    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
    [February 24, 1997]
    [Pages 196-199]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Democratic Business Council
    February 24, 1997

        Thank you very much, Tom and Carol. Chairman Grossman and Alan
    Solomont and Paul DeNino, thank you for taking on this important work.

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        Let me begin by thanking all of you for being here tonight and for
    your support, for the things that you said earlier, and your high hopes
    for our country. And let me remind you that we are involved in an
    extraordinary endeavor with a great opportunity. In the last 4 years we
    changed the economic policy of this country, and we now are committed to
    investing in our people, expanding our trade, and balancing our budget,
    and the consequences have been truly extraordinary.
        In the last 4 years, for the first time ever in one Presidential
    administration, we had 11\1/2\ million more jobs and record numbers of
    new businesses in every single year. The so-called misery index is the
    combined rates of unemployment and inflation. It's the lowest it has
    been in America since the 1960's. And every one of you who supported our
    efforts, who fought for our policies, who stood up for what we are
    trying to do played a role in that, and you should be proud of that.
        We changed the direction of social policy in this country, putting
    family and community at the center of our concerns and substituting
    action for rhetoric. And that's one of the reasons, thanks to the crime
    bill, that we've had years of declining crime now and people actually
    can believe that their streets can be made safe for their children; one
    of the reasons we've had the largest decline in welfare rolls in the
    history of the United States.
        We now have--I was telling the folks at the table tonight, from 1972
    to 1989, it was an average of 4.8 percent of the American people on
    public assistance. When I took office there were almost 5\1/2\ percent
    of the people on welfare. Today, it's 4.6, lower than the average since
    1972 and going down.
        And the only thing I would ask you is, any one of you--my friend
    Stan Chesley has already hired two people off the welfare rolls. We have
    to set an example. We can't just exhort people. We now have to hire one
    million people from welfare to work in the next 4 years to meet the
    targets of the welfare reform law. Meeting the target of the welfare
    reform law means requiring people who can work to work but not cutting
    anybody off public assistance who is honestly committed to supporting
    her children and cannot find a job. So we changed the law. Now we have
    to do our part.
        And I want to invite all of you to be part of what is a great and, I
    might add, a bipartisan effort to hire one million more people off the
    welfare rolls. And I ask for your support to pass the legislation in
    Congress to give special tax credits of up to 50 percent of a salary,
    capping out at $10,000 a year, for anyone who hires anyone from welfare
    into the work force. We can do this.
        And I know we can do it; I've added up all the numbers of all the
    employers of all sizes, of all kinds in America. This is a snap if we
    will just make a commitment as a country to do it. We owe it to the
    children in those families who deserve a chance to see their parents and
    themselves move into the middle class and have a shot at what we're all
    trying to build for our children in the new century.
        Let me say that today we had some very, very good news on the
    education front. You know from the State of the Union that I believe
    this should be the primary focus of our new endeavors in the next 4
    years. And today meeting in Washington, the National Convention of
    Community Colleges and all their trustees, and the American Council on
    Education, which includes 1,700 leaders of 2- and 4-year colleges and
    universities in America, both endorsed the education plan I put before
    the American people and the Congress in the State of the Union Address.
    So this is a good day.
        And we are going to be able to create a country in the next 4 years
    where every 8-year-old can read independently, where every 12-year-old
    and every classroom and library in America is hooked up to the Internet,
    where every 18-year-old has a chance to go on to college, and where our
    adults can continue to learn for a lifetime. These things are good
    things, and we are moving in the right direction.
        I can also tell you that I am confident that we will continue to
    reach out in a positive way to the rest of the world. The Secretary of
    State has had a great first trip on her first trip as Secretary of State
    around the world. I've been very proud of her, and I hope you have. And
    we have to continue to do that.
        Let me just make one last point here. In the last 4 years if you
    were to ask me, ``What did you do that was most significant,'' well,
    those of us who count votes might say, ``Well, you passed that economic
    plan in '93 by one vote, and it brought the country back and that's what
    happened in '96.'' Those of us who worry about the safety of our streets
    might say, ``If it hadn't been for the crime bill passing and the Brady

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    bill and the assault weapons ban, well, we wouldn't have the crime rate
    coming down.'' Others might say the family and medical leave law and the
    other things we did surrounding family. Others might say the fact that
    we defeated the other party's attempt to drastically change the course
    of America by beating back the '95 budget, and we killed, I think, once
    and for all the dominant rhetoric of the last 20 years, which is that
    Government is the enemy.
        Government is not the enemy. Neither is Government the solution. But
    we now know that every modern society that seeks to fulfill the
    potential of its people needs, through its Government, leadership in
    creating conditions and giving people the tools to make the most of
    their own lives.
        I told somebody today that Hillary and I over the weekend needed a
    little break from all this seriousness, and we watched ``Dante's Peak''
    at the White House movie theater--best perk about being President, the
    theater. [Laughter] And it's a movie about volcanoes, and I think it's a
    rather interesting movie because I'm interested in volcanoes. But I
    thought it was interesting that it was this movie, and the hero of the
    movie was an employee of the U.S. Geological Service. And the hero was
    nearly killed by the volcano, and in the end his life is saved by a
    technical contraption developed not for volcanoes but for space by NASA.
    Government is not the enemy. [Laughter] They would have had no movie but
    for the Government. [Laughter]
        And I think we've earned the right to say that, that this Government
    is now smaller by 285,000 people than the day I took the oath of office
    the first time--285,000, the smallest since President Kennedy was in
    office; hundreds of programs gone; thousands of pages of regulation
    gone; the reinventing Government effort led by the Vice President still
    gathering steam, not about to just sit around and do no more.
        But we have got to say these are things we have to do as a country,
    as partners. But apart from all that, I think maybe the thing that I
    would highlight is that in the last 4 years I hope we have created the
    conditions for seeing this country fulfill all of its potential because
    we have rejected the politics of division, whether it was based on race
    or religion or anything else.
        I think I made the right decision in saying we should mend
    affirmative action and not end it. I think I made the right decision in
    saying that I did not think that we should turn our backs on legal
    immigrants in this country; this is a nation of immigrants. I think we
    did the right thing to support the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and
    protect the religious liberties even of people whose politics are very
    different from mine and who believe they have a religious duty to try to
    remove me from office the last election. [Laughter]
        That's what made this country great. The first amendment guaranteed
    freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and
    freedom of religious faith. I think we did the right thing to try to
    combat in a very aggressive way these church burnings. And I might say,
    the recent bombing of the gay nightclub in Atlanta reminds us that this
    work is not over. That was wrong, and we have to stand against those
    things. We have got to go forward together. We don't have anybody to
    waste.
        And we surely have figured out finally that it is a great advantage
    to the United States to be the largest, most multiethnic,
    multireligious, diverse democracy in the world. We're still learning how
    to deal with it. But we still have to reach out to the rest of the
    world. We have to compete and win. And we have to educate our people to
    live and to be a humanizing, democratizing, freedom- and peace-promoting
    influence in the rest of the world. We can't do any of that unless we do
    it as one America. And I think that is a lasting legacy which you can
    all be proud of. And we have more work to do on that, and we will be
    doing more work.
        Let me finally say that I appreciate your being here for our party
    because this is not something a President can do alone. I'm glad to see
    Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater here tonight, who's going to
    acquit himself so well in that job, and my friend and sort of family
    member, Senator Barbara Boxer, here, who needs your help to get
    reelected in 2 years, and I hope you'll help her. She deserves it.
        And we're trying to do this together, and we're trying to do it
    together with the Republicans in Congress insofar as we and they--to be
    fair to them, because we have honest differences--insofar as we and they
    can in good conscience do that. The atmosphere is different here. And we
    have to keep it positive, constructive, building, trying to get
    something done to make this country great.

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        And the last thing I want to leave you with is this. I said this in
    the State of the Union, but I want all of you to think about it because
    it applies to our personal lives and our business lives as well as the
    life of this Nation. It is rare when things are going well on almost all
    fronts. You have to go back a good while to find a time when the economy
    was as strong as it is, when it was working for small businesses as well
    as big businesses, when the welfare rolls were going down, the poverty
    rate was dropping, the inequality among classes of working people was
    dropping, when all these things are happening at the same time, and when
    we're not threatened from without. And the tendency when things are
    going that well is either to relax and just sort of lay back and let
    things happen and have a good time, or to, frankly, find small things to
    fight about and fall out about and to be divided about. It sounds
    counterintuitive, but it's true. If you think about it in your own life,
    you see that. And we must not do either one of those things.
        This is a unique moment in the history of a country. When Abraham
    Lincoln was President, in the middle of the Civil War, someone asked him
    what his policy was, and he gave an answer that if I were to give it I
    would be nationally ridiculed. He said, ``My policy is to have no
    policy. I am controlled by events.'' Think how you would feel if I said
    that. [Laughter]
        Now, the truth is, he did have a policy. His policy was ``I'm going
    to hold the Union together if I have to--if everybody in the country has
    to die, including me.'' That was his policy, and he adhered to it. But
    it was also true that on a day-to-day basis he could have no policy, he
    was controlled by events. We are not controlled by events. We get to
    shape events. It is rare when this happens to a country.
        And we cannot blow this opportunity, either by being complacent or
    by falling out over small things. This is a time to be big and visionary
    and active and aggressive and a time to do it together. That is what I
    want you to be invested in. That is what I want you to feel that you are
    participating in.
        And whenever we announce a new initiative you agree with, or results
    of something you support, I want you to understand that it is all part
    of a bigger effort to create a country in which, really for the first
    time in our history, every person actually does have a chance to live
    out his or her dreams, a country which really can help to shape a world
    where there is more peace, more freedom, more prosperity, and in which
    we are organized in a different way to meet the different challenges to
    our security and to our values around the world.
        This is a very good time, but it imposes a special responsibility on
    us because nobody is beating us on the back with a lash, making us do
    the right thing. Our existence is not hanging by a thread so that we
    pray for the largeness of spirit that people seek when they know that.
    We just have to do it because we understand that this is a unique
    opportunity, and we are not going to pass it by.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:10 p.m. at the Sheraton Carlton Hotel. In
    his remarks, he referred to C. Thomas Hendrickson, chair, Democratic
    Business Council; Carol Pensky, treasurer, Steve Grossman, national
    chair, Alan D. Solomont, national finance chair, and Paul DeNino,
    finance director, Democratic National Committee; and attorney Stanley M.
    Chesley.