[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book II)]
[September 17, 1998]
[Pages 1610-1613]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Unity '98 Dinner in Boston, Massachusetts
September 17, 1998

    Thank you very much. Well, this has been good. [Laughter] I kept 
watching these guys come up here, just turning up the temperature one 
after the other. It's been really great.
    Let me say to all of you, first of all, thank you for your 
wonderful, wonderful welcome to me and to the Vice President. I thank 
all the people responsible for this dinner. I thank the Schusters, the 
Solomonts; thank you, Jack and Lyle; all the people at the tables who 
did all the work--all of you, thank you so much.
    I want to thank the Massachusetts Democratic Party. Joan, thank you 
and all of your cohorts for what you have done. I thank Steve Grossman 
for doing an absolutely magnificent job, and his wife, Barbara, and his 
family and his co-workers, for putting up with it and enduring it all 
these long months. It has meant more than I will ever be able to say.
    I want to thank all the nominees who are here for all the offices in 
Massachusetts. It could be good to have ``Congressman'' Capuano here 
pretty soon down in Washington. And I want to thank especially your 
Attorney General, Scott Harshbarger, for making this race for Governor. 
And I want you to make it a good race, a winning race. It's important to 
America; it's important to Massachusetts; and I want you to help him.
    I also want to say a special word of thanks to Tom Menino, not only 
for being a remarkable mayor of Boston but for being so incredibly 
generous with his time in showing the rest of the country, and in 
allowing our administration to showcase to the rest of the country, the 
good work that has been done in Boston, especially in trying to save the 
lives and build the lives of the most vulnerable children of this city. 
He deserves a great deal of gratitude from all of us.
    I really wish I didn't have to say anything tonight because I have 
enjoyed so much what has already been said, and I'm afraid I'll just 
mess it up. But I would like to thank John Kerry for what he said and 
for the conviction with which he said it. He and Teresa have been very 
good friends to Hillary and to me. And I think that--the thing I always 
think about when I talk with John is, no matter what the subject is, I 
never finish a conversation with him that he doesn't ask whether what 
we're really doing is right for the children. Is it the right thing for 
the children? When he always points out there's something wrong with our 
country when the poverty rate of the children is twice the rate of 
poverty in the country as a whole. There is something wrong when we're 
not doing more to save our kids, and we're

[[Page 1611]]

putting too many in jail and too few in college. And that's very, very 
important that you have a Senator who cares about that.
    I want to thank Dick Gephardt for--first of all, for never losing 
his energy or devotion or conviction about his work, when he went from 
being the majority leader to the minority leader of the House. A lesser 
person would simply have quit, and he didn't quit. Instead, he steeled 
himself for the work of the country. He knew that in some fundamental 
ways our country needed his leadership and our caucus to do our job, 
first to stop the contract on America, then to keep the deficit coming 
down, then to invest in our children and their future, more than ever 
before. And I thank him for that.
    Now, I want to tell you just one thing about Senator Kennedy--Vicki 
may never speak to me again. But I want you to understand one thing very 
clearly. If you reelect him twice more, he'll break Strom Thurmond's 
record and become the longest serving Senator in the history of the 
United States of America. [Laughter] And comparatively, he'll still be a 
young man. [Laughter]
    Today we started the day off together, Ted and I did, with the IBEW 
convention, talking about the Patients' Bill of Rights, talking about 
his fight for the minimum wage. The thing that astonishes me about him 
is, when Ted Kennedy came to the United States Senate, I was 15 years 
old--or 16 or something like that. He's still got more energy than I do, 
and he is still fighting with the same enthusiasm he was on the first 
day he showed up. That's a person who loves America and loves our 
people.
    And finally let me say, there's not much I can't say about the Vice 
President that--that I can say you don't already know, maybe, but I 
would like you to just reflect on something. There are partisan 
disagreements about whether I was right or wrong and maybe just 
principled disagreements about whether I was right or wrong with the 
budget of 1993--I think the results have borne us out--or when we took 
on the fight with the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban, or when we 
tried to change the welfare system but protect the most vulnerable among 
us, or when we took the hard decisions in Bosnia and Haiti and Mexico, 
and to work for peace in Northern Ireland. And people may disagree with 
how we've handled the peace process in the Middle East. You can disagree 
with a lot of things, but no one will ever be able to dispute one clear 
fact about the 8 years I served as President, and that is that in those 
8 years, Albert Gore of Tennessee did more good in more different areas 
than any Vice President in the history of the United States of America.
    Now, all I've done so far is talk about political activists and 
politicians. I think it's a high calling. I still want children to want 
to grow up to be President, to be in the Senate, to be Governor, to come 
to fundraisers, to go to rallies, to pass out cards, to believe in the 
political system. But that brings me to the most important thing, 
because what we're really all doing here has more to do with those kids 
that sang to us at the beginning of this banquet tonight than it does 
about most of the rest of us. And the reason most of us belong to our 
party is that we believe that the real thrill of public service is not 
partisan triumph or political power but advancing the lives of people 
and helping them to make the most of their own lives.
    So let me take just a couple of minutes; I won't take long. You know 
what the issues are. But I want you to ask yourself tonight, why am I 
here? And what shall we make of this movement? Let me give you just a 
little bit of a sober note here. Ever since the Civil War, in every 
midterm election, the party of the President has lost seats in the 
Congress if the President was in his second term. Now, why is that? That 
is usually because people perceive that the party's agenda has already 
been implemented to whatever extent it is, and they're beginning to get 
restless, whether the party was in the majority or the minority in 
Congress.
    I'll tell you another thing that's reasonably sobering. The 
Republicans have an enormous advantage at midterm elections because 
their electorate is wealthier and older and normally more ideological 
and, therefore, usually more likely to turn out.
    Now, what shall we make of this moment? I would argue to you we 
can't reverse that with a better, more ardent political speech. But we 
can reverse that if the American people realize that we're the only ones 
who want this election to be about them, that we really believe that the 
voters, the citizens, should be in the saddle, and that Washington 
should not be about politicians looking at each other and carving 
themselves up. It should be about people in public life looking at the 
American people and building

[[Page 1612]]

them up. That is what this election should be about.
    So I say to you, you have given a great gift tonight. This gift you 
have given will enable us to help our House candidates and our Senate 
candidates who have a good chance to win--and a lot of them do--to 
reverse over 100 years of history, to be able to get their message out. 
They will help Steve Grossman to help our State parties to get the vote 
out on election day.
    But I ask something more of you. I ask you to look into your heart 
and ask, what does it mean to be an American, and what should we make of 
this moment? It's clear what's afoot on the other side. We're 2 weeks 
from the beginning of a new budget year and, praise the Lord, the first 
balanced budget and surplus in 29 years--2 weeks away. Now, our 
administration has had a very active year, especially in foreign policy 
and dealing with economic matters. I've been to China; Hillary and I 
have been to Africa; I have been to Russia; and we went to Northern 
Ireland. And you know all about that. We're working on peace, and we're 
working on restoring economic growth. We've done a lot here at home to 
advance our health care and our education agenda within the framework of 
the executive branch powers.
    We're 2 weeks away from a new budget year. One of 13 appropriations 
bills as been passed. They killed campaign finance reform. They killed 
the tobacco reform legislation. Last night in the Senate, the leader of 
the Senate literally shut business down for 4 hours to keep them from 
being able to vote on the Patients' Bill of Rights.
    And they say, ``Well, you know, the country is pretty happy now. 
We've got the lowest unemployment, the lowest percentage of people on 
welfare, the lowest crime rate, the lowest everything in 25 or 30 years. 
Everybody is pretty happy. And we'll have a bunch of smoke up here, and 
we won't do much, and we won't get ourselves caught on the wrong side of 
the issues. But we won't pass anything that our interest groups don't 
want us to pass.''
    Now, in that mix of things, is it possible for not only us but for 
you, for all of us together as committed citizens, to pierce through the 
fog to the heart of the matter? To say that, yes, things are good, but 
we're living in a dynamic, fast changing world. There are a lot of big 
challenges out there. And the United States should use this moment--
indeed, we are obligated to use this moment to protect our own economic 
prosperity, as the Vice President said, by investing in the 
international institutions that will enable our neighbors to start 
growing again so they can buy what we're trying to sell; by investing in 
the integrity of our future by saving the Social Security system, even 
if it means resisting the temptation to pass a tax cut right before the 
election and spend a surplus that hasn't even materialized yet; by 
sticking up for a Patients' Bill of Rights.
    That sounds good. Do you know what that means? It means very 
practical things to people. There are 160 million people in this country 
in managed care plans--160 million--and many others in other kinds of 
plans with limits. Our bill simply says that if you walk out of this 
hotel tonight and you walk across the street and you get hit by a car, 
no matter what your health plan is, you can go to the nearest emergency 
room. You don't have to drive all the way across town and risk your life 
doing it.
    It says, if you go to your doctor and he says, ``I'm sorry, you need 
to see a specialist,'' that you'll be able to see that specialist 
without somebody worrying about the bottom line, not a doctor, saying, 
``I'm sorry, you can't see the specialist.''
    It says, if you work for a small business and they change insurance 
carriers and you're pregnant or your spouse is pregnant, they can't come 
to you when you're 6 months pregnant and say, ``I'm sorry, you've got to 
change your obstetrician.'' You get to see it all the way through until 
the baby is born. I want you to think--this is what I want you to talk 
to people about. We're talking about rules that govern 160 million of 
your fellow citizens.
    Have you ever had anybody in your family take chemotherapy? I have. 
You know what it's like for a family? You sit around and wonder, well--
and you make jokes about whether your hair is going to fall out and 
when, whether you're going to be too sick to your stomach to eat 
tonight, and you just wait until the end of the treatment, and you pray 
to God it works. What this bill says is, they can't get you two-thirds 
through your treatment--say, ``I'm sorry, you've got to change 
doctors.''
    This bill says that at least citizens ought to have some privacy in 
this country in their medical records. That's important.
    Now, we're for all those things, and they're not. And it affects 160 
million Americans. And

[[Page 1613]]

43 HMO's are supporting us and say, ``It's not right for us to be put 
out of business because we're doing the right thing.''
    We're for an education program. That sounds great. What does that 
mean? In our budget--balanced budget--we say we're going to give 100,000 
teachers in this country to the school districts who need it to take the 
early-grade class size down to an average of 18. That will change the 
face of education in America. Every single study shows if you give kids, 
particularly kids from disadvantaged homes, the chance to have that kind 
of early learning, the gains are permanent.
    Our plan says we're going to build or remodel 5,000 schools, so our 
kids will be in good, safe schools. It says we're going to have the 
funds to hook up all the classrooms to the Internet by the year 2000. 
That's what it says. It's not pie in the sky. This is not ``Wouldn't it 
be nice if we had an education program?'' We have an education program, 
and this election will determine whether it becomes real in the life of 
the American people or not.
    So you don't have to remember all the other issues; you can just 
remember those four. Do you want to keep our economy growing by getting 
the world economy fixed so they can buy our stuff? Don't you want to 
protect the surplus and the integrity of our budget until we honor our 
parents and our children by saving Social Security so that when the baby 
boomers retire, we don't either have a substandard retirement or we put 
an unconscionable burden on our children and grandchildren? Wouldn't it 
be nice if the best medical care in the world were available to 
everybody with insurance instead of being at the whim of accountants' 
rules? And don't you really believe that when we say we're for a world-
class education for everybody, now that we have the money to do it, we 
finally ought to start living up to what we say we believe in? That's 
what this is about.
    Now, we can beat over 100 years of history if we are on the side of 
the future. Records are made to be broken. I got home last night from 
the state dinner with Vaclav Havel, and I turned on the--we were in the 
bottom of the seventh inning between San Diego and Chicago, and the 
eighth inning came along and there were three people on base and two out 
and Sammy Sosa hit his 63d home run. We can do that. Records are made to 
be broken. We can do that.
    But make no mistake about it: We can only do that if the people who 
work at this hotel, who have to struggle to keep body and soul together, 
who work late at night and early in the morning, on election day believe 
it is worth it to them to show up, because we care about them, because 
we're fighting for them, because we have a vision for their children's 
future.
    If they think that, you can throw all the history records out the 
window, you can throw everything else out the window. This country still 
belongs to the people. Our party wants to give it back to them, and we 
want to give them a future. Your contribution has helped to give it to 
them; now let your voice, let the look in your eye, let the 
determination in how you spend your time between now and election day 
communicate to all the people that we have a job to do for America and 
we are determined to do it.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:50 p.m. in the Imperial Ballroom at the 
Boston Park Plaza Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to dinner hosts 
Gerald and Elaine Schuster, Alan D. and Susie Solomont, John P. Manning, 
and Lyle Howland; Joan Menard, State chair, Massachusetts Democratic 
Party; Steve Grossman, national chair, Democratic National Committee, 
and his wife, Barbara; Mayor Michael E. Capuano of Somerville; Teresa 
Kerry, wife of Senator John F. Kerry; Victoria Kennedy, wife of Senator 
Edward M. Kennedy; and President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic. The 
President also referred to the International Brotherhood of Electrical 
Workers (IBEW).