[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

[[Page 1228]]

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.

[[Page 1229]]

    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.

[[Page 1230]]

    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.