[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
[November 14, 1997]
[Pages 1567-1572]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Women's Leadership Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada
November 14, 1997

    Thank you very much. Thank you all for being here, for being in such 
a good humor. [Laughter] You know why they're sitting down now? Because 
they think I'm going to talk a lot longer than previous speakers. 
[Laughter]
    I want to thank Senator Reid and Senator Bryan and Governor Miller 
for being here, for their service, and for their remarkable friendship 
to me. I'd like to thank the national chair of the Women's Leadership 
Forum, Cynthia Friedman, who is also up here on the stage with

[[Page 1568]]

us. And we have other people here from the national Democratic Party--I 
see Carol Pensky out there--I thank all of them. But I want to say a 
special word of thanks to Shelly Berkeley and to Cassandra Williams, and 
to you, Mayor Jones, all of you who made this night possible.
    This is an event sponsored by the Women's Leadership Forum, but I 
see there are a few lucky men out here in the audience--[laughter]--and 
I thank you for showing up, too. I'd be lonely if you weren't here.
    I got tickled when the mayor was telling that story about my mother, 
which is a true story. That's not one of those things you make up 
because it sounds good on the podium. My mother spent the last weekend 
of her life in Las Vegas. [Laughter] And she had been quite ill for a 
long time. And the night she passed away she called me, and we had a 
long and perfectly normal conversation. And I thought to myself that in 
her own mind she got to go to heaven 4 days early. She looked at it that 
way. [Laughter] So whenever I land at the airport here, I always imagine 
that my mother is landing with me because she loved to come here so much 
and had so many friends here.
    Let me say very briefly to all of you, this is a very exciting, 
interesting, and good time for America. Congress just went home. We had 
a very good year. We passed an historic balanced budget agreement. It 
had the largest investment for children's health that your National 
Government has made since 1965. It has a huge effort to improve research 
and care in the area of diabetes, an illness that affects 16 million 
Americans. The diabetes foundation said it's the most important thing 
done in diabetes since the discovery of insulin 70 years ago.
    It has a major, major investment, the largest investment in 
education since 1965, everything from more Pell grants to more work-
study positions to more funds to put computers in every classroom in 
this country by the year 2000. It, for the first time, puts us on record 
as favoring national academic standards and a voluntary testing system 
to see how all our children are doing. This was a great budget, and it 
is going to make a huge difference in America. Yesterday I signed the 
last big piece of it, dealing with the health care and the education 
initiatives.
    The Senate ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention that will make 
all of you young people here and your children less likely to be exposed 
to deadly chemicals from terrorists and organized criminals, a terribly 
important thing.
    The Congress passed landmark reform of the Food and Drug 
Administration which will enable us to continue to test medicines to 
make sure they're safe for the American people but will move them to the 
market a lot quicker, so that people who have serious illnesses in 
America and want to know they're going to get access to the medicine 
that's the best in the world as quickly as possible will know that we're 
doing the best job in the world of both protecting their safety and 
getting them medicines that can save their lives. This is a huge issue.
    The Senate and the House passed a landmark reform of our adoption 
system in America to give massive new incentives and speed up the system 
by which families can adopt children, which is a terribly important 
issue. Just last year we passed a $5,000 adoption tax credit, and in a 
few days, when Hillary comes home from her trip--she worked hard on 
this--we're going to have a nice little signing ceremony and describe to 
the world what this adoption initiative does. But it is very important, 
and I'm proud of it, and every woman in America should be proud of it.
    So this was a good year, a historic year. And it was another step 
along the way in trying to implement the vision that I ran for President 
6 years ago to try to implement, one that, thank goodness, has received 
the support of a substantial majority of America's women and has helped 
us to build a party for the future.
    But it's pretty simple. I know that we are moving into a very 
different time. We are dramatically changing the basis of economic 
activity. We are seeing dramatic changes in the way people live as well 
as the way they work and the way we relate to each other. Our own 
country is changing dramatically; we're getting more and more diverse in 
every conceivable way but especially in racial and ethnic and religious 
terms. The way we relate to the world is different. We are the world's 
strongest military power and have the world's strongest economy, but we 
are still only 4 percent of the world's population, with about 20 
percent of its income, so that increasingly our ability to succeed in 
ensuring our own future depends on our willingness to get involved in 
issues beyond our border and our willingness to recognize that we are 
interdependent with others and that we have to work in partnership with 
others.

[[Page 1569]]

    What are the big security problems of the future? Terrorism, weapons 
of mass destruction proliferation, organized crime, international drug 
dealing, international environmental crises, the spread of new diseases 
across national borders--none of these can be dealt with unless we're 
willing to work as partners. We can lead, but we have to lead in a world 
increasingly interdependent.
    In Bosnia, we are there with soldiers from more than two dozen other 
countries, including Russian soldiers, working side by side. That is a 
metaphor for what we'll have to do in the future.
    And what I want to do is to have an America in which every person, 
without regard to his or her circumstances in life, has a chance to live 
out his or her dreams if they're responsible enough to work for it and 
to be a good citizen; a country in which we're coming together, instead 
of being driven apart as so many other societies are; and a nation still 
strong enough to lead the world for peace and freedom and prosperity. 
We've been working at it for 6 years now.
    The economy is stronger; we have the lowest unemployment rate in 24 
years; we have the lowest inflation rate in 30 years. We had another big 
drop in the crime rate last year. The murder rate in America has dropped 
22 percent in just 3 years, 10 percent last year alone. We've had the 
biggest drop in welfare rolls in the country's history. And even though 
we've had two decades of immigration, lots and lots of poor people 
coming to our shores to work and find their way, we have the smallest 
percentage of our population on welfare in almost 30 years. This country 
is working again. We're coming together; we're moving into the future 
again.
    And I guess what I want to say to all of you, since you invested in 
this to come here, is you've got to do a better job of telling people 
that this did not happen by accident. When I started running for 
President, with my rather earthy friend James Carville from Louisiana 
helping me--[laughter]--a brilliant young man by the name of--James is 
from Louisiana; Paul Begala, his partner, was from Texas; and I was from 
Arkansas. And a brilliant young man by the name of Gene Sperling who is 
now my national economic counselor, from Michigan, came to work for us. 
And he called his mother after working for us for about a week, and he 
said, ``Mom, if I'm going to survive down here with all these guys from 
the South, I'm going to have to learn a lot more animal stories''--
[laughter]--because we would all say things like our opponents were 
squealing like a pig under a gate--[laughter]--or you never know how far 
a frog will jump till you punch it. [Laughter] But one of the things I 
was taught as a child is that if you see a turtle on a fencepost, the 
chances are it didn't get there by accident. [Laughter]
    And so, all these things that are going on in America didn't just 
happen. We had a different political philosophy--not different values 
for the Democratic Party, the same values--but we believed we needed a 
new politics for a new era.
    And I must say, I've been deeply grateful for the support of both 
your Senators and your Governor in every critical step along the way, 
because it was basically what people were doing as mayors and Governors 
and State legislators throughout America anyway.
    But I thought, on the economy, we had to bring down the deficit and 
invest more in education and our future. I thought we had to trade more 
around the world. I don't believe it's right to say we can walk away 
from the obligation to sell more American products around the world. 
This is not rocket science. If you're 4 percent of the world's 
population and you have 20 percent of the income and you'd like to keep 
it, you've got to sell something to the other 96 percent. If your 
markets are open and other people's markets are closed, in order to make 
a trade agreement with them, you have to lower your trade barriers a 
little bit so they'll lower theirs a lot. That's probably a pretty good 
deal.
    On the other hand, we can't afford to say that's all we're 
interested in because the economy is churning so much today, most people 
who are dislocated from work lose their jobs because of technological 
changes that will occur in every country whether there's more trade or 
not. But because we're Democrats, we have an obligation to worry about 
those people, to give people a better, quicker, more comprehensive 
system if they are dislocated from their jobs for whatever reason to 
move back into the work force more quickly, and to contribute with us to 
our future.
    I believe on welfare we should require people to go to work, but we 
ought to recognize that their most important work, like everybody 
else's, is raising their children. So when they said in

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the other party, ``Oh, by the way, we want to require people to go to 
work and take away from the children the fundamental right of nutrition 
and the fundamental right of health care, and by the way, we don't want 
to come up with any more money for child care,'' I vetoed the bill 
twice, because I thought it was wrong. Now, but once we got it right, I 
changed. I signed the bill because it was consistent with what we've 
been working on for 3 years. But a lot of people don't get it. I still 
read in the paper, some journalist will say, ``The President signed the 
Republicans' welfare bill.'' Bull! [Laughter] What planet were they--
it's like in Washington, it's amazing, if an issue has a certain label 
on it, a lot of people in old-think say, ``Well, that label belongs to 
one party.'' The Democrats weren't supposed to be interested in crime 
and welfare and growing the economy. Don't be involved in people's 
lives. How many elections will you win?
    In crime, I read the other day that someone said, ``Well, some 
people in the House of Representatives were mad at the President for 
adopting a Republican position on crime.'' I said, hello--[laughter]--
what planet was this person on? In 1994 the Democrats, over the 
bitterest, fiercest opposition of the Republican leaders and a bitter 
attempt in a last-ditch filibuster in the United States Senate by my 
distinguished opponent in the last election, passed a crime bill that 
they were against and we were for. It put 100,000 police on the street 
and took assault weapons off the street. And I think it was right.
    We were for the Brady bill; their leadership was against it. And it 
played a role--65,000 police officers in 3 years have been approved 
under the crime bill to be put out on the streets. And if you go to any 
community in the country where the crime rate is coming down, they'll 
tell you the central reason is there has been a change in the philosophy 
of policing in this country, to get kids and keep them out of trouble in 
the first place, to walk the blocks and to build ties to neighbors, and 
to catch people when they do commit crimes more quickly. And that, plus 
the generally improving circumstances in America, is plummeting the 
crime rate in this country. And that is a good thing. But it did not 
happen by accident.
    I say that because we need people to understand that we still have 
big challenges out there. And we need the support, and we need to build 
an infrastructure of Americans who understand that the politics of this 
country have changed.
    In the environment, 1995, one of the most troubling things about the 
new Republican majority in Congress was their contract on America said 
the only way we could have a good America is to grow the economy and 
forget about the environment: ``We're going to break down all these 
terrible regulations for clean air and clean water, and it's just 
choking business.'' And I said, ``Well, if we Democrats were trying to 
choke business by cleaning the air, cleaning the water, and cleaning up 
the toxic waste, we've done a sorry job because we've had more new 
businesses start in every year since I've been President than in any 
year in American history.'' So we're not very good at killing business 
with environmental regulation. We're not very good at that.
    We believe you have to protect the environment and grow the economy. 
Shelly had that little passing line about the nuclear waste disposal--I 
thought you'd never mention it. [Laughter] I hope that everyone in 
Nevada remembers that there's been pretty much of a partisan divide on 
that, too, although some of our Democrats have strayed over to the other 
side. But that's just because it's a big problem in their States, and 
they want to dump it somewhere, and they've never been here. [Laughter]
    My position has never been to come here and pander to you; it's just 
to tell the truth. This is a serious issue, and we should not make a 
decision to do this anywhere until we're sure that it is safe and we're 
absolutely certain that our predecessors didn't pick a site for 
political reasons, because you don't have many electoral votes. That's 
all I've ever said.
    And I can honestly say that neither of your Senators nor your 
Governor ever asked me to promise that under no circumstances ever would 
I say that I didn't care what the evidence was, I would never think 
about this. All they said was, ``Make sure that we're doing the right 
thing by our children and make sure that we haven't been singled out 
because we're a big State with still a fairly small population and not 
many electoral votes.'' That's all they asked. And that was the right 
thing to do. I thought it was right then; I think it's right now. And I 
appreciated it.
    Again let me say, the reason this is important is not so Shelly can 
win an election--I'm not

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running anymore, so I can say all this--[laughter]--this is not just 
about an election for Congress; it's about how you're going to live.
    We still have a lot of other issues. Let me just give you some 
issues that I think would be quite important to you. We still have to 
pass through Congress legislation which implements our initiative to 
reduce teenage smoking in America and saves lives. It's going to be a 
huge thing, and we have to do it in a way that improves the public 
health and protects our children. That's a big issue for next year.
    Next year--a couple years ago we passed a bill that stopped 
insurance companies from kicking women out of the hospital in 48 hours 
after they had had a baby, whether they were ready to leave or not. And 
we now find that a lot of the same things are happening with 
mastectomies, when the women are leaving, and I think we ought to have 
the same standard for that. I think that's an important thing.
    But in a larger sense, we believe strongly that there ought to be a 
patients' bill of rights for quality health care that doctors and 
patients have worked on. And if we're going to have more managed care 
and we're going to have more HMO's, people have the right to know that--
that's a good thing if somebody is taking your health care money and 
making it go as far as possible so we don't have inflation, as long as 
you're not giving up quality.
    Now, right before this Congress broke up, there was huge news back 
East about how the leaders of the other party had called the health 
insurance companies and others and told them to get up off their 
backsides and go to work to kill our attempts to protect the quality of 
health care for patients in this country. That's a big issue. That is a 
choice.
    I believe we can moderate health care costs and guarantee quality. I 
believe it is part of the Nation's responsibility to do that. If you 
believe that, in 1997 terms that makes you a Democrat, because that's 
our party's position. And that is not their position.
    You have got to help us go out and clarify these choices for people. 
We passed that economic program in 1993. They told me, the people in the 
other party said I was going to bankrupt the country; we'd increase the 
deficit; and the economy would go into the tank. Well, that's what they 
said. They actually won a congressional race partly on that, that and 
telling everybody we were going to take their guns away and all the 
stuff they said in '94.
    Well, sooner or later, people should be held accountable. Are our 
ideas right? Were they implemented? Have they made a difference? Were 
their ideas right? Were they implemented? Have they made a difference? 
I've done everything I could to work in a responsible, bipartisan way, 
but where there are still clear differences, I think the evidence is, we 
were right.
    Today I took action again to try to deal with this assault weapons 
problem because, now that we've banned them in America, you've got all 
these foreign gun manufacturers who are trying to modify their assault 
weapons to get them in under the sport weapon definition. So I said, for 
120 days we're not going to take any more of these weapons until we 
study it. I am not going to let people overseas turn our streets into 
battle zones where gangs are armed like they were guerrilla warriors 
halfway around the world if I can stop it. But you've got to decide.
    So I thank you for being here. I thank you for your contributions. 
But let's go out and have a little debate here--1998 is an election 
year--and ask people to think about whether they really believe what has 
happened in America has happened by accident. Ask them to think about 
what they believe the Nation should do.
    The Democrats of 1997 are not out there defending big Government and 
big regulations and all this. We've reduced the size of Government by 
300,000--more than any previous Republican administration in modern 
times. We have reduced more Government regulations. We have given more 
authority to State and local government. We have privatized more 
operations than previous Republican administrations.
    But we have not given up the fundamental responsibility to define 
the national interest when it comes to protecting families and children 
and communities and futures. That's what we haven't done, and that's why 
this country is moving forward and moving forward together.
    I want you to be a part of it. I thank you for being here tonight. I 
hope you'll help us in all these elections. But talk to people about 
what is going to affect our children's lives. We're making a difference, 
and you can make a bigger one.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 7:50 p.m. in the New Country Club Building 
at the Sheraton

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Desert Inn. In his remarks, he referred to Gov. Bob Miller of Nevada; 
Carol Pensky, treasurer, Democratic National Committee; Shelly Berkeley, 
candidate for Nevada's First Congressional District, who introduced the 
President; Cassandra Williams, reception chair, Women's Leadership 
Forum; and Mayor Jan Laverty Jones of Las Vegas.