    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
    [April 2, 1997]
    [Pages 376-380]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic Business Council Dinner
    April 2, 1997

        Thank you. I wonder if you were just clapping because you were
    surprised I could stand up. [Laughter] Let me say I'm delighted to see
    all of you here tonight. I want to say a special word of thanks to Carol
    Pensky for her willingness to lead this group and for her leadership
    ability, and to my good friend Alan Solomont for agreeing to come on as
    the finance director of the Democratic Party when he knew it would be
    such an easy job just now, to Roy Romer for what he said and for what
    he's been and for the friendship we've enjoyed over so many years. And
    I'd also like to say a word of thanks to Steve Grossman, who is not here
    tonight because they've had 24 inches of snow in Boston. Now, Solomont
    didn't use that for an excuse, and I haven't quite figured out how. But
    anyway, I thank them all.
        I'd like to thank Secretary and Mrs. Pena and Secretary and Mrs.
    Slater and Frank Raines for coming tonight, as well as the people from
    our staff in the White House and the Vice President's staff. We're glad
    to have this opportunity to visit with you and to talk tonight.
        You know, this was an interesting day for me at the White House for
    more reasons than one. But you may have seen reported in the news that
    today we had an event in which the secretary of public instruction for
    the State of California--which has over 10 percent of the schoolchildren
    in the country--and the heads of 240 different high-tech companies
    jointly endorsed the national standards movement in education that I
    have been advancing and that I talked about in the State of the Union
    and agreed that the children of California would participate in 1999 in
    the examination of fourth grade students in reading and eighth grade
    students in math to see if they had met those standards. And that meant
    that within a period of only 2 months since the State of the Union, we
    now have 20 percent of all the schoolchildren in the country already
    committed to be a part of that.
        And we had--the most moving thing to me was we had a teacher of 30
    years and a parent who was the vice president of her local PTA, both of
    them from different California communities, both of them, as it
    happened, Hispanic-Americans, who said that they strongly believe that
    all of our children should be held to high standards. And the teacher
    said, ``If there's one thing I've learned about kids, it's if you have
    high expectations, they rise to meet them, and if you don't have high
    expectations of them, they don't. And we owe it to them to have high
    expectations.'' And then the parent said that she had been educated at a
    time when everyone just assumed that, and she didn't know how we lost
    our way, and that she wanted to see the country come back.
        Then Jim Barksdale, the CEO of Netscape, talked about how everything
    that was done in the high-tech community had to meet high international
    standards, and it was amazing that America had escaped applying those
    kinds of standards to our system of education for as long as possible.
    Then the head of the California School Board Association came up to me.
    And I thought, well, this is interesting because the reason America has
    never had national standards in schools is that we have local control of
    our schools and every time we try to do something like this--and
    Governor Romer and I have been working at this for a very long time
    now--they would say, ``Well, this ends local control.'' So the head of
    the California School Board Association, who is herself a member of the
    local school board, said, ``I finally figured out that we couldn't have
    local control without national standards.'' She said, ``What kind of
    control is it if--what are you controlling for? The only reason I wanted
    to be on the school board is to improve the education of the children in
    the

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    school district, and how could I do this unless I knew what the measure
    was, unless I could tell whether I was succeeding or not?'' And I
    thought to myself, we are doing something really important here. This is
    going to change America. This is going to give people opportunities that
    they would not have otherwise had. And it has ramifications in other
    ways.
        I want to talk a little more about this in a moment, but you know
    we've got this new welfare reform law that I signed, which requires us
    to move 40 percent of the eligible people on welfare from welfare to
    work over the next 4 years, which is about another million people. And
    we moved about a million people from welfare to work in the last 4
    years, but the economy produced 11\1/2\ million jobs, and that had never
    happened in a 4-year period before. This time, under the law, we have to
    move that many people whether the economy produces 11\1/2\ million jobs
    or not.
        And this was the anomaly: Last year in St. Louis, there were nine
    job applications for every entry-level job opening. In Chicago, there
    were six. The 240 companies, however, represented in this press
    conference today have created, just themselves, 130,000 jobs in the last
    4 years and today have thousands and thousands of job openings. So there
    is a mismatch between the people we're trying to move into the work
    force and the skills required to get there. This is a huge deal.
        I say that to make this point. I see what we are all doing as part
    of the seamless web of moving America into the 21st century, and I want
    you to know that I'm proud that you have decided to help support us,
    support these policies. If the election did not come out the way it did
    last November, that meeting would not have been held in the White House
    today. We would not be doing this. This would not be America's great
    national priority now. And you helped to make it possible, and you ought
    to be proud of it. You ought to be proud of it. So I thank you for that.
        Now let me give you just a quick rundown on where we are. Number
    one, on the budget, I have submitted my budget by the--the budget
    resolution requires the congressional majority to submit at least the
    outline of a budget by April 15th. That may or may not happen. But for
    whatever it's worth, I really believe we'll get a bipartisan balanced
    budget agreement this year. I think it is the right thing to do for the
    country. And because it's the right thing to do for the country, it is
    by definition good for the Democratic Party to do. But it is clearly the
    right thing to do for the country.
        And I want to say a special word of thanks to Frank Raines, who came
    into OMB at a difficult time and has helped us to produce a fine budget,
    and we're going to get there. And I hope that you will encourage your
    Members of Congress and your friends in the Congress, whether they
    represent you directly or not, to support this. If it's the right thing
    for the country it, by definition, is the right thing for our party. And
    we need to keep this economic expansion going, and we need to get an
    agreement for a balanced budget that protects our investments in the
    future and in our people. And ours does, and we can get that kind of
    agreement through Congress if we all work on it.
        The second thing I want to say is we need to continue to expand
    trade. I'm going to Latin America later this year. I have to go--because
    of my injury now, I have to go in two legs. I'm going to Mexico, Central
    America, and the Caribbean; then I'm going to go back to South America
    later in the year. There's some controversy, I know, still, about
    whether we did the right thing in NAFTA or not. All I can tell you is
    our exports are at an all-time high as a percentage of our economy. And
    export jobs, on the whole, pay better. And for whatever our difficulties
    with Mexico are, if you look back at the last time the Mexican economy
    collapsed before NAFTA 10 years previously, they were 2 or 3 times as
    rough then. We have been in much better shape because we have created a
    trading bloc with Canada and Mexico. And we have to do more trade with
    our neighbors in Central and South America. We have to do it.
        Last year for the first time, while we're still debating what we
    want to do, the MERCOSUR countries in South America did more trade with
    Europe than the United States. And it is time--we've got to take a
    serious look at this. And again I would say, from the time of Franklin
    Roosevelt the Democratic Party has been on the side of free and fair
    trade, and we can achieve both. And I think any of you who've worked
    with Mickey Kantor, when he was our trade ambassador, or Charlene
    Barshefsky know that we have worked hard and we have fought hard for
    fair trade for the American workers

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    and the American businesses. And we will continue to do that.
        But in a world growing ever more interdependent, when uncertainties
    abound, we need to be tied as closely as we can to our democratic
    neighbors who are willing to work with us and build a common future with
    us. So especially with regard to the important countries in South
    America and Latin America, I think we have to do more, and that will be
    a big issue in this year.
        On the social front, let me say one of the things I'm proudest of is
    that we've proved to ourselves as Americans in the last 4 years that we
    don't have to put up with social conditions we know are unconscionable.
    People now know they don't have to put up with a crime rate that's
    unconscionable. We have the crime rate now going down every year, and we
    have before the Congress a juvenile justice proposal that I believe will
    find strong bipartisan support and will enable us to keep lowering the
    crime rate.
        But I would just say again--and I hope we'll have your support in
    this--while the crime rate is going down, the juvenile crime rate is
    still too high. While drug use is going down, drug use among juveniles
    is still going up. Still too many kids out there who are disconnected,
    don't feel connected to the future, don't feel connected to their
    neighborhood, their families, their schools, or anything else. And while
    we need a juvenile crime bill that is tough, we also need one that is
    compassionate, intelligent, and gives these young people something to
    say yes to. And that's one of the reasons that I'm proud to be a member
    of this party, that we believe in the human potential of everybody. And
    I am determined that before I leave this job, we will have put a stake
    in the ground that proves that we do not have to lose the thousands and
    thousands and thousands of our young people we continue to lose every
    year. And if we do the right thing, we won't lose them.
        Let me just mention two other things. We've taken a lot of steps to
    strengthen family life and work life for families in this country in the
    last 4 years, whether it was in the family and medical leave law or
    raising the minimum wage or passing the Kassebaum-Kennedy health care
    bill or the V-chip bill, the television rating standards, the anti-teen-
    smoking initiative. But one of the biggest problems we still have is
    that there are still 10 million of our children who don't have health
    insurance. And a lot of them don't have health insurance because their
    parents lose jobs or change jobs. We have a proposal before the Congress
    that we believe would provide insurance to half of those children in the
    next 4 years. There are bipartisan proposals on that. I am very, very
    hopeful that we will do something in this Congress which will take a
    long step toward providing health insurance for all the children in this
    country. And that's important.
        We have also proved that we could lower the welfare rolls quite a
    bit and far more than the economy alone can account for. The welfare
    rolls have gone down by about 2\1/2\ million now in the 4 years and 2
    months that I've been in office. And we know from the patterns of the
    past that about half this decline would have occurred just because the
    economy got better. But we also know that about half the decline
    occurred because people were working at it, States, communities, people
    believing in welfare reform, people believing that able-bodied people
    who wanted to go to work ought to have the chance to go to work.
        Now, this welfare reform law, as I said, requires us to do more. And
    I will have more to say about this later. But I've asked every State in
    the country to take the welfare check and make it available to employers
    as a wage and training subsidy, if that will help. I'm trying to get the
    Congress to pass a very tightly targeted tax credit that's worth up to
    half of the wage of a welfare recipient who goes into a new job for an
    employer at a pay of up to $10,000 a year. But we are going to have to
    have help from the private sector and every community in this country to
    meet these goals. We cannot let welfare reform become an excuse for
    hurting children. It's got to be an excuse--or the pretext or the lever
    by which we liberate families from dependency. And we can do this. It is
    clear that we can do it. But we're going to have to work at it with
    great discipline. And I hope all of you will be willing to help. There
    are some people in this audience tonight who've already hired people
    from welfare to work and I want to--you know who you are, and I thank
    you for doing that. But that will be a big part of what we're up
    against.
        With regard to the work that the Vice President and I have been
    doing on reinventing Government and changing the way the Government

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    works, you should know now that the Government has 285,000 fewer people
    than it did on the day I became President in 1993--dramatic downsizing.
    And yet I'm confident that we are providing better service to more
    people in different ways, because we've worked at it very hard. We will
    continue to do that.
        We passed lobby reform legislation. We passed legislation to require
    Congress to live under the laws it imposes on others. The next thing we
    have to do is to pass a campaign finance reform. I believe that the
    McCain-Feingold bill should pass. I am strongly supporting it. But there
    are some other things that I think ought to be done as well, and I would
    like to ask all of you to think about this. You've been involved in this
    deeply. You know as well as I do that the exponential rise in the costs
    of communicating with the voters is what has led the exponential rise in
    the costs of the campaign.
        There is a coalition in America today working to get free television
    time for candidates. And if we could get that free television time for
    candidates, only those candidates who agree to observe certain spending
    restraints, that would do more to change the incentives and to change
    the framework in which we all operate and to give everybody a fair
    chance to get their message across than anything else.
        I have just seen an interesting analysis of the unprecedented amount
    of time--free television time that was given to Senator Dole and to me
    in the last election. And while it shows that only about 22 percent of
    the American people saw our spots that we did--your know, we did spots
    for--several of the networks gave us time to talk--1 minute, 90 seconds,
    2 minutes--on various issues. Sometimes we were both asked the same
    questions, and our answers were run back to back on successive nights.
    Sometimes we were given the opportunity just to talk about certain
    subjects. But the analysis showed that, on the whole, there was more
    policy information in these free timeslots than either in our paid ads
    or in the news coverage of the campaign--more policy information--that
    they tended to be less negative, less personal, but they tended to draw
    out the legitimate issue differences between the candidates. I believe
    that would happen in the races for Congress as well.
        And so what I think we need to be thinking about is, how are we
    going to improve the way this thing works? I also would urge all of you
    to think about what we could do to make voting more accessible, to
    change the--to think about this campaign reform as a way of giving the
    country more and more to the people who have to live with the decisions
    that are made in the elections. But there are a lot of exciting
    opportunities out there that I hope you will help us to pursue.
        Finally, let me say that I think this will be a very big year in our
    country for charting our role in the world ahead. We had a very good
    summit with President Yeltsin in Helsinki. We have agreed to try to
    reach agreement within a short period of time to lower our respective
    nuclear arsenals to 2,000 to 2,500 warheads, which would be an 80
    percent reduction from the cold war high of just 5 years ago, by 10
    years from now. That's a very important thing, an 80 percent reduction.
        I am going to have this week a bipartisan event to try to highlight
    the importance of our passing the Chemical Weapons Convention this year,
    which is absolutely imperative. The United States cannot afford not to
    be in the forefront of banishing chemical weapons from the Earth. We are
    trying to do something to restrict severely and eventually ban
    landmines. We are working hard on that. We hope to have some progress to
    report on that this year.
        You know what we've been doing on the Middle East peace. The only
    thing I can tell you is, the one thing I've learned about those folks is
    don't give up. Don't give up on it. No matter how bad the headlines are,
    don't give up. And we've got some very good ideas; we're working on
    that.
        I believe the Vice President had an extremely successful trip to
    China. He was able to spend some high-level time that we had not spent--
    our country had not been able to spend since our differences over
    Tiananmen Square--just making sure they understood how we looked at the
    world and we understood how they looked at the world and charting the
    areas where we could work together, particularly in the areas of nuclear
    proliferation where the Chinese supported us with the Comprehensive
    Nuclear Test Ban Treaty last year and dealing with the problems on the
    Korean Peninsula, in trying to resolve some of our economic disputes.
    And he also gave a very powerful human rights speech while he was there,
    of which I was very proud. I think it was a very good trip.

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        And I believe that by the end of the year, you will see with that,
    the expansion of NATO, the other things that are going on, we will be a
    lot closer to a world which has more democracy, more free market
    economics, more cooperation, and where we're making progress in trying
    to beat back the new security threats of our time.
        In short, this really is an age of great possibility, and it
    requires us to work together. But in the kind of country we have where
    the public sector is limited and the private sector is large, which I
    like, you have to play a role in public decisions, and it's good
    citizenship. And that's what you're doing. And again, let me say I'm
    proud of you. I appreciate what you've done, and I hope that you will
    continue to make your voices heard on the things that we are doing.
        We have a lot of other decisions I haven't even gone into tonight.
    Secretary Slater's here; we're going to redo the transportation bill
    this year. Secretary Pena has got a lot of our most important research
    going on in the Department of Energy. We've got a lot going on. We want
    you to be a part of it. But we want you to be proud of the fact that
    what you have done has made America a better place. In 4 more years,
    it'll be a much better place, indeed.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:28 p.m. at the Sheraton Carlton Hotel. In
    his remarks, he referred to Carol Pensky, treasurer, Alan Solomont,
    national finance chair, Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado, general chair, and
    Steve Grossman, national chair, Democratic National Committee; Secretary
    of Energy Federico Pena's wife, Ellen Hart Pena; and Secretary of
    Transportation Rodney Slater's wife, Cassandra Wilkins Slater.