[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
[December 3, 1997]
[Pages 1708-1714]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Democratic Business Council in Chicago
December 3, 1997

    Thank you very much. Lew, that was so nice I felt almost like it was 
a eulogy. [Laughter] I started to say, I'm not done yet; I'm not done 
yet.
    I want to thank Lew and Susan for their role in this tonight. And 
thank you, Phil, and thanks to all of the people here at this table and 
all the rest of you who helped to put together this wonderfully 
successful evening for our party.
    Lew and Susan, we go back a long time in this, and I can't help 
but--just listening to them reminisce, I'd like to say something I said 
when Gary LaPaille and I were down at the other event with Senator 
Moseley-Braun and Senator Durbin, and I don't know if Congressmen Davis 
and Rush are here, but they were with us at the other event.
    I'll never forget the first conversation I had with Al Gore after I 
became a candidate for President. Now, this was when I was the fifth-

[[Page 1709]]

best known candidate in New Hampshire. [Laughter] And only my mother 
really thought I had a chance to win. [Laughter] And I was over in 
Tennessee with my friend, the then-Governor of Tennessee, Ned Ray 
McWherter, who is a marvelous old-fashioned political leader and was a 
great Governor. And he wanted to get me and Al Gore together. And Al had 
run for President in '88 and decided not to run in '92. And so we were 
sitting alone in this room.
    And he said, ``You know what happened to me? I did real well in the 
South on Super Tuesday, but,'' he said, ``I didn't do so well after 
that.'' He said, ``What's your theory about how you're going to become 
the nominee of the Democratic Party?'' And I looked at him and I gave 
him a one-word answer. I said, ``Illinois.'' And he said, ``Why?'' And I 
said, ``Well, because of Hillary, because southern Illinois is south of 
Richmond and looks just like north Arkansas.'' [Laughter] ``And I've 
been there, and it feels just like north Arkansas.'' [Laughter] And I 
said, ``And besides that, half the people who live in Chicago are from 
Arkansas''--[laughter]--``Danny Davis, John Stroger, John Johnson--need 
I go on--Scottie Pippen, yeah.'' [Laughter] I'm not sure he was in the 
picture in the same way there as he is now. [Laughter]
    But anyway--and, you know, I came here in October of '91 and spoke. 
Gary hosted the chairs of the Democratic Party, and I spoke. And then we 
went to Navy Pier and announced that David Wilhelm was going to be my 
campaign manager. And then I just kept getting people from Chicago in my 
operation--Kevin O'Keefe, Rahm Emanuel, Laura and Bridget Hartigan, 
Minyon Moore--there's a lot of other people--Avis LaVelle; Dave and 
Deegee both worked for me; Bill Daley's now the Secretary of Commerce.
    And of course, when Chicago turned out for Hillary's 50th birthday 
the other day, it almost made it bearable for her. [Laughter] No one 
here will ever know what it meant to her, what was done.
    But I want to say, before I get into anything substantive at all, 
you will never know, none of you can ever know, what knowing that 
Illinois would always be there for us has meant to us, to Al Gore and to 
Hillary and to me, in two Presidential campaigns and the administrations 
and the times when we were down as well as when we were up, and how it 
changed the entire landscape of electoral politics of the last several 
years, knowing that it would always be there. I cannot thank you enough.
    I also want to say a special word of thanks to Gary LaPaille as he 
ends 8 years as head of the Democratic Party here. That's a hard job. I 
can't imagine anybody doing that job for 8 years; that's what people say 
to me. [Laughter] If I weren't term-limited, I'd probably run again. 
[Laughter] But Gary's done a great job, and I thank him for what he's 
done and also for his leadership as the head of all the State party 
chairs in the country.
    I want to thank Steve Grossman, who spoke so beautifully here 
earlier, for his leadership. This was--he was not exactly buying high 
when he agreed to become chairman of the Democratic Party in America, 
and he's done a superb job. And his friend and our good friend Alan 
Solomont, for being our finance director. And I want to thank Senator 
Durbin for many things, but especially--all of you know this, but I want 
to reiterate it--I hope and believe that next year, even though it's an 
election year, we will pass legislation which will embody the best parts 
of that settlement in the tobacco case and do some other things which 
will go beyond what the settlement does to dramatically reduce the 
exposure of young children to tobacco, which is still our number one 
public health problem. And if we are successful in that, it will be in 
no small measure due to the year-in and year-out, dogged determination 
of Dick Durbin. And I really appreciate that.
    I'd also like to say a special word, put in a special plug for Carol 
Moseley-Braun. I expect to be back here campaigning for her on several 
occasions in this next year. But I could say many things, but I'd like 
to ask you to think of three things when you think of this election--two 
in the past and one in the future--that are very important.
    One is, all the good fortune that has come to our administration 
because the American people are better off than they were 5 years ago 
had at its root the announcement we made after the election and before I 
took office that we were going to dramatically reduce the deficit. We 
were not going--America had quadrupled the debt in 12 years. We were 
choking on debt. Interest rates were too high. Investment was to low. 
The economy was stagnant. And we were going to turn it around.

[[Page 1710]]

    And when we presented a plan to do it, we could not get a single 
person from the other party to vote for it. They said it was going to be 
a terrible thing for the economy; it would bring on a recession. We 
passed the bill by one vote in both Houses. If it hadn't been for Carol 
Moseley-Braun's vote, I don't think we'd have the lowest unemployment 
rate in 24 years and 13\1/2\ million new jobs. And I hope you'll all 
remember that.
    Lew mentioned the crime issue. Maybe it was because I was out there 
living in the country and not in Washington; I never knew crime was a 
Republican issue. [Laughter] I never knew a policeman who asked a victim 
of a crime for their party I.D. before they filled out a report. I was 
unaware of this until I got to Washington, and I realized that talk too 
often supplemented for action, and if you talked long enough, you got 
credit for something whether you did anything or not.
    What we did was to try to give the American people a crime bill that 
was written, in effect, by police officers, prosecutors, and community 
leaders that worked with kids to try to keep them out of trouble in the 
first place and that was based on the experiences that I'd seen in 
places that, even before I became President, where the crime rate was 
already going down because of community policing and a better 
distribution in the number of police officers and more work at 
prevention.
    So we came up with this crime bill. We were afraid we couldn't pass 
it because there was a bitter Republican filibuster in the Senate, and 
we didn't have a vote to spare. When the Republicans filibuster, you 
have to get 60 votes. And thank goodness there were enough brave 
Republican Senators to give us one more vote than we needed. But if we 
hadn't had the Democrats we had, including Carol Moseley-Braun, I don't 
think we'd have the lowest crime rate this country has had in 24 years. 
And that's something that I think is worth remembering.
    At some point, you know, we all have to take responsibility when 
we're wrong. And I've made some mistakes, and I've tried to assume 
responsibility for them--you take the consequences. But when someone is 
right, it ought to be noticed. On those two great issues, which had a 
great deal to do with shaping where America is today, Carol Moseley-
Braun was not only right, her vote was decisive. And the people of 
Illinois should remember and reward, I believe, at election time.
    The third thing I'd like to say is about the future. Carol was the 
first Member of Congress who came to me and said that she thought we 
ought to reconsider the historic reluctance of the Federal Government to 
support any sort of capital expenditures for our public schools, any 
kind of fiscal expenditures. There is a good reason for that. We only 
provide about 7 percent of the total funding for our schools in America. 
Most of it comes from State and local level, and so most of the building 
has been done from local funds. Most States don't contribute to school 
buildings either. Most States just do it locally.
    But she made a case, and I looked into it. And I discovered, for 
example, in the city of Philadelphia the average school building is 65 
years old. And in many of our cities the percentage of people living in 
the city and paying taxes in the school district, with children, has 
gone down dramatically so that the tax base, the effective tax base for 
maintaining these physical facilities has shrunk.
    I was in a little town called Jupiter, Florida, the other day where 
I counted--I believe there were 12--12 trailers full of kids in 
classrooms, supplemental classrooms on the outside of the school 
building, because of the growth of the student population.
    Now, I want to say a little more about Chicago's reforms in a 
moment, but it was because of that that I made a proposal to Congress, 
which did not pass last time, but I think we still have to keep working 
on this, because if you want these schools to work right, they don't 
have to be modern--they can be old buildings--but the windows don't need 
to be broken, and the kids don't need to be in danger. And they at least 
need to be clean and fixed up and shiny and adequate so that you send a 
message to our children that they matter, that they're important, that 
they're not some second-rate ancillary concern to us. So I think there's 
quite a good chance that we'll be able to do something to support local 
efforts on school construction in a way that also furthers school 
reform. And I want to say a little more about that in a minute.
    But you just remember, when that comes up on the national screen--
today I was in Akron, as Steve Grossman said, at our first big national 
townhall meeting on race relations and building

[[Page 1711]]

one America for the 21st century. Three of the people--of the 65 people 
in the audience brought it up to me and said, ``I wish you would do 
something to help get our broken-down or overcrowded schools in a 
position where they can do the job for the kids without regard to their 
race.'' Carol Moseley-Braun made that a national issue for the first 
time in the history of the Republic. And she deserves a lot of credit 
for it, and we ought to keep fighting to make our schools better. And I 
hope the people of Illinois will back her up in this coming year on that 
issue, because it's very important. And I thank her for it.
    Now, let me go back to the beginning of this. Six years ago, when I 
came to Illinois for the first time, I was convinced that our country 
had its best days in front of it if, but only if, we actually tried to 
prepare for the future. I did not think we could simply stumble into the 
21st century. Nor did I think we could get very far by denying the 
significant challenges we faced.
    By 1992, it had been nearly 20 years since the bottom 60 percent of 
the work force had had an increase in their real wages, because of 
global competition and because of the premium that had been put on 
higher skills in the global economy and the growth of technology. 
Unemployment was high, growth was low, interest rates were high. And 
like I said, we had quadrupled the debt. Crime was going up every year. 
The welfare rolls were rising. And most people didn't think that this 
country worked very well anymore.
    I believed very strongly that if we had new ideas and we implemented 
them with discipline, we could turn the country around, not because I 
would be President--because the President is only one actor in a very 
big system--but because this country has enormous capacity to solve any 
problem before it if the people make up their mind to go in the right 
direction and actually do it.
    So I took to the people a new direction. And we said it was a new 
Democratic approach not because we were running from the Democratic 
Party's values in history but because at every time when there's change, 
you have to change your approach to be relevant to the times. You can't 
stick with an approach that no longer works. So what we said was we want 
new ideas and old-fashioned values, opportunity for everybody, 
responsibility from everybody, a community that includes everybody in 
America. We want a different kind of Government. We don't pretend that 
the Government can solve all the problems, but we don't think it should 
sit on the sidelines. We think we ought to have a Government that's 
primary focus is to create the conditions and give people the tools to 
solve their own problems and build strong careers, strong families, and 
strong communities. And that's what we've done.
    Five years later there are 300,000 people fewer working for the 
Federal Government. It's the smallest it was--your Federal Government 
today is the same size it was when John Kennedy was President. And this 
is a much bigger country.
    The percentage of the economy being taken by the Federal Government 
is smaller than it was 5 years ago. Of all the advanced economies in the 
world, the percentage of our wealth that goes to taxes at the State, 
national, and local level is lower than every other one except Japan; 
we're about even with Japan. And yet, we have still been able to invest 
more in things that are critical to our future, like education and 
environmental technology and cleanup and medical research and the 
expansion of health care coverage, things that bring us together and 
make us all stronger.
    And the consequence of that is that we've not only reduced the debt 
by 92 percent--the deficit--by 92 percent before the balanced budget law 
triggered in, because of the 1993 vote, but we're now going to balance 
the budget and at the same time have the biggest increased investment in 
health care for kids since '65, in public schools since '65, and in 
helping people go to college since 1945, since the GI bill.
    We are seeing the crime rate drop to a 24-year low, and the biggest 
drop in welfare rolls in history--3.8 million fewer people on welfare 
than when I took office--with a program that is tough in the sense that 
it requires able-bodied people to go to work, but compassionate for 
children because it guarantees medical care and nutrition for the kids 
and child care for the mothers if they go to work. So you don't ask 
people to choose between their children and their jobs.
    And if I might say, I think that's one of the largest questions 
still facing the United States. Even upper income people I know who have 
school-aged kids, almost every one of them can cite one example in the 
last few weeks when

[[Page 1712]]

they felt torn between their obligations to their children and their 
obligations at work. And I think one of the single achievements the 
Democratic Party should make to 21st century America is helping to 
reconcile the conflict between work and family so that people who do 
work do not feel that they have to sacrifice being good parents to do 
it.
    What does that mean? That's what the family and medical leave law 
was about. When we doubled the earned-income tax credit--I'll tell you 
what that means; nobody knows what this is, the earned-income tax 
credit--it means that if you make less than $30,000 a year and you have 
one or two children, you get a lower income tax as a result. It's worth 
about $1,000 a family, over and above the children's tax credit and the 
other cuts that we've done in taxes.
    We raised the minimum wage because of it; we increased child support 
collection by 50 percent; we reformed the adoption laws and gave a tax 
credit for people who would adopt children--all trying to strengthen 
families and help people balance the demands of work and family. And 
then Hillary and I sponsored the first White House conference ever on 
child care, and we're looking at what our options are within the budget 
limitations to try to expand the availability of affordable, quality, 
safe child care to working families. Because I think that the most 
important job any of us will ever have--and I guess I'm more mindful of 
that now because our daughter just went off to college and I don't sense 
it every day like I used to--but raising kids is the most important work 
of any society, ever. In all history, it's always the same. There is 
nothing more important.
    So we cannot ask our people to choose between success in the 
emerging economy and success at home. What we have to do is to find a 
way for us to achieve both. And that's something that we have to keep 
working on, but I'm proud of the progress we've made.
    I'm proud of the fact that the environment is cleaner than it was; 
the air is cleaner; the water is cleaner; there are fewer toxic waste 
dumps; and the food supply is safer than it was 5 years ago. Do we still 
have new challenges? We do. But we proved that those who said we should 
break down environmental regulations and weaken our commitment to a 
clean environment so we could grow the economy--I think we have proved 
conclusively that they were wrong and that our idea is right, that you 
can protect the environment and grow the economy, and we need to keep on 
doing it.
    And as you look to the future, that means, among other things, 
taking on the challenge of global warming and climate change. The Vice 
President is going to Kyoto, Japan, to present our position there, and 
it's somewhat controversial now because a lot of people believe that 
there is no way to reduce our amount of greenhouse gas emissions caused 
primarily from burning coal and oil without hurting the economy. I do 
not believe that. I think the evidence is all to the contrary. And we're 
determined to find a way to continue to clean the environment while 
growing the economy.
    Let me just remind you that in the last few years we have taken the 
chlorofluorocarbons out of the air--the spray, the stuff that's in the 
spray cans--to stop the thinning of the ozone layer. Everybody said it 
was going to be a big problem for our economy. It all happened while we 
were having this unprecedented boom. We have dramatically reduced sulfur 
dioxide emissions primarily from powerplants. We were told it was going 
to cost a fortune and take forever. We're now running 40 percent ahead 
of schedule at less than half the predicted cost, in the midst of this 
economic boom, cleaning up our air, because we did it in a way that 
supported business, supported free markets, gave people the incentives 
to do the right thing, but said in the end we've got to give our 
children a cleaner environment. We still have--there are lots of cities 
in this country where asthma is the number one public health problem for 
young children because of air pollution. So we're doing the right 
things, and we need to keep on doing it.
    In health care, we need to find ways to continue to expand health 
coverage, and without sacrificing quality in the name of controlling 
costs. Our side has embraced a health care bill of rights that has been 
endorsed by health care providers, by medical professionals not in the 
business end of it, by significant portions of the business and labor 
community. We may have a big argument about it between the parties next 
year, but I think the Democratic Party should be on the side of quality 
health care as well as affordable health care. And I think that's what 
people want us to do. I know that's what Susan wants me to do. She was 
almost clapping there. [Laughter]

[[Page 1713]]

    So these are things that I want you to think about. There are honest 
differences. I regret sometimes that all the political stories seem to 
be about, you know--Lew made some remark about the fundraising--you have 
to understand, when you contribute to a party, if that party advances 
things that you believe in and there is a difference, especially if 
there is a difference between your party's position and the other one, 
you are doing something that is not only all right, it is a good thing 
because if you don't, then your side won't be heard.
    And there is a direct line that will run from this dinner tonight to 
the actions that we will take and the fights we will be able to make to 
defend what we do when we try to raise school standards in every city in 
the country, like you're trying to do here in Chicago; when we try to 
get every school system to do what you say here, more homework, more 
parental involvement, more responsibility, more accountability, no more 
social promotion. The kinds of things you're doing here ought to be done 
everywhere in America. We believe that. That's part of our policy. We've 
got to have somebody sticking up for us and giving us the wherewithal to 
get that message out there. That's what you're doing. And you ought to 
be proud of that and feel good about it.
    Today at this townhall meeting on race, the one substantive 
announcement I made was that we were going to create 25 to 30 education 
opportunity zones to give 25 to 30 other communities--to give a chance 
to do what Chicago's trying to do, to put accountability and high 
standards and high expectations and real, effective commitment to 
excellence into the schools. This is important.
    And the last thing I'll say is this. One of the reasons that I'm 
very proud to be a Democrat is we still believe that we don't have a 
person to waste; we believe that people that don't have as many material 
resources as we do are as good as we are in the eyes of God and that we 
need them to develop to the fullest of their abilities. And we want 
everybody to be part of our American future. That's what we want, and 
that's what that townhall meeting in Akron was all about.
    I'll just leave you with that thought. A lot of Americans have 
thought about what the 21st century will be like in terms of, oh, 
biomedical research in 30 years. A lot of Americans have thought about 
what's going to happen in terms of the communications technology in 30 
years. A lot of Americans have thought about will there be relatively 
more people riding on airplanes or more people doing video conferences 
transatlantic when all the telephones have video screens. But what we 
have not thought enough about is what's it going to be like when there's 
no majority race in America in 50 years? It will happen within the 
decade in California, our biggest State, where 13 percent of the people 
live. How are we going to continue to prove that, no matter what happens 
in Bosnia or Northern Ireland or the Middle East or all these places 
where we're trying to help them make progress toward peace, that we're 
going to stay on the side of reconciling ourselves to one another across 
our racial and religious and ethnic differences so that we will be 
richer by it?
    How are we going to prove that we understand that the ethnic 
diversity that you see in Cook County is our meal ticket to the 21st 
century, and we are not going to let old-fashioned hatreds and newfound 
fears get in the way of that? I want our party--I want this to be a 
nonpartisan issue, but I want our party to be in the forefront of 
getting the American people to solve this problem community by community 
as well as the national level.
    So these are the things that we have stood for. I don't think 
there's any question that America is better off than it was 5 years ago. 
I don't think there's any question that I could not have done this if it 
hadn't been for the Democratic Members of the Congress and the voices in 
the mayors' offices and the Governorships around the country who stuck 
up for what we were trying to do. I could not have done this alone. We 
did this together. It is an achievement of our party.
    Do we have some differences of opinion? We sure do. We still have a 
big difference over trade, and I think I'm right, and I think that the 
people that think that we don't have to expand trade are not right. On 
the other hand, I believe that one of the things that all Democrats 
believe that is right is that no country has yet solved the problem--no 
rich country--of how do you get the benefits of the global economy, 
trade, technology, and investment, and still help the people that will 
get displaced from the global economy in an adequate and rapid way, so 
that they can immediately return to the winner's circle. No country has 
solved that problem.

[[Page 1714]]

    And I think you should see the debate within our party on trade in 
those terms. That is the positive way to see it, because all of us care 
about that. And I believe we'll get it worked out in a way that will 
enable us to continue to expand the frontiers of trade and prove that we 
can do a better job of returning hardworking Americans to the winner's 
circle.
    Apart from that, I think we're completely at one on things that 
really have made a difference to America. So you go home tonight, and 
you think about that. You think about that: the lowest unemployment rate 
in 24 years; the lowest crime rate in 24 years; the biggest drop in 
welfare in history; the family leave law; dramatic overhaul of the 
adoption laws; a dramatic overhaul of the food and drug law so we can 
move drugs into the workplace more quickly and people can get cures for 
terrible problems. The kinds of things we're doing will change the 
future of America for the better.
    And I want you to stay with us. I want you to stay with Carol 
Moseley-Braun. I want you to stay with your other candidates here in 
Illinois. But most of all, I want you to stay with the notion that you 
have the right and the responsibility to support those things that 
reflect what you believe are right for America. And because you and 
people like you all over this country have done it, we're in better 
shape than we were 5 years ago. And when we go into the 21st century and 
I ride off into the sunset, we'll be in better shape still.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:40 p.m. at Lino's Restaurant. In his 
remarks, he referred to Lewis Manilow, who introduced the President, and 
his wife, Susan, cochairs of the dinner; Phil Stefani, owner of the 
restaurant; Steve Grossman, national chair, and Alan D. Solomont, 
national finance chair, Democratic National Committee; John Stroger, 
president, Cook County board of commissioners; John H. Johnson, chief 
executive officer, Johnson Publishing Co.; NBA Chicago Bulls player 
Scottie Pippen; David Wilhelm, former chair, Democratic National 
Committee, and his wife, Deegee; and Laura Hartigan, former finance 
director, Clinton/Gore '96, and her sister Bridget.