[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
[November 22, 1997]
[Pages 1637-1640]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Reception in Denver
November 22, 1997

    Thank you very much. Thank you, Governor, Congressman Skaggs, 
Representative DeGette, Vice Chair Rodriguez, and Lieutenant Governor 
Schottler, and to all the officeholders and all the candidates and all 
the would-be officeholders. I'm delighted to see my longtime friend 
Dottie Lamm and all the others here who are going to put themselves up 
in our Democratic primary for office this next year. Thank you for being 
here. I'm glad to see Americans here from all walks of life, Native 
Americans, Hispanic-Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, a few 
of us Irish boys. [Laughter] This looks like the Democratic Party to me, 
and I'm proud to be a member of it, and I hope you are.
    I would like to begin by thanking Roy Romer--who, as all of you 
know, has a full-time job that he has done superbly well, I think as 
well as any Governor in the entire United States--for also being willing 
to take on the extremely challenging job of being the chairman of the 
National Democratic Party in the last year. He's done a superb job, and 
I'm very grateful to him. You should be proud of him.
    I want to thank David Skaggs for his superb performance in Congress 
and tell him I'm really going to miss him, and I wish him well, and I am 
very grateful that he has done what he's done so well for so long. Thank 
you, David.
    And I want to tell you that Diana DeGette has done very well for a 
newcomer, in fact, better than a lot of people who have been there a 
long time. And I hope she has no trouble staying there for a long time. 
Thank you.
    Ladies and gentlemen, as all of you know, I've had a rather 
interesting week and, on occasion, a rather exhausting one. But it's 
also given me time to think and reflect about the larger purposes of 
public life and what our role is in it. And if you don't remember one 
other thing I say today, when you leave here, remember this: You ought 
to be proud of the fact that you're a member of this party, and you 
ought to be proud of the fact that you're not ashamed to show up and 
support it, including contributing to it, because the good things that 
have happened to this country in the last 5 years bear a direct 
connection to your willingness to support people who would fight for 
those good things and fight through tough elections to advance our 
ideas, our values, and our causes. And I want you to be proud of 
yourselves, because I'm very proud of you.
    When I ran for President I was worried about the direction of our 
country. I don't think anyone can possibly say--or dispute the fact that 
America's in better shape today than it was in 1992. It is, in many 
ways.
    What have we done? We have pursued old values with new means for a 
new time. We

[[Page 1638]]

have sought to strengthen families and communities, to advance work and 
opportunity of all kinds, to increase responsibility among our citizens, 
to bring the American people together--across all the lines that divide 
us--into one America, and to continue to be the world's strongest force 
for peace and freedom and prosperity in the whole world. That's what we 
sought to do.
    And we're living in a new and different time. The way we live is 
different. The way we work is different. The way we relate to each other 
and the rest of the world is different. We're more different. We are 
increasingly diverse within our own country. Just across the river from 
my office in Washington--actually, it's your office; I'm just a 
temporary tenant--just across the river there's the Fairfax County 
School District with children from 180 different national and ethnic 
groups, with native languages that number over 100. We are increasingly 
different. We cannot expect to be able to go into this new era doing 
things the way we always did.
    So the American people gave us a chance to govern in 1993. And we 
had different ideas from the Republicans. And I don't subscribe to the 
kind of vicious personal attacks that characterize too much of our 
politics today. You know, I was telling the folks at the lunch at the 
Hill--I had a great meeting with Senator Lott yesterday, the Republican 
Majority Leader. I like him personally. Besides, he's from Mississippi, 
just across the river from me, and it's relaxing for me to have a 
conversation with a congressional leader that doesn't speak with an 
accent. [Laughter] I had to send him 5 pounds of barbecue a couple of 
weeks ago because Mississippi beat Arkansas in a football game. 
[Laughter] We have a nice relationship. He would be the first to tell 
you we do not agree on many things about how this country should respond 
to the challenges of the moment. That doesn't reflect on his character 
or mine; that's different judgments we make about what we ought to do. 
But it will make all the difference which views prevail. Or even when we 
reach principled agreement, it makes all the difference whether the 
debate is going on in the first place. And that's what I want you to 
understand.
    There is a direct connection between your political activism, the 
decisions that are made back in Washington and the reverberations it has 
in the lives of people in Colorado. And that's why it's so important 
that you do what you are doing.
    Let me just give you an example. One, we clearly have the strongest 
economy in a generation. The beginning of our big recovery was the 
passage of the 1993 economic plan. It did not get a single Republican 
vote. They said it would increase the deficit and bankrupt the economy.
    Five years later, really just a little over 4 years later--4 years--
we have reduced the deficit by 92 percent. That is before the balanced 
budget agreement saves one red cent. That's one reason we could have a 
bipartisan balanced budget agreement; it's easier to reach a deal once 
you have done 92 percent of the heavy lifting. Your party did that. Your 
decisions made that. And we did it while lowering taxes on our hardest 
pressed working families and investing more money in education, more 
money in technology, more money in our future. It was a party decision; 
it was a good decision.
    We got the lowest crime rate in 24 years. We had a crime bill that 
put 100,000 police on the street, preventive programs for kids, takes 
the assault weapons off the street. If people in Denver aren't for that 
now, I don't know when they'll ever be. It was a party fight. We did get 
some Republicans to vote for the crime bill, and I'm grateful to them, 
and I always will be. But the leadership of their party fought us in a 
sometimes bitter fight. But we prevailed. And what we did was what the 
police officers, the community leaders, and the prosecutors asked us to 
do, right across the political spectrum. And the crime rate has come 
down for 5 years; the murder rate is down 22 percent in the last 3 
years. Now, that is the record. Those ideas made a difference. And the 
people you helped get elected who did that had an impact on the lives of 
the people all across America.
    We passed a welfare reform bill that, yes, does require people to 
move from welfare to work if they're able-bodied and, yes, gives States 
more say in how to design work programs. But what it didn't do, because 
I vetoed two bills before, is to take food or medicine away from kids. 
And it does guarantee more money for child care when poor people go to 
work. And it has now $3 billion to help communities, where unemployment 
is very high, to help create jobs.
    What is the result of that? We had the biggest decline in welfare 
rolls in history--3.8 million--

[[Page 1639]]

and the smallest percentage of Americans on welfare since 1970. Now, 
with the smallest percentage of Americans since 1970, lowest crime rate 
in 24 years, the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years, it makes a 
difference.
    We also proved you can do it and have cleaner air, cleaner water, 
safer food, fewer toxic waste dumps. Our ideas have been proven to work 
for the American people. They never would have had the chance to work if 
it hadn't been for people like you--out here like you--all across 
America, sticking up for them. So you should be proud of the that and 
tell people about it and tell them that ideas have consequences; they 
made a difference; and the ideas that the Democratic party had for the 
21st century in America were the right ideas, and that's why we're 
moving in the right direction.
    Here's what I think the central questions are for the future--and 
that's why we're not going to run out of steam and there's always going 
to be plenty to do for the foreseeable future. What are the central 
questions facing our country? They're facing every advanced country in 
the world.
    Number one: So we're living in an information age, dominated by 
computers and high technology. And that's great. How do we preserve all 
the benefits of this age, all of the phenomenal individual 
opportunities, the great opportunity for all these new companies to 
start, and give all these young people things to do and still preserve 
the social contract? That is, what about the people that get left 
behind? How are we going to retrain them? How are we going to put them 
back in the mainstream of American life? How can we keep people moving 
forward and not leave anybody behind? How do we meet the challenge in 
the future of growing the economy and meeting the environmental 
challenges?
    Our next big one is to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions 
in this country so we don't contribute to global warming. Can we do it? 
Of course we can. If you look at the physics, we can. If you look at all 
the scientific data, it's out there. Are we going to do it? How are we 
going to do it? If we ask the American people to sacrifice their 
standard of living, we will never sustain a majority support for it. So 
we have to do it intelligently. We have to have the right ideas.
    How are we going to preserve access to health care, retirement, 
family leave, and child care for workers in an environment where we need 
maximum flexibility in the work force, where there are more and more 
small companies, where each year we set a new record for the number of 
new small businesses? How are we going to preserve our public schools 
and give all our kids access to education but have them flexible enough, 
creative enough, embracing technology enough, embracing accountability 
and standards and results enough to produce results that will continue 
to get support for the public schools from people who don't even have 
kids in schools anymore? How are we going to meet our intergenerational 
responsibilities? What are we going to do when the baby boomers retire? 
I, for one, don't want my kids to go broke trying to support me. Neither 
do I want to see Social Security or Medicare destroyed. Can we reform 
entitlements and, at the same time, help all the kids in this country 
who are living below the poverty line? Of course we can. But not unless 
we're thinking about it, and not unless we have the right values and the 
right ideas and we're willing to have the right kind of change.
    And I think I know that you believe that our party needs to be the 
party of positive change. How are we going to respect all the 
differences, even celebrate the differences among us, and still say, 
okay, you can be an Irish-American or Italian-American, whatever, but 
there are things that bind us together as one America that are more 
important than any of that? So it still will matter to be an American in 
the 21st century.
    These are great questions. No society has fully resolved them. But I 
say the Democratic Party has a fair claim on the allegiance of the 
American people because we have the best economy in a generation, the 
lowest crime rate in a generation, the lowest welfare rolls we've had in 
a very long time and the biggest drop in history, and a better 
environment with a growing economy, and we're moving the world toward 
peace and freedom. And that's the message I want you to give. And most 
important, that's the message I want to sink into your mind and heart.
    Everyone knows that last week I was overwhelmingly preoccupied, this 
last week, with the situation in Iraq. And I don't have much more to add 
to that, except one of our biggest obligations is to deal with the new 
security challenges

[[Page 1640]]

of the 21st century. And while the nuclear threat between two great 
countries is receding--I talked to President Yeltsin today about his 
efforts to get the START II treaty ratified there so we can bringing 
these nuclear weapons down, getting more countries to sign on to the 
Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty--we must face an enhanced threat 
of chemical and biological warfare practiced by terrorists, organized 
criminals, drug traffickers, and others in the 21st century. And it's 
our solemn obligation to minimize that threat for you in the next 50 
years, the same way we avoided having another nuclear war--a nuclear war 
in the last 50 years.
    But underneath that, a lot of things you might not have noticed 
happened. And I want to tell you about them, again, so you'll understand 
there is a consequence between what you do and what we do. We signed a 
bill reforming the Food and Drug Administration that will move drugs to 
market and medical devices to market quicker. It will save lives. The 
bill took 2 years to pass, and the Republican views were heard, the 
Democratic views were heard, all the stakeholders' views were heard. It 
passed by a voice vote. It will save lives. It makes a difference.
    We passed a bill to reform the adoption laws in America, a subject 
that Hillary has been working on literally for 25 years. And we had all 
these advocates there from all over the country and a couple that had 
adopted 20 children, including 3 in wheelchairs--adopted, not just given 
a foster home to, adopted--and people from all over the country. And you 
could see that it was going to change lives. And afterward, a member of 
my staff came up to me and said, ``I just want you to know that I lived 
in foster homes for over 8 years when I was a kid growing up, and this 
is going to change lives, hundreds of thousands of people's lives.''
    I went to Kansas and saw what Cessna is doing with our welfare 
reform program to take the hardest-to-place welfare people, oftentimes 
women that had been brutally abused in their homes, and give them 
training programs and jobs and guarantee jobs to them. I'm talking about 
high school dropouts--that had been brutally abused--in Cessna making 
high wages with guaranteed benefits, and they have a 71 percent success 
rate.
    And all these things happen, and just repeatedly somebody will be 
with me that works with us and we'd all look at each other and we'd just 
laugh and say, ``You know, this is what we got into public life to do, 
to give people the tools to change their lives for the better.''
    That is what the Democratic Party stands for. And you need to take a 
lot of pride in it, and you need to understand what we have done, how it 
happened, and what we intend to do. And if you do that, then this State, 
where we have to win the independent vote to win any elections, will see 
us as the party of positive change. We'll have more Democrats. We'll 
have more young people who are Democrats. The main thing is, we'll have 
a better America. When you go out of here today, you tell people that, 
and be proud you did what you did.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 2:23 p.m. in the Tennis Pavilion at the 
Lawrence C. Phipps Memorial Conference Center-University of Denver. In 
his remarks, he referred to Manny Rodriguez, vice chair, Colorado State 
Democratic Party; Lt. Gov. Gail Schottler of Colorado; and Dottie Lamm, 
Democratic senatorial candidate.