[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
[November 16, 1997]
[Pages 1588-1592]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Los Angeles, 
California
November 16, 1997

    Well, thank you, chaver [friend]. [Laughter] Actually, I learned how 
to do that--you know, that's just the way we say it in Arkansas; what 
can I say? [Laughter] Walk into any redneck bar on the weekend--
[laughter]--that's the way we talk.
    Thank you, Haim. Thank you, Cheryl. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, 
for being here. I'm, first of all, delighted to see you all, and I want 
to thank you for your presence here and for your support. And I want to 
thank you for having us in your beautiful home and your beautiful tent. 
[Laughter] I used to say, when I was on the stump running for President, 
I wanted to create a big tent in America that we could keep everybody 
in. And I think we've almost achieved it tonight. [Laughter]
    You mentioned Yitzhak Rabin, who was my great friend, and we sadly 
observed the second anniversary of his death just a few days ago. And 
I've only been through this twice, but the two anniversaries of his 
death that I have observed, both times I remember exactly where I was 
and exactly what I was doing when I heard that he had been shot, and I 
remember exactly what I did waiting for the news of whether he lived or 
not. So I've thought a lot about what it was to me that made him so 
special, because we had a relationship that was one of the most 
important things that ever happened to me in my life. The thing I liked 
about Rabin was that he was tough as nails, but he had a great heart and 
a great imagination. And he understood that the status quo would not 
work for Israel, and therefore he was prepared to make changes, even 
though they carried risks.
    In a less dire way entirely, that is the general choice that has 
faced America for the last few years, because when things begin to 
change in a society, if you want to hold on to your basic values--you 
can't hold on to your basic values by holding on to old conditions. In 
order to hold on to your basic values, you have to change conditions; 
you have to change your approach; you have to be open to new things and 
even open to taking risks.
    Six years ago, when I decided to run for President, I did it 
basically because I thought that we were not changing fast enough and 
that we didn't have a strategy about how we were going to get into the 
21st century. We were talking about the revolution in telecommunications 
and software and other things around the table tonight--they are really 
metaphors for the breathtaking changes that are going on in the way 
Americans work and live and relate to the rest of the world. And if we 
want to preserve what is best about America, therefore, we have to be 
the most aggressive change agents in the world. That is the premise on 
which I began to seek the Presidency 6 years ago.
    I thought the only way to restore opportunity and responsibility and 
a sense of community in this country was to basically have new ideas 
that were relevant to a new time. And so we set about doing that. And 
the people of California were kind enough to vote for Vice President 
Gore and me and to give us a chance to serve, and we changed the 
economic policy of the country. We went from trickle-down economics to 
invest-and-grow economics. We changed the National Government's approach 
to crime and focused on police, prevention, as well as punishment. We 
changed our approach to welfare and focused on requiring work but also 
supporting children. We aggressively embraced the environmental policy 
designed to facilitate economic growth by improving the environment.
    And we did a lot of other things. We tried to take on what I think 
is a central challenge for almost every family in America today, even 
quite well-to-do families, even though it's tougher for poor families, 
and that is, nearly every person I know with young children can cite at

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least one example where they have felt a conflict between their 
obligations at work and their obligations to their children. And our 
society is not sufficiently organized to enable people to succeed at 
work and at what is everybody's most important job, which is raising 
good children. It is still the most important work of every society, and 
we have given no thought, really, or very little thought as a country to 
what our national approach ought to be to making sure that no one had to 
give up being a good parent in order to be successful at work.
    So these were some of the challenges we tried to take on. I also 
have been concerned all my life, but particularly in the last few years, 
about how we could bridge our old divides of race and deal with all the 
incredible manifold new diversity coming into our society, respecting 
that diversity, even celebrating it, but still saying, these are the 
things which unite us as Americans. We can have one America, no matter 
how kaleidoscopic we get. As a matter of fact, the richer, the more 
diverse we get, we can even be stronger as one country.
    And finally, I was quite concerned that the temptation would be very 
great at the end of the cold war for the United States to lay down the 
responsibilities of world leadership, and I was worried that there would 
be a vacuum at the very time when we had enormous opportunities in terms 
of trade and the economy to bring people together and to reinforce 
democracy, and we had enormous new responsibility. Just because there is 
no cold war and the threat of two great countries annihilating each 
other and half the rest of the world with nuclear bombs is receding, we 
see a whole new set of threats from terrorists and weapons of mass 
destruction, from international criminal cartels and drug traffickers, 
and potentially over the next few decades, from more international 
diseases, infections traversing national borders. Particularly, it will 
become more pronounced if we have dramatic changes in the global 
environment. So we needed a new approach there, and so we set about 
trying to change all these things and a number of others I haven't 
mentioned.
    Five years later, thanks largely to the work of the American people 
but not unrelated to these changes, we've got the strongest economy in a 
generation, the lowest crime rate in 24 years, the biggest drop in 
welfare in history; the air is cleaner; the water is cleaner; there are 
fewer toxic waste dumps; and our food is safer.
    We have made a beginning on trying to deal with the conflicts of 
work and family by passing the family leave law and by providing special 
tax breaks for people to finance college education, for parents with 
young children, and for adoption, which is a very important issue to a 
number of you in this room and also to me.
    We're about to expand health care coverage to 5 million more 
children in working families who don't have it. We're moving the country 
forward. We have fought back our worst impulses to divide the country 
over immigrants and over race, and I hope we'll be able to take on a 
whole range of other issues as I continue this initiative of racial 
dialog that I started here in California a few months ago.
    The nuclear threat has been reduced. We've been a positive force for 
peace in Bosnia and Haiti and Northern Ireland and in the Middle East, 
troubled though the peace process is today. And we have begun to bring 
the world together, I think, around a shared approach not only to our 
common opportunities through trade and economic cooperation and dealing 
with common concerns over human rights but also in dealing with these 
terrorist problems and other related problems.
    So I think it's a very different country today than it was 5 years 
ago, and I am very gratified for all the people who have helped. So the 
first and most important thing I'd like to say tonight to all of you is, 
thank you. I think it is very important that you understand there is a 
direct connection between the decisions people make in elections, the 
policies that are put in, and the consequences that flow. And the system 
we have today requires us to be able to raise funds so that we can 
communicate.
    I would very much like to see campaign finance reform passed. I've 
worked hard on it. We've tried for 5 years. The forces that benefit from 
the present system keep trying to keep it, but I will say this, too--and 
a lot of you--I'm sure that Lew Wasserman has probably been contributing 
to campaigns as long as anybody in this room--would say the escalating 
costs of campaigns is like the escalating costs of making movies or the 
escalating costs of anything else. You don't raise the money and then 
look for something to throw it at. The costs go up, and you raise the 
money to meet them.

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    So if we're going to have meaningful campaign finance reform, we 
also have to have a meaningful way to lower the cost of candidates 
communicating with the electorate, through free or reduced air time for 
people who accept spending limits and other things like that.
    But you ought to be proud tonight that you have played a role in 
moving your country to a better place over the last 5 years. You also 
ought to know that we are nowhere near done, for two reasons. One is 
that a lot of things still need to be done. The second is that the 
American people are almost evenly divided, or they go first one way and 
then another, between what I think are the two dominant governing 
philosophies today, represented by the two parties.
    My philosophy is that the Government should be smaller and less 
bureaucratic but should be strong enough to create the conditions and 
give people the tools to make the most of their own lives, and that 
there are things that are very important for us to do as one America. 
Even though we often agree on things, the Republican philosophy is that 
Government is basically the source of our problems and it would be 
better if there were less of it, even if there is more inequality and 
more unfairness. And I don't agree with that. I've done everything I 
could to lift the burdens of Government from the American people but to 
bring the benefits of our common endeavors to moving the country 
forward. And as you see in all these elections that are genuinely 
contested, it's a near-run thing. The American people are still trying 
to work this through as we define what it means to be an American and 
what America means as we move into a new era.
    I can only say this, in addition to thank you: You should all be 
very excited to be alive now, and grateful, because we have the chance--
the chance--to give not just our country but the world the 50 best years 
in all of human history, in terms of freedom from genuine fear of 
extinction, elevation in material conditions, resolution of a lot of our 
most difficult problems, if we work together and we really work at it.
    And in terms of the difficulties, they always attend this level of 
change. And every time this country has gone through a change, we've had 
a big debate about what America means. We had a big debate in the 
beginning about what America means. A lot of people in the beginning 
thought America meant a bunch of States that basically had to put up 
with a National Government so we could have a common currency and some 
trade rules and we could raise an army if anybody ever threatened us; 
otherwise, go away and leave us alone.
    Then, because our Constitution said all people were created equal, 
but slaves were three-fifths people, we had another debate about what 
America means that led to the great Civil War. And we said, no, America 
means all people are created equal. And it changed the politics of 
America for another 40 or 50 years.
    Then the industrial revolution came on, and we had another debate 
about it. And Theodore Roosevelt first, then Woodrow Wilson, said this 
can't be America--to say, ``Yes, we want to have these great factories 
rising up, but we don't want 9-year-olds working 12-hour days and 6 days 
a week in factories; that's wrong. It's a good thing to get all the 
resources we can out of the land, but we ought to save our national 
parks; we ought to save our natural resources. We owe something to our 
grandchildren and to their grandchildren.''
    When Franklin Roosevelt came in and one in four Americans was out of 
work and he had to face the threat of Hitler, we had to redefine again 
what the role of America was. The same thing happened in the civil 
rights crisis. That's what's going on today, and you should be very 
excited to be a part of it.
    You know, when I became President, the Internet was still the 
province of physicists. It is now the fastest growing human organism in 
all of history. While we've been having dinner, there are probably a 
million new sites on the Net. Things are happening at a pace and in a 
way, in dimensions we could never imagine before. This is good. It's 
basically a good time.
    But there are challenges we have to face. I'll just mention a few of 
them. We've got the budget balanced. We've reformed Medicare for the 
next 10 or 12 years; it's going to be fine. We have not fully come to 
grips with the implications of the retirement of the baby boomers on 
Social Security and Medicare. How are we going to do that? I personally 
think it's very important to preserve them because of the large number 
of Americans who would be in a world of hurt if they weren't there. But 
we have to do it in a way that does not bankrupt our own children as 
they attempt to raise their children. Can we do it? Of course we can. 
But we have to do it.

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    In the area of criminal justice, the crime rate has been coming down 
for 5 years, but it's not coming down so much among children between the 
ages of 12 and 18. Most crime by juveniles is committed between 3 in the 
afternoon and 7 at night, when the parents are still at work or coming 
home. We haven't thought about how our schools, our community centers, 
and other things--how should they be organized? If we know that this is 
when it occurs and we don't really want to jail a lot more kids and we'd 
like to keep them out of trouble in the first place, we need a national 
commitment to give these kids the future they need.
    We finally got a vote out of Congress for the first time to 
establish national academic standards and voluntary exams to see whether 
kids were meeting them, but we still haven't implemented it, and I'll 
have to fight it every step of the way for the next 3 years. But I'm 
telling you, it is wrong to let children get out of school without the 
basic educational skills they need to do well in this modern economy, 
and we will never overcome our economic and racial problems until we do 
it.
    If you look at the economic changes that are going on and the big 
argument we had over fast track--which I still think will be resolved in 
a positive way, for my position, some time next year--when a plant 
closes, you see it. When trade adds jobs, it's one here, 10 there, 50 
the other place. People are traumatized by the churning of the economy 
even when the unemployment rate is low. Does that mean that we should 
run away from trade? It's ridiculous. You know, we could try, and it 
would still happen; we just wouldn't benefit from it. But it is true 
that no society, no wealthy country in the world has figured out how to 
get all the benefits of all this economic change and still help the 
people that are temporarily dislocated to start their lives anew, to be 
on an equal or better footing and to do it in a hurry.
    So the answer is trade more. Get rid of more trade barriers, but do 
more and do it more quickly to help people that aren't very well suited 
for this modern economy, in terms of their skills, move into the 
mainstream again. And we don't have a system to do that. No other 
country has a very good system either. But we ought to have the best, 
and we're nowhere near the best. And we can do better, and we must.
    In 1994 a lot of people didn't like what I proposed in health care. 
But I said if we didn't do something, the percentage of uninsured people 
would go up and, sure enough, it has. So here we are with the world's 
best medical care and more and more people without any health insurance. 
We've got to find a way to make health insurance affordable and to 
emphasize quality care at the same time. Can we do it? Of course we can. 
But we can't do it by having bogus debates about the things that don't 
have anything to do with this. We have to have a practical as well as 
passionate and compassionate approach to this.
    And let me just mention one or two other things. I'm convinced this 
challenge of climate change is real. I have reviewed every document I 
can get my hands on. I am convinced the climate of the Earth is warming 
at a rapid rate that is unsustainable. I am also absolutely convinced 
that the technology is there, or right over the horizon, to enable us to 
continue to grow like crazy and drastically change the basis of energy 
consumption in this country to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Every 
one of us should be concerned about that. That's something we owe to our 
children and our grandchildren.
    Most of us in this room won't live to see a terrible adverse 
circumstance, in all probability. But turning 6 billion people around 
cannot be done on a dime. It's going to take 20 or 30 years of hard 
work. It's the sort of thing democracies aren't very well suited to do. 
But we've got to be visionary enough and disciplined enough to say, this 
is a gift we're going to give our grandchildren, and we're going to 
start now.
    The last point I want to make--I don't want to get into the details 
on this so much--but it is very important that we recognize that our 
security problems in the future, in all probability, will not be the 
United States against some other big country. I hope to goodness we can 
reach a constructive accommodation and partnership with all the major 
nations of the world. I hope we can build a trading network in the 
Americas and one with the Asia-Pacific and that we can continue to 
advance democracy and human rights throughout the world. But there will 
always be organized forces of destruction that will seek to profit from 
opportunities in whatever situation exists. The more society becomes 
integrated around the globe, the more open our borders are; the more we 
move money and technology and people around rapidly, the more vulnerable 
we will be to organized crime,

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to drug syndicates, to terrorists, and to people who can take advantage 
of small-scale weapons of mass destruction.
    That's why I'm working so hard on this biological and chemical 
issue. We have got to be firm in making sure that we've done everything 
we possibly can to set up a system which protects the world from the 
worst aspects of the new security threats in the same way we worked hard 
during the cold war to keep the world from being blown up. It is the 
same sort of challenge; it just will happen in a lot of different 
places. Can we do it? Of course we can, if we have the vision and the 
determination to do it.
    So I guess what I want to say to you is, this is a great time to be 
alive, and it is a great time to be a citizen of the United States. It 
is a great time to be involved in the political process, but don't ever 
think it doesn't matter. It has serious consequences what you do or 
don't do, what you're committed to or what you withdraw from. And your 
presence here tonight I hope at least gives you the satisfaction that 
you've helped to make America a better, stronger, more unified country 
than it otherwise would have been. And I hope it will redouble your 
determination to make sure that when we finish our business here, that 
this country will be in great shape for the best 50 years in all of 
human history.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 9:34 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Haim Saban, chairman and chief 
executive officer of Saban Entertainment, and his wife, Cheryl; and Lew 
Wasserman, chairman emeritus, MCA, Inc.