    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [May 7, 1999]
    [Pages 724-729]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 724]]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Austin
    May 7, 1999

        Thank you very much. You know, when Roy was
    doing that riff, you know, ``Before he came, I didn't know I needed new
    furniture; I didn't know I needed new art work; I didn't know I
    needed''--Mary kept getting redder and redder,
    and finally she says, ``He may not know he needs another place to spend
    the night tonight.'' [Laughter] I must say this is a lot better than the
    last hovel we spent the night in. [Laughter]
        Let me say to all of you, I've had a wonderful time here tonight,
    seeing so many of my old friends. There are a lot of people here--the
    ones Roy mentioned and also Carlos Truan,
    Gonzalo Barrientos--a lot of other people
    who were with Roy and Garry and Judy and Nancy and Tom, all the rest of us,
    way back in 1972. And we have remained friends for a long time. And
    during most of that time, with the odd interruption, sometimes the odd,
    wonderful interruption like the reign of Governor Richards, the election
    of Lloyd Doggett, we've been in the minority.
        And I want to talk tonight a little bit about--I want to have kind
    of a serious conversation tonight about why I really came here, because
    what Joe said is right. I'm not running for anything. And I would seize
    any excuse to come here to Austin, because I had some of the happiest
    days of my life here, and I have a very jealous wife who wishes she were
    here today.
        But for the next 2 years, I'm helping the Democratic Party because I
    believe it's the right thing to do for America. I hear a lot of folks on
    the other side kind of licking their lips and saying, ``Well, wait until
    the next election, and we'll have Clinton out of the way. Maybe it will
    be better.''
        What I want to say to you is that I am very grateful that I've had
    the chance to serve you. And I am profoundly grateful that we have the
    lowest unemployment in 30 years and the lowest welfare rolls in forever
    and a day--they're half the size they were before--and the lowest crime
    rate in 25 years. Roy was saying that we've got 90 percent of our
    children immunized against serious diseases for the first time in
    history. The doors of college are virtually open to every American now
    because of our HOPE tax credit and the student loan changes we've made.
    We've set aside more land in perpetuity than any administration, except
    for the two Roosevelts, in American history. I'm grateful for all that.
        But what I want you to understand is that I'm grateful because I got
    a chance to implement a set of ideas that now represent the governing
    philosophy of the Democratic Party. And it is very different from the
    driving philosophy of the other party. And if the American people like
    the results that have been achieved, then we need to support those
    people running for the Congress and the White House who believe in these
    ideas.
        In 1991, when the incumbent President was at 75 percent approval and
    I decided to make this race when nobody but my mother and my wife
    thought I could win, I did it because I was worried about my country and
    my Capital. Because it seemed to me that there was nothing particularly
    wrong with America that couldn't be fixed if we would just open our eyes
    and go to work. The unemployment rate was high, inequality was
    increasing, the social problems were worsening, and we had a lot of
    problems around the world that we didn't seem to have any governing idea
    of dealing with. But I felt great about America. I just thought we had
    to change the way Washington worked.
        Just go back in your mind to that period and that long period where
    the other party spent 12 years telling us how terrible the Government
    was, and a lot of our guys were sort of fighting a rearguard action
    defending it. But most of the ideological battles which took place in
    Washington were about yesterday instead of about tomorrow. And so I set
    off on this crazy journey with a lot of you, based on a few simple
    ideas.
        First of all, I asked myself, what is the problem? The problem is
    that we have not thought about how to take full advantage of this
    explosion in technology and the globalization of the economy in society
    and at the same time figure out how not to leave anybody behind and make
    our families and our communities stronger and maintain our push for
    peace and prosperity around the world. We haven't thought about

    [[Page 725]]

    how to make the transition in a way that not only provides vast
    opportunities for people like those of us in this beautiful setting
    tonight, but makes America as a nation stronger.
        And it seemed to me that what we had to do is to go back to some
    very basic things: that we had an obligation to try to have opportunity
    for every person who was responsible enough to deserve it; that we had
    to try to build a community made up of every law-abiding citizen without
    regard to what other differences they had; that we had to commit
    ourselves to be more involved in the rest of the world, not less
    involved, because the world is growing smaller and smaller; and that we
    needed a different sort of Government that could be much smaller--and it
    is today, by the way. It's the same size it was in 1962. That's the size
    of your Federal Government today. And I'm proud of that.
        But what you need to know, we made it smaller but more active,
    focused not so much on telling people what to do or maintaining old
    bureaucracies but giving people the tools they need to make the most of
    their own lives. Those were my ideas: opportunity, responsibility,
    community, a Government that gives people the tools to make the most of
    their own lives.
        And I thought to myself, there are a whole lot of things people
    believe that I don't think are true. I believed if we work at it, we
    could reduce the deficit and still increase our spending in education
    and health care if we did it right. Well, 6 years later, we've got a
    huge surplus, and we've nearly doubled spending in education and health
    care.
        I believed we could improve the economy and improve the environment.
    The air is cleaner and the water is cleaner than it was 6 years ago.
    We've reduced chemicals in the atmosphere from chemical plant emissions
    by 90 percent in the last 6 years.
        I believed that we could help people succeed at work and at home.
    And I still think that's one of the biggest problems we've got in this
    country, people trying to be good parents and trying to meet their
    obligations at work at the same time.
        I believed that we could promote entrepreneurialism and trade around
    the world and still help people who, because of their education or where
    they live, are at risk of being left behind. Those are the things that I
    believed.
        I believed that we can be a force for peace and recognize that there
    are some times when we have to use our overwhelming military force.
        I believed that in welfare we could reduce the welfare rolls, get
    more people to work, and at the same time help people who were on
    welfare to do a better job of raising their children, that we didn't
    have to hurt people in their responsibilities as parents to say, ``If
    you're able-bodied, you ought to work if you can.''
        I didn't believe that--all those choices and all those debates that
    I kept hearing in Washington. And so we set out to do it, and the public
    responded, and the people gave me a chance to serve; and then in '96,
    another chance; and then in '96 and '98, kept returning more of our
    people to the Congress so that we're at the point where we can almost
    reverse the election of '94.
        I think the election in '94 happened, by the way, because we made
    the tough decisions as a party, all alone, to reduce the deficit,
    without a single vote from the other party, and increase our investment
    in education. We made the tough decision almost all alone to pass a
    crime bill that put 100,000 police on the street, banned assault
    weapons, and required the Brady bill's waiting period. And by the
    election in '94--and we tried to provide more health insurance, all
    alone, and didn't have enough votes to do it. And by '94, what happened
    was people knew what we'd done on the economic plan, but they didn't
    feel the economy was getting better; they knew what we'd done on the
    crime bill, but the NRA convinced a bunch of hunters we were going to
    take their rifles. By '96, everybody still had their rifles and the
    crime rate had gone down, the economy had gone up, and we got reelected.
    And the Congress is doing better ever since our elections.
        So now we're poised for this election in 2000. And what I want to
    say to you is, I appreciate what Roy said about
    me, and it's nice to be introduced by your old friends. They'll lie
    about you a little now and then. But the truth is, you must believe
    this, this administration has succeeded because we had the right ideas
    and the right approach and we're grounded in the right values, and it's
    what represents the heart and soul of the Democratic Party today. And
    that's why I'm here.
        We've got a lot of big decisions to make. And you have to decide who
    is going to make them. We have to deal with the aging crisis--

    [[Page 726]]

    twice as many people over 65 by 2030. I hope to live to be one of them.
    [Laughter] I've given the Congress a plan that will save Social
    Security, save Medicare, provide help for people taking care of their
    parents and long-term care, allow middle income people and lower income
    people to save for their own retirement for the first time and do it in
    a way that pays down the national debt by 2015 to the lowest point it
    has been since before World War I. And that's really important to keep
    the economy going, because we'll be less dependent on the vagaries of
    the global financial system.
        I've given the Congress a plan that will improve the quality of
    education by ending social promotion, by providing after-school and
    summer school programs for our kids, by finishing the work of hooking
    all our classrooms up to the Internet, by modernizing a lot of these old
    school buildings and helping the school districts that are having kids
    in housetrailers, by supporting better teaching, and by having national
    academic standards, which I hope our whole party will embrace and help
    us in this great battle we're in, because I think you should have local
    control of the school about how to implement national academic
    standards.
        There's an international standard that all of our children need to
    meet if we want them to make a good living. And we're about the only
    advanced country in the world that doesn't have that. As a result, we've
    got the finest system of higher education in the world; no one believes
    that our system of elementary and secondary education is uniformly the
    finest in the world. And yet, it can be. And all the diversity we have
    in our schools is a great asset in a global society, but every one of
    those kids deserves a chance at the brass ring.
        I was in the Alexandria school system the other day, across the
    river from the Capitol and the White House. There are kids from a
    hundred different racial and ethnic groups there, nearly a hundred
    different native languages. Every one of them can make a contribution to
    America if he or she gets a world-class education. And to pretend that
    it ought to be a local option whether they get it is, I think, obscuring
    what is plainly real here.
        So we Democrats stand for more flexibility about how to do things,
    but for national standards of excellence based on international
    standards of what our children need to know. And I think the American
    people are with us on that.
        I could talk about a lot of other issues. I'd just like to mention
    one or two more. The Vice President is
    coming down here to south Texas in a couple of weeks to our annual
    empowerment zone conference. Since 1993, we've been trying to figure out
    ways to get more investment into poor urban neighborhoods and poor rural
    areas and poor Native American reservations, because there are still a
    lot of people that haven't participated in this economic recovery.
        And I worry a lot about how we're going to keep America's growth
    going and our unemployment low without any inflation, especially if we
    have trouble overseas. One way is to make more markets here at home. And
    there are lots of places right here in Texas where unemployment is still
    too high, too many hardworking people still don't have the skills they
    need, and where if we could attract the right investment in the right
    way we could have dramatic growth. So this is going to be a big
    challenge. If we can't get around now to giving poor rural areas and
    urban areas that have been left behind the chances they need, we'll
    never get around to it.
        Let me just mention one or two other things. I am very interested in
    this whole issue of balancing work and family. And I think there's some
    things we ought to do. I think we ought to raise the minimum wage again.
    I think we ought to strengthen the family and medical leave law. I think
    we ought to pass the Patients' Bill of Rights. I think we ought to pass
    our child care plan to help lower income people with their child care
    costs. We have to realize that most parents have to work and every
    parent ought to have the option to do it, but no parent should have to
    sacrifice the most important job any woman or man has, which is to raise
    strong, good kids. There are a lot of things out there we have to do.
    We've got a big job to do in the world. You can see it today with some
    of the problems we have.
        Now, I'd like to close by just asking you to think about three
    things and giving you examples of what my philosophy is, that I think is
    our party's philosophy. These are the best of times for Americans, but
    we're all pretty sobered up right now because of three events of the
    recent days. One are the terrible tornadoes in Oklahoma and Kansas and,
    to a lesser extent but still sad, in Texas and Tennessee; two is

    [[Page 727]]

    the heartbreaking incident in Littleton, Colorado; and third is the
    continuing conflict in Kosovo. Now, let me tell you what they mean to
    me.
        First, the tornadoes mean that none of us should get too big for our
    britches. We're not in control. We have to maintain a certain humility
    when thinking about all the problems of the world. But as our hearts go
    out to those people--I'm going up to Oklahoma City tomorrow to tour the
    damage and talk about what we can do to help them put their lives back
    together--I'm thinking about what we can do to try to prepare better for
    the next one. I'm thinking about what we can do if we know we're going
    to grow and expand in areas that have been tornado alleys, what we ought
    to do to build houses that will do a better job of withstanding them or
    have quicker escapes to places that will be safer. In other words, I
    think what we always should be thinking about is: How can we make it
    better? How can we deal with what is going to come?
        In the case of Littleton, on Monday, Hillary and I and Al and Tipper
    Gore are going to sponsor a big meeting at the White House with people
    from the entertainment and Internet communities, people from the gun
    manufacturers, people from the religious communities, people who work in
    schools on problems of violence, students, a lot of other segments of
    our society, coming together to talk about how we can start a national
    campaign to reduce the likelihood of violence against our children.
        Now, I think it is important that you know how I look at this. I
    think the world's worst thing we can do is to use this awful heartbreak
    to get into a fingerpointing session, because the truth is that not a
    single soul here knows exactly what triggered those kids. And we all
    know that in any given time there will be people who are more vulnerable
    than others to whatever influences to which they're exposed to. But I do
    think we would all admit, if we sort of take our defenses down, that the
    society in which our children grow up today, number one, throws things
    at them faster; number two, gives them even more opportunities to be
    isolated from their parents and from their peers; number three, exposes
    them at an earlier age and in greater volume and intensity to more
    violence and the coarsening of human relationships; and number four,
    it's way too easy for them get things like Tech-9 assault pistols. And I
    think we can all sort of admit that.
        And what I'm trying to do is to figure out what we should all do
    here to launch a genuine grassroots national campaign where I try to
    pass the laws I should pass; the gun manufacturers come forward and do
    what they ought to do to try to protect our kids; the entertainment
    community makes a contribution; the Internet community makes a
    contribution--they've worked hard, by the way, with the Vice
    President to try to give parents more
    screening technologies--and the religious community comes forward; the
    mental health community comes forward; the schools provide more adequate
    counseling services and peer mediation for the kids, and what some of
    our schools are doing now, providing a hotline so kids who know what's
    going on in the school can call and tell somebody without being subject
    to abuse.
        There are lots of things to be done here. But there's also something
    to be said here for recognizing the incredible pressures that parents
    and children are under because life is so fast and so crowded. And it is
    easy for all of us, if we're not careful, to wind up being strangers in
    our own homes. And our children need to understand also that no matter
    how solid and rooted they are, childhood is a fragile and difficult
    time. Every school will always have its cliques. Every school will
    always have its groups. But we've got to teach our kids that they can
    enjoy being in their crowd without looking down on the others; because
    people who are constantly subject to ridicule and abuse are going to
    have their lives twisted or distorted in some ways, unless they are
    really superhuman.
        So I'm looking forward to this. And all the cynics who say it can't
    be done, I would remind you that teen pregnancy is now down 5 years in a
    row because of a national grassroots movement, not because of any law we
    passed in Washington. Drunk driving is down because of Mothers and
    Students Against Drunk Driving. We now have 10,000 companies that have
    voluntarily joined an alliance that we organized a couple years ago to
    hire people from welfare to work, and they've hired over 400,000 people
    without a single law being passed. We can do this. And I believe we can
    do it, but only if our political, public life brings us together and not
    drives us apart.
        And the last thing I'd like to say is about Kosovo. I know this is a
    difficult issue. I saw

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    the people with their signs on the way in, saying we ought to end the
    fighting. Nobody wants to do it more than me. I think those of you
    who've known me for 30 years know that the most difficult thing that I
    ever have to do is use a superior position to put pressure on somebody
    else, particularly if it involves the use of violence. I'm not that sort
    of person.
        But let me tell you, since the end of communism, we have seen the
    inevitable rise of national aspirations and ethnic aspirations,
    especially in Central and Eastern Europe. In one place only, the former
    Yugoslavia, we have seen that turned into a credo that says it is all
    right to burn the homes, destroy the records, destroy the churches--the
    mosques, in this case--and the museums, and the libraries, and the very
    lives of families; it's all right to rape the daughters; it's all right
    to shoot the sons; it's all right to do this.
        And for 3 years, we worked, through the United Nations and
    negotiations and everything else, to end the war in Bosnia. And finally,
    we ended the war in Bosnia when NATO bombed and when the opposition
    forces started winning some battles on the ground. And we've been able
    to maintain a peace there.
        People don't have to like each other. People may have legitimate
    grievances. But ethnic cleansing and killing people wholesale because of
    their race or religion is wrong. And the United States is in a position
    to stand against it, and we ought to.
        I know there are a lot of people who disagree with me. They say,
    ``Well, we don't have any vital national interest.'' I would argue to
    you that we do. It's not only a moral, humanitarian issue. We'll be
    better off if our best allies in the world, in Europe, live in a
    continent that is whole and democratic and at peace and free of this
    sort of thing. First of all, they won't be wasting their money tearing
    each other up. Secondly, they'll be better trading partners. Thirdly,
    they'll be better partners in helping us solve problems in other parts
    of the world. And if we can put an end to ethnic cleansing in Europe,
    then we can put an end to it in Africa, and we can put an end to it
    wherever else it rears its ugly head.
        If we can't solve this problem, it's very difficult to understand
    how our children are going to live in peace in a world where every
    radical terrorist group can get on the Internet and figure out how to
    build a bomb or get weapons or do anything else they want to do. We have
    got, at least, to tell people that in the world of the 21st century, it
    is not okay to kill people just because they're of a different race or
    ethnicity or religion.
        That's why I must say, I want to applaud the senators who are here,
    who are trying to pass that hate crimes act in the legislature in honor
    of James Byrd. I think it's very important. It makes a statement.
        This is the last thing I'll say about this. I've already talked
    longer than I meant to, but if you don't remember anything else I say,
    remember this: It is one thing to say that we all ought to get along
    together and quite another to do what is necessary for us to do so in
    decency and honor.
        The differences among us are a part of what makes life more
    interesting and makes this country so successful, as long as they are
    contained. When the differences among us are used, as they are in Kosovo
    today, as they were in Bosnia before, as an instrument of human
    destruction, they can quickly make life unbearable.
        Now, we can't force anybody to like anybody else. Maybe not
    everybody in this place tonight likes everybody else. But we live
    according to certain rules, and we do it not only because it is morally
    right but because we do better when other people do well. When we do the
    right thing or, as Hillary says, when we act like we're in a village, we
    all are better off.
        So I ask you to think about this. The Democratic Party has stood for
    community and for opportunity and for citizen responsibility. We have
    refused to accept all these phony choices we were presented with,
    between economic growth and the environment, between accountability and
    help in education, and all the other things. These ideas have led
    America to a better place. That's why I'm here. I'm glad I was
    President. I hope I was the instrument of a lot of the good things that
    have happened in this country. But the most important thing is that we
    continue in this direction, that we stay on this course, that we embrace
    these ideas. And that is why it is important to support this party.
        I'm very grateful to you. Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:38 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to Roy

    [[Page 729]]

    and Mary Spence, dinner hosts; Texas State Senators Carlos Truan and
    Gonzalo Barrientos; Garry Mauro, former Texas land commissioner; Judy
    Trabulsi, Nancy Williams, and Tom Henderson, who worked with the
    President on the 1972 McGovern campaign in Texas; former Gov. Ann
    Richards of Texas; and Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, Democratic
    National Committee.