[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
[June 23, 1997]
[Pages 803-805]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Luncheon for Senator Barbara Boxer in San Francisco
June 23, 1997

    Thank you very much, Senator Boxer, Senator Torricelli. Delaine 
Eastin, thank you for being here and for supporting our educational 
standards and excellence movement. I thank the Saxophone Quartet and the 
Bacich School second grade choir. I thought they were both terrific. 
[Applause] Thank you. I guarantee you one thing, when the kids were up 
there singing, every one of us was saying, ``I wonder if I could sing 
that song, if I could remember all those States in alphabetical order.'' 
[Laughter] Good citizenship.
    When Barbara Boxer was finishing her remarks, Bob Torricelli, who is 
an old friend of mine--old friends talk, she should have chided us for 
talking--[laughter]--Bob Torricelli leaned over to me and said, ``She is 
the best spirit in the entire Senate.''
    You know, in the spirit of campaign reform, I think you know one of 
the things that I favor is full disclosure. And for those of you who 
don't know, Barbara Boxer's first grandchild is my second nephew, so 
that's really why I'm here. [Laughter] It has nothing to do with party 
or conviction or anything. Therefore, I have had an unusual opportunity 
to get to know this woman, and what I can tell you is that everything I 
have ever seen of her in private is completely consistent with the face 
and the voice she presents to the public. And that is important. What 
you are seeing is exactly what you get 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 
365 weeks a year.
    And while we normally but not always agree on the issues, the thing 
I would like for you to think about today is the spirit, the heart of 
the matter. I've been here a good while now in Washington, and I had a 
real life before I moved to Washington--[laughter]--and I expect to have 
a real life when I leave. And I have almost come to the conclusion that 
more important than the ideological debates or the party differences is 
which spirit will dominate Washington as we move into the 21st century.
    I mean, here we are basically with the strongest economy in a 
generation, with an unemployment rate below 5 percent for the first time 
in 24 years; the lowest inflation in 30 years; and for us Democrats, a 
very important statistic, the biggest decline in inequality among 
working families in over three decades; the number one exporter in the 
world; the lowest deficit as a percentage of our income of any major 
economy in the world; a crime rate that dropped--the biggest drop in 36 
years last year; before the welfare law took effect, the biggest drop in 
welfare rolls in the history of the Republic. And yet, there are really 
still people in Washington who seem like they're mad about it. 
[Laughter] And they want to do whatever it takes to make sure you don't 
think about it. And this whole spirit, you know, are you going to be for 
the people who try to drive you down or the people who try to lift you 
up. That's really what it's about.
    You know, you listen to some of these people talk in the Nation's 
Capital, you'd think that they spent the whole morning sucking lemons 
before they got up to give the speech. [Laughter] And you listen to 
Barbara Boxer talk in the middle of a rainstorm and you'd be convinced 
you were on the beach in some sunny resort. [Laughter] It's a difference 
in approach to life and attitude and whether you believe the purpose of 
politics is to elevate the human spirit and bring people together across 
the lines that divide them and make people believe that tomorrow can be 
better than today, or whether you believe the purpose of it is to carve 
out your little niche of power and anything that threatens it, including 
good news, should be crushed at the earliest possible moment with 
whatever means at hand.
    Now, that really is the great choice here. You must not let this 
woman be defeated by all the people who will say, well, she's too 
liberal on this, that, or the other thing. If she ever made a mistake in 
her life, it was a mistake of the head, not the heart. And don't you 
ever forget it. We all make mistakes.
    And that is really what is at issue. I have done everything I can as 
President to heal the kind of divisive, destructive, political climate 
that has come to dominate too much of the discourse in Washington, the 
automatic assumption that anybody who is different from you has got 
something terrible wrong with them, the feeling that anything you can do 
to beat somebody who is

[[Page 804]]

your opponent, no matter how much you have to denigrate them, is all 
right. I've tried to get beyond that. I've tried to treat my opponents 
with respect and dignity and honor. And I've tried to restore what I 
thought was the best tradition of this country.
    But you've got a Senator that works like crazy every day, that gets 
things done. You heard that list. One thing she didn't mention--she'll 
be glad Torricelli told me this. He said she forgot to say something. 
She forgot to say that when she was fighting for that emergency 
supplemental that we got passed for all the emergencies, one of the 
things it had in it was money for breast cancer research in the San 
Francisco area to see whether environmental causes are leading the 
higher rates of breast cancer here than other parts of the country. She 
did that.
    You know, I hope you'll forgive me, but I'm as high on America as 
those kids are. I think they're right. I think they're right. And I 
don't pretend to have all the answers. All I know is that this country 
is better off today than it was when Barbara Boxer got elected to the 
Senate. I know that she has made material contributions to the efforts 
that our administration has made to grow the economy, to give poor 
people a chance, to increase the availability of education, to increase 
the accessibility of health care, to drive the crime rate down, and to 
bring us together across the lines that too often divide us. That's what 
I know.
    And that's far more important than any specific issue that you can 
turn into a 30-second ad one way or the other. And I know that the 
spirit she brings to public life is the spirit we need from all people 
who go to Washington to represent you without regard to their party or 
their philosophy. If we brought that kind of spirit into all of our 
endeavors, instead of thinking about how we could drive a stake into the 
spirit of the American people by our short-term advantage, this country 
would have no problems.
    And also, we cannot afford to be afraid of the future. And that sort 
of divisive talk, you know, it makes people afraid of the future. We 
don't have anything to be afraid of if we just face our problems, face 
our challenges, realize that we've still got a lot to do, realize that 
we don't have a person to waste, and realize that we all deserve to be 
represented by people who wake up in the right spirit.
    And I believe that this woman is a rare treasure for our country. 
Yes, we're now united by marriage. [Laughter] Yes, I'm personally crazy 
about her. That's all true. But the most important thing--I'm not 
running anymore, I won't be on the ballot anymore. I've been in public 
life for a long time. I've seen a lot of people come and go. Contrary to 
what you may read or feel, the overwhelming majority of people I have 
known of both parties and all philosophies have been scrupulously honest 
people who worked hard and made less money than they could've made doing 
nearly anything else with people of their talent and energy and ability, 
who wanted to make this a better country. And everybody who is trying to 
convince you of the contrary is wrong. And people who try to keep the 
American people in a bad frame of mind because they just can't bear to 
think that somebody is happy and successful somewhere are wrong.
    And what we need to do is to be focused on our common problems and 
our common business. So don't let the people who trade on fear and only 
win when you're unhappy turn Barbara Boxer into a cardboard cutout of 
what she really is. Don't let that happen. And remember, it's way more 
important than the issues; it's about the spirit of the country. It's 
about the spirit of California. California did not get where it is, you 
didn't come back from all those disasters and a terrible recession just 
on my policies. I'd like to think I helped, but you didn't get there--
you got there on the spirit of the people. And if everybody had sat 
around, being in the frame of mind that the kind of people who are going 
to fight her so hard want you to be in when you go vote on election day, 
you would not have recovered.
    We cannot behave on election day in a way that is different from the 
way we want to behave on every other day of the year. We cannot look at 
the world in a different way on election day in a way different from the 
way we want to look at our life and expect to get the kind of elected 
representatives we want and the kind of collective decisions we have to 
make as a people. Remember that.
    Remember Senator Torricelli's line. And through the ups and the 
downs, you stay with her and you make up your mind that you will not let 
the people of California be taken in by an attack on her because she is 
the great

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spirit of the Senate. And that's what America needs: the right spirit.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 12:24 p.m. at the Hyatt Regency San 
Francisco Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Delaine Eastin, 
California superintendent of public instruction.