[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book II)]
[July 18, 1998]
[Pages 1274-1277]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Dinner in Little 
Rock
July 18, 1998

    Blanche, that was a great talk. And I can't believe you remember 
that, but it is a true story. After we walked on up the steps--that 
story you were telling--the Irish Ambassador looked at me kind of funny. 
I said, ``Listen, those guys are from my home State, and I'm absolutely 
certain they're Irish.'' [Laughter] So he was fine. [Laughter] People 
have learned to make allowances for my Arkansas ways in Washington, you 
know.
    I want to thank Senator Pryor for a lot of things, for being my 
friend--he and Barbara were in the snows of New Hampshire with Hillary 
and me and our campaign--for many years of service in a stunning, 
wonderful, decent way, and for coming home and not only not losing 
interest but actually generating more interest and energy in the future 
of the children of Arkansas. And we are all very much in his debt that 
he is doing that, and I thank you, sir.
    I want to thank all the officeholders and the candidates who are 
here. I thank especially Congressman Snyder and Congressman Berry who 
have been great friends to me and to our administration and to our 
cause. And I want to ask you all to do everything you can to help Vic 
Snyder win reelection. He is a truly exceptional

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human being, and we need more people like him in the Congress.
    I ask for your support for Bill Bristow and his running mate, and 
Judy Smith, and of course, Mark Pryor. Every time I look at Mark Pryor I 
think, you know, the first time I saw that guy he wasn't old enough to 
vote. [Laughter] Actually, I'm not sure he knew what voting was the 
first time I saw him.
    But it's wonderful to see all these new people coming in, all this 
new blood, all these young people coming in. I'm very grateful. But the 
most important thing of all--I'd like to acknowledge all the relatives 
of Blanche who are here and the other six people in the audience. 
[Laughter] You know, I thought I'd done pretty good; I had relatives in 
15 counties. She makes me look like a piker. [Laughter]
    Actually, it's great to see this election be a family affair, not 
only for her family members but for all the rest of you. And we've had a 
good time tonight. I've enjoyed visiting with everybody, and all of you 
have heard me speak a thousand times anyway, and you probably think that 
everything that needs to be said has already been said, but not everyone 
has had the chance to say it yet. But there are a couple of things I 
would like for you to know.
    First of all, I would like for you to know that not everybody in the 
U.S. Senate is like Dale Bumpers and David Pryor. And I don't mean in 
terms of party or philosophy. And I see a couple of people nodding their 
head back there who have to come to Washington and lobby all the time.
    I would like for you to know that maybe because we're from here, but 
for whatever reason, people like Blanche and me, we sort of had this 
apparently naive idea that if we went to Washington, we'd just sit down 
with everybody who's interested in solving a problem without regard to 
their party or where they were from, and we'd figure out how to do it 
just the way we do at home. We thought that people would always put 
progress over partisanship. And you can tell by the stories that were 
told that we believe that politics is about people not power.
    We think the Founding Fathers believed that, too, by the way. If you 
go back and read the Constitution, power is given to people who are in 
politics temporarily and in limited fashion for the sole purpose of 
advancing the cause of the rest of the folks that live in this country.
    And you know, I went to one of these events in Washington, DC, that 
the press puts on every year, and it was a kind of a toast and roast, 
and everyone makes fun of me, so I get to say a few wisecracky things. 
And I alluded to the fact that some people have criticized Hillary and 
me for traveling abroad from time to time. And I said that we always 
liked to go to a new country and that we particularly enjoyed the 
opportunity to get a visa to come to Washington, DC, and see how a 
completely different culture lives. [Laughter]
    I say that to make a very serious point. There are two reasons you 
should send Blanche to the Senate: One is because the ideas and the 
direction that we and our party now represent are good for America; two 
is because we still believe politics is about people, not power. We 
still believe progress should be put over partisanship. And I'll say 
again, not everybody does.
    I'll just give you a couple of examples. First of all, let me say, 
I'm really grateful to all of you for giving me the chance to serve, for 
giving me permission to run in '91. And I think that you must be pleased 
that our country is in the shape it's in, that we do have the lowest--
every time you hear something about it, I hope you take some measure of 
personal pride and ownership when you hear that we have the lowest crime 
rate in 25 years, the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years, the lowest 
welfare rolls in 29 years, the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 
years, the lowest inflation in 32 years, the highest homeownership in 
history, and, oh, by the way, the Federal Government is the smallest--
under Democrats, not Republicans--the smallest it's been in 35 years. 
But we did not do it by posturing, by putting power over people and 
politics, by elevating partisanship over progress. We did it in just the 
reverse way. In other words, I have tried to work with like-minded 
people to get something done in Washington that would elevate the lives 
of the American people and the future of our children. And I'm telling 
you, you cannot possibly underestimate the enormous significance of 
every single seat in the United States Senate, not only for having the 
right ideas and doing the right things but for doing it in the right 
way.
    And a lot of you have been kind enough to come up and say, ``Well, 
gosh, Bill, you look like you're having a good time. You look pretty 
good.'' I mean, I don't know what you all expected. [Laughter] Did you 
think they'd wheel

[[Page 1276]]

me in here in a gurney tonight? [Laughter] Listen, you prepared me well. 
This is no big deal. You know what the deal is; I know what the deal is. 
I'm working for the American people and their future, and we're all fine 
because we are determined to take this country into the 21st century in 
a way that befits our heritage and that honors our children.
    I want you to think about this. There really are differences here. 
We don't see the world in the same way as many of the Washington 
Republicans. I make a big distinction between Republicans that I come 
across all over America in different walks of life.
    I'll just give you one example. We had an incredible event a couple 
of days ago in Washington to endorse the passage of a very strong 
Patients' Bill of Rights, because there are more and more Americans who 
are insured by HMO's, and because they have cost pressures of all kinds, 
and because increasingly doctors' decisions are being overridden or 
disregarded when it comes to emergency room treatment or specialists or 
a whole range of other things.
    So I appointed this quality medical care commission, had all 
different kinds of folks on it from all sectors of our health care 
society including insurers. And they recommended that we have this 
Patients' Bill of Rights so that people could have some enforceable way 
of making sure that when it came right down to it, especially in life-
threatening conditions, that these health care decisions were made by 
doctors.
    So we said we're going to have a big event about this. Democrats in 
the House came; Democrats in the Senate came. Two Republicans showed up. 
And I honor them. But their real problem is they don't act like they're 
from Washington, DC; they still act like they're, in one case, Long 
Island, in another case, Iowa.
    One of them has a terrible problem: He's a doctor; he knows what the 
facts are. It's an enormous burden, you know. [Laughter] It's hard to 
live in that nether neverworld if you actually know what the facts are. 
So here's this Republican doctor up here with a bunch of Democratic 
Congressmen, and it had been pointed out that when he wasn't in 
Congress, because he was a physician, he would often go to Central 
America and help to fix the cleft palates of young children so that they 
could have normal lives. So this doctor holds up a picture of a young 
boy with a cleft palate. And everybody gasped in the room because it was 
so awful. And he said, ``The problem is this young man is not from 
Central America. This young man is from the United States of America, 
and he was denied the procedure to fix his face because it was deemed by 
an accountant to be cosmetic.'' Then he held up a picture of the boy 
with his face fixed, and everybody cheered.
    Now, why am I here at this event talking to you about what a 
Republican Congressman from Iowa said? Because all of us who were 
Democrats were cheering. Why? Because our country comes first, and 
people come first, and progress and moving forward and meeting new 
challenges come first. But don't you forget, that happened at a caucus 
of our party because we're for that, and they're not.
    We're for an education agenda that gives us the best elementary and 
secondary schools in the world because we already have the best colleges 
and universities in the world. We're for smaller classes and higher 
standards and more teachers in the early grades and hooking up every 
classroom to the Internet and a bunch of other things that they're not 
for. They think we're wrong. I think our ideas are right.
    I don't see how we can ever make America everything it ought to be, 
I don't see how we can ever lift up every poor community in this State 
until we can say with a straight face, ``Yes, we've had the best 
university system in the world for a long time. Now we have a system of 
elementary and secondary education that is second to none in the 
world.'' I think we're right about that.
    I went all over the country when I was running for President--
indeed, long before--and asked all these police officers, I said, 
``What's the most important thing you could do to drive the crime rate 
down?'' And they said two things: Put more police on the street working 
in the neighborhoods, and give these kids something positive to do to 
keep them out of trouble in the first place.
    Now, we had a few Republicans who voted with us to put 100,000 
police on the street, but most of them didn't. And some of them are 
still trying to undo it and stop it, today, when we've got the lowest 
crime rate in 25 years. I thank those who are voting with us, but don't 
forget, it is our party that fought for this and stands for this, and it 
helped to give

[[Page 1277]]

us the lowest crime rate in 25 years. And anybody here who's ever been a 
victim of a crime, there is no more issue--no issue more important.
    So I just give you these examples. But to back off--you heard 
Blanche saying all that stuff about Arkansas values. You know, I used to 
be embarrassed to talk about that--I'll be honest with you--because my 
mother raised me not to be self-promotional in any way like that. But 
I'm telling you, it's real. There is a real and profound difference.
    There are times when I wake up in our Nation's Capital, and I deal 
with people day-in and day-out, and they say one thing one day and then 
the next day they're trying to basically say that I'm the worst thing 
since Joe Stalin. The day before we were all working together, hunky-
dory, and I said, ``What happened here?'' They said, ``Oh, they got a 
different poll last night or something.'' [Laughter] And I said, 
``Hello!''
    There is a difference in the parties in Washington, not only in what 
our ideas are--and I believe ours are better and right, and I think 
you've got evidence of that now, so you don't have to have a debate 
about that--but in how we believe people should be treated, what we 
think it is legitimate to do to try to defeat your enemies, and how we 
believe we should work with everybody when it comes right down to it, to 
put the interest of the country first.
    I'll just give you one last example, because it meant a lot to me. 
Blanche wrote me a letter. When I said we hadn't had a surplus for 29 
years, we quadrupled the debt of the country from 1981 to 1993, and now 
we're going to have one--the last thing in the world we need to do is 
start promising all this money to people in an election year in tax cuts 
or spending programs until we fix Social Security for the baby boom 
generation in a way that does not require either the baby boomers, 
because we're so large, to be poor when we're old, or require our 
children to be poor and our grandchildren to be worse off because they 
have to spend so much money to take care of us. And Blanche said, ``I am 
for that.''
    Now, we see everybody--we see other people in the other party 
saying, ``Oh, I don't know. We're going to have a $60 billion surplus 
this year. That means it's going to be a lot bigger over the next few 
years than I thought, so let's just go on and pass a big tax cut now''--
oh, by the way, just before the election. Well, just because I'm not 
running again doesn't mean I don't remember what it's like to be just 
before an election.
    But folks, we've been waiting for 29 years to get out of the red. 
It's not even going to happen officially until October 1st. Don't you 
think at least we ought to look at the bank balance for a week or two 
before we start spending it again? [Applause]
    That's another important thing. She will come home and say, ``Look, 
I know this isn't popular, but I think it's the right thing to do.'' 
And, believe me, there are a lot of those decisions that have to be 
made.
    So when you leave here tonight, I want you to leave here with a 
happy heart and in good spirits. I want you to be proud that your 
country is in good shape. And I want you to be proud of your personal 
role in helping me to play the part in that, that I've had the chance to 
play. I want you to be committed to the proposition that now is not the 
time to relax and lay back and enjoy it but to bear down and deal with 
the large questions that are still before us on the edge of a new 
century.
    And I want you to remember why you are here for Blanche Lambert, 
besides the fact that you either love her or are kin to her. [Laughter] 
There are differences in Washington more profound than the differences 
out here in the country on the issues, and we now have evidence. We've 
got a 5\1/2\-year record about who's right about these ideas.
    And even more important, when the chips are down, there are profound 
differences in those Arkansas values. We believe in people over power, 
and progress over partisanship. And believe you me, we need a lot more 
of that in the United States Congress. Send her there, and she'll make 
you proud.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:39 p.m. in the Robinson Auditorium at the 
Robinson Center Exhibition Hall. In his remarks, he referred to former 
Congresswoman Blanche Lincoln, candidate for U.S. Senate; Mark Pryor, 
candidate for State attorney general, and his parents, former Senator 
David H. and Barbara Pryor; Arkansas gubernatorial candidate Bill 
Bristow; Kurt Dilday, candidate for Lieutenant Governor; and Judy Smith, 
candidate for Arkansas' Fourth Congressional District.