    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
    [November 14, 1997]
    [Pages 1572-1575]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Las Vegas
    November 14, 1997

        Thank you. Thank you very much. We've had such a nice evening, it
    seems a shame to spoil it with a speech--[laughter]--but I'd like to say
    a few words. First of all, I want to thank Brian and Myra for once again
    welcoming me into their homes and for being my friends, and for being my
    friends when I was the fifth-best known candidate for President in the
    New Hampshire primary. When the only person in America who thought I
    could be elected was my mother--[laughter]--they were my friends.
        I also want to thank them because we share something else in common.
    In addition to the fact that Brian and I went to college together, our
    family and theirs, we're both parents of only daughters who are
    reasonably important to us. And I had Amy with me for a long time, and I
    miss her terribly, so I'm glad to see her here tonight. It was wonderful
    having her in the White House for the years that we had her.
        I'd like to thank Governor and Mrs. Miller and Senator and Mrs.
    Bryan and Senator and Mrs. Reid for being here tonight. And I'd like to
    thank the people of Nevada for voting for Bill Clinton and Al Gore
    twice.
        When we ran, I was told that there were all these States that I
    could never carry, among which were any between the Mississippi River
    and California. And that seemed to be an irrational thing to me, to give
    them all up. And most of them we did lose, both times--[laughter]--but
    Nevada was here for us both times. And I never will forget that, and I'm
    very grateful.
        I would like to tonight just ask you to think about where we are as
    a country on our journey, what we're going through as a people, and what
    we should be doing about it together.
        If you look at--now that I have been President for 5 years, I tend
    to have a little bit of detachment and see a lot of the specific
    struggles and contests and efforts we're making as part of the broad
    sweep of American history and as sort of human drama of our generation,
    in terms of how people work and live and relate to each other, relate to
    the rest of the world. And one thing I've learned from studying our
    history and from living it for the last 5 years is that whenever we go
    through a period of real sweeping change where our working patterns
    change, communications patterns change, living patterns change, and in
    our case the very composition of our population is changing--we're
    becoming much, much more diverse with these new waves of immigration--
    and then our relationships after the cold war to the rest of the world
    is changing--whenever something like that happens and all the balls get
    thrown up in the air, there is not only the need that individuals feel
    to know what the deal is--how am I going to constitute my life; how am I
    going to constitute a stable family life; how are we going to keep our
    community together; what's our future like?--we also engage in
    redefining the Nation.
        You know, when we started as a country, we basically defined
    ourselves as a bunch of people that didn't want to be under British
    control anymore. So then we had years where we really argued about what
    ought to be in our Constitution and, once we had a Constitution, what
    did it mean--what did it mean to be one Nation of associated States.
        And we pretty well worked it out, and then things rocked along fine
    for a while. And then finally we had to come to grips with slavery, and
    whether slavery would be extended or restricted or done away with
    altogether; and how were we going to accommodate that within the
    Constitution; and could we do it and keep the country together. And half
    the country said no, half the country said yes, and we fought the
    bloodiest war in our history with each other. The casualties in the
    Civil War were slightly

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    greater than the casualties in World War II with a much, much smaller
    population. But we once again wound up defining the Nation. We fought a
    war to do it, and then we had to pass a bunch of constitutional
    amendments. But essentially America, by 1870, was what Abraham Lincoln
    said it ought to be in the Gettysburg Address.
        Then we became a great industrial country, and we had to do this all
    over again. Wasn't it wonderful? We had all these factory jobs. But
    wasn't it terrible that 9-year-old kids were working 9 hours a day, 6
    days a week in some of these factories? What were we going to do about
    that? And so through the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow
    Wilson, we did it all over again. We defined what the Nation was. And we
    found a way to get the benefits of a new era and still meet its
    challenges and kind of come together as one people. Then we had to do it
    again during the Depression and the Second World War. And we had to do
    it all over again for the cold war.
        Now we have to do it again, because we're moving into a truly global
    society, bound together more than anything else by shared technology and
    communications, where the movement of money and ideas and people is more
    rapid than ever before; where the security threats we will most likely
    face for the next 20 or 30 years are not animosities between two
    nations, although there may be some of that--we see that in the press
    today; there may be some of that--but far more likely it will be
    terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction into the hands of
    organized crime or drug dealers, shared international environmental
    problems, or new diseases crossing national borders--new problems we
    share with people who are living in different countries because they
    cross national borders and require a much higher level of cooperation
    than before.
        So there's a lot of change in the air. And when I ran in 1992, I
    attempted to address that and what I thought the Nation was. I said,
    ``Look, I want to build a country in the 21st century where everybody
    who's responsible enough to work for it has the opportunity to live out
    his or her dreams. I want to build a country that's still the strongest
    force for peace and freedom and prosperity in a new world. And I want to
    build a country where, in spite of all of our differences, we're still
    coming together as one America.''
        It wasn't the end of the debate; it was the beginning of the debate.
    In '94, the Republicans won the Congress. They said, ``We've got a
    different idea. We think Government is the problem, and we will be a
    nation if we just say we believe in the same things and we get the
    Government out of the way, and the international market is a wonderful
    thing, and so vote for us and we'll drastically diminish the role of the
    Government, and that's the real problem.'' And people liked it when they
    heard it. But then when they saw it in action in 1995 and 1996, they
    didn't like it so well. And we fought them over that.
        But you need to see all this not just as an isolated political
    event. All of you are present at another moment of creation for America.
    We are in the process of once again redefining what it means to be an
    American and what we want our country to do. And my idea is that we have
    to be faithful to our oldest values and then be highly pragmatic and
    aggressive about what the challenges are.
        What are the challenges we face in this country today? First of all,
    you can't do very well in this world unless you've got a decent
    education. So it's more important than ever before to give a world-class
    education to every child in the country.
        Secondly, with more and more people in the work force, men and
    women--over half the children in this country under one have mothers in
    the work force--way over half. We have to recognize that even for upper
    income people and certainly for lower income working people, we have to
    work very hard to enable people to balance the demands of work and
    family, because if we have a society where you have to choose whether
    you're going to be a good parent or successful in the workplace, we are
    defeated before we begin. The most important work of any society is
    raising children. There is no more important job. It is the most
    significant work we ever do. But if people who want to be--and indeed we
    need to be--in the work force can't be successful parents and get the
    kind of supports they need and still succeed at work, we're in deep
    trouble.
        And so that's what the--when you see a specific issue like family
    and medical leave, or we cut taxes more for lower income working people
    with a lot of kids, or we're working on trying to broaden the child care
    system of the country, or I wouldn't sign welfare reform until we put

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    $4 billion in it so Governor Miller and his colleagues could figure out
    how to give these lower income parents who go from welfare to the
    workplace adequate child care for their kids--all of that is really part
    of a big issue, which is that a decent, good America will reconcile the
    conflicts of work and family. That's what Harry Reid and Dick Bryan have
    to deal with every week in some form or fashion.
        We have to prove that we can make our streets safe, and we have to
    prove we can make our communities coherent. We have to have a system
    that brings the benefits of free enterprise to places that it hasn't
    reached yet. We have to prove we can grow the economy and preserve the
    environment, a huge issue.
        A big difference between us and the Republicans in '95 and '96 was
    whether you could actually increase environmental protection and
    increase economic growth at the same time. I always believed if you did
    it right, you'd make more jobs with the proper kind of environmental
    protection, because that would be the new technology of the future and
    there will be more demand for it in the future. And I think the evidence
    is on our side. I believe that's exactly what we've done. The air and
    water is cleaner. We're making our food safer. We're cleaning up toxic
    waste dumps. And we're creating jobs like crazy in all those areas. And
    it's very good.
        But when you strip it down, what we believe is that in order to be
    bound together as a nation, we must do certain things as a nation: to
    create opportunity, demand responsibility, bring us together as a
    community, and preserve our leadership. And if it works, America will
    once again be, in effect, reborn as the strongest country in the world
    and a beacon of hope to people.
        And so far the evidence is pretty encouraging. We've got the lowest
    unemployment rate in 24 years, the lowest inflation rate in 30 years.
    The crime rate has been dropping for 5 years. We've got the lowest--
    biggest drop in welfare rolls in history. We're moving in the right
    direction. We have average incomes that are rising now. And our
    environment is significantly improved. We are moving in the right
    direction.
        This year we had a good year. We passed the balanced budget law,
    with the biggest increase in investment in education since '65, the
    biggest increase in investment for children's health since '65. The
    American Diabetes Association says what we've done for families with
    diabetes is the best thing since insulin was discovered 70 years ago.
        And the most important thing, I believe, over the long run is, I
    think with the latest tax credits, scholarships, work-study funds, we
    can honestly say we have now opened the doors of college to every
    American who is willing to work for it. This year we had the biggest
    increase in assistance to people to go to college since the GI bill was
    passed 50 years ago. This was a good year for America.
        Are there problems? Of course there are. You read about them in the
    paper every day. But I just want you to feel good about this because
    when I started this little odyssey 6 years ago, when I spent my first
    night at this house, I would go from place to place in America, and I
    would really meet a lot of people who weren't sure that we could--this
    country worked anymore. They didn't know if we could get the economy
    going again. They didn't know if we could bring the crime rate down
    again by working together. They didn't know if we could ever really kind
    of break the culture of poverty again. They weren't quite sure how we
    were going to relate to the rest of the world again.
        We're in better shape than we were then. And all we need to do is to
    remember this. We just are fortunate to be living in a time of truly
    breathtaking change. It makes it more interesting. But it also imposes
    on all of us as citizens higher responsibilities because you have to
    figure out how are you going to make the economy work for everybody
    again, how are you going to keep the society together again, how are you
    going to help families again.
        We also have a lot of new challenges, particularly in the
    environmental area, that no one has ever had before. And finally, we
    have to figure out how to relate to all these other countries around the
    world when we're not all divided up into Communist and non-Communist
    camps, and we have to figure out how to build new alliances for
    cooperation all the time. It's almost as if you abolished the two-party
    system in the world and now nations were just trying to figure out where
    they're going to organize themselves issue by issue. So it's
    fascinating; it's endlessly complex; but in the end, it's pretty simple.
    If you're expanding opportunity, if citizens are being more responsible,
    and if we're pulling people together instead of driving them apart, this
    country is going to be fine.

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        And I am gratified beyond measure, but I can also tell you this: We
    have a lot left to do. When the baby boomers like me retire, we have to
    have reformed Medicare and Social Security enough so it will be there
    for our children and so that we're not going to bankrupt our children as
    they raise our grandchildren to pay for our retirement.
        We still have to work through the big tobacco settlement issue next
    year to guarantee that we protect the health of our children. It's still
    the number one public health problem in America. Illegal smoking among
    children will lead to bigger health care bills and more problems than
    anything else.
        We have a number of exciting issues to deal with in the environment
    and on climate change. But the general thing is people now believe that
    we get it in America. You should all have a very high level of
    confidence that our country can function, that it can succeed, that we
    can meet any challenge.
        And I just am so grateful to have been given the chance to serve and
    to play a role in once again proving that America will always be a young
    nation if at every time of challenge it can redefine what it means to be
    an American. That's what you're doing, and I hope you're very proud of
    it. And I hope, so far, you're very pleased with the results.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:32 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to Brian and Myra Greenspun, dinner hosts, and
    their daughter, Amy; Gov. Bob Miller of Nevada and his wife, Sandy;
    Bonnie Bryan, wife of Senator Richard H. Bryan; and Landra Reid, wife of
    Senator Harry Reid.