[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

[[Page 745]]

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

[[Page 746]]

$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

[[Page 747]]

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.