[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.