    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [March 23, 1999]
    [Pages 442-447]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner
    March 23, 1999

        The President. Thank you so much. I want to thank, first of all, Joe
    Andrew and Beth Dozoretz and all the people with the Democratic Party for their
    work. But especially I want to thank Tom and
    Chris for having us here tonight. When I drove
    up in the backyard and I was walking up through the kitchen, which is
    bigger than my first house--[laughter]--Tom and I have been friends a
    long time, and I saw Tom, I said, ``Tom, I have one question.'' I said
    ``You really want to do something great for the Democrats?'' He said,
    ``Sure.'' I said, ``Don't let any incumbent Member of Congress come to
    your house. They'll all quit.'' [Laughter] He wouldn't give me that
    commitment. [Laughter]
        It's a beautiful home. It's a warm atmosphere, and I know that we
    all thank Tom and Chris
    for having us here. I'd also like to thank the people who prepared and
    served our food, and the wonderful musicians who entertained us before.
    Their songs were better than mine will be. But they're out there. Thank
    you very much for the music. You were great. Thank you. [Applause]
        I want to thank you for your contributions, for your support for our
    party tonight. I would like to begin with a brief retrospective. In 1992
    I ran for President because I wanted to change the direction of national
    politics, because I felt that there was a lot of rhetoric and not very
    much action being generated in Washington. And I thought the two parties
    were like locked gears, locked into sort of a rhetorical argument that
    just kept repeating itself over and over and over again, without
    allowing us ever to actually deal with something like the debts that
    are--deal with what national policy on education ought to be or deal
    with what national environmental policy ought to be or deal with what
    national health care policy ought to be.
        And the people were kind enough to elect me President in '92. And
    then in '94, when we got beat in the congressional races, I thought they
    were saying they really didn't mean it, after all. [Laughter] Part of
    the reason we took such a licking is that we tried to break the mold. We
    tried to pass a deficit reduction plan which raised taxes on 1\1/2\
    percent of the people that had the highest incomes--cut taxes, as Tom
    said, through the earned-income tax credit on the 15 percent of the
    people with the lowest incomes who were working for a living, so we
    could say nobody who works 40 hours a week and has a child in the house
    would be in poverty. And we cut a lot of spending.
        And the economy had not turned around enough. And the Republicans
    offered their Contract With America. By 1996, thanks to the recovery of
    the economy, the passage of the crime bill, the family leave law, the
    Brady bill, a lot of the other things that were done, and a lot of the
    other initiatives in the administration, the efforts we made for peace
    from the Middle East to Bosnia to Northern Ireland, the country felt
    pretty good about itself, and we were given another term.
        In 1998, under circumstances which appeared on the surface to be
    exceedingly difficult, in an election in which our party was outspent by
    more than $100 million, our party's candidates for the House of
    Representatives picked up seats in the sixth year of a President's term
    for the first time since 1822. And we had no losses in the Senate when,
    just 3 weeks before, most experts thought we would lose between four and
    six seats.
        Now, what I would like to say is--about that is, I believe that
    election in 1998 came out the way it did and the one in '96 came out the
    way it did and the one in '92 came out the way it did because we ran on
    Democratic

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    values and new ideas, because we ran on our willingness to be held
    accountable for results, and because we tried to build new coalitions
    and asked people to think about the future and not the past.
        And what I want to say to you tonight is, I--first of all, I am
    profoundly grateful for your generosity and your support. But I also ask
    you to bring to the Vice President and me and our administration, to Joe
    Andrew and Roy Romer
    and Beth, and all the members of the
    Democratic Party the benefit of whatever you know that you think would
    help us do a better job serving America, because we'll win more
    elections if people think we're standing for the right things and they
    think we deliver.
        I told any number of people that I was convinced that the real
    reason we won in '98 was not so much a reaction against the Republicans;
    it was that there was a reaction, coupled with the fact that we said,
    ``Hey, vote for us; our policies are working; and if you vote for us, we
    will keep the economy going, save Social Security and Medicare before we
    squander the surplus, pass a Patients' Bill of Rights, and modernize our
    schools and give you smaller classes.'' We had an agenda. People could
    remember what we stood for, and it resonated out there. And it was not
    the same things that people had been saying year-in and year-out.
        Therefore, I say to you tonight, the reason I ask for your help and
    your ideas is I think it is quite important that we make every effort to
    produce. I try--the closer I get to the end of my term, the less time I
    try to spend talking about what we have done and the more time I try to
    spend talking about what we ought to do. We still have about 25 percent
    of the time that this administration has been given by the American
    people, almost half of a full Presidential term. And I think it is
    absolutely imperative that we take advantage of this enormous prosperity
    that we have been blessed with, with the first surplus we've had in 30
    years now 2 years in a row and say, ``Hey, we're a year from a new
    century and a new millennium, and we're living and working and relating
    to each other in a very different way now. We need to deal with the
    great unmet challenges that are before us.''
        And there are many. And I won't--I don't want to give you a policy
    speech tonight, but I just would say this. I think we owe it to the
    American people to make the reforms necessary to save Social Security
    and Medicare for the 21st century. I think we also owe it to the
    American people to set aside a significant portion of the surplus, about
    three-quarters of it, to fund those programs along with the reforms and
    to pay down the debt at the same time.
        Now, a lot of you have followed this Social Security and Medicare
    debate. Let me just say this: There is not a single expert I have talked
    to who seriously believes that we can reform Medicare and keep it going
    without putting more money in it, because we're living longer and older
    people use more medicine. The only way to fix Social Security when there
    are only two people working for every one person drawing, you either
    have to cut benefits, put more money in the program, or raise the rate
    of return on the money you've got in the program.
        To do everything we want to do, we might have to have an amalgam of
    that. But first and foremost, before we raise the payroll tax, which is
    already too high, I think we ought to take some of this surplus, pay
    down the debt, and do it in a way that obligates that money as it
    repeats itself to go into--to pay for Social Security obligations in the
    out-years. We still have to make some changes. It's important.
        Let me also say to you, if we use the money--if we set it aside for
    Social Security and Medicare and pay down the debt, we can, in 15 years,
    have the lowest debt we've had since World War I, since the beginning of
    World War I. Now, a lot of you are in international business. I'm doing
    my best to fix the international financial system. I'm going to do my
    best to do whatever I can to bring the Asian countries back, to help
    Russia restart its economy, to keep Latin America from being totally
    afflicted by what happened in Asia. I'm going to do my best.
        But whatever happens, we need to make America as strong as possible.
    If we were to pay down the debt over the next 15 years, if we would go
    from spending 13 cents of every tax dollar you spend on debt service
    down to 2 cents, we would have lower interest rates, higher investment,
    more jobs, lower car payments, lower college loan payments, lower home
    mortgage payments, lower credit card payments, higher incomes.
    Simultaneously, we would be freeing up that money to be borrowed by
    others in other parts of the world, at lower interest

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    rates. And they need the money. And their incomes would rise in a way
    that would permit them to buy more of what we have to sell.
        And I cannot tell you how important I think it is for the Democratic
    Party that gave the people of this country Social Security, that gave
    the people of this country Medicare, and now has brought this country
    back to fiscal sanity, to say, ``Hey, we can fix Social Security and
    Medicare for the 21st century and do it in a way that dramatically
    increases the prosperity of the American people for the next 20 years.''
    And we have no excuse for not doing it, unless our friends in the other
    party stop us. We should be focused on getting these big things done.
    And I want you to help us.
        I also believe we have a very ambitious education agenda, that I
    think also goes beyond another choice. People--I used to hear this
    debate all the time. Every time I'd come to Washington, my friends in
    the Democratic Party back in the eighties would always want to help me
    with more Federal aid to education. And then the Republicans that I knew
    would always say they would want to be for higher standards, back then;
    they've abandoned that now, unfortunately. I hate that, but they have,
    if you look at the debates.
        But anyway, they were for higher standards back then. But they would
    say it's not a money problem. And as I've said many times, one of
    Clinton's laws of politics is whenever you hear somebody stand up and
    tell you it's not a money problem, they're talking about somebody else's
    problem. [Laughter] That's a lecture we like to give to other people; we
    never look in the mirror and say it's not a money problem.
        And our approach is to increase our investment in education. We
    nearly doubled the investment of the Federal Government in education in
    the 5 years that we were balancing the budget. We were cutting other
    things enough to dramatically increase it. So we should have smaller
    classes. We ought to hire 100,000 teachers. We ought to have modernized
    school buildings. We ought to have Internet access for every classroom
    in the country. But we also ought to stop giving money away without
    saying, ``Look, here are basic standards that we know work every place
    they've been tried. End social promotion, but don't brand the children
    failures----

    [At this point, a cell phone rang in the audience.]

        The President. ----and don't give every kid a cell phone.''
    [Laughter] Don't be--I'm just glad it didn't happen to me. [Laughter]
    This is--I was just really trying to see if you all were paying
    attention. [Laughter]
        This is a big deal. The United States Government has never been for
    both approaches. We have never done both at the same time. We've had
    periods where we really thought we were coming out for education reform.
    Then we've had periods where we knew we had real needs, and we provided
    funds. We've never been serious about saying, ``We're going to raise the
    standards. We're going to judge results. We expect children to learn.
    We're tried of patronizing poor kids and saying they can't learn, but
    we're not going to brand them failures. We're going to have more after-
    school programs. We're going to have more mentoring programs. We're
    going to have more summer school programs. We're going to give them the
    chances they need.''
        This is a huge deal. No serious person believes that America has an
    adequate system of elementary and secondary education for every child in
    this country. And as we get more and more diverse, it will become more
    and more important that we do that. Every one of you know about the
    additions to economic value that all people have when they have a better
    education.
        So this is a big issue. We've got the best system of higher
    education in the world. It's open. We've now made it pretty much
    affordable for everybody, with the tax credits, the HOPE scholarships,
    the student loans, the work-study programs, the AmeriCorps program. Now
    we've got to spend 2 years really doing some things. And I'm telling
    you, it won't be popular. There are people who are going to scream to
    high heaven when I--we've got to reauthorize the $15 billion we're
    spending on schools. And they'll say, ``Okay, we'll give it to you again
    next year, but we would like you to show some results to keep getting it
    or at least get caught trying.'' And I don't mean to denigrate--most
    people do a good job. But the people that do a good job don't need it
    one way or the other. What we want to do is to make sure we take what
    works and replicate it throughout the country.

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        Any person who's ever spent any serious time working on education
    reform will tell you two things. One is that every challenge in American
    education has been met superbly by somebody somewhere. Two is, we are
    not very good at replicating what works. Most of you who have been in
    entrepreneurial, competitive environments would quickly go broke if
    somebody did what you were doing better and you didn't figure out how to
    at least meet the competition. We do not do that. And we have to find a
    way to do it. And I think I've given some good ideas here.
        Let me just mention one last issue. I think that we have convinced
    the American people that we can bring the benefits of free enterprise to
    people who have not previously enjoyed it. You have poverty rates going
    down. You have the lowest unemployment rates among minorities ever
    recorded in this country. We finally have wages going up.
        But we should be under no illusion that everybody in America has
    participated in this recovery. It is simply not true. In almost every
    big city in the country, there are huge census tracts--big blocks of
    areas where there has been no new investment. There are rural areas
    where the unemployment rates are still quite high. And because of the
    financial crisis overseas and a few other factors, our farmers are
    facing the worst financial crisis they've had in 20 years, at a time
    when we've got this record low unemployment.
        And I have asked the Congress to pass a series of tax credits and
    loan guarantees which would give incentives to people like a lot of you
    in this room, like take Mr. Titelman
    here from Philadelphia, to go to the--let's say there's a big section of
    Philadelphia that hasn't had any new investment in a long time and if it
    can qualify--kind of like the empowerment zone program that the Vice
    President is already doing such a good job
    of running the last several years. But let's suppose you could get a
    $300 million investment in a place like that. If this bill passes there
    would be a 25 percent tax credit on the first $100 million for the
    investment. And the next two-thirds of the investment would be subject
    to getting a loan guarantee, just like American investment in designated
    foreign countries is today. It just seems to me that it is elemental
    good sense to set up the same sort of financial incentive structure for
    people to invest in underdeveloped markets and people in the United
    States that we give our American investors to invest overseas.
        And I hope this has great appeal to the Republicans, because it
    gives us a real chance. You just think about it. Think about how many
    places in this country you could say, ``If we raise $300 million and we
    invest it in place X in a viable-going concern that meets all the
    criteria for getting credit, we only have $75 million at risk.'' That's
    not a bad deal. That's not a bad deal.
        If we can't take a few chances to develop the rest of America now,
    when will we ever get around to it? The unemployment rate in New York
    City is still too high--the unemployment rate in a lot of rural
    communities, not just out in the South and the Mississippi Delta or in
    Appalachia but in the Mid-Atlantic States, in New England, other places.
    We need to do these kinds of things, face the big challenges, get them
    right.
        The last point I want to make is this--I don't want to talk about
    Kosovo tonight, for obvious reasons--I made the best argument I could
    today when I spoke to the AFSCME group, and they, I understand, showed
    extensive coverage of it on the media. But I will say this. I want to
    make two points only.
        One is, I talked until I was blue in the face when I ran for
    President in 1992 about the fact that we can no longer make a clear
    distinction between domestic and foreign policy. We live in not just a
    global economy, a global society. We are being drawn closer together in
    ways that are good, in ways that are uncomfortable or potentially
    dangerous. And we have got to stop as a people putting this little box
    over here and calling it ``foreign policy'' and having a big box over
    here and calling it ``domestic policy'' and every now and then say,
    ``Oh, I've got to go pick up this other box.'' We have to see it
    together.
        What does that mean for the Democrats? It means, number one, I've
    got a responsibility to do everything I can to modernize the financial
    architecture of the world so we don't have another crisis like the one
    we had in Asia. It means, number two, we have got to find a consensus on
    trade, because a big part of our growth has come from selling more
    things overseas. We've got 4 percent of the population and 22 percent of
    the wealth. It's not rocket science to figure out, if that's where you
    are, you've got to sell something to somebody else.

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        But on the other hand, we have been caught in the vice where some
    Members of Congress, representing a lot of people in America, are
    worried about the dislocations of trade, and other Members, many in the
    other party, see the benefits of trade but don't worry about the
    dislocation. So we wind up, well, are you going to get the benefits and
    say too bad about these people, or are you going to protect these people
    but slow down the economic prospects of the country? This is a dumb
    thing to do. It is very wrong to make either one of these decisions.
        We need to build an American consensus in which we say ``We're going
    to reach out. We're going to lead the world. We're going to open up our
    borders.'' We've got a lower unemployment rate than any other advanced
    country, for the first time in decades, even lower than Japan. But we
    ought to say, we also--``We're the party that believes in preserving the
    environment. We're the party that believes in the dignity of labor and
    elemental labor standards, and we're going to create a global economy
    where we lift people up instead of hold them down.'' And we just ought
    to do it and quit wringing our hands about it. It's very important.
        And the last thing that I would say about that is, I think it is
    terribly important that we recognize that economics cannot exist in a
    global context in the absence of security and peace and freedom. So that
    if you really believe that our future depends on that and that Europe is
    a big trade and investment partner of ours, we have to ask ourselves,
    don't we have a responsibility when our friends in Europe ask us,
    through a group that we all belong to, NATO, to help end the kind of
    chaos we see that we had first in Bosnia and now that we have a chance
    to prevent the most severe manifestations of in Kosovo--isn't that more
    than just a foreign policy issue? Even though I think there's a huge
    moral component there, it will have direct personal benefits to
    Americans if we have a stable, free, united Europe.
        The last point I want to make is this--and then I'll stop. Both at
    home and abroad, there are two great dynamics going on in the world
    today. One are the forces of integration that you see most positively in
    the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web and everybody sharing
    information and everybody knowing--you know, pulling us together.
    Secondly, there are great forces of decentralization, when they're
    positive, and disintegration when they're negative. And you see that in
    the decentralization of all kinds of operations.
        When I ran for President in 1992, 3 million people were making a
    living primarily out of their own home. When I ran for reelection in
    1996, 12 million people were. In 1998, by the mid-term elections, 20
    million people were. Rising exponential--decentralization, that's all
    the flexible work rules, and all the stuff you know about. And all
    ethnic groups, you know, recovering their heritage in a happy way,
    having festivals. And you know, Hillary's from Chicago. I love to go to
    Chicago every year, when they have the ethnic festival, because I can
    eat for 3 miles--[laughter]--and never have the same thing twice.
    [Laughter]
        You know, decentralization--you have all these little companies
    coming up, fitting certain niches in the market, all these specialty
    magazines, everything--and you see it all over the world. That's the
    good news. The bad news is, decentralization when you see the ethnic
    fights in the Balkans, or people unable to get along. They want to be
    apart.
        The American idea, modernized for the 21st century, is that out of
    many, one. E pluribus unum. Believe me, the Founding Fathers never had a
    clue what they were talking about. They could never have--I don't mean
    that in a pejorative way. They weren't thinking about the Fairfax County
    school system in Virginia, right across the river from me, that has
    children from 180 different racial and ethnic groups, speaking 100
    different native languages. They never--they didn't have a clue about
    that. That's not what they were thinking about. You had to be a white
    male property-owner to vote when they started. But they had the right
    idea. And we've been struggling for over 200 years, now, to cram the new
    facts and our new perceptions and our true values, into that idea.
        And so that's the last thing I want to say to you. I think that--if
    somebody asked me why I was a Democrat now, in 1999, I would say,
    because I really believe everybody who's responsible enough to work for
    it ought to have the opportunity to live out his or her dreams, and
    because I really believe in the idea of community, of belonging, of
    mutual responsibility. I do not believe that my life or my child's life
    will be as good as it would otherwise be, unless everybody else has a
    chance to fulfill themselves.

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        I believe we can do more together than we can apart. I like the fact
    that we all look different from each other, but I think what we have in
    common is more important than even all the interesting things that we
    have that are different about us.
        And believe me, the big threat the world faces today is the marriage
    of modern integrating technologies with the negative disintegrating
    forces of people with primitive notions that their lives only matter
    when they've got somebody they can look down on, somebody they can put
    their foot down on their neck on, somebody they can--lift themselves up
    by pushing somebody else down, whether it's in Northern Ireland, the
    Middle East, Bosnia, the tribal wars in Africa, or you name it.
        You plug all that negative stuff into access to how to make
    missiles, how to make chemical weapons, how to make biological weapons,
    how to jam records, computer records in banks or powerplants, or all
    these sort of--you know, what may seem like fictional scenarios. That is
    the threat our children will face, the combination of primitive
    disintegration with modern integrating technology.
        And we, America, we have to say, ``Hey, the people that started us
    were right.'' We have--out of many, we must be one. And we've got to be
    willing to carry our load in the world. And today, I can tell you that
    the Democratic Party, by far, is more likely to bring that kind of
    approach to the world, and home to every American community. And in the
    end it counts more than everything else.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:27 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, Beth Dozoretz,
    national finance chair, and former Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado, general
    chair, Democratic National Committee; Tom and Chris Downey, dinner
    hosts; and William A.K. Titelman, executive vice president, managed care
    and government affairs, Rite Aid Corp.