    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
    [January 8, 1998]
    [Pages 10-14]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 10]]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in New York City
    January 8, 1998

        Thank you very much. The good news is this is the only speech I
    have. [Laughter] And I wrote it in the car on the way over from the
    airport. I want to thank Steve for what he
    said and for the extraordinary effort he's put in, in a very difficult
    and challenging year, as head of our National Democratic Party. I thank
    Craig and Jane for
    having us in their home. I have not been in this magnificent historic
    old building in, oh, about 10 or 11 years. And I'm a very schmaltzy
    person so I get all choked up when I come here. I keep imagining whether
    I'm standing someplace where John Lennon was, and all that. [Laughter]
    Thank you very much for letting us come here. Thank you, Judith
    Hope, for leading the New York Democratic Party.
        And I think what I would like to do today is just talk in kind of a
    larger sense about where I think we are at this moment in history and
    why what you're doing here matters. And I'd like to begin with two,
    maybe, apparently, unrelated things.
        The first is, you know we're 2 years from a new century in a new
    millennium, something that only happens every 1,000 years. I expect all
    the predictions of doom and the end of time to be rising up, and maybe
    there will be a lot of wonderful, glowing predictions as well. But the
    time just begs for historic drama. And the good news is you have it,
    because of the globalization of the world economy and society, because
    of the explosion in information and science and technology. People are
    fundamentally changing the way they work, the way they live, the way
    they relate to each other and the rest of the world. And that is
    changing everything else in ways that are, more often than not, quite
    positive, but sometimes quite troubling.
        We have a lot of people in the finance community here today.
    Everybody is trying to calculate what is going on in Asia: Is it going
    to keep going on; is it going to stop; is there something the United
    States can do to stop it; regardless, what impact will it have on us?
    There is a level of interdependence in the world today and a scope and
    speed of change in the world today that has hitherto been unknown to the
    American people, and that is changing things. And that will shape the
    new--in that sense, we already have a foot in the 21st century.
        The second thing I'd like you to think about is that--we have a lot
    of very distinguished actors here today. Hillary and I went to the
    premiere in Washington the other night of ``Amistad,'' the new movie
    about the slave ship. It culminates in the work of John Quincy Adams
    helping a young American lawyer to get these slaves freed so they could
    be free to go back home to Africa before the Civil War. And they won a
    case in the Supreme Court on a unique point of property law. But it's a
    very moving picture, I think.
        Why do I mention that? Because at that moment in our history, John
    Quincy Adams, a man who was a one-term President, got the living
    daylights beat out of him for reelection by Andrew Jackson, an American
    hero, and then was humble enough and dedicated enough to go back and
    serve nine terms in the House of Representatives, where he died in
    service in his early eighties--a unique American story. John Quincy
    Adams was the embodiment of the Nation's opposition to slavery, and to
    something called the gag rule which, believe it or not, was imposed by
    the Southerners on the Congress before the Civil War so that you weren't
    even supposed to be able to bring up petitions opposing slavery on the
    floor of Congress.
        Now, at that moment, Adams was the symbol for our country of the
    idea that the National Government ought to take a stand against slavery,
    to strengthen the Union and to, in effect, apply the guarantees of the
    Constitution to the present moment--in other words, to acknowledge that
    we were wrong when we started as a country and we said that black people
    were only three-fifths human and they didn't really count as citizens.
        What's that got to do with this time? In every period of profound
    change in the whole history of the country, the debate is always the
    same. The debate is between those who believe that the period of change
    requires us to come closer together as one nation and to extend the
    fundamental principles on which we were founded to the new moment--and
    there have been four

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    or five moments in American history which were literally break points,
    where we were being tested.
        First, we got started; we had to decide, are we going to be one
    country or just a collection of States, kind of like an eating club, and
    every now and then we'll get together? And we decided to be one country.
    And then in the Civil War, when slavery and sectionalism threatened one
    nation and Abraham Lincoln literally gave his life, first for the Union
    and second to get rid of slavery.
        Then in the industrial revolution, where first Theodore Roosevelt
    and then Woodrow Wilson's administration, and all the way through FDR,
    had to deal with the consequences of America moving from an agricultural
    to an industrial society--most of them were good, but not all of them
    were. How do you get the benefit of all this new wealth and say it's
    still not okay to work children 15 hours a day, 6 days a week in coal
    mines? How do you do that? How do you deal with all these people teeming
    into the cities of America from all over the world, and how do you
    assimilate them into our country, and how do you make immigrants a part
    of the American fabric of life? If the whole system breaks down, as it
    did in the Great Depression, how do you get it back up?
        And throughout, there was the debate between--going from Lincoln to
    Roosevelt and Wilson to FDR--between those who say we have to strengthen
    the Union in order to preserve and enhance liberty, and those who said,
    ``Ah, the Government, it will screw it up. They will mess up a one-car
    parade--[laughter]--and this country was founded on the principle that
    we've got to limit it and just let the market take its course.'' Then we
    had World War II and the cold war, which was a 50-year battle against
    totalitarianism, when there was much more of a consensus among the
    conservatives and the liberals for united policies to make the Nation
    strong because our very existence was at stake.
        Now we literally are facing an era of globalization and information
    revolution which is upsetting the established patterns of life to an
    extent never before known. Most of it's positive. Some of it's not.
        What are the problems we're facing? Well, first of all, we've got
    more people in the work force than ever before, more women in the work
    force than ever before, and nearly every family with children has
    trouble balancing the demands of work and family, even wealthy people. I
    don't know a single couple with young children that hasn't felt a moment
    of guilt at some time in the conflict between the demands of work and
    the demands of childrearing. That's fundamentally different, and
    rampant.
        Second, there is the question of--the perennial question--how do you
    get the benefits of these new changes but make them available to
    everybody, give everyone a chance to participate? America has the lowest
    unemployment rate in 24 years; New York City has an unemployment rate of
    9 percent. How do you bring the benefits of the new market to the
    neighborhoods that it hasn't reached? We have children who know more
    about computers than their parents, but not every child has access to a
    computer. How do you make sure that the benefits of technology are made
    more universal?
        Third question--that you saw debated at Kyoto in the climate change
    conference--how do you continue to grow the economy and bring all these
    vast new countries like China and India--the two biggest countries in
    the world--into the mainstream of economic life to stabilize the lives
    of the people there and still not only preserve but indeed restore the
    economy?
        Last question--big question--how do you accept the fact that the
    global marketplace is dominant and the cold war is over and say we're
    not going to disintegrate into chaos and anarchy? That is, how can you
    have a social contract where everybody has a chance, at least, and where
    people who deserve a hand up get it, and where people learn to live with
    each other amidst all their diversity and localism?
        You said your daughter said it was not necessary for Socks and Buddy
    to like each other, but they did have to get along. Maybe that should be
    my policy in Bosnia. [Laughter] I mean--you laugh, but you think about
    it. This is a significant thing. How do we deal with the fact that the
    old structures that people used as magnets for identity in the world are
    breaking down, giving vast new freedoms, and still find ways for people
    to integrate and make sense of their lives? These are huge challenges.
        I believe--and the reason I ran for President in 1991 and 1992--that
    we had to take a new direction. The progressive party, my party, I
    thought, had the right idea about trying to hold the country together,
    but they didn't seem too willing to change to develop new approaches

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    to deal with the new challenges. The Republicans had basically abandoned
    what might have been a basis for being a very successful modern party if
    they had essentially been like traditional northeast Republicans and
    modified their position. And instead, they adopted the Reagan position,
    which was, the Government is always the problem, is inherently bad, and
    is oppressing people, and what we really need to do is just to get it
    out of the way and everything will be fine. It seems to me that that is
    self-evidently untrue.
        So what we tried to do was to take an approach that said that
    Government could not do everything, but it couldn't sit on the
    sidelines; and what we really should focus on is to create the
    conditions and give people the tools to make the most of their own lives
    and to build successful families and communities and to enable America
    to reach out to the rest of the world in a positive way. That's why we
    focused on an economic policy that works. That's why we supported local
    crime policies that work. That's why we've worked on--we've moved
    historic numbers of people from welfare to work.
        And I think we've had a fair measure of success in meeting the new
    security challenges of the world beyond our borders. And after 5 years,
    as I said, we have the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years, the lowest
    crime rate in 24 years, the biggest drop in welfare rolls in history.
    The air is cleaner; the water is cleaner; the food is safer. We have
    cleaned up record numbers of toxic waste dumps, and we're tackling the
    big challenges of our time. So I think we're moving in the right
    direction.
        Now, what are we about to do in Washington? Congress is about to
    come back to town, and I have to give the State of the Union Address.
    And I will very briefly tell you what I think is still out there to be
    done. First of all, we have got to find a way to bring economic
    opportunity to the areas in this country which haven't received it.
    We've got to bring economic empowerment and enterprise into isolated
    inner-city and rural communities. And I won't bore you with the
    details--you may have better ideas than I do--but we're going to have an
    agenda to do that.
        Secondly, in the area of crime, the crime rate is dropping, but the
    juvenile crime rate is not dropping as fast. Kids get in trouble--almost
    all juvenile crime is committed between 2 and 6 o'clock in the
    afternoon, almost 100 percent of it. It is a very foolish thing for us
    to keep building prisons to put young people in to become permanent
    criminals as a strategy to lower the crime rate, when for much less
    money we could leave the schools open, give them something to say yes to
    and build their lives around. And so we're going to try to deal with
    that.
        In the area of welfare reform, the fundamental issue is we've
    reduced the welfare rolls by 3.8 million; all the people that are left
    are going to be harder to place. Therefore, there needs to be more
    training, more child care, but also jobs that are created, if necessary,
    in community service work so that people aren't just cut off welfare.
        The other thing we have to examine is how do we make sure that
    people aren't required to give up their educational programs if they're
    actually going to school. There's been a lot of publicity about that
    here in New York. And one of the things we're trying to do there is to
    make sure that people on welfare can qualify for work-study while
    they're going to college and they can work their way through school like
    everybody else does who has to work their way through school. So we're
    trying to work through that.
        On the issue of balancing family and work, the most single
    meaningful action that I've taken as President, I think, if you took a
    poll, most people would probably say, ``I like the Family and Medical
    Leave Act.'' Probably around 15 million people have been able to take
    some time off from work when a baby was born or a parent was sick.
        Yesterday Hillary and I and the Vice President and Mrs. Gore
    announced the largest child care initiative in the history of the
    country, to try to make child care more affordable, more available, and
    of a higher quality and safer than ever before to millions more
    Americans.
        The next big challenge we have to face is all of us around here in
    this room who are baby boomers--some of you are not, some of you are a
    little older, some of you are a little younger--but the baby boom
    generation, until--this generation now in the public schools is the
    biggest we've ever had, but until they were in the public schools, we
    were the largest generation. If we don't make some changes in Social
    Security and Medicare, when we retire we either won't be able to draw
    them in the way that they're now being enjoyed by seniors, or we will
    impose incredible tax burdens on our

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    children to do it, in ways that I think are morally unacceptable. So we
    have to undertake in the next 2 years a significant review of Social
    Security and Medicare, and they have to be modernized so that the baby
    boom generation can actually access them in a way that is universal and
    fair, but so that they actually work for the 21st century.
        Over and above that, we have to recognize that half the people in
    this country have no retirement savings. And almost no one can maintain
    their standard of living on Social Security alone. There are very few
    people living on that little money. So we have to do more to get people
    to save for their own retirement. We've done a lot of work on that in
    the last 5 years; we must do more.
        The next issue I'd like to mention is education. I spent, in my
    years in public life, more time on this than any other issue. In the
    end, a lot of Americans, a lot of you in this room over the last 5
    years, have told me that you're very glad you've done well in life, but
    you're very concerned about the increasing inequality of wealth in
    America because people in the lower 40 percent of our work force have
    not had their earnings increase in a proportionate way--for 20 years
    now. Now, there's some indication, by the way, that that's turning
    around the last 2 or 3 years, and we've worked very hard on it.
        What can a country do if it has great inequality and you don't
    believe in punishing the successful; what can you do? Well, in 1993 we
    asked upper income people to pay more and gave lower income working
    families a tax break as part of our strategy to bring down the deficit,
    but that's a one-time deal. We can expand trade and try to change the
    job mix in America, and we're doing that. For the last 2 years, more
    than half the new jobs in this country paid above-average wages. That's
    a slow process, since most people are not in jobs that were created last
    year. The only other thing you can do is to set up a system of lifetime
    education and training which starts with an excellent primary and
    secondary education and gives people the chance always to continuously
    upgrade their skills so they're on the cutting edge of change. In the
    end, that is the only answer to this. And, therefore, it is imperative
    that we do that.
        History will record that the best thing about the balanced budget
    bill we passed last August was that we made community college free for
    all Americans, that we gave tax breaks for any kind of education after
    high school, from graduate school to workers in factories who have to go
    back to school to upgrade their skills.
        The second thing we did was to launch the debate on whether America
    should have high national standards. And I want to talk about that a
    little bit. Fifteen big city school districts, including New York City,
    said, we support the President's desire to have national standards and
    national tests and measure kids by how well they do and tell their
    parents. But there is still an enormous resistance to that in this
    country. Now, there was a study that's in the paper today--you may have
    seen it--showing that big city school districts perform at significantly
    lower levels by any measure than non-city school districts in America.
        You can say, well, what do you expect, the kids there are poorer.
    They may be poorer, but we spend more money on average on them. And I
    say that to make this point: We cannot pretend, if we have a truly
    progressive vision of the future, that we can ever achieve what we want
    to achieve unless we hold our children--all of our children, without
    regard to their race, their income, or their background--to high
    standards of learning, and then give them the support they need to meet
    those standards, and measure whether they do or not, and if they don't,
    keep on working at it until they do.
        Chicago has just undertaken a complete overhaul of its school system
    in which local parent councils are involved in local school districts,
    and they have ended social promotion. You have to pass an exam to go on
    to the next grade. If you don't, you've got to go to summer school. If
    you get through summer school and you pass the exam, you can go on. If
    you don't, you have to stay back. But because it's a community-based,
    parent-based thing, you don't hear one word about it being
    discriminatory, about it being unfair, about anything else. Why? Because
    people have taken control of their children's education. They say, our
    kids have got to learn something.
        In the end, when they're 50, their self-esteem will be more harmed
    by not being able to read and write and learn new skills than it will by
    having been held back one year in school when they were 10. And we have
    got to have that kind of commitment to national standards, to rigorous
    standards.

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        The survey also reported that children in Virginia, for example, in
    urban school districts--let me--I live across the river from one, from
    the most diverse school district in America, Fairfax County, Virginia--
    children from 180 different national and ethnic groups in one school
    district. And the survey concluded that the reason that the urban
    students in Virginia scored better was because they had specific,
    rigorous standards to which they were held and consequences for failure.
    So I say to you, I hope you will all support that.
        Finally, let me say--in this old world we've got a lot of
    challenges; I just want to mention two. We need a national consensus to
    do something on global warming. It is real; it is significant; and what
    we need is an understanding that we can grow the economy and still
    preserve the environment. Just with the pressures that--public pressure
    that has been created in the last few months, look at all the new
    announcements that Detroit has made about cars that no one had
    anticipated before. We can do this. But we will pay a terrible price if
    we do not.
        The second issue I'd like to raise is that the wonderful explosion
    in science and technology and information that allow kids in New York
    City to get on the Internet and talk to kids in Australia about school
    projects also mean that crazy people in New York can talk to crazy
    people somewhere else about how to make chemical weapons or biological
    weapons. You remember when we had the Oklahoma City bombing trial, the
    publicity came out that there was a webpage where, if you could hook
    into it, you could figure out how to make the bomb.
        I say that simply to make the point that when you see me on behalf
    of the United States trying to stand up against the spread of chemical
    and biological weapons, or trying to devise ways to stop the spread of
    disease, or more rigorous standards to preserve the quality of our food
    supply as we import more food and more food goes across national
    borders--see that as part of this larger issue. We want all the benefits
    of globalization, but we have to preserve the integrity and the value of
    our life and that of people around the world.
        And since we're in New York, I'll make my last pitch. I need your
    support for convincing the Congress that they should support and we
    should pay our way in the United Nations, in the World Bank, in the
    International Monetary Fund, and all the other international
    institutions. We live in an era of interdependence, and we have richly
    benefited from it. We were able to do what we did in Bosnia because
    others would help us. And I could give you lots of other examples.
        Now, why should you be here and why are you doing this? Because we
    believe that Government is not the enemy, but it has to be an agent of
    change; because we believe this is an age in which we have to form a
    more perfect Union by giving people the tools to make the most of their
    own lives, to serve in their communities, and to build a strong country;
    and because the evidence is, after 5 years, that this approach is right
    for America.
        You've made it possible for it to continue, and I very much
    appreciate it. Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:10 p.m. at a private residence in the
    Dakota apartment building. In his remarks, he referred to Steve
    Grossman, national chair, Democratic National Committee; luncheon hosts
    Craig Hatkoff and Jane Rosenthal; and Judith Hope, chair, New York State
    Democratic Party.