. [Applause] Thank 
you.
    Ladies and gentlemen, last night I got home late from Pennsylvania 
and I got all my accumulated paperwork and I took it to bed and started 
ripping open the envelopes and talking to Hillary. And she was saying, 
``It's late. We should go to sleep.'' And I said, ``I've got to read 
this stuff.'' And all of a sudden I opened this envelope, and I said, 
``Holy smokes.'' And I got, as I do, the Government reports regularly 
scheduled to come out the next day. They send me a little summary the 
night before, and this was just a brief summary. But it said, ``Tomorrow 
the United States Government, in its regularly scheduled annual report 
on the incomes of Americans, will say that we've had the biggest 
reduction in the inequality of incomes of Americans in 27 years, the 
biggest drop in poverty in raw numbers in 27 years, the biggest drop of 
children in poverty in 20 years, the biggest drop of female head of 
households in poverty in 30 years, the lowest recorded poverty rates 
ever among African-Americans and senior citizens in the United States.'' 
And I thought, we are on the right track. We're onto something. We're 
doing something right.
    And I appreciate what Bob Kerrey said. But to be fair to him, given 
the prevailing political rhetoric in 1993, it wasn't very easy for a 
Senator from Nebraska to cast the vote he did. But we got the interest 
rates down. We got the economy going again. We have 10\1/2\ million jobs 
to show for it, record numbers of new small businesses, the lowest 
combined rates of home mortgages and inflation and unemployment in 27 
years. That's what we have to show for it. We're moving in the right 
direction.
    And because of what we tried to do and because of the results that 
our efforts are helping to bring, I think it puts the choice the 
American people will make in 40 days in a clear perspective, 
particularly when you look at the fights we had over the budget, the 
Government shutdown, and the other issues.
    I was just out in Senator Daschle's home State in South Dakota where 
they put--if you ever get discouraged about America, go to South Dakota. 
We said we'd like to stop in South Dakota, and we wanted to go to a town 
where they were having a homecoming game, so they just put the 
homecoming game back an hour. And we sort of warmed up the crowd. So 
I've now warmed up for--I've been the lead act for a homecoming game and 
the lead act for Don Henley. I'm kind of getting into this. I like this. 
[Laughter] And I was just talking to people there in the audience. And 
it's very humbling to see the fundamental goodness of our people and the 
old-fashioned faith people have in this country and to see people feel 
connected again to their elected representatives and understand the 
relationship between what happens here and what happens where they live. 
And that really is what this election is all about.
    Once in a great while, a country like ours makes a set of decisions 
at election time--or if they don't have a democracy, they do it in some 
other way--that has huge, huge ramifications. This is such a time, not 
because of any of us but because of the times in which we live, because 
we are changing so fundamentally the way we work and live and relate to 
each other and relate to the rest of the world.
    When I sought the Presidency 4 years ago, I did it because I did not 
like the fact that we were not prepared and we didn't have a unifying 
vision to take us into the 21st century. And every day I get up and 
think of the three things that I wanted to do in 1992. I wanted to take 
us into the next century with the American dream alive for every man and 
woman, every boy and girl willing to work for it. I wanted us to grow 
together instead of be driven apart by our diversity, as so much of the 
rest of the world is being bedeviled by their diversity, even though 
it's much less in most countries than we have here. And I wanted us to 
continue to lead the world, as Bob said, for peace and freedom and 
prosperity.
    And 4 years later, because we followed a strategy that was simple 
and profound: of opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and a 
community where everybody who works hard and shows up and does the right 
thing has a place, we are clearly better off than we were, and we are 
clearly moving in the right direction.
    But there are some very big decisions that underlie all the specific 
issues that are being discussed. It really is: Are we going to build a 
bridge to the future or attempt to build one to the past? There really 
is a difference of opinion about whether you think we're better off 
being left to our own devices, or at least our family is left to their 
own devices, or is the First Lady right, does it take a village to raise 
our children and build our country and strengthen our economy and move 
forward?

[[Page 1688]]

    It is not a question of big Government or small Government. Our 
administration and the Democrats who are here took the lead in reducing 
the size of Government and the burden of regulation and changing it more 
in ways that gave more legitimate authority to State and local 
governments and to the private sector than the previous administrations 
did. But we do not believe that it is responsible to stand up and say 
the Government is somehow inherently bad and if it just weren't hanging 
around here you would be great, because we believe that we have to have 
a partnership and that we have to do those things together that help us 
to move forward.
    I'll just give you one example. In the area of research and 
development, we just agreed--as many of you have heard me say--we just 
agreed with IBM to build a joint supercomputer that will do more 
calculations in a second than you can do on your calculator at home, 
your hand-held calculator, in 30,000 years. Now, I think that's a good 
expenditure of your money, but you can't make it by yourself.
    Our medical research has led to a doubling of life expectancy of 
people with HIV and AIDS in only 4 years. We had--just before 
Christopher Reeve gave his powerful speech at the Democratic Convention 
calling for more research, for the first time ever we had laboratory 
animals with severed spines have movement in their lower limbs because 
of nerve transplants.
    I just talked to the International Association of Machinists before 
I came here, by satellite. A lot of them lost their jobs in the defense 
downsizing. But because we believe that the Defense Department ought to 
try to find other things for those folks to do, many of their workers 
have been helped by a technology research project that we have used 
defense technology on to try to help structure a system wherein heavily 
trafficked highways will be able to avoid car accidents forever by 
computer programming and things that will cushion against them.
    So all of these things are things that none of us could do on our 
own but we can do together. The student loan program and scholarships 
and credits for people to go to college are things we have to do 
together.
    So what I want to ask you to do is not only contribute to all of 
these candidates, anybody who can be here tonight is articulate enough, 
knowledgeable enough, and has enough conviction to influence other 
people. And I'm telling you this is one of the four, five, or six most 
important elections this country has ever had. This is a watershed 
election, not because of any of the individuals involved but because of 
the moment in time. And we will make decisions in 40 days that will 
affect how we live in 40 years.
    If you doubt it, just think back over the history of the country. 
What did George Washington and his crowd have to do? They had to decide 
are we going to be one country or 50 States--I mean 13 States. They 
decided one country. If they hadn't decided one country, there never 
would have been 50 States, we would have been stuck at 13. And John 
Breaux and I and those of us who lived in the Louisiana Purchase never 
would have served in public life. [Laughter] Some of you might think 
that would be good--[laughter]--but on balance, you get the idea.
    Then Abraham Lincoln had to decide, well, if the States formed the 
country, could the States turn around and leave it--a pretty logical 
argument. He decided the answer was no, and he gave a half a million 
lives, including his own--including his own, to uphold that answer. And 
then having made that decision, he had to decide, well, if we're going 
to be one country, can we go on being hypocrites forever? How can we say 
we believe all people are created equal and tolerate slavery? Can we do 
that? The answer to that was no. If either of those two decisions had 
been different, think about how your lives would be today, how much 
smaller your lives would be, how much less our lives would be.
    Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, they had to decide, well the 
country is no longer a rural country dominated by small farms; it's 
basically an urban country dominated by big industries. Can we just rip 
all of the natural resources of the country up? Can we let monopolies 
dominate the country and oppress workers and charge whatever they want? 
Is it okay to let kids work 70 hours a week, some of them in coal mines? 
And they said no. If they hadn't made those decisions, think how 
different your country would be.
    Now, the closer you get in time, the more you can see the 
implications of the decisions made in the Great Depression and World War 
II by President Roosevelt, the decisions made for the cold war by 
President Truman and upheld since then. This is that kind of time.

[[Page 1689]]

    And this whole business about are we going to build a bridge to the 
future or try to hold on to the past, do we believe it takes a village 
where we all work together, or in this new, highly technological, 
entrepreneurial, fascinating world where all the barriers are coming 
down, would we be better off if everybody just left us alone to find our 
own level? These are huge decisions. And the implications of them for 
our children and our grandchildren are things that we cannot today fully 
appreciate. But deep down inside we know they are big deals.
    So I say to you we have the evidence on our side now. I gave you 
some of it tonight. We could talk until tomorrow at dawn about the 
things that are better now than they were 4 years ago. But the important 
thing is whether we're going to keep charting the right kind of course 
for the future.
    So I say to all my fellow Democrats, don't make a party argument for 
this election, make a people argument. Ask every voter to decide, what 
do I want this country to look like when we start the 21st century, and 
what do I want this country to look like when my children are my age? 
And when my grandchildren and their children are reading the history 
books, what do I want them to say about what we did at this critical 
point in history? If those are the questions, you know what the answer 
is going to be.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 7:58 p.m. at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. In 
his remarks, he referred to musician Don Henley and actor Christopher 
Reeve.