    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
    [June 16, 1997]
    [Pages 743-749]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner
    June 16, 1997

        Thank you. Thank you very much. Mr. Mayor, my friend and neighbor,
    thank you for that generous introduction and for your great leadership
    in Memphis. I'd like to thank all of those who made this dinner possible
    tonight: I thank Richard and Janice and Ernie and Bob, who aren't here,
    and Weldon and Mel Clarke and Marianne Niles and Bill Kirk, Larry
    Gibson, Marianne Spragen, Jeff Thompson, everyone else who got all of
    you here tonight. I'm glad to see you.
        You know, when you come to an event like this, even if you've been
    reelected President, right before you go in you're gripped with this
    recurring fear that you'll walk through the door and nobody will be
    there. [Laughter] So I'm very grateful to see you all here tonight.
    [Laughter]
        Let me say, too, that I'm delighted to be joined tonight by two
    members of the White House staff, Craig Smith and Minyon Moore. And I
    see Carroll Willis from the DNC. There are a lot of other people from
    the Democratic Committee here.
        I appreciate what the mayor said about my speech in San Diego, and I
    thought what I would try to do tonight just for a few minutes is to try
    to explain how that speech came to be. And we brought a few copies here
    tonight. If you want one on the way out, you can get it. But I thought I
    would like to explain how it came to be.
        In 1992 when I ran for President, I had an idea that we could make
    this country work again if we could liberate ourselves from kind of
    traditional political battles and think about what we wanted the country
    to look like in the 21st century and then think backward and say,
    ``Well, what would I have to do to get it that way?'' Don't say in the
    first instance, ``Well, you can't do both those things. They're
    inconsistent.'' Just ask yourself, what would you like our country to
    look like in the 21st century?
        And I wrote a little answer down, and I have said it a thousand
    times since then. And every single day I think about it. I want my
    country to be a country where the American dream of opportunity is alive
    for every person, not just some. I want all citizens to be good,
    responsible citizens and assume the responsibilities of citizenship. I
    want the United States to lead the world for peace and freedom 20, 30
    years from now, just like we are today. And I want us to live together
    as one community where we respect, we even celebrate our differences,
    but we're bound together as Americans.
        Now, those are the things I want. And I wrote it down over 5 years
    ago, and I've stuck with it ever since. Way back in 1991, before I made
    the decision to run for President, I said--nearly 6 years ago now--I
    said, ``No point in me running unless I've got a better reason than I'd
    like to live in the White House.'' [Laughter] What will I say when
    people say, ``What do you want to do? Why are you doing this?'' And
    every single day I think about it.
        So the first thing I wanted to do was to change the economic policy
    of the country. I said, ``We can't keep on spending all this money we
    don't have; we're going to bankrupt the country. But we don't want to
    walk away from the poor or the dispossessed or the future of the
    country. So we have to find a way to reduce the deficit, for example,
    and spend more on education and spend more on preserving the
    environment, because they're our children and our future.''
        And most people didn't think you could do that. But you can, and we
    did. We had to do some things that weren't so popular. We got rid of
    hundreds of programs that I thought we could do without. And we got rid
    of 16,000 pages of Federal regulations. And by attrition, not firing,
    the Government's 300,000 people smaller than it was. But we're spending
    more money on education, we're spending more money on the environment,
    and we've cut the deficit by 77 percent. And that's a big reason, not
    the only reason, by any means, but a big reason the economy has done as
    well as it has.
        On crime and social welfare, I thought to myself, there's got to be
    a way to protect the children and support people in moving from welfare
    to work but require them to do it, if they can, without hurting the
    kids. And that's what we've tried to do. We've had the biggest drop in
    welfare rolls in the history of America by far in the last 5 years.

    [[Page 744]]

        On crime, what I wanted to do was to deal with the causes. Anybody
    can make a tough speech on crime and pass one more bill raising the
    penalties. But it was obvious to me, having been a Governor who built
    more prison cells than any Governor in my State's history, that there
    would be a limit to how far we could jail our way out of this. There are
    several States that are already spending more money on prisons than they
    are on higher education--several States.
        So I said to myself, ``We can't stop being tough on people who do
    vicious things; you have to catch them, prosecute them, and put them in
    jail. But we have to stop this from occurring; we have to find a way to
    prevent crime.'' And it wasn't so hard to find because already there
    were people who were beginning to bring the crime rate down by going
    back to old-fashioned community policing and reaching out to our young
    people and trying to find kids something to say yes to as well as
    something to say no to.
        And so we passed a crime bill. We passed the Brady bill. We passed
    the assault weapons ban. I heard all the people say I was going to take
    all these hunters' guns away and it wouldn't do any good. Well, no
    hunters have lost their weapons, but 186,000 felons, fugitives, and
    stalkers have not been able to buy handguns. We were right about that.
    We're putting 100,000 police on the street. Crime has gone down every
    year, last year the biggest drop in 35 years.
        And I say that not to be self-serving but to say, if we can get our
    country always to think about what do we want the country to look like
    when our grandchildren are our age--and we're going through a time of
    change, so we have to think in different ways--then I think there's a
    way to find good-faith solutions to these problems. And no one can
    seriously question that we're better off than we were 5 years ago in
    terms of jobs and employment, new minority businesses, biggest drop in
    inequality since the 1960's among working families. So I said to myself,
    ``What do we still have to do?'' because I never wanted to get a second
    term just to ratify the fact that I'd done a good job in the first term.
    You could do that with a gold watch. No one should ever want to be
    reelected because they've done a good job.
        I remember the first time I ran for reelection--that I was
    successful anyway--[laughter]--in 1984. I went out, and things were
    going pretty well in my State, and this guy said, ``Are you going to run
    for reelection as Governor?'' I said, ``I think so,'' and I said, ``If I
    do, will you support me?'' He said, ``Probably.'' He said, ``What are
    you going to say?'' I said, ``I've done a good job, and we're better
    off.'' He said, ``Bill, you can't say that. That's what we hired you to
    do.'' [Laughter] That's pretty good, right? You think about that. He
    said, ``You can't brag on just doing what you were hired out to do.''
        So I said to myself, ``What are we going to do in these next 4
    years? What still needs to be done?'' And I'd just like to mention three
    or four things and end with the initiative on race, and you'll, I hope,
    understand why to me we're doing the right thing at the right time.
        I said, ``Okay, the economy is better; welfare rolls are down; crime
    rate is down.'' Another thing that was encouraging, we just saw that our
    fourth graders ranked way above the national average on international
    math and science tests, something that I was told for years would never
    happen because we had such a diverse student body and our kids were poor
    and all that. I've listened to that for years. But our teachers and
    others have been out there working to get these standards up, and we
    finally saw it manifested in international competition this year. This
    is something people have been working on, literally, for 10 years, since
    the ``Nation At Risk'' report was issued, now, 13 years ago. And it's
    finally--you're finally beginning to see people figuring out how to give
    poor kids the chance to prove they're just as smart as anybody, not just
    in town but around the world, and prove that we can make education work.
        So I said, ``What else do we have to do?'' Okay, one, we have to
    keep the economy going. The best antidote to all despair and
    disadvantage is having a chance to make a living, because if everybody
    else messes up, as long as you can make a living you can at least take
    care of your own.
        So I wanted to finish the job of balancing the budget in a way that
    would continue the strategy of investing in our future. And that's why I
    was thrilled with this budget agreement. I didn't agree with everything
    in it, but after all, we negotiated it with the leaders of the
    Republican Party in Congress and the leaders of the Democratic Party.
    But it will permit us

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    to balance the budget, and it has literally--literally--over 95 percent
    of the investments that I recommended in my budget to the Congress.
        It enables us to go on and invest in education and to invest in
    preserving the environment and invest in research and development and
    technology. It enables us to continue to try to grow the economy in the
    dispossessed areas--more than doubles the number of empowerment zones
    that have been so successful in some of our communities, including
    yours--more than doubles the number; has a special initiative for the
    District of Columbia that we have paid for there in there to try to get
    DC up and going again in a good way; has a brownfields initiative that
    all the mayors asked for to give private sector incentive to go back and
    invest in the inner cities in areas that had previously been
    unattractive because of environmental problems. It has--in this budget.
        So I said, ``This is a good thing''--has $3 billion to give to our
    communities to help put people on welfare back to work if the private
    sector can't pick them up. And I might add for those of you who are
    concerned about it, the States in this budget get the same amount of
    money they got in 1994, when the welfare rolls were at their all-time
    high, which means almost every State in America has got at least a 20
    percent cushion that they can use to do things like pay prospective
    employers the welfare check as a wage and training supplement.
        So I'd really like to see the African-American business community go
    out there and hit every State legislature in the country and say,
    ``Listen, you asked for this. You got it. You've got to give these
    people a chance to work. Give us some of that money, and we will train
    them and give them a job and make sure they're not hurting their kids
    and they're taken care of in that way.'' And that ought to happen all
    over this country. We are spending much, much more money on welfare
    today than we would have spent if the old law had stayed in place
    because the rolls are down by more than 20 percent. But the States have
    it, and they will live to regret it if they don't spend the money now to
    make folks independent and put them into the workplace and put them into
    the mainstream of American life.
        So all that, anyway, is in this budget. That's the first thing.
        The second thing I wanted to do is to emphasize two specific things
    in education. One of them doesn't cost much money. And that is, I wanted
    to provide funds to help the Department of Education work with the
    appropriate experts to develop a test that would grow right out of the
    ones we're using now--we're just not giving them to all kids--to ask
    every child in the country in the fourth grade to take a reading test,
    in the eighth grade to take a math test by 1999, based on these
    international standards so we could see how our children were doing,
    with no adverse consequences to the kids, just a way to see whether we
    were really challenging our children hard enough to reach the right
    standards.
        Now keep in mind, this last international test that showed us way
    above the average of math and science in the fourth grade was given to a
    representative sample of American students by race and income and
    region. Nobody's fooled with this. And what I want to do is to see every
    child have the chance to have the basic education necessary to succeed.
        One of the things I said in my speech in San Diego--I don't know if
    you heard it--applies to Hispanic-Americans, who are legendary for being
    willing to leave school early to support their parents in low-wage jobs
    that they have to work long hours at. That was a responsible thing to do
    10 years ago. Today, it's not a responsible thing to do. The high school
    completion rates of African-Americans and whites are almost identical.
    The high school completion rates of Hispanics are 25 percent lower--25
    percent lower. And there is nothing all my social policies will do,
    nothing all my economic policies will do for any young person who is at
    least not willing to finish high school and get 2 years of further
    training. But a lot of people who have parents in need--their hearts are
    in there, they want to quit and go to work, help support their parents,
    but what happens is they get stuck in these jobs and their incomes go
    down.
        So I'm trying to get people to focus on those first 12 years with a
    view toward, number one, everybody should finish and, number two, when
    you finish, your diploma ought to be worth something. And the only way
    to do it is to have high standards and not be afraid of them, and not
    punish people if they don't measure up, but just show them where the bar
    is and then help everybody clear it.
        The second thing I want to do is open the doors of college to
    everyone. And that's why we proposed to give a tax credit worth about

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    $1,500 a year for the first 2 years of college and then a tax deduction
    for any cost of higher education after that. We know from the 1990
    census that every young person--not every but most young people who get
    at least 2 years of college or more get a job with a growing income. And
    young people who have less than 2 years of college or who don't even
    have a high school diploma tend to get a job with a stagnant or a
    declining income. We know that's where the break was in 1990. And we
    know that our economy is now producing more of the high-wage jobs. In
    the last 2 years--that's another thing--more than half the new jobs in
    the last 2 years have been in higher wage categories. So that's the
    second thing I wanted to do.
        The third thing I wanted to do that I've got some differences in our
    party about--and there's a lot of differences within the Republican
    Party; both parties are split on this--is to continue to expand the
    network of trading partnerships the United States has. But we negotiated
    200 trade agreements to get fair and equal access to other markets in my
    first term, and we're now the world's number one exporter again. And one
    of the reasons more than half our jobs pay above average is that so many
    of them are tied to exports.
        Now, tomorrow the First Lady and I and others are going to announce
    a very important initiative with regard to Africa that we've been
    working on for some time and that really was reinforced by her recent
    trip there. But I would hope that all of you who are business people
    would help us to continue our normal trade relations with China and to
    push them on things we disagree with but to keep involved with them, and
    to continue our reaching out to Latin America, even as we reach out to
    Africa. You know, we're going to have a billion people in Latin America
    before you know it. And they're very excited and would like to deal with
    us. But last year, the southern countries in Latin America, Brazil,
    Argentina, and the others in a group called MERCOSUR, for the first time
    ever did more business with Europe than the United States. Why? Because
    we stopped reaching out to them with our trade agreements.
        So it's not like these folks aren't going to go on to create a
    future, and we have a great opportunity. And if we want more high-wage
    jobs created so that when we educate young people they'll be able to get
    good jobs, we have to create the high-wage jobs. Mr. Brown's father
    literally gave his life for that cause. And that is the right thing to
    do. That is not against working people. What is good for working people
    is to create more high-wage jobs in America. And so I hope you will
    support that.
        The fourth thing that we have to face is that with all of our
    successes, 20 percent of our kids, at least, are still living in
    poverty--minority children, much higher percentages. Now, in the end, no
    society can permit that without paying an awesome price. And that is
    something, by the way, that ought to factor into this affirmative action
    debate, when people say, ``Oh, you don't need it.'' You cannot leave
    people isolated for 18 years from the mainstream of economic and social
    life and then tell them, ``There are no barriers to your entry into
    colleges, universities, or starting your own business.'' You cannot do
    that.
        So the reason I thought the Presidents' Summit of Service that we
    did, the former Presidents and General Powell did in Philadelphia was so
    important is it gives us a chance to mobilize millions of people around
    specific objectives that I'm also trying to see the Government do its
    part in. And let me just reiterate them real quick.
        We want to see that every child has a safe place to grow up. I've
    got a juvenile justice bill before the Congress now that is both tough
    and smart, modeled on what they've been doing in Boston where our
    chairman, Mr. Grossman, lives, where not a single child has been killed
    by a gun in a year and a half. Don't tell me you can't do that. Not one.
        But do we need volunteers? Yes. Why? Because look what they did in
    Boston. I can pass all the bills in the world, in addition to the
    probation officers and police officers, to have all these people walking
    the streets, saving these kids' lives. And you go to any city where the
    juvenile crime rate is going down, they have both citizens and
    appropriate action by the public sector.
        The second thing we want is for every child to have marketable
    skills. I already talked about that, education.
        The third thing we want is for every child to have access to health
    care. And I was really appreciative of that--this is one thing that
    General Powell and I share a common obsession with. He said, ``I can't
    believe we let working

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    families get by without health care. If I proposed to end the health
    care guarantee for people in the military when I was Chairman of the
    Joint Chiefs of Staff, there would have been a riot.'' No one in America
    would think about depriving military people and their children of health
    care. But we have 10 million kids, for example, who don't have health
    care. And we've got enough money in that balanced budget to cover half
    of them. We need to finish the job. We need to finish the job. It's not
    right. It's not right.
        The fourth thing and the fifth thing are things that have to be done
    at the community level. We want every child to have a mentor, and we
    want every child to have a chance to serve. And I think that's
    important. Kids who serve feel more important; they know they matter.
    And 90 percent-plus of young people in a recent national poll said that
    they would serve in their community, even poor kids, if just somebody
    would ask them, if somebody would ask them and give them a chance.
        So those are the things that I'm trying to get done now for our
    country, to keep this momentum going. But I really believe--and this
    brings me to the race initiative. Right now we just have one State,
    Hawaii, where there is no majority race. Within 3 years, California, our
    largest State, will be the same. Within somewhere between 30 to 50
    years, depending on patterns of immigration, it will be true for the
    Nation as a whole. That means that we really will test whether or not we
    are not a nation of race or place but a nation of ideas and ideals.
    Politicians have been saying that in speeches for a century now--
    [laughter]--about to find out. [Laughter] And I don't know about you,
    but when we find out, I know what I want the answer to be.
        Think how much time I've spent as your President and how much time
    I'm going to spend in the next 3\1/2\ years, dealing with hatred and
    mistrust in the Middle East born of ethnic and religious difference,
    dealing with hundreds of years of accumulated animosity in Northern
    Ireland born of their ethnic--originally--and religious differences, the
    Scotch-Irish and the Irish, the Protestants and the Catholics. How many
    hundreds of thousands of people died in Rwanda and how many had to be
    saved by us and the French and others because of the fights between the
    Hutus and the Tutsis? Most of us, if we walked down the street in one of
    those African communities, could not tell the difference, but they knew
    enough to hack each other's children to death.
        Or what about the Bosnians, where there is literally no biological
    difference between them? They are by accident of history divided because
    of the political forces coming together where Bosnia is now. The
    Orthodox became Serbs; the Catholics became Croat--or vice versa--and
    the people that were left in the middle were colonized by the Ottoman
    Empire and became Muslims. But they now are ethnically different, and
    people who lived together as friends and neighbors for decades turned on
    each other like that.
        So when you think everything is hunky-dory here and, oh, we might
    have an occasional riot when there is a controversial thing like Rodney
    King, but we won't really ever have a disintegrating energy in this
    country, you just think about how easy it was for those people to fall
    on each other.
        Now, I know we've got a lot more to lose, you would argue, than they
    do. But no great nation has ever had a multiracial, multiethnic,
    integrated society. The Russians are doing a good job, actually, of
    trying to preserve their democracy with a whole lot of different ethnic
    groups. And they had that unfortunate difficulty in Chechnya, but there
    are a lot of Chechnyas over there where they don't have difficulty. But
    they live apart, physically apart, and normally in distinct, what we
    would call, States. Here we are, together.
        So I said to myself, ``This would be a good time to do this because
    we're not having a civil rights crisis, and we're not under the illusion
    that there's just this X little problem--even if it's a big problem--
    different perceptions of the fairness of law enforcement, for example--
    that if we fix, everything will be hunky-dory, and we'll go on. We need
    to imagine what it's going to be like 30 years from now.'' Because if
    you think about it, we can have a good economic policy, a good social
    policy, we can even begin to do the things we need to do to rescue our
    children, and if we can't get along together and we don't trust each
    other and we don't feel that people are treated in the proper way, then
    the rest of it could just unravel on us somewhere down the road.
        Now, that's why I did this. And do I know it will be successful? Do
    I know that there's some mechanical way to define success? No, I don't
    know that, but I think it will be.

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        And that's how I want all of us to see this affirmative action
    debate. Look, if I didn't think we needed it, I'd be happy to shed it.
    If somebody could offer me a credible alternative and then test it for a
    year or so and proved that it worked, I'd be happy to shed it. What I
    know is that we have a vested interest as a nation, without regard to
    race, in having universities where people of different backgrounds get
    educated together, in giving people from each different ethnic group in
    the United States a chance to have their fair share of--not a quota but
    at least a share, a representative group of people in any form of human
    endeavor, to inspire others to come along, to have economic self-
    sufficiency.
        You know, if you look at why--why does the United States have an
    unemployment rate under 5 percent and a lot of the European countries
    have higher unemployment rates? One reason is people like you, small-
    business people, independent business people, people that proved they
    could put together something, hire a few people, work over a lifetime,
    and build something. And we have a vested interest as a people in saying
    that there are pockets of economic self-sufficiency and entrepreneurs in
    every neighborhood in this country. And if we had it, we wouldn't have
    half the problems we've got today.
        You just think about it. If every block in this country had one or
    two small businesses succeeding on it, there would be people on that
    block employed, there would be role models for those kids walking the
    streets to see, there would be people giving money to the school to make
    sure they don't have to give up their music programs. You just think
    about it.
        So we have a vested interest, all of us, in trying to make sure we
    can all participate. So, to me, this affirmative action debate is
    somehow smaller than the larger issue. I will--I'm doing my best to
    honor the Supreme Court decision. I'm doing my best to have reasonable
    standards. I hope that there will be other things we can do as well.
    That's why I want the empowerment zone to double, the empowerment zones
    to pass. We've got a lot more economic things we need to do.
        But the larger issue is, what do you want this country to look like
    30 years from now? Every other question should be answered in terms of
    that. Once you ask the right question, it's a whole lot easier to come
    to a commonsense answer.
        Now, what we're going to try to do with this race initiative, just
    very briefly, is, first of all, stick with this vision of racial
    reconciliation, try to get everybody to agree on what we want the
    country to look like.
        Second, get the facts out. Now, that's important. I think when we
    decide what to do with the welfare system, for example, it would be
    helpful if everyone in America knew that last year in Chicago there were
    six applicants for every minimum wage job that opened up and nine
    applicants in St. Louis. Don't you? I was a little concerned that over
    40 percent of African-Americans and over 40 percent of whites, when
    asked what the percentage of the American population was black, said
    between 20 and 49, when the correct answer is 12. We need to know the
    facts.
        Then the third thing we want to do is to have this kind of a dialog
    in every community in the country. We want to recruit and encourage
    local leadership.
        And finally, we want to come up with some specific, concrete actions
    to be done at the national level and at the community level. That's what
    we're trying to do.
        But I wanted you to understand tonight because I want you to be a
    part of this; I want you to feel like it's yours. And I want you to go
    out and find your friends and neighbors and ask them to be a part of
    this. And I want you to find people that don't agree with you on
    everything and ask them to be a part of this. Because this is a huge
    deal.
        If we can pull this off, the United States will be by far the best
    positioned country in the global society of the 21st century. And if we
    act like we don't have to think about it until the wheel runs off, there
    is a chance that the wheel will run off. And even if it doesn't, we will
    never be what we ought to be. That is what this whole thing is about.
        So I ask you, go out there and tell people--if they want to be
    cynical, skeptical, say, ``I don't know if it will amount to anything. I
    don't know about that Clinton; he's got to have something to do in his
    second term''--whatever they're saying out there--let them say it. Tell
    them to participate anyway, saddle up. They don't have anything to lose
    by trying. I'll tell you one thing, if we all try we'll be better off

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    than if we just let it go. So I ask you for your help.
        Now, the last thing I want you to know is--that's why I want you to
    be proud to be here, because I think these things that our Democratic
    Party stands for now are the future. I think they're not just Democratic
    future; they're not just African-American, Hispanic-American, you name
    it; this is America's future. And we're going to have to make it
    together. And tonight, by your being here, you're making it more likely
    that we will do just that.
        God bless you. Thank you.
        Let me say one other thing before I leave. I don't know who all was
    here from my office before I got here, but we've got--Bob Nash, who is
    my Director of Personnel, is here. If you want to be Ambassador, ask
    him. He has the hardest job in the Government. He has to tell one person
    yes and 10 people no. [Laughter] And Maurice Daniels, the Vice
    President's political division person, is here.
        And let me just say one other thing, too. I want you to know,
    because a lot of you are friends of hers, that Hillary and I were deeply
    saddened by what happened to Betty Shabazz, and we've been praying for
    her, and I know you are, too.
        That's a whole other subject, but it ought to remind us that we
    don't have a kid to waste. You don't want any of them to get away from
    you, and they do all too soon and all too easily, which is another
    reason we ought to think about what we came here to do tonight.
        Thank you. Bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:24 p.m. in the Crystal Ballroom at the
    Sheraton Carlton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Willie W.
    Herenton of Memphis, TN; Richard Mays, attorney, Little Rock, AR, and
    Janice Griffin, vice president, Prudential, cochairs of the event;
    Ernest Green, managing partner, Lehman Brothers; Robert L. Johnson,
    chairman and chief executive officer, BET Holdings, Inc.; Weldon Latham,
    Jr., partner, Pittman, Potts and Trobridge; Mel Clarke, president,
    Metroplex; Marianne Niles, president, National Association of Investment
    Companies; Bill Kirk, partner, Reid and Priest; Larry Gibson, partner,
    Shapiro and Orlander, Baltimore, MD; Marianne Spragen, president, W.R.
    Lazard; Jeff Thompson, accountant, Thompson and Bazilo; Carroll Willis,
    director, communications services division, and Steve Grossman, national
    chair, Democratic National Committee; Michael Brown, son of former
    Secretary of Commerce Ronald H. Brown; Gen. Colin L. Powell, USA (ret.),
    chairman, America's Promise--the Alliance for Youth; and arson victim
    Betty Shabazz, widow of civil rights leader Malcolm X.