    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
    [April 7, 1998]
    [Pages 525-530]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic Business Council Dinner in Chicago, Illinois
    April 7, 1998

        Thank you very, very much. Let me thank all of you for coming
    tonight, and especially to Lou and
    Ruth for opening their home and giving us this
    wonderful meal, and Ramsey Lewis and the other
    fine musicians. You get a comedian after me. [Laughter] I used to tell
    jokes, and I was pretty good at it, and they made me stop. They said it
    wasn't Presidential, so now I have to have help.
        I want to thank Mike and Pat Cherry and Howard and Judy
    Tullman and anyone else who was responsible for
    this dinner tonight. On behalf of Steve Grossman and Len Barrack, we're very
    grateful for the help and support you're giving to our party.
        I think I saw Congressman Conyers walk
    in here a minute ago; there he is. Thank you, John, for being here. I
    want to thank Gary LaPaille, who is leaving
    his post after many years as chairman of the Democratic Party of
    Illinois, for his work in that regard. Thank you, Gary.
        I want to say a word--I thought that when Dick Durbin got wound up a while ago we were about 3 days from
    election day. [Laughter] That speech had the kind of juice you expect
    when you're coming right down to the wire. I want to thank Senator
    Durbin for many things. He has been a great friend to me, to our
    administration, and to this country. I was thrilled when he was elected,
    and I have been even more pleased by his service. He has exceeded even
    my high expectations, and you should be very, very proud of him. He has
    done a great job for you.
        I want to say a little more about Carol Moseley-Braun in a moment, but I was very delighted to see not only
    what Dick Durbin said but the reception
    that you gave for her. I hope very much that she will be re-elected. I
    intend to do everything I can to help her get re-elected. And I think
    that for her advocacy of education reform alone she has earned the right
    to be re-elected United States Senator from Illinois.
        I'd also like to say a word for someone who's not here, our nominee
    for Governor, Glenn Poshard, who's been a
    great Congressman from southern Illinois. And I've had a chance to work
    with him now for over 5 years. I like him very much. He is an extremely
    able political leader, and he has--when Dick and Carol and I were
    riding in here together from the airport, we were laughing about Glenn
    Poshard's fanatic support he got in the Democratic primary. He got 98
    percent of the vote in his hometown, and I think that's a pretty good
    indication of what the people who know him best think. So the way I've
    got it figured, if the rest of us could help the rest of Illinois know
    him as well, he'll do quite well in the fall.
        I was thinking when all this storm came up, when the tent began to
    sway, this is the way I live every day in Washington. [Laughter] Believe
    me, I've found that if you just keep standing up, most of the time the
    tent won't fall. [Laughter] And if the storm blows over you, you won't
    melt. Ninety percent of it is just showing up every day. It gratifies
    your friends and confounds your enemies; it's a good thing to do.
    [Laughter]
        I wanted to say to all of you, I just came back from this incredible
    trip to Africa, and I won't give you a travelog. If you followed it in
    the press, you know pretty much what we did. But let me say it was, for
    me, not only as your President but as a citizen, it was an astonishing
    experience. Hillary went to Africa
    with Chelsea about almost exactly a year
    ago, and they went to many of the same places that I went, although not
    all. And they had many of the same experiences I did, although not all,
    but I was sort of prepared for this at one level.
        But I was literally overwhelmed by the energy of the place and the
    refusal of people to be ground down by the most difficult of
    circumstances. I guess the most emotional moments of the trip were when
    I flew into Rwanda to meet with six survivors of the genocide, which

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    took somewhere between 700,000 and a million lives in 90 days. And I met
    a woman there, among other--I met this woman who was calmly telling me--
    she wore her nicest dress, and she was there with all great dignity,
    incredible dignity, telling me how the Hutus had come to her village to
    kill her people and that they had taken her outside with her family and
    taken a machete to her.
        And miraculously, she hadn't died. But when she woke up lying on the
    ground in her village, she saw that her husband and her six children had
    been killed. And yet somehow she felt the--she found the inner strength
    to go on and to devote her life to trying to heal these terrible wounds.
        I met a very articulate young woman who lost two of her four
    siblings and both her parents in the war, and she talked about how her
    parents were betrayed by their neighbors. These are stories that a lot
    of Jewish-Americans can identify with. But this woman was telling me--
    she said, ``You know, we lived in this little village.'' And she said,
    ``My parents--their neighbor came up to them and said, `These people
    will take you to safety.' And instead they took them to a stadium where
    they were killed with other people just like them.'' And she said, ``Now
    I have to go back to their house, and we have the same neighbor we had
    before.''
        And they're trying to come to grips with this and trying to decide
    whether there is anything they could do like what's been done under
    President Mandela's leadership in South
    Africa to try to work through this some way and build some harmony.
        I saw a village in Senegal where people were living as they had
    lived for hundreds of years, and they were living on the edge of a
    desert, but they had recovered 5 acres of land in beautiful green
    gardens because an organization in the United States and our aid program
    had given them enough money to dig a well. All they needed was enough
    money to dig a well. They've recovered 5 acres against the desert. It's
    a big problem in Africa and a big international environmental problem,
    the growth of the desert. And these people were so proud of what they
    had done, and this village elder was just holding his accounts in his
    hand. He wanted me to know that they hadn't wasted the money that had
    been given them and he was keeping count of all their expenses and all
    their income, and he knew exactly what their return on the investment
    he'd been given had been in this distant village in Senegal.
        When I was in Accra, Ghana--you probably saw the film, which was
    somewhat misleading--we had something like 400,000 people within this
    square and a couple hundred thousand beyond the square, and I was upset
    because two ladies got crushed against the fence as the crowd came
    forward, and we got them out, and they were fine later. But I guess I
    want to tell you two things about that. When I came home, besides being
    more optimistic about Africa than I had ever been before and more
    optimistic about our options for investment in Africa, we dedicated a
    commerce center in Johannesburg, dedicated to the late Secretary of
    Commerce Ron Brown. We had a lot of African business people there, a lot
    of American business people there. And last year American business
    people earned a 30 percent return on their investment in Africa, highest
    return of investment on any continent, so I'm quite optimistic about all
    of that.
        But the two points I want to make tonight--I came home thinking, for
    all of the challenges we have in this country, we are so lucky to live
    in a country where we have the level of prosperity we enjoy and where
    we're at least trying to make a conscious effort to live together across
    all the racial and ethnic and religious lines that divide us. And the
    second thing that I want to say to you is, I just wish every American
    could see in the reaction that Hillary and I received in Africa the way
    people all across the world in distant villages, many of them we've
    never done anything for, the way they look at the United States, the way
    they believe in the promise of America.
        And what I want to say to you tonight is I spent a lot of time in my
    first term trying to fix things that weren't working in America, and a
    lot of it was quite controversial. Dick Durbin told the truth: Carol
    Moseley-Braun, a first-term Senator from
    Illinois, with all the Republicans saying that they would destroy
    anybody that voted for my economic plan in 1993, that it would cause a
    huge recession and be the end of the world, if she hadn't been willing
    to walk down the aisle and say ``Aye,'' I wouldn't be here today,
    because the economic plan we passed was the thing that got the deficit
    down, which got the interest rates down, which got the investment going,
    which has put us in the position now for the first time in 30 years of

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    having a balanced budget and projected surpluses of a trillion dollars
    over the next decade.
        The point I want to make is not that we're doing well. The point I
    want to make is the point I tried to make in the State of the Union
    Address. This is a golden moment for our country. We have the best
    economy in a generation. We've got the crime rate going down for 5 years
    in a row, apparently for the first time since the Eisenhower
    administration. We've got a record high homeownership. We have the
    lowest welfare rolls in 27 years.
        But this is a time when we should not be complacent, because the
    world is still changing very rapidly and because there are still a lot
    of challenges in this country. And when I see how others look at us and
    I imagine the challenges we have at home and the opportunities and what
    I see going on in the rest of the world, this is a time when we ought to
    say, ``We have the elbow room now. We have the confidence, and frankly,
    we have some money, to bear down and meet the challenges this country is
    going to face, so that we can position America to guarantee that 50
    years from now people will still feel the same way about our country
    that they do today, that I saw in Africa.'' That is really what we ought
    to be doing.
        I'll just give you a few examples. Today I was in Kansas City with
    two Republican Members of Congress and two Democratic Members of
    Congress having a national forum on Social Security. Why? Because when
    all the baby boomers get in the Social Security system, there will only
    be two people working for every one person drawing Social Security if we
    keep the same birth rates, immigration rates, and retirement rates we
    have today. And that means the system will go broke in 2029; at least,
    we'll only be covering 75 percent of the cost of the system with the
    revenues that are coming in.
        And I think it's imperative now to do something about that, because
    we can do something now, 30 years in advance, that will guarantee that
    those of us in the baby boom generation don't either have to see our
    poorest members in a destitute old age or see our children overtaxed and
    impaired in their ability to raise our grandchildren just because we
    didn't take the time right now to fix Social Security. And we ought to
    do it, and we ought to do it right now.
        So we're going to have all these forums around the country. And then
    in December I'm going to convene a meeting of the leadership, and in
    January we're going to try to pass some legislation. Why? Because that's
    a gift we can give the 21st century. It's a gift. Just think, nobody
    else will have to worry about that for 30 or 40 years. And it's
    something we ought to do to just free people of worrying that either
    we're going to go back to an insecure old age for some of our fellow
    Americans, or we're going to damage the American economy or burden
    younger people coming up.
        I'll give you another example. We have a historic opportunity this
    year--I know it's an election year, and it's hard to get stuff done.
    We've got an historic opportunity to pass comprehensive legislation to
    protect our children from the dangers of tobacco. Now, 3,000 kids start
    smoking cigarettes every day; 1,000 of them are going to have their
    lives shortened by it. It's illegal in every State in the country; yet
    it's still a terrible problem.
        Dick Durbin has done as much as
    anybody in America to call the attention of the people of this country
    to this problem. And I thank him for that. But it will be unconscionable
    if, just because this is an election year and just because this is a
    complicated issue, we don't deal with it this year. And this is a long-
    term issue. You think about it. We've got a chance to save 1,000 lives a
    day in perpetuity, and we ought to do it.
        In education, tomorrow morning, Carol Moseley-Braun and I are going to go out and do an event to highlight
    what she's trying to do to get us, for the first time, to help our
    schools either construct new buildings or rehabilitate the ones that are
    there.
        Now, why is this a big deal? We've got the largest number of
    children in school ever now; the first time we've got more kids in
    school, starting last year, than the baby boom generation had, the first
    time--the largest number of kids in school. Now, the average age of a
    school building in the big inner cities of America is 60 years. In
    Philadelphia the average age of a school building is 65 years of age.
    You have all these kids coming into bigger and bigger classes, bringing
    more and more problems from their home. I offered a program that would
    reduce class size in the early grades to an average of 18 kids a class,
    hire 100,000 teachers, and modernize schools. She gave me the idea on
    the schools. And this is a huge thing.

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        We're having a big fight in Washington because the leaders of the
    other party and most of the rank and file don't think it's the thing to
    do. They think it's not their problem; they think it's a local problem.
    But even though Chicago--I take my hat off to Chicago, and I'm trying to
    help other school districts do what's been done here to kind of end
    social promotion and have mandatory summer school, do the things that
    have been done here, which you should all be very proud of.
        It is not true that it's not a national problem. We've got the
    finest system of higher education in the world. No one questions it.
    Today I'm down at a community college in Kansas City at this Social
    Security forum, meeting with a bunch of students from the University of
    Central Oklahoma who came all the way over to come to the forum, and I
    meet two kids from Pakistan, two kids from Nigeria, a young man from
    Darbyshire in England. Why? Because people want to come to America to go
    to college. We've got the best system of college education in the world.
        So what I tried to do after I became President was just to open the
    doors of college to everybody, with better student loans and more work-
    study slots and more scholarships and now a $1,500 tax credit for the
    first 2 years of college and tax credits for the other years as well.
        But no one believes we have the best system of elementary and
    secondary education in the world. And if you look ahead--right now we
    have the strongest economy in the world, but more and more and more and
    more this economy will run on what people know and not only what people
    know but what they're capable of learning. Therefore, we must do
    whatever we can to give ourselves the best system of elementary and
    secondary education in the world.
        I tell you, I've been working at this for 20 years. And I would be
    very surprised if any President has ever spent any more time in schools
    than I have, because I was a Governor for a dozen years before I took
    this office. I still read the literature. I still try to learn
    everything I can. No one has all the answers. But I can promise you
    this: Every problem in American education has been solved by somebody
    somewhere. And the biggest problem is we don't have a system where we
    have to learn from one another to survive.
        But I can also tell you that I have been in districts in very poor
    areas, but I've never been in a successful school that wasn't in decent
    physical shape. And that's why what Carol Moseley-Braun wants to do is all right. I can also tell you there's
    no point in us hiring 100,000 teachers if they don't have a classroom.
    You can't lower the class size unless there is a classroom with a
    teacher to put the 18 kids in.
        So this is a very big deal that we're trying to do. And again I say,
    in my judgment, while there is no simple answer, having higher
    standards, having greater accountability, doing more to get the best
    kind of teachers trained and out in the schools, and having the smaller
    classes in the early grades, and having the help to districts that don't
    have a lot of money to have decent physical facilities, these things are
    important. And her leadership in this agenda alone--never mind the fact
    that if you're from southern Illinois she's pretty good on the
    agricultural issues and all that--just on education, our stake in
    building a world-class system of elementary and secondary education
    dwarfs most other public issues, and it justifies your effort and
    support to re-elect Carol Moseley-Braun
    to the Senate.
        Let me just mention a couple of other issues. When I was in Africa,
    I met--I had an amazing meeting with six environmentalists from
    countries around the African continent, and it was very interesting.
    Those of you who are interested in the environment, if you'd been
    sitting there talking to these people, you would have thought this was a
    conversation you could have in this community, except you wouldn't be
    worried about how to preserve the rhinos. I don't think there are any
    around here.
        But except for the--you know, the common interest we have in having
    clean water and clean air and a sustainable environment is very
    important. One of the things that I'm hoping we can do in this session
    of Congress--but I'm not optimistic based on the preliminary soundings--
    is to pass our clean water initiative and also to pass an initiative for
    America to do its part in dealing with the problem of global warming.
        The overwhelming consensus of scientists is this climate is warming
    up. And if you see what's happening, you see how much more extreme
    weather this El Nino has brought us all over America than the last El
    Nino, and you look at how upsetting it's been, that will become more and
    more and more regular unless we

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    take steps to reverse the incredible speed at which the Earth is warming
    up.
        Now, our party is four square for the proposition that we can
    preserve the environment and grow the economy. But right now, we're in a
    big fight about that in Washington, and right now we're not doing so
    well.
        So again I say to you, if you're thinking about not just how to keep
    this stock market up until next month but what kind of America our
    grandchildren are going to live in, whether we have a systematic program
    to have clean water in America and whether we're prepared to do
    something about climate change are huge issues. It is our moral
    responsibility in a good time to take on a long-term issue like this.
        Now, I'll just mention two other things very briefly. First, a lot
    of you know that I've invested a good deal of time and effort in efforts
    to bring peace to other parts of the world. We're doing much better in
    Bosnia today than we were a year ago. And I still think we were right in
    1985 to go in and stop that war. It was the bloodiest conflict in Europe
    since the end of World War II, and I think history will record that.
        We are working very, very hard to find a formula which will permit
    the Middle East peace process to be resumed. And the less I say about it
    the better, but we're working hard on it.
        And Senator Mitchell, my former
    Senate majority leader, was named to be the principal broker for peace
    in Ireland, and he's tabled a peace proposal, and there is some chance
    that sometime within the next few days the land of my ancestors will
    actually have an agreement to resolve some issues that are hundreds of
    years old.
        So there's a lot of hope there, but the United States should
    continue to be involved in this. And I hope all of you will support
    that. Believe it or not, it's more controversial than you think in
    Washington. There are lots of people that think we ought to just be
    tending to our knitting more and be less involved around the world. I
    personally believe we should be more involved around the world because
    there is no easy division between our domestic interest and our foreign
    interest. And about a third of our economic growth in the last 5 years
    has come because of our expansion of trade and our reaching out to other
    countries and our willingness to be good partners with other people.
        The last point I would make is this: If you think about what the
    roots of the problems in the Middle East and Bosnia and Northern Ireland
    are; if you think about the fact that in Rwanda, where I told you
    somewhere between 700,000 and a million people were killed in 90 days
    because of the conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis, tribal
    differences--let me tell you that they lived together in that country
    for hundreds of years, not hundreds of days--hundreds of years. Even
    though they are very distinct looking, the differences--you could see
    after you were in a room, you'd know who the Hutus were and who the
    Tutsis were. They spoke the same language. They had the same native
    religion. They shared the same land. They worked out accommodations for
    tribal differences. And yet still, the wheel ran off the track, and
    there they were, killing each other with breathtaking abandon.
        What's the point of all of this? One of the reasons that America is
    attractive to others in the rest of the world is because we are trying
    every day to bridge the gaps that are still tearing people apart. What
    good does it do you to work a computer, to solve all the problems of
    science, if all you do is put all that knowledge and all that power to
    work in a primitive way dividing people instead of uniting them?
        So I would say that I still believe we have no more important work
    than trying to bring the American people together and trying to continue
    to be a beacon of hope. I was so moved when I was in Senegal, a country
    that is 85 percent Muslim. I went to the biggest mosque in the country
    and visited. Why? Because they publicly rebuke the notion that they
    should hold down people who are of a different faith. The President is a
    Muslim with a Christian wife and now a Jewish daughter-in-law.
    [Laughter]
        And so, here's this man, every day, in much more difficult
    circumstances than America, trying to embody the idea that it is crazy
    for us to punish one another because of our religious or our racial or
    our tribal differences. But these are deep feelings, man. It is deep in
    the psychology of all human history that people, when threatened
    especially, look for others to look down on and try to define themselves
    up by pushing others down. And you have to teach people to escape that,
    and you have to practice that.
        And every time people see America uniting all different kinds of
    people, it sends a loud

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    message to the rest of the world and gives a greater chance that your
    children and your children's children will never have to leave our
    shores to fight in a foreign war because people hate each other for
    reasons that are fundamentally not as important as what they have in
    common.
        So these are the things I think we ought to be thinking about. Now,
    if you think about what elections used to be about--what did they used
    to talk about, the Democrats? You didn't hear this; this is not the
    subject of elections. How did the Republicans win the Congress? How did
    they win the White House? They always said, ``Oh, you can't vote for
    those guys. They're weak on the deficit. You know, they're weak on
    crime; they're weak on welfare; they're weak on all that.'' You remember
    all those speeches, sort of driving wedges in the election.
        Well, I'm sorry, but there's no deficit anymore. We've got the
    lowest welfare rolls in 27 years. We've got the best economy in a
    generation. The crime rate has been going down. We, just last week, said
    we were going to stop importing another 55 assault weapons, keep another
    million and a half weapons out of this country that are designed for
    nothing other than killing people. So now we don't have to worry about
    that anymore.
        Elections do not need to be, and indeed should not be, dominated by
    negative issues anymore or fear. There's no fear. You can go out in 1998
    and talk to your friends and neighbors and try to put a little juice in
    the idea that we can actually have a referendum in America about the
    future direction of this country and about whether we're going to look
    at the long-term problems.
        And I think if we do that, Carol Moseley-Braun will win handily. I think if we do that, our party will
    pick up seats in Congress, although it never happens in the second term
    of an incumbent President that his party picks up seats in Congress. It
    never happens. It's going to happen this time if we make the election
    about the future of the American people.
        And your investment in our party has made the chance of that
    happening much, much more likely. That's why you're here, and that's why
    I'm grateful.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 9:17 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Lou and Ruth Weisbach; Mike and Pat
    Cherry and Howard and Judy Tullman, event cochairs; Steve Grossman,
    national chair, and Leonard Barrack, national finance chair, Democratic
    National Committee; President Nelson Mandela of South Africa; former
    Senator George J. Mitchell, independent chairman of the multiparty talks
    in Northern Ireland; and President Abdou Diouf of Senegal and his wife,
    Elizabeth.