    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
    [November 17, 1997]
    [Pages 1598-1602]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Dinner in
    St. Louis
    November 17, 1997

        Thank you very much. Thank you, Jay. Thank you for running. Thank
    you for being a good attorney general. Thanks for inviting me to dinner.
    [Laughter] Maybe I will come back next Monday. [Laughter] I'd also like
    to thank the owners of this magnificent theater for allowing us to be
    here tonight and for doing such a wonderful job in restoring it.
        I think that when we come here and you see all this beauty and--sort
    of--your eyes normally just sort of go up, don't they?--and you feel
    elevated, that's the way you ought to feel about your country. That's
    the way you ought to feel about your political system. That's the way
    you ought to feel about your choices as citizens to support people in
    campaigns.
        So the first thing I want to do is just to thank you for being here
    tonight and for being proud to have the freedom to come here, to
    contribute to this man's campaign and to what he's trying to do for our
    country, to take a stand, and to be a part. I hope that when you think
    about it over the next year, you will be constant in trying to help him
    get elected and that you will go beyond financial support to talking to
    your friends and neighbors and doing whatever you can to help prevail.
    And I hope you will always try to remember how you felt when you walked
    into this theater tonight. If you can create that kind of spirit among
    the people of Missouri, I think you'll win the election. And I think you
    can do it.
        Let me say that, as all of you know just from reading the press,
    this is a rather challenging time for our country, and I don't have
    anything else to add about what I'm trying to deal with in Iraq than
    what I've already said. But it has made me a little more reflective even
    than normal, and I'd like to try to put this race for the Senate in some
    sort of larger context for you so you can see how I see it and why I
    came here.
        When I ran for President, when I decided to run for President about
    6 years ago and I was the Governor of your neighboring State to the
    south, I was really concerned about the country, not because I was
    worried about Americans or I didn't think that we could deal with any
    problem but because we were going through this period of sweeping change
    with no unifying vision about how we were going to go into the 21st
    century together, and because we had been

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    dealing with the impacts of the global economy and increasing technology
    and changes in the way we work and live for 20 years. Even by the time I
    ran for President, it had been nearly 20 years since it had become
    apparent to everyone that there were big changes going on. The average
    wages of Americans had been stagnant for 20 years. Unemployment was
    going up, and we were beginning to see tensions, racial tensions,
    rekindled in America. The economic anxieties, I'm convinced, were the
    primary driving force in the movements that I faced, that we all faced
    as Americans to try to restrict opportunity to minorities and to
    immigrants. And it seemed to me that Washington was making it worse by
    having the same old debates over and over and over again.
        What I wanted to do was to take the values that I was raised with,
    which I think are the values of the Democratic Party and I hope are the
    values of America, and tie them to new ideas and new policies for new
    times, so that we could not just reclaim the White House but reclaim the
    future for our children; so that we could challenge every American to be
    responsible and give opportunity to every responsible American; so that
    we could bring this country together, across all the lines that divide
    us, into one community; and so that we could continue to lead the world
    for peace and freedom and prosperity.
        Now, when I went to Washington, thanks to the votes of the people in
    Missouri and a number of other places, I encountered an atmosphere very
    different than any I had ever seen as a Governor. I had always had
    opposition, and we had fought hard, and I welcomed my opposition to the
    debate. We fought hard over issues. I had never been to a place where
    they said no before they heard what you were for, a place so dominated
    by partisanship and old categories and old thoughts and old behavior
    that I could see that breaking the paralysis was not going to be easy.
        But I ask you to consider the decisions that we have made in the
    last 5 years and the consequences of those decisions and the decisions
    that still have to be made, and think about how it's going to affect you
    and your children and your grandchildren, and then you can decide how
    hard you want to work on this Senate race.
        The first thing we had to do was to scrap trickle-down economics. It
    was a failure. It quadrupled the debt of the country in 12 years. The
    country was drifting apart. And we put in a new economic policy that I
    called invest-and-grow. I said, give me a shot; I believe I can reduce
    the deficit and still have more money to invest in education and
    technology and our future. And we got our shot by one vote in both
    Houses. It was the Vice President's incentive; as Al Gore never tires of
    saying, whenever he votes, I win--[laughter]--by the narrowest of
    margins. Why? Not because the Democrats didn't support me--I received
    more support from my party than my three previous Democratic
    predecessors--because every single member of the other party voted
    against my economic program and railed to high heaven and talked about
    how it was going to bring a recession, how it was going to be a total
    failure, told all the American people we were putting these huge tax
    burdens on them, when they knew that 98.5 percent of the American people
    were not going to have an increase in their income tax. They knew that
    we were cutting taxes for more people than we were raising taxes for--
    mostly hard-working people. Now a family of four with an income of under
    $30,000 is paying $1,000 less income tax than they would have paid under
    the system that existed before our economic plan passed.
        They knew all that, but they hoped that the people couldn't figure
    it out by 1994's election and that they wouldn't feel a better economic
    climate. And they were right about that, and they won a lot of seats in
    Congress over it.
        But now it's 5 years later, and we're in a position to make a
    judgment. Every single one of them, including Mr. Nixon's opponent,
    voted no on our '93 economic plan. What did it do? Well, before one
    dollar kicks in from this balanced budget amendment, we've reduced the
    deficit by 92 percent, produced 13\1/2\ million jobs--a record for this
    period of time--and we now have the lowest unemployment rate in 24
    years. So you have a clear choice there, and you should bring that
    choice to bear on this race.
        On the area of crime, Jay Nixon, as attorney general, supported our
    efforts to put 100,000 police on the street, to have gun-free school
    zones, to ban assault weapons. Now, consider what happened: In 1994, I
    brought the crime bill up. I was an attorney general; I have been
    working on criminal justice matters for 20 years now. That crime bill
    was not written by me or by bureaucrats in Washington; it was written

    [[Page 1600]]

    by police officers and prosecutors and community workers who work with
    young people in trouble all across this country. And all I did was
    reflect what was already working in many communities to bring the crime
    rate down.
        So I said, ``You know, violent crime has tripled, but we only have
    10 percent more police officers. Let's put 100,000 police on the
    street.'' Our friends on the other side said, ``Oh, if you do that, it
    won't make a lick of difference; it's just a waste of Federal money.'' I
    suggested that it was time to pass the Brady bill and not let people who
    had criminal histories buy handguns. They said, ``Oh, it's
    unenforceable, and it won't do any good.'' I said, ``You know, I come
    from a big hunting State, but I just don't think the NRA is right on
    these assault weapons. I never saw a single deer killed with an assault
    weapon.'' [Laughter] And they said when we passed that, we were going to
    go out and take everybody's guns away.
        We had this bitter fight over this crime bill--pure politics. The
    whole law enforcement community in the country was on our side. But they
    were good politicians, and they did everything they could do in the
    Senate to beat it, everything they could do. A bitter, bitter, bitter
    filibuster--the awfullest things said you ever heard. And we broke the
    filibuster, finally, because there were five brave Republicans who stood
    up and said, ``Enough is enough; we're going to go out and vote with the
    Democrats and try to give our kids a better, safer life.''
        And so we put 100,000 police on the street. That's what we're doing.
    We're 3 years ahead--we're 3 years into it; we're two-thirds of the way
    done; we're ahead of schedule and under budget. And we banned the
    assault weapons, and we kept over a quarter of a million people with
    criminal histories or mental health histories or people who were
    stalkers from buying handguns, who shouldn't have done it. And the crime
    rate is the lowest it's been in 24 years.
        Now, he took one position; his opponent took another position. You
    have evidence; you know. Make a judgment, and tell the people who live
    in Missouri to make a judgment. But don't pretend that there are no
    consequences to this vote. There are consequences. And we could have
    used another vote or two in 1994 when we were trying to save the lives
    of the children in this country. This is a safer, better country today
    because we won that fight and they lost it. And I'd like to have some
    more help when we deal with the issues that are still ahead of us.
        Juvenile crime hasn't dropped as much as crime among adults. Most
    juveniles commit crime between 3 and 7 in the afternoon. We have to do
    some creative things to keep those kids out of trouble in the first
    place, and we don't need any more speeches on the floor of the Congress
    about how it's a waste of money to try to keep kids out of trouble in
    the first place. I'd rather keep a kid out of trouble than send another
    kid to jail, if we can do that. And I think we ought to do it. So we
    were right, and they were wrong.
        In 1994, they picked up a lot of seats in the Congress. They went
    out there and told people in rural areas and all over America, ``You
    know, President Clinton and the Democrats are coming to get your guns.''
    I told the group earlier, I said I went back to New Hampshire, where I
    won in '92--unusual for a Democrat--and I went to this crowd of people,
    and every one of them had a hunting license, and they were looking at me
    kind of funny. [Laughter] And I said, ``You know, in 1994 you people
    beat a Congressman up here because he voted to ban assault weapons. And
    they told you that you were going to lose your gun. And now it's 1996,
    and if you lost your gun I want you to vote against me, too. But if you
    didn't lose your gun, they didn't tell you the truth, and you need to
    get even.'' [Laughter] My vote in New Hampshire in 1996 was 12 percent
    higher than it was in 1992. [Laughter] And they got even.
        I say that not for personal reasons but because there are
    consequences to this. There are a lot of voters out there that think,
    oh, it's all politics; it doesn't make any difference. That's bull. It
    does make a difference, and it makes a huge difference. If we had lost
    that economic fight in 1993, the deficit would not have gone down by
    over 90 percent and the economy wouldn't have produced 13\1/2\ million
    jobs and interest rates wouldn't have gone down. If we had lost that
    crime bill in 1994, we would not have as much success with crime as
    we've had today, the lowest crime rate in 24 years.
        Or look at an area where we've worked together on. We got a big
    bipartisan majority for welfare reform finally, and I'm grateful for
    that and I appreciate the fact that the members of the other party
    worked with us on it. I tried every time I could to get a bipartisan
    resolution. But I had to veto two bills first because they

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    said, ``If you want to require people on welfare to work, we also want
    you to take away from their children the guarantee that you want to
    leave them with, of nutrition and health care. And we don't want to give
    you a lot more money for child care, even though these women are going
    to get minimum-wage jobs and they can't afford child care. And we're not
    going to give you very much money to help people in big cities, where
    there aren't any private sector jobs, find jobs.'' So I vetoed the bill
    twice. Finally, we got it. But it would have been a tragedy if we hadn't
    passed the right kind of welfare reform.
        We've now seen the welfare rolls drop by 3.8 million in America, the
    biggest drop in American history. But I think our side was right on
    that. The Democratic position was, yes, require able-bodied people to
    work, but do not require them to abandon their children. The most
    important job anybody ever has is being a good parent. And if everybody
    did a better job of that, we wouldn't have half the problems we've got
    in this country. You can't ask people to go to work and forget about
    their responsibilities at home. The trick is to allow people to fulfill
    both those responsibilities. And the parties had different positions on
    that.
        There are huge differences in our attitude toward the environment.
    Look, we have gotten rid of more regulations than the two previous
    Republican Presidents have. We have given more authority to the States
    and local governments. We've even privatized more Government operations.
    I do not like Federal bureaucracies. The Federal Government is 300,000
    people smaller than it was the day I took the oath of office. It's the
    size it was when John Kennedy was President.
        But the air is cleaner; the water is purer; the food is safer; there
    are fewer toxic waste dumps. And I think we have established the fact
    that on the environment, our philosophy is right and theirs is wrong.
    Their philosophy is, we hope somebody will clean up the environment, but
    nothing should be allowed to get in the way of short-term economic gain.
    My philosophy is, we owe it to our children and our grandchildren to
    keep the environment and improve it. And we have proved that you can
    grow the economy faster with new technologies if you're committed to
    cleaning up the environment. It's a clear choice, and let's not pretend
    that there is no choice there. There is a choice there.
        So I've enjoyed these fights enormously. [Laughter] I like to
    debate; I like to argue. But I am impatient with those who think it
    doesn't make a difference. It makes a difference. And when I think about
    how far this country has come in the last 5 years and what we still have
    to do to build our bridge to the 21st century, when I think about the
    honest differences--I don't want to get into condemnation here, I'm
    talking about the honest differences in the parties--I know that a
    person like Jay Nixon could make a positive contribution to the people
    of Missouri and the people of this country. And I know that it would
    help in the fights we've still got ahead of us.
        We finally--finally--succeeded, against intense opposition, in
    convincing a bipartisan majority of the Congress to embrace the
    elemental notions that it's high time in America we had some national
    standards of academic excellence and we quit putting kids out of school
    that can't read, write, and count; and instead, we give the schools of
    our country the trained teachers, the technology, the support they need,
    but there has to be, first, high expectations, high standards, and high
    measurements to see if they're being met. Every child in this country is
    capable of learning, but I'll guarantee you, a child in difficult
    circumstances with low expectations won't. And it's to the poorest
    children that we have the highest obligation to give a world-class
    education.
        Now, I'm not trying to have the Federal Government take over
    education. Their argument was that the Federal Government should keep
    its mouth shut about education, maybe write a check. My argument is, we
    put more money into education in this last budget than any Presidency
    and any administration in 35 years, but it's not a question of money.
    It's money plus standards. It's a big issue. And I could give you--if we
    had all night, I could talk to you all night about the differences
    between our parties. It makes a difference. A Senator's vote makes a
    difference.
        Last year they held all these judges hostage, in an election year,
    hoping against hope I'd get beat and they wouldn't have to appoint them
    at all. This year, I had a 4-year term; they still only confirmed 35
    judges--slow walk and everything. It's like pulling teeth.

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        One of the finest people you ever met, this man, Bill Lee, that I've
    nominated to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, a
    Chinese immigrant raised in Harlem, devoted his entire life to the civil
    rights of people of all colors in this country. The Senate Judiciary
    Committee says they don't really think they should confirm him, even
    though he has sworn to uphold the letter of the law, even though he is
    unquestionably qualified--intellectually, in terms of experience and
    moral character--because he agrees with me that we shouldn't just throw
    out all affirmative action.
        This is an unusual position they're taking: The President must
    appoint someone to the Civil Rights Division who is not committed to
    civil rights in the way the President is. Now, if the Democrats had felt
    that way, you wouldn't have half the people on the Supreme Court that
    are on there today. If the Democratic majority in the Senate had done a
    Republican President that way, you wouldn't have that.
        There are differences in terms of what we do and how we do it.
    That's why I'm here tonight. I'm telling you, the next 50 years can be
    the best years this country ever had. If I told you 5 years ago, come
    back in 5 years and we'll have the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years,
    the lowest crime rate in 24 years, the biggest drop in welfare in
    history, and the environment will be improving even though the economy
    is growing, you would have said, ``I'll take that bet.'' And you'd be
    darn proud of it. And if I said, ``Oh, and by the way, we'll have passed
    the family and medical leave law, we'll give families tax cuts for their
    children and for their children's education, and if they'll adopt other
    children that need a home, we'll cut their taxes,'' you would like that.
    All that has happened because of choices that have been made. And I
    believe the direction that our party has taken has led the way toward
    building an American future where we can go forward together.
        That's the last thing I'll say. Just look around the theater on your
    way out. How do you want to feel about America? How do want to feel
    about American politics? Do you want to make it lift your eyes and you
    feel big and you want to take a deep breath? Or do you want it to be a
    mean-spirited, divisive, demeaning, diminishing experience? I have tried
    to give this country a unifying vision. I have tried to heal the
    divisions of the country. I have tried to minimize the sharpness of the
    partisan debate. But I am prouder tonight to be a Democrat than I was 5
    years ago. And I am prouder tonight because I know things I could never
    have known before I became President about the importance of every
    single solitary vote in the United States Senate.
        He is a good man, and if you will work for a year, you'll make him a
    Senator.
        Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 9 p.m. on the stage at the Fox Theater. In
    his remarks, he referred to Leon and Mary Strauss, owners of the
    theater; and Mr. Nixon's opponent, incumbent Senator Christopher S.
    Bond.