[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
[October 8, 1997]
[Pages 1326-1330]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]


[[Page 1326]]


Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Philadelphia
October 8, 1997

    Thank you. If I had any sense at all, I would simply quit while I'm 
ahead. [Laughter] That was a wonderful statement, Mr. Mayor, given by a 
person who's in a position to know.
    I've said many times in the last 6 years or so that, as I've had a 
chance to travel this country, the most gifted and innovative public 
servants in America today are the mayors of the cities that are 
beginning to work again for all the people. And Philadelphia certainly 
is, and in no small measure because of you.
    I know most of you heard what I had to say downstairs, and I won't 
make you sit through it again. So I would just like to try to build on 
what the mayor said. I've been feeling rather nostalgic lately; last 
week was the 6th anniversary of my declaring for President, and the end 
of this week is my 22d wedding anniversary. And Hillary and I are 
dealing with the empty nest syndrome, so we have time to think--
[laughter]--we have time to think high thoughts at night now, instead of 
wondering when Chelsea is going to bed--``Stop studying, turn out the 
light, you can't learn after one o'clock,'' or something. [Laughter]
    Let me just say that I am, first of all, very grateful for the last 
almost 5 years. I've tried to do what I said I would do when I ran for 
President. A leading political scientist said before I was reelected 
that I had already kept a higher percentage of my promises than the last 
five Presidents and that I made more than they did, which really was 
something. And I was very grateful to hear that.
    This last balanced budget meant a great deal to me because I thought 
it would be a good thing for the country psychologically, as well as 
economically, to have a balanced budget for the first time in a 
generation. And I thought it was important to prove that you could 
balance the budget and still have the biggest increase in investment, in 
health care for working families and poor children, and in education 
since 1965.
    And I do agree with Mayor Rendell, I think the biggest legacy of 
that budget over the long term will be that we literally have opened the 
doors of college to everybody who will work for it now--because we had 
the biggest increase in Pell grants in 20 years; we go up to a million 
people in work-study; we have IRA's that people can save in and withdraw 
from without penalty if you use it to pay for education. You get a 
$1,500 tax credit for the first 2 years of college, the HOPE 
scholarship, and then other tax credits for the junior, the senior year, 
graduate school, or when people go back. It's a great, great thing. But 
I'd like to just sort of ask you to take a few minutes and sort of look 
at what underlies that.
    Six years ago when I decided to run for President, I had been a 
Governor for quite a long while. And one of the things that bothered me 
was that the rhetoric that came out of Washington and the fights that 
the political parties had seemed increasingly disconnected from the life 
that I knew my friends to be living and my people to be living. And it 
was all sort of left-right, liberal-conservative, this box-that box, 
this conflict-that conflict, and it didn't seem to me to really work. I 
mean, I didn't know anybody that talked like that except in Washington. 
I never met anybody on the street that talked like that. And it really 
bothered me, because I admired a lot of the people in Washington, 
frankly, in both parties, with whom I had worked. I didn't understand 
it. But I just thought that we were locked into a dialog with each other 
in Washington that was actually preventing anything from getting done 
and moving the country forward.
    And essentially what I thought was that the Republicans understood 
the importance of the market but were blind to the needs to give 
everybody the tools and conditions to take advantage of the market; that 
the Democrats understood the importance of compassion and of trying to 
take care of everybody in the social contract but too often were 
unwilling to make the tough decisions to get the economy going, which is 
still the best social program for everybody who has got a good job; and 
that somehow we had to reconcile that and develop a dynamic approach to 
politics so that we could have this debate between the two parties, and 
one would be more liberal and the other would be more conservative and 
the debate would go on, but

[[Page 1327]]

at least it would be about the real choices facing the country and the 
real lives of people.
    And I decided that if I didn't do anything else in the campaign--and 
when I started only my mother thought I could win--[laughter]--that I 
was going to try to change the terms of the debate, so we would be 
talking about real things in a real way that could have a real impact on 
the way people live. And in a way, I tried to be President the way I 
served as Governor or the way Ed Rendell serves as mayor.
    So let me just sort of take stock about where we are. I said, 
``We're going to have to take a new direction. If we're going to have 
opportunity for everybody responsible enough to work for it, if you're 
going to rebuild the American community with all this diversity, and if 
we're going to maintain America's leadership, then we have to focus on 
it.'' Instead of the old left-right, liberal-conservative, we said, ``We 
have to be for the future, not the past; for change, not the status quo; 
for unity, not division; for policies that help everybody, not just a 
few people; and we have to do things that will help us lead, not 
follow.''
    I love that old one-liner, you know, that unless you're the lead dog 
on the sled, the view's always the same. [Laughter] And I think it's 
something that we have to remember. Because as I told the young people 
down there tonight, it's very frustrating to me that I have not been 
able to persuade my fellow Americans of the benefits of our involvement 
in the world on a general, philosophical level. And I regret that. I've 
got to keep working on that. I've got to find a way to do a better job 
of that.
    But if you look at where we are now compared to where we were, with 
an economic policy that says basically we're going to charge head on 
into the global marketplace, but we're going to try to preserve the 
social contract at home and give everybody a chance to play--what that 
has meant in practical terms is expand trade; be fiscally responsible 
and balance the budget, but invest more in education, invest more in 
environmental technology, invest more in the health care of our people, 
and support things like family and medical leave and the minimum wage 
and the adoption tax credit and things that enable people to build 
strong families while they go to work; support the empowerment zone, 
like the one Philadelphia has, and community financial institutions that 
loan money to new entrepreneurs that couldn't get money at the local 
bank otherwise, do things that bring the benefits of free enterprise 
into the inner cities. The other big trade opportunity we've got in 
America is all these neighborhoods where people are unemployed or 
underemployed. If they were all working, that would be a big market for 
America's future.
    So that's what we've tried to do. And I think it's incontestable 
that it has worked. We've never generated so many jobs in such a short 
time, over 13 million now in less than 5 years. And it has worked. There 
is more to do, but it has worked.
    With the crime program--the mayor talked about that--what we wanted 
to do was to be tough and smart. We had people in Washington that wanted 
to pass tougher and tougher sentences when the police were screaming, 
``Give me more police officers, and I'll not only catch more criminals, 
I'll prevent crime. Give me people who can walk the streets and know the 
kids and know the parents and know the neighbors, and we'll drive the 
crime rate down.'' And that's what we did. And it had to be done. It 
cost us a few Members of Congress in 1994, but sooner or later the 
Federal Government had to take on the people who said that it was wrong 
to have any restriction on guns. And what we did with the Brady bill and 
the assault weapons ban has made this a safer country. It was the right 
thing to do. It's something we take for granted now--we wonder what else 
we ought to do--but it was a huge thing at the time it occurred. And our 
party sacrificed so many House Members that it may--that alone may have 
cost us the House in '94, including some here in Pennsylvania, because 
all these people were told we were coming after their guns.
    But in 1996, I had the pleasure of going back to New Hampshire and 
looking at all those people with their hunting license and saying, ``You 
remember 2 years ago when they told you we were coming after your guns, 
and you beat one of our Congressmen?'' I said, ``Every one of you that 
lost your gun, you ought to vote against me, too. But if you didn't, you 
need to know they lied to you, and you need to let them know you don't 
appreciate it.'' And we carried New Hampshire again and turned it 
around, because people now say, ``We can have safe streets, we can have 
responsible gun laws. There's no reason somebody who's got a felony 
record or a serious mental instability should be

[[Page 1328]]

able to walk in and buy a handgun without even being checked out.''
    So we changed the debate now. The debate is not this sort of 
abstract argument about the second amendment. The debate is, how can we 
preserve the culture, the way of life, the legitimate desire of people 
to go out and hunt and fish and do what they ought to be able to do, and 
make our streets safe and stop these kids from getting killed in 
Philadelphia. The mayor told the truth: There are kids all over this 
country that don't believe they'll ever live to be 50. Why should they 
ever forgo anything that's bad for them since they're not going to be 
around very long? But at least we've changed the debate now; we're 
moving forward.
    I think we changed the nature of the welfare debate. Today we found 
out another 250,000 people moved off the welfare rolls last week. There 
are now 3.6 million Americans living off paychecks, instead of welfare 
checks, that weren't when I became President. That's how much we've 
reduced the rolls by, 3.6 million. Why? Because the answer was not to 
throw people in the street. And it's fine to require people to go to 
work, but you also have to realize they had young children--that's why 
they're on welfare in the first place--so they've got to be able to take 
care of their kids. So don't take their health care away. Don't take 
their food stamps away. And give them medical care, and give them child 
care.
    Because the biggest problem most families face--even a lot of well-
to-do families with young children face terrible problems of reconciling 
their responsibilities as parents and their responsibilities to the work 
force. There are people in this room who have good incomes who have had 
lots of days where you were tearing your hair out, trying to figure out 
how you could do what you thought you ought to be doing at work and 
still do the right thing by your children. It is the single most 
significant social challenge facing all classes of Americans. Why? 
Because our biggest job is still raising our kids right. That's more 
important than everything else. If we do that right, most everything 
else will be all right.
    On the other hand, if we have to, in order to do that, basically 
crater our family's income, wreck a business, or weaken the American 
economy, that's a price we shouldn't have to pay. That's why all these 
family leave policies and all that is so important.
    So we tried to say, ``Okay, we'll step into the gap here.'' That's 
why we passed family and medical leave and raised the minimum wage and 
passed that Kennedy-Kassebaum bill that said you can keep your health 
insurance when you change jobs or if somebody in your family gets sick, 
or stopped the sort of drive-by deliveries where women could be thrown 
out of the hospital after they had a baby within 24 hours, or provided 
the extra tax credit so we get people to adopt kids that are homeless 
and desperately need homes. Why? Because we're trying to figure out a 
way to grow the economy and support families. Not the same debate--it's 
not an either-or. We have to find a way to do both things, to have 
balance and harmony in America.
    The same thing with the environment. I consider myself a passionate 
environmentalist, and yet you know that I have devoted most of my 
energies in my first term to getting the economy going again. I think if 
we have to choose, we're in terrible trouble.
    But most of the choices are false choices. I remember when the 
United States decided--this was before my time--to limit sulfur dioxide 
emissions into the atmosphere. And everybody said, ``This is going to 
cost a ton of money, and it's going to bankrupt the country, and we'll 
never get it done on the timetable.'' And we let the market take over. 
They set up a permit trading system for sulfur dioxide emissions 
permitting. And a few years later, we're way ahead of schedule at far 
less than half the predicted cost, and the economy is booming because we 
found a way to get the private sector and its creativity involved in 
protecting and cleaning up our environment.
    That's what we have to do with this greenhouse gas problem that's 
warming the climate. If we do this right, we will create jobs, we will 
not shut down jobs, and we'll preserve the environment for our children.
    So we got out of the environment--so the Republicans are for jobs, 
and the Democrats are for the environment; the liberals are for the 
environment, the conservatives for jobs--what a crazy way to live. I 
want to be able to breathe when I go to and from work. [Laughter] This 
is not a debate that should be structured this way. So I think we've 
changed it.
    And the last thing I'd like to say in that regard is this whole 
business about how we should handle our diversity. I could see it coming 
even in '92. The whole thing was, are you for or

[[Page 1329]]

against affirmative action. What I'm for is everybody having a chance to 
participate in this country's life. And if people don't have a chance, 
then I am poorer. It is a selfish thing to want every American, without 
regard to their race, their neighborhood, their background, or where 
they start out in life, to have a good chance to make it. That is a 
selfish thing for you to feel, because if they don't, then they're a 
drag on your future. And if they do, then they're contributing to your 
future.
    So we tried to reform the affirmative action programs without 
getting rid of them. Why? Because it was manifestly clear that there is 
still an absence of completely equal educational and economic 
opportunity in America. But that's not the main thing. The main thing 
we've got to do is get everybody a job, everybody an education, and open 
opportunity to people.
    The other thing I tried to get the American people to think about 
is, we are well on our way to becoming a country in which there is no 
majority race. Before midway through the next century, people of 
European heritage will not have a majority of the population, before 
2050. We don't know exactly when, but sometime before then. Within about 
5 years, that will be the case in California.
    Now, we have always said we were a country bound together by ideas 
and ideals, not by any particular piece of land and not by any race and 
not by any standard. When we started out, you had to be a white male 
property owner to vote. We've slowly shed all that stuff. We've moved 
toward more and more and more equality. But we are now going to have to 
face the fact that in a global society our greatest asset is our 
diversity. But if you look at the problems other countries are having, 
and the problems that are still lurking under the surface here from 
place to place, it could also be our greatest problem.
    Now, it seems to me to be foolish to have yesterday's debate about 
this. The facts are, here we are. I said to the group downstairs and I'm 
going to say again: The most diverse school district in the country 
apparently is the one that's across the river from Washington, DC, in 
Fairfax County, Virginia, where there are children from 182 countries in 
one school district, speaking over 100 languages. But there are 5 school 
districts already in America where there are kids whose native tongues 
number more than 100. And there will be 12 within a couple years. And 
every school district--there are school districts that had no diversity 
at all 4 or 5 years ago that now have large Hispanic populations where 
people had to be brought in because there was a negative unemployment 
rate. So this is happening across America.
    Now, what's our attitude about this? Are we going to think about 
this in future terms or in yesterday's terms? Are we going to look at 
people who are different from us as a great opportunity to make our 
lives more interesting or as some problem we have to deal with? This is 
a huge issue.
    The one thing I'm convinced of is, if we think about the future 
instead of the past, and change and not the status quo, and unity 
instead of division, and what helps everybody instead of what helps a 
few people, we are highly likely to make the right decision. And it is 
very important.
    So if--in addition to what the mayor said about hope for young 
people, I want you all to think about this. I want you to do what I try 
to do. When you get up tomorrow, think about: What would I like America 
to look like 20 years from now? What would I like America to look like 
when my children are my age? What would I like my legacy to my children 
to be in terms of my country? And I think that if we do that, we're 
going to be just fine.
    I have seen, in the last 5 years--if I had told you 5 years ago when 
I was inaugurated President, in 5 years we'll have over 13 million new 
jobs and the biggest drop in welfare in history and 5 years of dropping 
violent crime, and the environment will be cleaner, and the public 
health will be more secure, and America will be clearly leading the 
world toward a more peaceful situation--you would have been pretty 
happy, wouldn't you? But you probably wouldn't have believed it. At that 
point, we didn't have much self-confidence. And this was not rocket 
science; we just sort of showed up for work every day. This was not 
rocket science.
    I thought about how would I--how should I be President in the way I 
would behave if I were mayor--it's the way I would behave if I were 
Governor, it's the way I would behave if I were running any other big 
enterprise--remembering that my bosses are the American people as a 
whole. And I think we've changed the direction of the Democratic Party. 
I hope we've changed the direction of the political debate in the 
country. I hope eventually we'll also

[[Page 1330]]

change the direction of the Republican Party so we'll have a principled 
debate about where the dynamic center of America ought to be on 
education questions and environmental questions and other questions for 
the future.
    But when you come here and contribute to this, I just want you to 
understand that. I'd also just like to say this last thing. I think that 
we have changed the way Government works. State and local governments, 
the private sector are in more partnerships with us now. We have 300,000 
fewer people than we used to, 16,000 fewer pages of regulation. We've 
reformed a lot of our laws and our processes. The only thing we haven't 
reformed is campaign finance, and that's because--if we had a majority 
in Congress today, at least enough to break a filibuster, we could do 
that. But we may get that if we keep working at it. And that will be 
nice, because I'll still have dinner with you and it will be less 
expensive for you--[laughter]--and we'll have a good time. That would be 
important, too. That's important, too.
    And let me just say one last thing to all of you. I'm glad you're 
here. I appreciate your support. We ought to pass this McCain-Feingold 
bill, but the work won't be done until we lower the cost of campaigns. 
And to do that, you have to lower the cost of communicating with the 
voters. That's what really has driven this whole thing. So people who 
observe strict campaign limits ought to be rewarded with free or reduced 
air time and other means of communication with people, so they can 
afford it. Sometimes we put the cart before the horse here, and we 
forget what has been driving all this. And I hope we can do that.
    I just want you to feel good about your country. We're in better 
shape than we were 5 years ago. We're having a debate that makes sense 
again, by and large. We're arguing over things that are important, that 
will make a difference to your future. And you should feel very good 
about your country. You should be very strongly confident in the role 
you've played in it.
    But I want to make it clear that for all the things that have been 
done, we've got a lot to do between now and the 21st century. And I 
intend to work to the last minute of the last hour of the last day, 
until the Constitution puts me out to pasture, to do my part. But even 
then, there will be more to do. And I just hope you can remember and 
believe in these basic ideas and make sure that our party keeps pushing 
this basic line, to throw this country into the future, because this is 
a great place and it has been given to us to sort of take it through 
this transition.
    And here in Philadelphia, where it all began--I was talking to the 
mayor tonight about what John Marshall wrote when he heard George 
Washington had died, and he heard it here, and he couldn't go home to 
Virginia and get there in time for his funeral. So all the Founding 
Fathers had to organize a service for President Washington here. And we 
were thinking about it--just think about it, over 200 years ago. We're 
still around because people like us, in the past, at every moment of 
change, did the right thing. And that's what we really have to be doing 
now.
    I think we're going in the right direction. But I need you--you 
should not flag in your commitment. You shouldn't be discouraged. You 
should be encouraged, and you should know that if we face the challenges 
that are still out there and complete this transition, that clearly--
clearly--the best days of our country are still ahead.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 9:45 p.m. in the Victors Restaurant at the 
CoreStates Arena. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Edward Rendell of 
Philadelphia.