    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
    [February 28, 1998]
    [Pages 304-307]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Dinner for Senator Barbara Boxer
    in Los Angeles
    February 28, 1998

        Thank you very, very much. First I want to thank all of you for
    being here for Senator Boxer and for your country. Thank
    you, Senator Torricelli, not only for
    being here and for your leadership on behalf of your fellow Democrats in
    the Senate and some of the people we hope will be joining us, but for
    always being willing to stand up and fight for what you believe in and
    not just standing--[applause]--thank you. The longer I stay in
    Washington, the more I come to appreciate people who will stand up and
    fight. And I thank you, Senator. [Laughter]

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        I want to thank Ron and Jan for having us here. I don't believe, if I live to be
    100, I don't believe I'd ever get tired of coming to this magnificent
    place. I'm sure they would get tired of me coming--[laughter]--and are
    doubtless glad that I am term-limited, but I love coming here.
        I want to say just a couple of things tonight--and I've already
    eliminated all the stories I was going to tell, because all the
    entertainers will be downgrading me if I tell a joke. Whoopi told me a funny story once; I think it's the funniest
    joke I ever heard, but I certainly can't tell that. [Laughter] It's not
    that bad, it's just too bad for me to tell in front of all of you, but
    it's really funny. If you file by the front table on your way out,
    she'll be glad to--[laughter]. That's the best I could do.
        Hillary and Chelsea actually wanted to be here tonight. We love
    Barbara Boxer, and she is now a member of our family, or we are a member
    of her family, or however it works, but anyway, we're all here together.
    And that's one of the reasons I came. But there are a couple of other
    reasons I wanted to talk about.
        I asked, when I came in, I asked Sim to talk
    to me about the race and Barbara to talk to me about the race, and they
    said one of the members of the Republican Party who wishes to oppose
    Senator Boxer had already spent almost $6 million on television ads and
    that a lot of these television ads are trying to convince the California
    voters that she has not been a good Senator. Now, you be the judge.
        When I introduced the bill in 1993 that reduced the deficit 92
    percent before--before--a single dollar had been taken out from the
    balanced budget bill last year, we didn't have a vote to spare in the
    Senate--not a single one. Al Gore had to
    vote for it; it was a tie vote. And as he says, whenever he votes, we
    win. [Laughter]
        You know, being President has had all kinds of humbling experiences.
    [Laughter] And I'm sure you all have your top-10 list. But if anybody
    had ever told me 5 years ago I'd wind up being a straight man for Al
    Gore, I never would have believed that. Such are the burdens of office.
    [Laughter]
        Anyway, we didn't have a vote to spare--one vote. California--you
    know what it was like in 1992, 1991, 1993. Barbara Boxer voted yes
    knowing she had a difficult campaign, knowing it would be easier to walk
    away from, knowing that they'd be pounding the drums and saying all kind
    of terrible things. Five years later, we're on the verge of the first
    balanced budget in 30 years. The stock market went from 3,200 to over
    8,000. We've got the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years, the lowest
    crime rate in 24 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest
    inflation in 30 years, the highest homeownership in history. I think
    that's a pretty good record.
        I don't believe that $6 million in negative television ads, or $60
    million, or $600 million should be allowed to wipe away that fundamental
    truth. That one vote--that one vote--should get her the support of a
    huge majority of the people of California for reelection to the United
    States Senate. It's that important.
        But that's not all that happened. We also--you heard Senator Boxer
    talking about the decline in the crime rate now--we put more community
    police on the street. We were ridiculed for that bill by people like the
    folks that are advertising against her--ridiculed. Why? Because we also
    said, ``Okay, we'll put more police on the street and put them back on
    the beat, but we think we should take assault weapons off the street and
    we ought to spend some money to give kids something positive to do so
    that they have something to say yes to in life.'' And we were ridiculed.
    They said, ``Oh, this bill will be a failure; it's pork barrel; it's
    terrible''; and besides that, we're ``trying to take everybody's guns
    away from them.'' Well, 5 years later the Brady law has kept over
    300,000 people with criminal records from getting handguns. I don't know
    how many people are alive because of it, but a lot of people. And
    juvenile crime is going down again, and it's going down most in the
    communities where the kids are being dealt with as people and being
    given a positive future. So I think that's enough to justify reelecting
    Senator Boxer.
        And I could give you lots of other examples. I also believe you can
    just see, watch her standing up here--and she has to stand on this box
    that then they have to move away for me. But don't kid yourself, it's
    just a prop. [Laughter] It's designed to disarm the enemy. [Laughter]
    She's a very large person--a very large person. [Laughter]
        Washington is a place where too many people take themselves too
    seriously, where a lot of people profess to be profoundly religious but

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    actually worship power, and where having a person who shows up every day
    more interested in people and interested in power as an instrument of
    doing good, not as an end in itself, is a very precious commodity. For
    that reason, Barbara Boxer should be reelected to the United States
    Senate.
        And finally let me say, as I said in the State of the Union Address,
    Hillary had this idea that we ought
    to honor the passing of the century and the coming of a new millennium
    with a set of gifts that she sort of--she gave me this idea, she said we
    ought to call it ``Remembering the past, and imagining the future.'' And
    Barbara Boxer has a good imagination, and she thinks about her children
    and her grandchildren and the world we want to leave to them. And when
    the world is changing as fast as it is now, it's really actually rather
    difficult to predict what is going to happen next month, and it's
    difficult to know with absolute precision what's going to happen 30
    years from now. But we know what challenges we have to face if we want
    the world to be a positive place 30 years from now.
        So all those things that Senator Torricelli talked about--the
    efforts that we can now make because we do have a strong economy,
    because we do have budgetary discipline, because things are going well,
    we can now make an effort we need to imagine that future and to make it
    come true. That's what the education and the child care and the health
    care initiative is about; that's what the environmental initiatives are
    about. I don't think people will be making fun of us much longer when we
    talk about climate change and global warming. You look at what El Nino
    has done this year in America, in southern California; can you imagine
    what can happen to our climate if the average temperature over the next
    50 years went up another couple of degrees? People ask you what global
    warming is about--it's about that hole in the interstate here. It's
    about mud rushing down and carrying away the lives of innocent people.
    It's about malaria rising to the highest known altitudes on other
    continents and people carrying infections into airports and giving it to
    other people so now there's a phenomenon called ``airport malaria.''
        We like to believe that technology and intelligence and everything
    just defies all the laws of gravity and nature; it's just not so. The
    good Lord has a way of bringing us back to Earth, and we must return to
    Earth on this. We've got to meet our responsibilities to future
    generations. We do not have to give up economic prosperity. Every time
    we faced an environmental challenge in this country for the last 30
    years, when we've been working on it seriously, every single time people
    say, well, if you do this you'll hurt the economy; if you do that it
    will cost you jobs; if you do the other thing, you'll set everybody back
    and people won't be able to make a good living. It's been wrong every
    time; it is wrong now. We will find a way to find greater prosperity if
    we honor our obligations not only to preserve but actually to restore
    the planet and reverse this process of climate change that I believe is
    very destructive. And I hope you will support it.
        So there is a lot of stuff to do. We want to establish a medical
    research fund that will double funding for the National Cancer
    Institute, dramatically increase funding for the National Institutes of
    Health, increase overall scientific research spending, establish a space
    station in the sky that I think is very, very important for what happens
    here on Earth. And all of that is great and important, and all these
    issues I hope will be out there. But remember the second half of what
    we're trying to do for the millennium. We're trying to imagine the
    future, but also remember and honor the past.
        And I would just close with this, because it really does matter who
    these Senators are, what their values are, what kind of memory they
    have, how they look at the world. They have enormous influence. And,
    yes, I want to do all these specific things I said. But all these
    specific things that we should do have to be seen against the background
    of our progress as a nation from the beginning into the future for, I
    hope, as long as human beings exist on this planet.
        That's why we want to preserve the Star-Spangled Banner. Believe it
    or not, we need $13 million to save the flag that led to our national
    anthem. We've got a lot of work to do just to save the Declaration of
    Independence and the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. And it's worth
    doing. There's a house where Abraham Lincoln and his family used to
    spend the summer, by the Old Soldiers' Home in Washington, DC--this
    little cabin, it's just about to go to pieces--we ought to save that.
    People pay a big price when they forget where they came from. And here
    in this county, there are parts of your past I hope you will find a way

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    to save as a part of celebrating a new millennium.
        But if you go back through American history and you say, what were
    we all about when we started--at least what did we say we believed, and
    where did we fall short, and how do we do better; what was the Civil War
    about, where did we fall short, and how do we do better; when all these
    people quit working on the farm and moved to the cities, and all these
    immigrants came to America around the turn of the century and started
    working in the factories, were we falling short of our ideals, and how
    do we do better? What happened in the Depression; what happened in World
    War II; what happened in the civil rights movement; how did we fall
    short, and how do we do better? You look at all of it, and think about--
    just go home tonight and think about this: Why did people come here in
    the first place? They wanted to get away from arbitrary, abusive,
    unaccountable power, to be free--remember the Declaration of
    Independence--to pursue happiness, and to form a more perfect Union so
    their children could do an even better job of being free to pursue
    happiness, to form a more perfect Union. Go back and read it; that's
    what it says.
        Now, did we live that way? Of course not. You had to be a white male
    property owner to have any influence in the beginning. And given my
    family's history, that means that I wouldn't have been much better off
    than Whoopi, because we wouldn't have had any property. No, we weren't
    there. But it was the right idea. Freedom is better than oppression.
    Freedom, what? Not to have a guaranteed outcome but pursue your own
    dream, and to form a more perfect Union so your children after you will
    do even better, not just materially but spiritually as well. That was
    the idea. You go back and think about every single turning point in the
    whole history of this country, and you will see that we had to ask
    ourselves the same old questions: How can we deepen the meaning of our
    freedom; how can we widen the circle of opportunity; how can we form a
    more perfect Union?
        I've had the chance to say many times now in the last several
    months; I want to say it one more time: The Republican Party represented
    the dominant party in America for deepening the meaning of our freedom,
    broadening the circle of opportunity, and forming a more perfect Union
    from the time Abraham Lincoln laid down his life to save this country
    until Theodore Roosevelt served as President. But from the time of
    Woodrow Wilson through Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and John
    Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter down to the present day, we
    have not always been right, we Democrats, but we have always been on the
    right side of those three great issues in the 20th century.
        If you think about all of these great challenges we face and you
    listen to the rhetoric and you listen to the arguments that are made,
    strip it all away and take every single issue, and go home tonight and
    look at your kids, think about your grandkids or your nieces and nephews
    or all the people you care about, and ask yourself, ``What should I do
    as a citizen to deepen the meaning of freedom in my country, to widen
    the circle of opportunity so it embraces everybody, to give us a chance
    with all this diversity--this brilliant, blazing, confusing, complex
    diversity--to form a more perfect Union'' there may be more than one
    answer. But surely one answer is electing the people to public office
    like Barbara Boxer.
        Thank you, and God bless you. Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 9:15 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Ron and Janet Burkle; comedienne
    Whoopi Goldberg; and Sim Farar, finance chair for Senator Boxer's
    reelection campaign committee.