[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
[November 14, 1997]
[Pages 1572-1575]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Las Vegas
November 14, 1997

    Thank you. Thank you very much. We've had such a nice evening, it 
seems a shame to spoil it with a speech--[laughter]--but I'd like to say 
a few words. First of all, I want to thank Brian and Myra for once again 
welcoming me into their homes and for being my friends, and for being my 
friends when I was the fifth-best known candidate for President in the 
New Hampshire primary. When the only person in America who thought I 
could be elected was my mother--[laughter]--they were my friends.
    I also want to thank them because we share something else in common. 
In addition to the fact that Brian and I went to college together, our 
family and theirs, we're both parents of only daughters who are 
reasonably important to us. And I had Amy with me for a long time, and I 
miss her terribly, so I'm glad to see her here tonight. It was wonderful 
having her in the White House for the years that we had her.
    I'd like to thank Governor and Mrs. Miller and Senator and Mrs. 
Bryan and Senator and Mrs. Reid for being here tonight. And I'd like to 
thank the people of Nevada for voting for Bill Clinton and Al Gore 
twice.
    When we ran, I was told that there were all these States that I 
could never carry, among which were any between the Mississippi River 
and California. And that seemed to be an irrational thing to me, to give 
them all up. And most of them we did lose, both times--[laughter]--but 
Nevada was here for us both times. And I never will forget that, and I'm 
very grateful.
    I would like to tonight just ask you to think about where we are as 
a country on our journey, what we're going through as a people, and what 
we should be doing about it together.
    If you look at--now that I have been President for 5 years, I tend 
to have a little bit of detachment and see a lot of the specific 
struggles and contests and efforts we're making as part of the broad 
sweep of American history and as sort of human drama of our generation, 
in terms of how people work and live and relate to each other, relate to 
the rest of the world. And one thing I've learned from studying our 
history and from living it for the last 5 years is that whenever we go 
through a period of real sweeping change where our working patterns 
change, communications patterns change, living patterns change, and in 
our case the very composition of our population is changing--we're 
becoming much, much more diverse with these new waves of immigration--
and then our relationships after the cold war to the rest of the world 
is changing--whenever something like that happens and all the balls get 
thrown up in the air, there is not only the need that individuals feel 
to know what the deal is--how am I going to constitute my life; how am I 
going to constitute a stable family life; how are we going to keep our 
community together; what's our future like?--we also engage in 
redefining the Nation.
    You know, when we started as a country, we basically defined 
ourselves as a bunch of people that didn't want to be under British 
control anymore. So then we had years where we really argued about what 
ought to be in our Constitution and, once we had a Constitution, what 
did it mean--what did it mean to be one Nation of associated States.
    And we pretty well worked it out, and then things rocked along fine 
for a while. And then finally we had to come to grips with slavery, and 
whether slavery would be extended or restricted or done away with 
altogether; and how were we going to accommodate that within the 
Constitution; and could we do it and keep the country together. And half 
the country said no, half the country said yes, and we fought the 
bloodiest war in our history with each other. The casualties in the 
Civil War were slightly

[[Page 1573]]

greater than the casualties in World War II with a much, much smaller 
population. But we once again wound up defining the Nation. We fought a 
war to do it, and then we had to pass a bunch of constitutional 
amendments. But essentially America, by 1870, was what Abraham Lincoln 
said it ought to be in the Gettysburg Address.
    Then we became a great industrial country, and we had to do this all 
over again. Wasn't it wonderful? We had all these factory jobs. But 
wasn't it terrible that 9-year-old kids were working 9 hours a day, 6 
days a week in some of these factories? What were we going to do about 
that? And so through the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow 
Wilson, we did it all over again. We defined what the Nation was. And we 
found a way to get the benefits of a new era and still meet its 
challenges and kind of come together as one people. Then we had to do it 
again during the Depression and the Second World War. And we had to do 
it all over again for the cold war.
    Now we have to do it again, because we're moving into a truly global 
society, bound together more than anything else by shared technology and 
communications, where the movement of money and ideas and people is more 
rapid than ever before; where the security threats we will most likely 
face for the next 20 or 30 years are not animosities between two 
nations, although there may be some of that--we see that in the press 
today; there may be some of that--but far more likely it will be 
terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction into the hands of 
organized crime or drug dealers, shared international environmental 
problems, or new diseases crossing national borders--new problems we 
share with people who are living in different countries because they 
cross national borders and require a much higher level of cooperation 
than before.
    So there's a lot of change in the air. And when I ran in 1992, I 
attempted to address that and what I thought the Nation was. I said, 
``Look, I want to build a country in the 21st century where everybody 
who's responsible enough to work for it has the opportunity to live out 
his or her dreams. I want to build a country that's still the strongest 
force for peace and freedom and prosperity in a new world. And I want to 
build a country where, in spite of all of our differences, we're still 
coming together as one America.''
    It wasn't the end of the debate; it was the beginning of the debate. 
In '94, the Republicans won the Congress. They said, ``We've got a 
different idea. We think Government is the problem, and we will be a 
nation if we just say we believe in the same things and we get the 
Government out of the way, and the international market is a wonderful 
thing, and so vote for us and we'll drastically diminish the role of the 
Government, and that's the real problem.'' And people liked it when they 
heard it. But then when they saw it in action in 1995 and 1996, they 
didn't like it so well. And we fought them over that.
    But you need to see all this not just as an isolated political 
event. All of you are present at another moment of creation for America. 
We are in the process of once again redefining what it means to be an 
American and what we want our country to do. And my idea is that we have 
to be faithful to our oldest values and then be highly pragmatic and 
aggressive about what the challenges are.
    What are the challenges we face in this country today? First of all, 
you can't do very well in this world unless you've got a decent 
education. So it's more important than ever before to give a world-class 
education to every child in the country.
    Secondly, with more and more people in the work force, men and 
women--over half the children in this country under one have mothers in 
the work force--way over half. We have to recognize that even for upper 
income people and certainly for lower income working people, we have to 
work very hard to enable people to balance the demands of work and 
family, because if we have a society where you have to choose whether 
you're going to be a good parent or successful in the workplace, we are 
defeated before we begin. The most important work of any society is 
raising children. There is no more important job. It is the most 
significant work we ever do. But if people who want to be--and indeed we 
need to be--in the work force can't be successful parents and get the 
kind of supports they need and still succeed at work, we're in deep 
trouble.
    And so that's what the--when you see a specific issue like family 
and medical leave, or we cut taxes more for lower income working people 
with a lot of kids, or we're working on trying to broaden the child care 
system of the country, or I wouldn't sign welfare reform until we put

[[Page 1574]]

$4 billion in it so Governor Miller and his colleagues could figure out 
how to give these lower income parents who go from welfare to the 
workplace adequate child care for their kids--all of that is really part 
of a big issue, which is that a decent, good America will reconcile the 
conflicts of work and family. That's what Harry Reid and Dick Bryan have 
to deal with every week in some form or fashion.
    We have to prove that we can make our streets safe, and we have to 
prove we can make our communities coherent. We have to have a system 
that brings the benefits of free enterprise to places that it hasn't 
reached yet. We have to prove we can grow the economy and preserve the 
environment, a huge issue.
    A big difference between us and the Republicans in '95 and '96 was 
whether you could actually increase environmental protection and 
increase economic growth at the same time. I always believed if you did 
it right, you'd make more jobs with the proper kind of environmental 
protection, because that would be the new technology of the future and 
there will be more demand for it in the future. And I think the evidence 
is on our side. I believe that's exactly what we've done. The air and 
water is cleaner. We're making our food safer. We're cleaning up toxic 
waste dumps. And we're creating jobs like crazy in all those areas. And 
it's very good.
    But when you strip it down, what we believe is that in order to be 
bound together as a nation, we must do certain things as a nation: to 
create opportunity, demand responsibility, bring us together as a 
community, and preserve our leadership. And if it works, America will 
once again be, in effect, reborn as the strongest country in the world 
and a beacon of hope to people.
    And so far the evidence is pretty encouraging. We've got the lowest 
unemployment rate in 24 years, the lowest inflation rate in 30 years. 
The crime rate has been dropping for 5 years. We've got the lowest--
biggest drop in welfare rolls in history. We're moving in the right 
direction. We have average incomes that are rising now. And our 
environment is significantly improved. We are moving in the right 
direction.
    This year we had a good year. We passed the balanced budget law, 
with the biggest increase in investment in education since '65, the 
biggest increase in investment for children's health since '65. The 
American Diabetes Association says what we've done for families with 
diabetes is the best thing since insulin was discovered 70 years ago.
    And the most important thing, I believe, over the long run is, I 
think with the latest tax credits, scholarships, work-study funds, we 
can honestly say we have now opened the doors of college to every 
American who is willing to work for it. This year we had the biggest 
increase in assistance to people to go to college since the GI bill was 
passed 50 years ago. This was a good year for America.
    Are there problems? Of course there are. You read about them in the 
paper every day. But I just want you to feel good about this because 
when I started this little odyssey 6 years ago, when I spent my first 
night at this house, I would go from place to place in America, and I 
would really meet a lot of people who weren't sure that we could--this 
country worked anymore. They didn't know if we could get the economy 
going again. They didn't know if we could bring the crime rate down 
again by working together. They didn't know if we could ever really kind 
of break the culture of poverty again. They weren't quite sure how we 
were going to relate to the rest of the world again.
    We're in better shape than we were then. And all we need to do is to 
remember this. We just are fortunate to be living in a time of truly 
breathtaking change. It makes it more interesting. But it also imposes 
on all of us as citizens higher responsibilities because you have to 
figure out how are you going to make the economy work for everybody 
again, how are you going to keep the society together again, how are you 
going to help families again.
    We also have a lot of new challenges, particularly in the 
environmental area, that no one has ever had before. And finally, we 
have to figure out how to relate to all these other countries around the 
world when we're not all divided up into Communist and non-Communist 
camps, and we have to figure out how to build new alliances for 
cooperation all the time. It's almost as if you abolished the two-party 
system in the world and now nations were just trying to figure out where 
they're going to organize themselves issue by issue. So it's 
fascinating; it's endlessly complex; but in the end, it's pretty simple. 
If you're expanding opportunity, if citizens are being more responsible, 
and if we're pulling people together instead of driving them apart, this 
country is going to be fine.

[[Page 1575]]

    And I am gratified beyond measure, but I can also tell you this: We 
have a lot left to do. When the baby boomers like me retire, we have to 
have reformed Medicare and Social Security enough so it will be there 
for our children and so that we're not going to bankrupt our children as 
they raise our grandchildren to pay for our retirement.
    We still have to work through the big tobacco settlement issue next 
year to guarantee that we protect the health of our children. It's still 
the number one public health problem in America. Illegal smoking among 
children will lead to bigger health care bills and more problems than 
anything else.
    We have a number of exciting issues to deal with in the environment 
and on climate change. But the general thing is people now believe that 
we get it in America. You should all have a very high level of 
confidence that our country can function, that it can succeed, that we 
can meet any challenge.
    And I just am so grateful to have been given the chance to serve and 
to play a role in once again proving that America will always be a young 
nation if at every time of challenge it can redefine what it means to be 
an American. That's what you're doing, and I hope you're very proud of 
it. And I hope, so far, you're very pleased with the results.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 11:32 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to Brian and Myra Greenspun, dinner hosts, and 
their daughter, Amy; Gov. Bob Miller of Nevada and his wife, Sandy; 
Bonnie Bryan, wife of Senator Richard H. Bryan; and Landra Reid, wife of 
Senator Harry Reid.