    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
    [February 25, 1998]
    [Pages 285-289]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Reception in
    San Francisco, California
    February 25, 1998

        Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, first for the warm
    welcome and second, and very importantly, for your support for these
    fine candidates for Congress.
        I think I should begin by expressing my profound concern and support
    for all the people in California who have been suffering from the
    effects of El Nino. And tomorrow I'm going to Oakland to have a meeting
    with a lot of the folks about that. I also want to express my gratitude
    to the people of California and especially the people of San Francisco
    for the incredible support that Hillary and I and the Vice President and
    Tipper and our administration have received.
        When Nancy Pelosi almost drank my water--
    [laughter]--I thought to myself, she has carried so much water for me,
    she ought to drink some of it. The thing I find--I really admire Nancy
    Pelosi, and I like her a lot, even when she disagrees with me--but the
    thing I find remarkable--and I think this is important--is that after
    all these years in Washington, every time I talk to her about anything,
    if I didn't know, I would have thought she came yesterday because her
    passion, her energy, her intensity never fails. And believe me, even
    from this far distance, you've seen enough about how Washington works to
    know that anyone who can work there as long and as hard as she has and
    never become cynical and never lose their passion or their idealism is a
    truly remarkable public servant.
        Senator Thompson, first, thank you for
    running. Thank you for running. And thank you for being willing to give
    up what must be an immensely rewarding career in the California State
    Senate, and certainly, almost certainly a more congenial lifestyle than
    the one you are

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    about to embrace--[laughter]--for your willingness to be part of this
    great national adventure as our country goes through these profound
    changes into a new century and new millennium. Congratulations on
    getting your main opponent not to run. I never was very good at that
    myself--[laughter]--but I certainly am impressed.
        And to my good friend Lois Capps, thank you
    for running. It took a lot of courage and a lot of depth and a lot of
    conviction. I was standing up here listening to Lois talk about the
    issues that I'm pushing in Washington in terms of the people who live in
    her district. That's another thing we need more of in Washington; we
    need a lot more concern about people and less concern about power. Power
    is the instrument through which you do things for people, but the power
    belongs to them. All of us, every single one of us, we're just hired
    hands for a fleeting period of time in the broad sweep of our Nation's
    odyssey. And apart from the love and affection I felt for Walter Capps,
    the enormous admiration that Hillary and I have for Lois, the love we
    have for Laura who now has the longest leave of
    absence in history from the White House--[laughter]--I'd like to see her
    in Congress because she understands that politics is about people, and
    power is a temporary, limited instrument through which they can advance
    their dreams. Believe me, we need more of that in Washington.
        And I think she's going to win. She has a big fight, she's being
    out-spent, but she will never be out-worked. And there will be no one
    who will connect with people that they seek to represent, not a single
    person, as well as Lois Capps. And I'm thrilled
    at the prospect of her victory.
        Let me just say very briefly, we know in America that our country is
    having good times. We see that even California, with all the troubles
    you had in the years of the late eighties and the nineties, has made an
    astonishing comeback which will not be deterred by the natural disasters
    that you seem to face on a regular basis here. [Laughter]
        But what I want to say to you is, I come here grateful for the fact
    that we have the lowest unemployment in 24 years, the lowest crime rate
    in 24 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 27 years, the lowest inflation
    in 30 years, the highest homeownership in the history of the United
    States. But that imposes on us a special obligation, because we know,
    looking to the future, that the country and the world in which we will
    live both are changing very rapidly in ways that are quite profound, not
    all of which we can fully understand but many of which we do clearly
    know.
        And at times like this, when it's easy to sort of relax, that's the
    last thing we ought to do. And the purpose of my State of the Union
    Address this year was to say, ``Don't relax. Bear down. Look to the
    future. Let's be confident. Let's be happy.'' Yesterday the indexes of
    consumer confidence came out, the two main ones, and one of them was the
    highest in 30 years; the other one was the highest ever recorded. That
    confidence should not be grounds for complacency; it should be a spur to
    action.
        And we have a lot to do. Yes, our economy is in good shape, but if
    we want to keep it there, we have to more broadly share the benefits of
    it. That's not only why I favor raising the minimum wage but why I want
    to do more to bring the spark of enterprise and jobs to the
    neighborhoods in this country, principally in inner cities and in rural
    areas, which have not yet felt it. And that's a big part of our agenda.
        We have an education agenda because we know that is the key to
    broadly shared prosperity and the key to America's future. I think 30
    years from now, when people look back on the last 5 years, they may well
    say that even more important than balancing the budget was the work we
    did to open the doors of college education to all Americans, with the
    tax credits, the IRA's, the Pell grants, the work-study positions, all
    the things that have been done--the interest deductibility on student
    loans.
        We can literally say for the first time in our country's history
    that if you're willing to work for it and somebody will take you, you
    can go. But now we know that while--the one reason we're so happy about
    it is that we really believe, and we're right, that America has the best
    system of higher education in the world. Indeed, our colleges and
    universities and graduate schools are filled with people from all over
    the globe because of that. No one believes we have the best system of
    elementary and secondary education in the world, but we know we can
    have, and that must be our next goal. That's why I want the smaller
    classes. That's why we want the smaller classes and the better-trained
    teachers and why we're working with the people

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    from California to hook up every classroom in the country to the
    Internet by the year 2000.
        We have to have a children's agenda. The crime rate has dropped
    dramatically in America for 5 years but not nearly so much among
    juveniles and only began to go down among juveniles a year or so ago. We
    now have the biggest group of young people in our schools in the history
    of the country. Finally, we've got a group, as of last year, bigger than
    the baby boom generation.
        Now, that's good news for us in many ways, but it's troubling news
    unless we keep more of them out of trouble. We have to begin by helping
    more parents to succeed at home as well as at work. That's what this
    child care initiative is all about, not only to provide millions of more
    people the chance to access child care but to make it better child care,
    with a stronger education component, and safer, so that parents can feel
    more secure and their children will do better.
        That's also why I think it's very important that our initiative to
    provide more funds for schools to stay open and for community centers to
    stay open after school are important. You know, we've been filling our
    jails in this country for the last 15 years with younger and younger
    people. Most juvenile trouble starts when school lets out and ends when
    the parents get home at night. So if we would just spend a little money
    to help our schools and our community centers stay open after school
    until the parents get home so kids would have something to say yes to,
    we wouldn't have to worry about their tomorrows, and we could keep them
    out of trouble in the first place. And I hope very much--[applause].
        Lois talked about our health care agenda. It is important; we're
    trying to insure 5 million more kids in this country. We've still got a
    lot of work to do on that, but the funds have been set aside. I want to
    let people between the ages of 55 and 65 buy into Medicare if they can
    afford it or their children can help them, because there are hundreds of
    thousands of people in this country who through no fault of their own
    have lost their health insurance. And if they buy in at the cost of the
    program, it will not do anything to undermine the stability of the
    Medicare program, which is now secure for more than a decade. I think
    it's important.
        The Patient Bill of Rights is important because we've got 160
    million now in managed care programs. And on balance, it's done a lot of
    things we like. The inflation rate in health care has finally come down,
    almost to the inflation rate of the economy generally. But people are
    still entitled to certain rights, which when you boil them all down, you
    take all the specifics--the right to have a specialist, the right to
    know what the options are for your care, the right to get emergency room
    care regardless if you need it--all those things, and the other things
    in the bill, when it comes right down to it, people have a right to know
    that they're not sacrificing quality to save money. We have to maintain
    that.
        We do have an environmental agenda and it has many parts. But the
    most important I would mention for this coming year are the new clean
    water initiative and our attempts to do America's part to meet the
    challenge of global climate change. Now, when you see the El Nino and
    you see that it's particularly severe this year, what it--it should give
    you a glimpse of what could happen if we permit the temperature of the
    globe to rise one or two or three degrees more than is absolutely
    necessary over the next few decades. And we can do this and grow our
    economy.
        Every time we take on an environmental challenge, the naysayers say,
    ``Oh, my goodness, it's going to bankrupt the economy.'' And every time
    we have raised our environmental sights and cleaned our environment and
    preserved the Earth for our children, it has generated untold numbers of
    new, high-tech jobs that actually diversified and strengthened the
    American economy because we were doing the right thing to try to
    preserve the Earth, the water, the air, and our natural resources for
    our children.
        We have an agenda for the future. It begins with saying quite
    simply, as Nancy said earlier, that both Republicans and Democrats
    should resist the temptation to try now to spend the surplus we think
    we're going to have. We had 30 years of deficits. We'll almost--unless
    the Asian economic problems slow our economy so much that the next half
    of the year is different from what we think the first half will be,
    we'll probably have a balanced budget this year, if not, certainly next
    year. And we haven't had one since 1969. The last thing in the world we
    need to do is to start spending the surplus that hasn't materialized on
    tax cuts or on spending programs we would like.

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        The Social Security Trust Fund is all right until 2029; that's the
    year that basically all the baby boomers will be in. And when all the
    baby boomers get in, which is a troubling thought to me--[laughter]--as
    I am the oldest of the baby boomers, we'll only have about two people
    working for every one person drawing Social Security if we continue to
    retire at present rates and if immigration continues at present rates
    and birth rates continue at present rates. That's basically the
    estimate. Now, if we begin now, we can make modest changes that will
    secure that program as an important backstop for people's retirement.
        Keep in mind, it's only been a little over a decade that the poverty
    rate among senior citizens has been lower than the overall poverty rate
    in the country. It was an astonishing achievement of the World War II
    generation, an astonishing achievement. And what we have to do now is to
    modernize that system so we can preserve it. We also have to say very
    few Americans can maintain their present lifestyle on Social Security
    alone, so we not only have to secure Social Security, we have to find
    more and better ways to get the American people also to save for their
    own retirement.
        And finally, looking toward the future, I would just mention two
    other things. Hillary--with whom I talked right before I came here
    tonight, by the way--she said to me--she said, ``You know, I will never
    love politics as much as you do, but I am actually jealous that you're
    going to be there tonight, and I'm not.'' [Laughter] So that's a great
    compliment to the people of San Francisco.
        I want to say two things. She came up with this idea that we ought,
    as a nation, to have gifts to the millennium this year and that there
    ought to be two parts to it: first, honoring our past, and second,
    imagining our future. So we have this project. The first thing we're
    trying to do is to save the relics of the country. And they actually
    need a lot of work, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the
    Declaration of Independence, the documents themselves need some work to
    be saved, and the Star-Spangled Banner, which needs $13 million to be
    preserved. And it would be a tragedy if we let it go. But in San
    Francisco, in every other community in this country, there are important
    parts of our national story that we hope every community will save.
        And looking to the future, we have proposed the largest increase in
    research and development in the country's history, concentrated, but not
    exclusively, in medical research, but with a doubling of the National
    Cancer Institute, a huge increase to the National Institutes of Health.
    This is important.
        And the last thing we have to do for the future is to make sure that
    we have more crowds like this one that all get along. [Laughter] We have
    the most diverse democracy in human history. There are other countries
    that are equally diverse if you look at them from statistical points of
    view. India, for example, has even more diversity if you look at it from
    a statistical point of view. Russia has phenomenal diversity. But this
    is the only place where we actually all live together. [Laughter] I
    mean, physically, we all live in the same places, and we rub elbows, and
    we work in the same places, and we have this idea that no matter what
    our differences, we can, if we adhere to a certain set of values, get
    along together.
        Nancy mentioned Jim Hormel. I have just
    one question, the only question the United States Senate should ask, and
    there is only one answer: Will he, or will he not, be a good Ambassador?
    And any member of either party that might be considering voting against
    him, I ask you to ask a second question: Have I ever voted for anybody I
    thought was less qualified? That is all we should ever ask. [Laughter]
        And let me close with this point. I've spent a lot of time and been
    criticized in some quarters for trying to modernize the Democratic
    Party, for trying to break the old logjam of the eighties between the
    pro-Government and the anti-Government debate. We now have a smaller
    Government than we had when President Kennedy was in office, but it's
    very active and very progressive.
        And we proved that you could grow the economy and have a social
    conscience, that you could be tough on crime but intelligent and humane
    as well; that if you reduced the welfare rolls, you had to give people
    education and child care and give them the chance to succeed at home as
    well as at work because that's what we want for everybody else.
        And I say that to close with a word for the political party to which
    I proudly belong. Ideas are important, and it's very important to be
    modern and to be right, and you have to get it right. People can demean
    the importance of

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    the economy, but when people don't have economic opportunity, it's hard
    to get them to think in broader terms about their fellow men and women.
    But in the end, it is the core ideas and values that we believe and live
    by that really count.
        Today, when I was in Florida touring the tornado damage, the last
    man I came to was sitting in a chair, and he had his arm in a sling, and
    he stood up and saluted me. And he told his name, and he said, ``Retired
    Master Sergeant U.S. Air Force, 21 years.'' And this man now lives
    alone. He spends half the year in Pennsylvania, where he works at a
    trailer park, and then comes down to Florida for the winter. He lives
    with his little dog; he has a dog--he and the dog. And he lost
    everything in the world he had in that tornado, including the bicycle
    with the basket that he took the little dog around in, except his little
    dog. But he's still got his country. And, thank God, we've still got
    him.
        To me that's what politics is about. You think about all the people
    who came over here and started this country; they had a lot of problems
    by modern standards. You had to be a white male property owner to amount
    to much. Given my family's background, I probably couldn't have voted in
    the beginning. We probably wouldn't have had enough to own any property.
    But we had the right ideas.
        The people who started this country said that power can only be good
    if it's limited and accountable. They came here fleeing the arbitrary
    exercise of absolute power. They said, ``We have a different idea. We
    think freedom is good.'' Freedom for what? Freedom, first of all, to
    pursue happiness. Not a guarantee, but the freedom of the pursuit of
    happiness, along with the obligation to form a more perfect Union.
        Now, if you think about freedom, the pursuit of happiness, and a
    more perfect Union, and then you think about every important period in
    this country's history, I think you would have to say that it always
    involved one or more of those three things. At every time of challenge
    and change we have been called upon to deepen the meaning of freedom,
    widen the circle of opportunity, and strengthen the bonds of our Union.
        Now, in the 20th century, I don't believe anyone could say that the
    Democratic Party had not stood for those things. We may not have always
    been right, but we have always been on the right side. And the reason I
    want these folks to succeed is that we have shed ourselves of the
    shackles of things people said were wrong, all the things they used to
    say about the Democrats--they can't manage the economy; they're weak on
    crime and welfare; they tax and spend; bad on foreign policy--all that
    stuff, you know. That's all just rhetoric now, yesterday's rhetoric.
        Now, our challenge is to take this country into a new century in
    which we deepen the meaning of our freedom and extend to everybody who
    lives in this country, widen the circle of opportunity, and strengthen
    the bonds of our Union. I don't think you have a doubt--a doubt--about
    which party is more likely to fight for those things, day-in and day-
    out, year-in and year-out.
        So I want you to try to help Lois Capps a
    little more before March 10th. [Laughter] I want you to see that Lois
    and Mike succeed in November. And I want you
    to remember that it's part of a great national enterprise. A lot is
    riding on it, and it is very much worth the effort.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 7:25 p.m. at the Fairmont Hotel. In his
    remarks, he referred to State Senator Mike Thompson, candidate for
    California's First Congressional District; Lois Capps, widow of the late
    Representative Walter H. Capps and candidate for California's 22d
    Congressional District, and her daughter, Laura; and James C. Hormel,
    nominee for U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg. A tape was not available for
    verification of the content of these remarks.