    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
    [November 15, 1997]
    [Pages 1580-1585]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in Sacramento
    November 15, 1997

        Thank you very much. Eleni, thank you very much for your remarks and
    for the hard work that you have done. Thank you, Angelo and Sophia.
    Congressman Matsui, when he stood up and said that he was speaking on
    behalf of the Tsakapoulous family, I thought we were taking ethnic
    diversity a little far there. [Laughter] But you know me; as far as I'm
    concerned, it should have no limits. So I liked it.
        I want to thank Bob Matsui and Vic Fazio for the wonderful work that
    they do in Congress. I have wished on many days--privately, so I might
    as well say publicly--that a higher percentage of people in both parties
    were more like Bob Matsui and Vic Fazio. They always try to find common
    ground, and they're always willing to stand tough and fight if
    necessary. They get a lot done, and they're always looking to the
    future. And I'm very grateful to them.

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        I'm also glad to be back in Sacramento and back here with your
    mayor, who has been a good friend of mine and a good leader. And I thank
    him for that. And Phil Angeledes, good luck to you in your endeavor this
    year. Most people should trust you to handle the money. [Laughter]
    You've had a lot of experience at it. [Applause] Thank you. I'd also
    like to thank my good friend Dan Dutko for coming all the way from
    Washington, DC, to be part of the Democratic Party's efforts today. And
    let me thank all of you.
        Congress has just gone home, and this was a remarkably good year.
    It's a 2-year congressional session--we have a lot to do next year--but
    we did pass the first balanced budget in a generation. We ratified the
    chemical weapons treaty, which will help to protect our children and our
    grandchildren and involves a lot of what is at stake in Iraq today. We
    made progress on expanding NATO in ways that will give us a chance to
    have a 21st century where Europe is a source of peace and prosperity,
    not a cause for war that involves Americans. We passed a wonderful
    adoption bill that I will sign in the next few days to facilitate
    adoptions in many ways in America. We passed a huge increase in medical
    research in all kinds of areas and the best package to help families
    with diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association, since the
    discovery of insulin 70 years ago. So it was a very good year for the
    American people in the Congress.
        What I'd like to talk to you about a little bit today is how that
    year is a part of what we've been doing for the last 5 years and what I
    hope to be doing for the next 3, how it fits in with what we celebrated
    just a few moments ago when I went out, literally, to the wetlands area
    today--[laughter]--to celebrate this joint partnership to try to restore
    wetlands and to preserve some of your precious environmental heritage,
    even as you permit the economy to grow and the uses of water to
    proliferate.
        When I started running for President about 6 years ago, our country
    was not in very good shape. California was in terrible shape
    economically. But times come and go. In every person's life, in every
    country's life, there are times that are better than other times. There
    will never be a period where we have complete, unbounded, uninterrupted
    good news. I used to have a set of rules of public life I kept with me,
    and one of them said, ``You're always most vulnerable when you think
    you're invulnerable. Something is always going to happen. It's endemic
    to the human condition.''
        But what a free people must always have is a vision of where they're
    going, a strategy to get there, and the concentration and discipline to
    pursue the strategy through the tough times. That's what I didn't think
    we had in 1991 and why I ran for President. And my goal as a Democrat
    was basically to take the mainstream values of our party and our country
    and marry them to modern ideas and policies that would move the country
    forward and that would take us into the 21st century with the American
    dream alive for everybody responsible enough to work for it. It would
    help us to create a country where we were coming together, across all
    the lines that divide us, into one America and would keep us strong
    enough to continue to lead the world for peace and freedom and
    prosperity.
        As you see from the events of the last week, I think it is clear
    that at the end of the cold war not all of the dangers of the world have
    gone away. And it is very important that the United States be strong
    enough to do what is necessary to stick up not only for our own
    interests and our own security but for the kind of world we are trying
    to create. And that's what we have been doing for the last 5 years.
        And what I want you to understand that is so often overlooked is
    that there is a direct connection between your presence at this lunch
    here today and what we have been doing and what we will be able to do
    because, in the end, the people who make decisions are those that are
    put there by the American people. They are put there after elections.
    And if you don't have the capacity to communicate your message, to be
    heard, and to answer the charges against you in this world today, you'll
    be in a lot of trouble.
        So every time you hear--if you've been out here helping us all these
    years--every time you hear of a new breakthrough, a new movement forward
    for the United States, you should feel that you are a part of that. And
    you should be under no illusion that if there were not people like you
    around to help us, that all these ideas, all these policies, and all
    these people would be around anyway; it's not so. I've seen elections
    conducted in an atmosphere of unilateral disarmament, and I wasn't very
    satisfied with the results. It doesn't work very well in politics, and
    it doesn't work very well in other

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    areas of human endeavor. So I'm glad you're here.
        What is it that's changed in the last 5 years? Well, the first thing
    we had to do was to make up our mind in Washington what the Government's
    job was. What's the President supposed to do every day when he gets up?
    What's the Congress supposed to do? What is our job? What is the role of
    Government, and what must our priorities be?
        The old debate seemed to me to be a little bit artificial, where
    some people said, ``Well, the Government has to try to do everything
    when there's a problem,'' and others would say, ``The Government is the
    problem and should do nothing, and we hope everybody will come out all
    right.'' Neither one of those was consistent with the way I saw people
    living in my State and my hometown or everything I knew about how you
    build an economy or a society.
        So I tried to reformulate what I believe the mission of Government
    is, and I think it is--and I hope it is--the philosophy of the
    Democratic Party on the edge of a new century. We believe the role of
    Government is not to do everything or to sit on the sidelines but to
    give people the tools and conditions they need to make the most of their
    own lives. If you think about it in that way, it tells you what to do
    and what to stop doing.
        Now, that doesn't answer the question, so what should your economic
    policy be? We believe that there was a false choice put before the
    American people: Should we cut taxes and run a huge deficit, or don't
    cut them and spend a little more money and run a slightly smaller
    deficit? Our country's debt quadrupled in the 1980's, and it was wrong.
    We said, ``We're going to cut the deficit. We're going to cut spending,
    but we're going to spend more on education, on technology, on medical
    research, on the things that are key to our future. We're going to make
    choices.''
        The strategy worked. Before the balanced budget kicks in, the
    economic plan adopted by Democrats only, including the two Members of
    Congress in this room, had reduced the deficit by 92 percent--92
    percent--from where it was the day I took office.
        What was our crime policy? I was amazed when I got to Washington,
    there were people who actually wrote in newspapers and respectable
    journals that if I talked about crime, I was trying to get a Republican
    issue. And I was not aware that Democrats were pro-crime. [Laughter] Nor
    was I aware that the Republicans had done such a great job, since the
    crime rate was--had gone up quite a lot.
        Now, most anticrime work is done at the community level--in the city
    of Sacramento, in this county--but it was obvious there were things the
    National Government could do that would make a difference. And I went
    all across the country looking at things that were working, talking to
    people. And I said our crime policy is not going to be caught in the old
    debate: Lock them up and throw away the key; or hope things get better,
    and when things get better, the crime rate will go down. Neither one
    was, I thought, particularly accurate. I thought we ought to be tough
    and smart and do what works: Put 100,000 more police on the street; take
    assault weapons off the street; keep handguns out of the hands of
    crooks; give kids something to say yes to so they don't get in trouble
    in the first place; and punish people who are really bad. That's what I
    thought our policy ought to be. And the crime rate has dropped now for 5
    years in a row, and we played a role in it, and I feel good about that.
        Our welfare policy--the old policy was, encourage people to do
    better, or cut them off, and who cares. That was the old debate. Our
    theory was, require people who can go to work to go to work, but don't
    ask them to give up their most important job, which is raising their
    kids. And we started working with States from the day I got there on
    moving people from welfare to work. The Republicans said, when they got
    a majority in Congress, they wanted to pass a welfare reform bill. I
    said, ``Fine, we'll work with you on it.'' They passed two bills that I
    vetoed. Why? Because they were more than happy to be tough in cutting
    people off of welfare, but they did not want to give them the tools they
    needed to get in the work force, and they were willing to hurt their
    kids by taking away the guarantee of food and medical care.
        So I vetoed those two bills; they put the guarantees of food and
    medical care back in, gave me some money for job training and child
    care; we're off to the races. The result? Welfare rolls have dropped by
    3 million people. And it's working; it's working.
        What I want you to understand is there's a direct connection between
    you being here at this lunch and that happening. And I thank you

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    for it. We are changing the nature of politics in this country.
        We had a big reaction to a lot of what we did in '93 and '94, and
    the benefits of it weren't apparent. The Republicans won the Congress in
    '94. The American people got to see what they wanted to do in '95 and
    '96. We beat back the contract on America. It didn't happen by accident.
    It was a lot of hard, disciplined work, putting our message out against
    their message. And it's a good thing for the country that we did.
        What we celebrated today at that wetlands project was people who
    want to grow the economy and people who want to preserve the environment
    working together to do something at the grassroots level. That's how we
    ought to be doing this. Their idea on the environment was, it was a nice
    thing if you could get it, but it was really an irritant that shouldn't
    get in the way of people going about their daily lives.
        I think that's wrong. I think we have proved conclusively--you have
    cleaner air today, cleaner water, more toxic waste dumps cleaned up, a
    safer food supply, all through major initiatives of this administration,
    and a stronger economy. We have got to do it in the right way. We don't
    want to do things that are stupid. We don't want to shoot ourselves in
    the foot, but we know we have got to preserve public health and the
    environment and grow the economy. That is the policy of our party. And
    we are determined to do it, and we are making progress on it, and your
    presence here today contributes to the triumph of that idea. And you
    should be proud of that, and you should talk about it, and you should
    help us to refine it.
        I don't mean there aren't tough decisions out there. This climate
    change issue, for example, is a very difficult, challenging issue that
    will occupy us for the rest of my term in office. But I know that the
    technology, the know-how, the creativity is out there in the American
    people to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and grow the economy. We've
    already done it in two other areas. You know these chlorofluorocarbons,
    the CFC's that were in all the spray cans--they said, ``Oh, there will
    be terrible damage to the economy if we get rid of them.'' Well, we got
    rid of them, and the American economy is doing just fine. They said we'd
    do terrible damage to the economy if we took sulfur dioxide out of the
    atmosphere. We found a pro-business, market-oriented way to do it; we're
    getting it out of the atmosphere at less than half the cost I was told
    it would cost, and we're doing just fine.
        And we'll solve this problem, and we'll do just fine if we'll all
    work together and realize that we cannot be forced into a position where
    somebody says, ``If you want to save the environment, you have to tank
    the economy,'' or, ``If you want a good economy, you just have to turn
    your back on the environment.'' That is wrong. And it's one of two big
    choices that I think we can't afford to make.
        The other one, and the last issue I want to emphasize domestically,
    is the choice that I alluded to earlier, welfare. That's the choice
    between work and family. When I signed the family leave law, a lot of
    people said, ``You're going to hurt a lot of small businesses,'' even
    though we exempted people with under 50 employees. For 5 years we've had
    a record number of new small businesses formed in every single year. It
    is a good thing to allow people who go to work every day not to have to
    worry themselves sick about their children at home or at school. It is a
    decent thing to do that.
        I will say again, every society's most important job is raising
    healthy, good, strong children with good values. There is no more
    important work. More than half of the children in this country under the
    age of one have mothers in the work force. And since I have had a wife,
    a mother, and a grandmother in the work force--as long as I have been
    alive, that is what I have known--I do not think that is a bad thing.
    But I think it is a very bad thing when people who are working are
    worried sick about their children.
        And so as we look ahead to the future, our party has to find a way
    to provide more affordable child care. Our party has to find a way to
    provide health insurance for these children, all of them--we're going to
    cover half of them with this balanced budget this year--all these
    children who live in families where their parents are working in lower
    income jobs and they can't afford health insurance. Our party has to
    find a way to help the American people balance the demands of raising
    their kids and going to work every day. And if we have the same approach
    that we've had for the last 5 years, we can do that as well.
        Lastly, let me just say very briefly, because I think you can
    understand that I don't want

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    to talk about this in any detail, we've got all kinds of other
    challenges. We've got to make sure that Medicare and Social Security are
    there for the baby boom generation and for their children and their
    children's children. And we have to do it in a way that doesn't--where
    people my age, of the baby boom generation, don't ask the smaller
    generation of our children to bankrupt themselves and not take care of
    their kids to preserve these institutions. We can do all that.
        We also, though, have to have a framework in our mind for what it
    means for America to be secure in the 21st century. National security
    during the cold war was pretty straightforward. We wanted to keep a big
    strong military and plenty of nuclear weapons, and we wanted to have a
    system that existed between ourselves and the Soviet Union so that
    either side thought that, if they launched nuclear weapons, the other
    side would be destroyed, so no one would ever do it. And then we'd fight
    around the edges in various places around the world, to try to keep them
    from getting much of a toehold.
        With the decline of the cold war, with the Russians becoming our
    partners and our soldiers standing side by side in Bosnia, we now know
    that national security has to be defined somewhat in different terms. To
    be sure, there's a lot of problems still with nuclear weapons. We're
    doing our best to continue to work with the Russians to get rid of more
    and more nuclear weapons and actually destroy them and make sure that
    the nuclear materials don't fall into the wrong hands. And we've gotten
    a wonderful amount of support around the world for a Comprehensive
    Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
        We're working hard to deal with the aftereffects of these civil
    wars, the worst of which is landmines. And while I do not agree with all
    the terms of the Ottawa convention on landmines, it is encouraging that
    over 100 nations are willing to say that they will never build, buy, or
    use any kind of landmines. The United States has destroyed a million and
    a half such mines; we're going to destroy another million and a half
    while I'm President. And this year we'll spend slightly more than half
    the money spent in the entire world to go get those landmines out of the
    ground so kids don't walk on them and blow their lives away in the years
    ahead. This is a good thing.
        But the most likely problems--there are a couple little babies in
    this audience, or there were today, and some children--the most likely
    problems these children will face when they come of age will be problems
    that cross national borders: terrorism, organized crime and drug
    running, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, chemical and
    biological weapons and maybe small-scale nuclear weapons--this much
    nuclear cake put in a bomb would do 10 times as much damage as the
    Oklahoma City bomb did--the spread of environmental problems or diseases
    across national lines. We are going to have to, in other words, find
    ways to cooperate, to keep the organized forces of destruction that are
    taking advantage of the Internet, the technological revolution, the
    freedom of travel and the freedom of movement, access to computers, and
    moving money around and all that--there will always be organized forces
    of destruction.
        That is fundamentally what is at stake in the standoff we're having
    in Iraq today. I don't want you to look at this backward through the
    prism of the Gulf war and think it's a replay. I want you to look at it
    forward and think about it in terms of the innocent Japanese people that
    died in the subway when the sarin gas was released, and how important it
    is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that
    can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological
    weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people
    develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in
    briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms.
        And I say this not to frighten you. The world will always have
    challenges. I think the chances are quite good that we can organize
    ourselves for this challenge and deal with it very effectively. I
    personally believe that the next 50 years will be far more peaceful and
    less dangerous for our children and our grandchildren than the last 50
    years were. I also believe they will be the most prosperous and
    interesting time in all of human history, but only if we do the right
    things.
        And so I say again to you, this is an exciting time to be alive.
    There have only been maybe four periods like this in American history,
    over our 220-year history, where we are really being called upon to
    rethink what we want of our Government, rethink what we want of our
    Nation, meet a whole set of new challenges, and in effect recreate the
    American dream. It can only happen once every generation, sometimes once
    every two or three generations. You are

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    living in that kind of America. In that kind of time, political
    participation is more important; the integrity and validity and strength
    of your ideas are more important; and your passionate willingness to
    stand up and defend what you believe in is more important.
        So I thank you for being here today because I believe that what you
    are doing is helping to build an America that your children and your
    grandchildren will be very proud of and will thank you for.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:15 p.m. at the Sacramento Capital Club.
    In his remarks, he referred to luncheon organizer Eleni Tsakapoulous and
    her parents, Angelo and Sophia; Mayor Joseph Serna, Jr., of Sacramento;
    Phil Angeledes, candidate for State treasurer; and Dan Dutko, chair,
    Victory Fund.