[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[November 6, 1996]
[Pages 2086-2089]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Victory Celebration at the National Building Museum
November 6, 1996

    Thank you. Let me join Tipper and Hillary and Al in telling you how 
glad I am to see all of you. I'm sorry we couldn't get everybody into 
the limited hotel space in Little Rock. Although, somehow or another, we 
had about 50,000 people in the street.
    It's been a wonderful day. And I am full of gratitude to all of you 
and to all those whom you represent. I thank my Cabinet; I know that at 
least Secretaries Riley, O'Leary, and Brown are here. But all of them 
worked very, very hard. I thank Don Fowler. And along with Hillary and 
Tipper and Al and all of you, I send our prayers and best wishes to Don 
and his wife tomorrow. And I thank Chris Dodd for speaking out in his 
brave and aggressive and incredibly articulate way. And we did pretty 
well in Connecticut last night. I think that the people there agreed 
with him instead of all those that were attacking us and running us 
down.
    I thank Marvin Rosen for taking on this hard job and doing it well 
and Peter Knight and all of our wonderful campaign staff and Richard 
Sullivan all the people at the DNC. I thank Terry McAuliffe and Laura 
Hartigan; they worked so hard with all of their people to make sure our 
campaign was financed early and well.
    I want to thank those who entertained us tonight, and thank all of 
you. There are a lot of people in this audience and around this country 
who played a major role in this campaign.
    I feel I have to say a special word of thanks to the mayors that are 
here. I know that Dennis Archer and also Mayor Ed Rendell of 
Philadelphia are here. I don't know if there are any other mayors, but 
if there are mayors or Governors here I don't know about, I thank you 
very much for what you've done. Thank you, Reverend Jesse Jackson, for 
what you did in this campaign and what you do in every campaign, all the 
miles you traveled, all the speeches you gave. Thank you for going to 
California and standing up, as I did, for what we believe. We don't 
always win when we stand up for what we believe, but we always come out 
ahead. And I thank you, sir, for that.
    Let me say that a campaign is a fascinating thing--the people who 
give and give and give of their time, their money, their heart. This was 
an unusual campaign for me, in terms of the difference from the one 
before, because this time, everywhere I went I could actually see the 
evidence of our collective endeavors.
    I was in Denver the other night and we had a nice little crowd and 
then folks were standing

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by the ropeline the way you are. I just was walking down the ropeline, 
and I started shaking hands with people. And within 5 minutes, I met a 
young woman who had obviously been a victim of domestic violence, who 
thanked me for the Violence Against Women Act, the hotline, the fact 
that we were moving to bring down domestic violence.
    Then there were three women standing there with a little sign that 
said, ``Thank you for putting more money into breast cancer research,'' 
who knew that we had uncovered now two of the genes which cause breast 
cancer and may someday be able to not only actually cure those cancers 
early but even to find out enough to prevent them in the first place.
    And then I met a man--a big, big man who reached across four or five 
folks and shook hands with me and said, ``I wish my wife were here 
tonight, but we adopted a baby 2 months ago and because of the family 
leave law, she's able to take a little time off from work to integrate 
that baby into our home life without losing her job.''
    And then I met a young man who said he had dropped out. But when we 
passed this new law to reform the college loan process so that he could 
pay the loan back as a percentage of his income and he didn't have to 
worry about going broke anymore, he had gone from being a college 
dropout to a good student in microbiology.
    And then I met a lovely young woman who happened to be the daughter 
of one of the Federal agents who was there, who was a police officer in 
a smaller community in Colorado, who thanked me for the law enforcement 
part of the crime bill because her community was about to get five more 
police and she thought the children of her community would be safer and 
she would be safer doing her job because she was going to have help. 
That was in 5 minutes.
    I was in Longview, Texas, the other day. We had 13,000 people at 8 
in the morning, and that's hardly a hotbed of liberalism. [Laughter] I 
met a young single mother with two children who had gone back through 
the AmeriCorps program to serve in her community, get off public 
assistance, and was now going to the Kilgore Junior College there. And I 
met another woman whose husband had cancer, who got to save her job 
while she took care of her husband because of family leave. And I met a 
man who was a Vietnam veteran there with his wife. And he asked me--he 
said, ``What did you all ever do with that bill to help the veterans who 
were exposed to Agent Orange whose children got spina bifida?'' And I 
looked at him, and I said, ``I signed it yesterday, and now those people 
will get disability as well as medical benefits for the first time.'' 
And he was real tall, so I was looking up at him--he was a head taller 
than I was--and he said, ``Well, thank you very much for her.'' And I 
looked down at his little girl who was 12 years old in a wheelchair who 
had 12 operations because she contracted a condition that almost 
certainly she got because her husband served our country 20 years ago.
    This is what this whole deal's about to me. You know, all this 
political business that you read in the newspaper, who's doing what and 
all that. And let me say something else. A lot of you contributed to our 
campaigns; a lot of you really stretched the limit; a lot of you went 
out and raised money for our campaigns. And you knew good and well you 
could have gotten a more direct benefit if you had put your money into 
the other side. I mean, they told you you'd get a big tax cut, and you 
maybe could have had other things. And you did it because you wanted 
your country to grow together.
    As you know, I have said for 5 years, I think we ought to find a 
different system of financing our campaigns. But I want you to know that 
I appreciate that fact that you helped us stay competitive, even though 
the Republicans still raised $150 million or more, more than we did. We 
were able to stay competitive because people like you believed in the 
common ground of America. And I thank you for that. And I thank all of 
you for that. We had unprecedented financial support from the African-
American community, from the Hispanic community. And I want to say as an 
Irish-American, I appreciate the support we got from every ethnic group, 
from the Jewish-Americans, from the Greek-Americans, and yes, from the 
Asian-Americans. I'm proud to have your support, and I thank you very 
much for it.
    And let me say also, there are lots of other people who worked in 
our campaign. I went back to New Hampshire--I started my last day of my 
last campaign where we began our quest for the Presidency--and early in 
the morning in New Hampshire, on that last day, the 60 people who 
started out with me in 1991 and stayed with me when my death warrant was 
pronounced by the experts, gathered in a little

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restaurant. And they had all these pictures up everywhere. One of them 
was a young boy named Mike Morrison who was only a high school junior 
when I ran the last time and is now in college and was finally able to 
vote for me. And he said, ``Mr. President,'' he said, ``I'm in college 
now, and I'm a straight-A student.'' And I said, ``Well, Mike, what do 
you like? What's your favorite courses?'' And he said, ``I like creative 
writing and critical thinking, and I'm writing essays.'' And he said, 
``You know, my teachers at our school, they think I should submit my 
essays to magazines, Readers' Digest and some others.'' And we talked 
about it awhile, and I thought about the first time I saw that boy 
joining with his high school classmates, carrying my banner down the 
middle of the aisle at the New Hampshire Democratic Convention.
    Mike Morrison gets up every day and gets into a wheelchair. And he's 
a big, strong boy, and he was raised by his mother on a very modest 
income. He worked hard for me in 1992. And on election day, he promised 
to be a poll worker, but his mother's car broke down. It was a cold 
winter day in New Hampshire, and Mike Morrison took his wheelchair 2 
miles along the side of a highway from his home to the polling place to 
be there, to give us a chance to do what we have done these last 4 
years.
    And the thing I'm so proud of about our campaign is that we've got 
all kinds of people with all kinds of abilities. And all of us have some 
disabilities. And we have together made a difference, partly because we 
decided we were going to do what we were doing together. Justin Dart 
went to every State in America to organize Americans with disabilities 
for the Clinton/Gore campaign. That's one reason we won some of those 
States. God bless you, and thank you. There are people here who 
organized Republicans for Clinton/Gore, and I thank you for that. And I 
thank you for what you did. Your numbers were significant.
    And last night, when the vote came in and all across the country, I 
thought of all the people I had met along this journey and all the 
people whose lives have been touched and how much better off we all are 
when we work to give everybody not a guarantee but at least a chance, a 
real chance to be what God meant them to be.
    I am very proud of you. I want you to be very proud of this 
campaign. I want you to be very proud of what has happened. There are 
millions and millions and millions of people whose lives have been 
directly touched by the fact that we offered them a chance to have a 
second chance--to have their main chance to be what they ought to be. 
And there's lots more to do.
    But we should be very grateful we happen to be here in America at 
the time that I'm convinced it is more possible for more people to live 
out their dreams than ever before, if we simply meet our challenges and 
move ourselves closer to our ideals. And it has fallen to us now to do 
that.
    The people decided to leave the Congress in the hands of the 
Republicans, but they sent a very strong message. A lot of the offices 
they won, they won by less than 1,000 votes. They don't want meanness. 
They don't want the politics of personal destruction. They want us to 
put the people first, the future first, and work together. All of that, 
too, you contributed to making happen. The whole feeling in this country 
is so different from what it was just a couple of years ago, and you 
helped to make that happen.
    So I ask you tonight--I ask you tonight to sort of hold back your 
shoulders and take a deep breath and be very proud because you helped to 
make our democracy work and, of course, all of us believe, to make the 
right decision. And I ask you to wake up tomorrow--I hope, like me, 
you'll be a little less tired than you are tonight--but I ask you to 
wake up tomorrow with a new sense of optimism about your country, a new 
sense of belief in the future, and a new determination to continue the 
work of citizenship. We are making a difference. We're going to make a 
big difference in the next 4 years. And everybody's got a role to play. 
And everybody has something to do.
    In closing, let me say a special word of thanks to Tipper and to Al 
and to Hillary. We four have had an unusual partnership. I doubt that 
there's been anything quite like it in the history of the Presidency and 
the Vice Presidency. But it has served America well.
    And if I had served out my term as Governor and had been elected to 
another term as Governor instead of running for President, George 
Clinton and Bill Clinton would have been the two longest serving 
Governors in American history, and we could have been on a different

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list. So I think it's a pretty distinguished list, Mr. Vice President, 
myself.
    Let's have a good time tonight. Let's wake up tomorrow proud that we 
won. And let's think about what we can do to build that bridge to the 
21st century.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:15 p.m. In his remarks, he referred to 
Donald L. Fowler, national chairman, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, 
general chairman, Marvin Rosen, national finance chairman, and Richard 
Sullivan, finance director, Democratic National Committee; Peter Knight, 
campaign manager, Terry McAuliffe, finance chairman, and Laura Hartigan, 
finance director, Clinton/Gore '96; Mayors Dennis Archer of Detroit, MI, 
and Edward Rendell of Philadelphia, PA; Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, civil 
rights leader; and Justin Dart, former Chair, President's Committee on 
Employment of People With Disabilities. A tape was not available for 
verification of the content of these remarks.