    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
    [September 24, 1997]
    [Pages 1226-1230]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in Pittsburgh
    September 24, 1997

        That was an interesting introduction. [Laughter] You know, I have to
    begin by saying, when my friend of more than 30 years now, David Matter,
    made that reference to Henry Kissinger's joke about it's the 90 percent
    of the politicians that give the other 10 percent a bad name, I think
    it's only fair to tell you that he succeeded me as the president of our
    class at Georgetown. [Laughter] He was in the 90 percent. [Laughter] I
    never said anything like that until this event was already put together
    and organized and successful.
        Thank you, David. I want to thank Phil and Diann. I want to thank my
    good friend John Connelly; it's wonderful to see him up and about, so
    trim, young looking. [Laughter] Audrey; and Mr. Mayor, thank you; and
    thank you, Mike, for what you said. And Commissioner Cranmer, we're glad
    to have you here.
        I was hoping there would be at least one Republican here because
    when I came in here, I said, ``This is a pretty nice club. It makes me
    feel almost like a Republican.'' [Laughter] And one of the people at the
    table said, ``If we had held this dinner a few years ago, you would have
    had to be one to get in.'' [Laughter] So it's nice to see that even that
    barrier of discrimination is being broken down. [Laughter]
        I'd like to thank all the other folks who are here: Judge Del Sol;
    former State Treasurer Catherine Baker Knoll; former Lieutenant
    Governor, Chairman Singel; your former mayor, Sophie Masloff--we had a
    lot of fun together in Pittsburgh. Mayor, I have fun with you, too, but
    it's not quite the same, you know. [Laughter] And Senator Mellow,
    Senator Bodak, and all of you, thank you for coming.
        I love coming here. I like western Pennsylvania; I love Pittsburgh.
    It's one of those towns where I can walk up to anybody on the street and
    ask them what the score was in last night's Pirates game, and they'll
    all know. It's a place where people are proud of their roots, proud of
    their ties, proud of their community.
        I'm delighted that you have some ties to Arkansas--my good friend
    Lazar Palnick there--

    [[Page 1227]]

    even though I'm a Southern Baptist, I used to refer to his father as my
    rabbi. And I've always felt a certain affinity for this community and an
    affinity for western Pennsylvania. And you've been wonderful to me now
    through two elections for President. And this is really the first
    opportunity I've had since the '96 election just to say simply, thank
    you. And to all the people of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, thank you
    for being so supportive of what we have tried to do together.
        This is a proud time for America. The economy is in the best shape
    it's been in in a generation. We're working hard to make the world a
    more peaceful, more prosperous place. And we're proving once again that
    we can constructively deal with our problems.
        It's the sort of time that I dreamed about in 1991 when I declared
    for President. And the country seemed drifting; it seemed divided to me;
    it seemed--it was clearly in difficult economic shape. And the thing
    that bothered me most-- you know, we'll always have bad times as well as
    good times. No course of life ever runs smooth; it's part of human
    nature and the inherent rhythm of events. But what bothered me in '91
    was, it seemed to me that we had no strategy, no clear vision that a
    strategy could be developed to support. And when I think of how fast the
    world is changing, how fast--the way we work, the way we live, the way
    we relate to each other and people indeed all across our Nation and all
    across the world, I still have the same simple vision I had when I
    declared for President.
        When I leave office in the 21st century, I want this to be a country
    where everybody who is responsible enough to work for it has an
    opportunity to live out his or her dreams. I want this to be a country
    that is celebrating its diversity but coming together as one America,
    not being divided as so many other places in the world are divided
    today, by race or religion or culture. And I want us still to be the
    world's leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity, not meddling
    around the world and trying to solve all the problems but being a beacon
    of hope, an example and, yes, being involved where we can make a
    difference. That's what I want for America.
        And I've worked hard for that for the last 5 years. None of it would
    have been possible if it hadn't been for people like you all across this
    country. But every one of you know that this area of Pennsylvania has
    been especially good to me and to the Vice President and to our efforts.
        Now, in order to achieve that, it seemed to me we needed to say,
    ``Well, what kind of policies would you develop to achieve that? What
    would they be like? '' And I'll tell you what we talked about back in
    '91, before I ever announced for President. I think it's a mistake to
    run for President before you have a general idea about what you're going
    to do if you get there. It's kind of--the Presidential election is this
    vast job interview. It's pretty scary; 100 million people can want to
    hire you, and you can still get fired. It's pretty disorienting.
    [Laughter]
        But it seemed to me we needed policies that focused on the future,
    not the past; on unity, not division; on the interest of people and our
    basic values in this country, not power politics; that focused on
    America leading, not America following; that focused on the need for a
    certain kind of Government, not a Government to do everything and
    certainly not a Government to do nothing but a Government whose primary
    mission would be to give people the tools to make the most of their own
    lives; and finally, that we had to begin with a new economic strategy
    that would make the economy work for everybody, not just for a few
    people.
        And we began with the economic strategy. I used to say it's a stool
    with three legs: We have to reduce the deficit until we balance the
    budget; we still have to find the money to invest in people and in
    technology and in research, the things that will build our future; and
    we have to expand American trade in our products and services, because
    we only have 4 percent of the world's population, but we enjoy a high
    standard of living because we produce 22 percent of the world's wealth.
    And in a world becoming increasingly competitive, increasingly open,
    increasingly interconnected, you cannot expect to maintain 20 percent of
    the wealth with 4 percent of the people unless you go where the business
    is.
        So that's what we've tried to do, hard, for 5 years. And the results
    have been what you know they are: unemployment under 5 percent, 13
    million new jobs, over a million new construction jobs--a lot of you
    helped to create them in this room--half a million new machine tool
    operators, half a million new people working in transportation. The last
    2 years, over half

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    the new jobs paid above average wages, something that was not the case
    for new jobs for many years in the 1980's.
        The average income is beginning to rise, and that gap which had been
    widening for 20 years seems like it may be coming back together now
    between the middle class, lower income working people, and upper income
    people. From World War II to the mid-1970's, we all grew together. And
    then as the economy began to change and we didn't develop an effective
    response to it, we began to grow apart, so that those of us that were in
    a very good position to take advantage of the emerging world economy did
    just fine, and those of us that weren't got hurt. And now we're
    beginning to turn that around, partly because of the second part of the
    strategy, investing in people. If people are the most important part of
    the new economy, it follows by definition, their health, their
    education, and their ability to raise strong families are the most
    important parts of our strategy there.
        So we've worked hard to do what we could to stabilize the health
    care situation for Americans, to help do things that would lower the
    rate of inflation without eroding the quality of care, pass the Kennedy-
    Kassebaum bill which says you can't lose your health insurance if you
    change jobs or somebody in your family gets sick.
        We had a dramatic increase in research and support for diabetes in
    this last budget, which the American Diabetes Association said was the
    most important thing since the discovery of insulin in 1927. We've
    worked hard on breast cancer, prostate cancer, a lot of the other major
    health problems this country faces. We've worked hard to do something to
    put a stop to the marketing and sales of cigarettes to teenagers, still
    our number one public health problem.
        In this last budget, $24 billion was allocated to provide health
    insurance to 5 million children, half the children who don't have health
    insurance in this country. Almost all of them, by the way, are in
    working families whose place of work does not provide them health
    insurance.
        In education, we now have had from 1993 to the present an enormous
    increase in Federal support for education. This last balanced budget had
    the biggest increase in Federal support for education since Lyndon
    Johnson was the President of the United States in 1965, and the biggest
    increase in helping people to go to college since the GI bill was passed
    50 years ago. And it's going to change the future of America.
        Now, with the things that were in this last budget, we will have a
    million work-study positions for people who go to college; the biggest
    increase in Pell grants in 20 years; an IRA where people can save in an
    IRA and then withdraw from it without penalty if they use it for their
    education or their children's education; a tax credit of up to $1,500 a
    year for the first 2 years of college; a HOPE scholarship to open the
    doors of 2 years of college to everybody; and continued tax credits for
    any kind of education, undergraduate or graduate, or job training after
    high school.
        We can now say for the first time in the history of the country--
    when all these tax credits kick in next year, we'll be able to say for
    the first time that any American who's willing to work for it can have a
    college education. That's never been true before. And that's something
    all of you can be proud of, because if it hadn't been for you and people
    like you, we in Washington would never have been in a position to do it.
    It was the central pledge I made to the American people in the 1996
    campaign.
        So we're moving along. Crime has dropped every year the last 5
    years. Part of the reason is we're supporting local strategies that
    work--more community police in the street. The Brady bill has kept
    250,000 people with criminal or mental health histories who shouldn't
    have handguns from buying them. And there was a study released just last
    week which said that illicit gun dealers have had terrible difficulty
    operating in places where it's vigorously enforced. This is a safer
    country than it was 5 years ago.
        We have the lowest percentage of our population on welfare than
    we've had since 1970, in spite of 20 years of the most active
    immigration in our country's history. Why? Because we pursued a welfare
    reform policy that was tough on work, but pro-family and pro-child.
        So you can be proud of where we are because all of you had a role in
    it. But it only sort of indicates where we have to go. Now, as I look to
    the future both this year and the years beyond, we've still got to do
    things to keep this economy growing. That's why I want this fast-track
    trade authority that I went to the AFL-CIO to talk about today. And we
    differ about it.

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        But we're not going to save any jobs by leaving our trade relations
    as is with countries a long way from here, when our markets are more
    open than theirs. But if they open their markets to us, we can sell
    more. Seventy percent of the growth in America's overseas trade this
    last year came from Canada to the tip of South America and our own
    backyard. And the further you go away from here, the less likely it is
    that any of you or anybody else would want to shut a plant down in
    America and move it down there to sell products back here. Labor is
    becoming an increasingly smaller part of manufacturing costs anyway.
    This is about selling America's goods and services, and it's also about
    partnerships with new democracies, to keep us the world's leading force
    for peace and freedom.
        We've got an education fight going that's a real doozie in
    Washington now over whether the Congress will prohibit me and the
    Secretary of Education from spending any tax money to have a
    nonpolitical board, established by Congress years ago, with Republicans
    and Democrats on it and educators on it, develop a national examination
    for reading for fourth graders and math for eighth graders, to be given
    voluntarily and with no mandated consequences to every fourth and eighth
    grader in the country in 1999. Why? We are the only advanced economy in
    the world that does not have a national set of academic standards, a
    definition for academic excellence, even a definition for academic
    adequacy.
        This has nothing to do with local control of the schools. Reading
    and math are the same in Michigan and Montana and south Florida and San
    Diego and northeastern Maine and northwestern Washington. It's about
    whether we believe our kids can learn and whether we're going to expect
    them to. I can tell you this: All the evidence is they can. Our schools
    are getting better. This last year, for the first time ever, America's
    fourth graders scored above the international average in math and
    science. And we had a few thousand kids take it, but they were
    representative by race, by region, and by income.
        So our kids can learn what they need to know to do well, but we've
    got to measure it to see whether they do or not. Any of you running any
    enterprise here, if I suggested that you stop measuring it tomorrow, you
    would be without profits before long. If you didn't keep up with your
    performance, if you didn't define success in some way, if you had no way
    to know whether you were up or down, truly, measured against the
    competition which is global in nature, you would have difficulty. That's
    all I want to do.
        We're going to try to deal with some of the most difficult issues in
    the world over the next several months in trying to reconcile our need
    to grow the economy and the environmental problems that are developing
    around the globe and the requests that have been made of all of us,
    Europe, Japan, all the advanced economies, to try to do something about
    greenhouse gas emissions. Can we do it without hurting economic growth?
    Of course we can, if we do it right. It's going to be something that all
    of you will have to be concerned about and involved in.
        We have to reform the entitlements for the baby boom generation so
    the next generation will have Social Security and Medicare. It is wrong
    for us not to make modest changes now that will save Social Security and
    Medicare over the long run. We've already made some modest changes in
    Medicare that I believe will add more than a decade to the life of the
    Trust Fund. But you can't expect all these young people to support those
    of us who are in the baby boom generation, when there will be barely two
    people working for every one person retired, without making some
    changes. We cannot raise the payroll tax any more on ordinary people or
    small businesses. There are ways--modest changes that can be made over
    the next 2 to 3 to 4 years, very modest changes which will avoid that,
    and we have to deal with that.
        Just one or two other things I wanted to mention. We are finally, it
    looks like, going to get a vote in the Senate for the first time in 5
    years on campaign finance reform, and I think that's a good thing. But I
    want everyone to understand, who is here at this dinner today, the real
    problem with campaigns is how much they cost. The amount of money raised
    is a direct relationship with the perceived requirements of how much
    they cost. So if you want to have campaign finance reform, particularly
    if this country is not prepared to go to taxpayer-financed elections,
    like many nations do across the board, except we just do it for
    Presidents now, then we must do one thing: You must give people access
    to mass communications for free or reduced rates if they adhere to the
    standards of the campaign finance laws. That must be done. And we're
    looking into that.

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        But the Senate has got a good bill before it. They're going to
    debate it. They're going to vote on it, and that's a good thing. And I'm
    proud that it was precipitated at least in part by the unanimous vote of
    the members of my caucus in the Senate--our party's caucus--to support
    the McCain-Feingold bill.
        Finally, let me say this. If you look to the future and you ask,
    what is the issue most likely to define America in the 21st century--of
    all the many issues we can deal with, what is the issue most likely to
    define us? Well, what has defined us for 200 years? People think this is
    a place uniquely devoted to freedom and opportunity, where every person
    gets his chance at the brass ring.
        They know that we've been imperfect. I'm leaving you to go home to
    Little Rock to observe the 40th anniversary of the Little Rock Central
    High School crisis, a glaring, timeless example of the imperfection of
    America the nation not living up to America the idea. But we also know
    that from the beginning, when we started out with a Constitution that
    said African-Americans equal six-tenths of a person, we have come a long
    way. We have steadily pushed back the barriers that bore down on people,
    people of color, on women, all the groups of people that have ever been
    discriminated against. We are steadily pushing back those barriers.
        But if you really think about what's likely to define us, you
    imagine what's the world going to be like. It's going to be a high-tech
    world dominated by information technology where distances will be
    shortened, millions--that's no exaggeration; I talked to the people who
    set it up last week--millions of new contacts are happening on the
    Internet every month, probably every week. They can't be measured.
    Literally it's growing by millions and millions and millions a month and
    probably a week. That is the world we're going to live in. Now, if we in
    the United States have the most multiethnic, multiracial functioning
    democracy, where we don't just live in the same country but in little
    different places, and then we vote on election day, and that's all we
    have in common, but we actually live and work together and learn
    together and grow together, then we will be the most well-positioned
    country in the world for the 21st century.
        It is, therefore, in our self-interest to rid ourselves of the last
    vestiges of the poison which seen in its darkest form can destroy a
    place like Bosnia; can bedevil the home of many of us in this room,
    including Mayor Murphy, in Ireland--we think we're making some progress
    there; can keep the Middle East in constant turmoil--and they've got all
    kinds of social problems in a lot of those countries there. If they were
    all working together, they could turn the whole region around in a
    matter of a decade. And on and on and on--you know the stories.
        If we are the polar opposite of that, in a world where we have the
    world's finest system of higher education, where we're on the cutting
    edge of technology, where we're committed to all the things we've been
    talking about today, and we're all getting along together, this country
    is going to do very well, and the next 50 years will be the best 50
    years in American history.
        Now, I was raised to believe that's what we owe our children. And I
    was raised to believe that none of us--it is not given to any of us to
    solve all the problems or to transform human nature; it is our
    responsibility to leave the world better than we found it. It is our
    responsibility, in the great stream of human existence, to make our
    contribution to the right direction. That's what we've got a chance to
    do. And we owe it to our children.
        And from the day I started running for this job, all I ever wanted
    to do was to make sure that, when it was all said and done, people like
    you, who share the same values and ideas I did, could actually say
    together, we gave opportunity to everybody responsible enough to work
    for it; we are coming together as one country, not being divided; and we
    are the strongest force in the world for peace and freedom. I still
    think we're moving in that direction, and we have another 3 years. And
    I'm going to give you every day I can to make sure we get there.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 1:39 p.m. in the Walnut Room at the
    Duquesne Club. In his remarks, he referred to David Matter and Phil and
    Diann Stout, State Democratic Party trustees; John Connelly, president,
    J. Edward Connelly Associates; Mayor Tom Murphy of Pittsburgh; Mike
    Dawida and Bob Cranmer, Allegheny County commissioners; Audrey Dawida,
    wife of Commissioner Dawida; Judge Joseph A. Del Sol, Democratic
    candidate for Pennsylvania State Supreme Court; Mark Singel, chairman,
    Pennsylvania Democratic Party; State Senators Robert J. Mellow and
    Leonard Bodak; and Pittsburgh attorney Lazar M. Palnick, originally from
    Arkansas.