    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [May 7, 1999]
    [Pages 717-722]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in Houston
    May 7, 1999

        Thank you very much, Ken. I want
    to thank you for so many things, but particularly today for the work you
    have done on this. And I thank Joe Andrew
    for being willing to leave Indiana, a State no one thought could become
    a Democratic State, that just elected a new Democratic
    Governor and elected Senator Evan Bayh overwhelmingly, thanks in no small measure to his
    leadership there. And I look forward to many years of his leadership for
    the DNC.
        I'd like to thank Molly Beth Malcolm
    for being here and Steve Zimmerman for
    providing us this modest little room to have lunch in. [Laughter]
    Someone told me that Napoleon was once in this room, but not in Texas--
    [laughter]--and Frederick the Great, and all kinds of other people. I
    don't know if any of them were Democrats, but we are. We may have
    tripled the number of Democrats who have ever been in this room in the
    last 300 years, just today at lunch. [Laughter] But I am delighted to be
    here, and I thank all of you for coming.
        I want to talk a little today--I know several of you said that I
    looked tired, and I don't know whether it's just because I'm not young
    anymore or because I just got back from 2 days meeting with our troops
    and with refugees from Kosovo in Germany. But this is a rather unusual
    moment for our country, I think, because things are in some ways the
    best of times. We just saw today, again last month unemployment rate was
    4.3 percent. We had another 234,000 jobs; we're up to 18,400,000 now in
    the life of this administration. The welfare rolls have been cut nearly
    in half. We've got a 30-year low in the crime rate. The teen pregnancy
    rate is going down. Basically, the social indicators are good. Many of
    the indicators relating to drug use are moving in the right direction.
        And I want to say a special word of thanks, by the way--I think he--
    no, he didn't leave--to Mayor Brown, who
    in his previous incarnation was a member of our Cabinet and led our
    Nation's efforts to keep our children away from drugs. And I was elated
    when he was elected mayor, and I hope you'll keep him here for a good
    long time, because I think he'll do a great job for you. And thank you,
    Mayor, for being here today.
        Anyway, you know, we have to feel good about these things. And I do,
    and I feel grateful. But all of us are sobered and saddened by three
    events of the recent days. And I would like to mention--although they
    seem entirely disparate--one is the terrible tornadoes that have claimed
    record numbers of lives in Oklahoma and Kansas and related storms here
    in Texas and over in Tennessee; the second, obviously, is the
    heartbreaking tragedy in Littleton, Colorado--I know we were all glad to
    see the children go back to school this week; and the third is the
    conflict in Kosovo. And I would like to try, if I could, today--it's not
    exactly your typical party-stump speech at a fundraising luncheon--but
    just ask you to think with me about how we're--what lessons we should
    learn from those three events and how it relates to what we're

    [[Page 718]]

    trying to do in our administration and with our party.
        And I'd like to go back just for a moment to 1992 and late 1991,
    when I made the decision to seek the Presidency. I was in my fifth term
    as Governor. I was having a wonderful time. Our daughter was doing well
    in school and with her friends. And Hillary and I were having more fun
    with our friends because I was about to get the hang of being Governor,
    having done it for 10 or 11 years. And I really didn't want to do what I
    did in 1992--plus, it seemed like a fool's errand; President Bush was
    at, like, 75 percent approval in the polls when I made the decision to
    run. And I knew I was a relatively young person, and I could wait, and
    that was my kind of personal inclination.
        But I was profoundly disturbed by two things: first, by the
    objective conditions in the United States. There were--unemployment was
    high; inequality was increasing; wages hadn't increased in real terms in
    20 years; and all the social indicators were going in the wrong
    direction.
        But the second thing that bothered me was that the debate in
    Washington seemed so divorced from the world, on the street in Arkansas
    where I lived and from the larger world beyond the borders of the United
    States, that it seemed to me that the parties were caught in a gridlock,
    labeling each other and fighting over turf in Washington that did not
    deal with what I thought were the two great challenges of our age: One
    was preparing for the 21st century by trying to take advantage of all
    the economic changes and the technology and globalization that was going
    on in a way that enabled people to build stronger families and stronger
    communities and left no one behind; and the second was, to find a way to
    deal with the dizzying array of differences in our own society in a way
    that respected those differences but pulled us closer together. And I
    didn't see much coming out that would do that.
        And it seemed to me that there was a way that you could actually
    strengthen the economy, for example, and improve the environment. There
    was a way to reward entrepreneurs and still reach out to people who were
    being left behind and let them go along for the ride in this new
    economy. There should be a way to reduce the deficit and still increase
    investment and education and health care. There should be a way to help
    people succeed at home as parents and succeed at work. There should be a
    way that we could glorify the individual, as we always have in America,
    and recognize that fundamentally we'll all do better if we're one
    community.
        And that's basically what the campaign in '92 was all about, and
    those words that I said, that I wanted a society that had opportunity
    for all and responsibility from all and a community of all Americans.
    And that's why I'm here today. You know, I'm not running for office, and
    some of the people out on the street are apparently elated about it.
    [Laughter] But that's the American way. I'm not running for office. I'm
    here because, while I am grateful for the role I have been able to play
    as President, in the 18 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment
    rate in 29 years and having 90 percent of our kids immunized against
    serious diseases for the first time in history, opening the doors of
    college to all Americans with the tax credits and the improved student
    loan program and the scholarship programs, and all the other things
    we've done--the air is cleaner; the water is cleaner; we've set aside
    more land to be protected than any administration in history, except
    those of the two Roosevelts--I am grateful for all of that.
        But this is not a matter of personality. We had ideas that we turned
    into policies. We changed the role of Government. We have a smaller
    Government. There are fewer people working for the Federal Government
    now than in any time since John Kennedy was President. And yet, it's
    more active. We focus less on telling people what to do and more on
    giving people the tools to solve their own problems and creating the
    conditions in which Americans could thrive in the world. And the ideas
    matter. And the values, the principles of opportunity and responsibility
    and community matter. And the Democratic Party, therefore, matters.
        These ideas have benefited every people in every State. They have
    benefited Republicans and independents as much as they have benefited
    Democrats. They are capable of unifying the country at a time when so
    many continue to seek to divide it. And they also give us a clue about
    what we should do.
        We've still got big challenges out there. It would be a big mistake
    for us not to deal with the challenges of Social Security and saving
    Medicare and to do it in a way that will enable us now to reduce the
    debt of this country over the next 15 years to its lowest point since
    before

    [[Page 719]]

    World War II. Did you ever think you'd hear anybody stand up and talk
    about doing that?
        It would be a great mistake for us not to continue to push for
    education reform, to put more teachers in the classroom with modern
    facilities, to finish the job of hooking all our classrooms up to the
    Internet, to end the practice, nationwide, of social promotion, but not
    to label the kids failures, to give them the after-school programs and
    the summer school programs they need to have higher standards around the
    country. It would be a mistake for us not to continue to do this just
    because times are good here. It would also be a mistake for us not to
    continue to try to give opportunity to people who still don't have it.
    There are still places in Texas, with all the economy booming, that
    haven't felt this recovery.
        Just a few days from now the Vice President is going down to south Texas to have our annual
    empowerment zone conference. And I'm very proud of the fact that one of
    the things that we have worked hard to do in the last 6 years is to
    leave no one behind, to give tax incentives and other investments to
    poor communities to try to induce people to start businesses there and
    put people to work there. And I'm very proud of the fact that one of the
    major initiatives before the Congress this year, my so-called new
    markets initiative, would give people loan guarantees and tax credits to
    invest in the poor neighborhoods of America and urban and rural areas--
    like they can get today to invest in poor neighbors overseas.
        I think we ought to give people the same incentives to invest in
    Americans who don't have jobs and opportunity that we give them to
    invest elsewhere. I don't want to take the others away. I just want our
    folks to have the same chance.
        So there's a lot to do. And it would be a mistake, just because of
    our prosperity or because people are already talking about the next
    election, to overlook the fact that we still have a lot of time between
    now and January of 2001, and to put a great country in idle is a great
    mistake.
        The second thing I'd like to say is I think it is a mistake to
    forget about our continuing obligations in the face of the problems of
    the moment. But I think there are lessons in each of these three things
    that I mentioned that we're all very much preoccupied about now.
        What is the lesson of the tornadoes? This maybe belongs more in a
    sermon on Sunday than a political speech, but the lesson is, no matter
    how well America does, a little humility is always in order. We are not
    in full control. And we have to be sensitive about this, especially here
    in this part of the country. We have to do more to try to prepare
    ourselves for these storms, and we have to do more to try to minimize
    their impact when they occur.
        The Governor of Oklahoma said a couple of
    days ago when I called him after the tornado that--we were talking about
    how Oklahoma and east Texas and Arkansas are at the beginning of
    basically the tornado belt in America--and he said, ``You know, the more
    growth we have, the more expansion of our communities, the more
    construction we're going to have in these alleys where tornadoes often
    hit.'' And we began to talk about that, about construction and safety
    and prevention.
        I say that to point out that there are certain constants that we
    have to deal with in our society that call on us to be humble, call on
    us to be prepared and remember we're not in total control.
        Now, the second thing I'd like to say about Littleton is that the
    lesson here is that no matter how prosperous we are economically--and
    this was terrible for that community; I've talked to school officials
    and local officials there--we have to understand that there are forces
    at work in our society that call on us to make an extra effort to
    protect our children from violence.
        I think it is important not to overly politicize this in the sense
    of fingerpointing. I have said before, and I will say again, I think
    that instead of everyone saying, ``Whose responsibility is that? Whose
    fault is this?''--I mean, instead of saying whose fault this is, we
    should say, ``What can I do to take responsibility for it? What can I do
    to change it? What can I do to make it better?''
        Like you, I don't know any more about what happened there than what
    I can read about it. But I have read voraciously. I have watched the
    television programs. I have listened to the townhall meetings and the
    other interviews that people up there have done. And you may know that
    Hillary and the Vice President and Tipper and I are going to have a big
    meeting at the White House on the 10th, next Monday. We're going to
    bring in people to talk about every aspect of this, including some
    people who have been very active in antiviolence initiatives around the
    country.

    [[Page 720]]

        But I would just like to say--I ask you to think about Littleton in
    the following ways. Number one, no society has any job more important
    than raising its children well. It is the number one job of every
    society. And raising our children well depends upon doing our jobs as
    parents but also recognizing, as Hillary said years ago, it does take a
    village, and we need to look at the village and see what the village is
    like now.
        And the following things occur to me, and I don't want to prejudge
    what we will do on Monday, but I think we need to recognize that without
    regard to family income, the speed and pressure of modern life increases
    the chances that children will become isolated and that vulnerable
    children, therefore, will be more likely to drift into something that's
    really bad for them. At any given moment in time there will always be
    children who are vulnerable to problems.
        But if you just think about the speed and pressure and sheer
    movement of modern life, the speed with which people move around and the
    hassles that are associated with that, and the speed with which images
    and news and information of all kinds--positive, negative--is crammed
    into our lives, I think that a lot of what we have to deal with here is
    giving our children some breaks, some protections, and our families some
    breaks and protections about that.
        The second thing I think is important is that we need to honestly
    try to challenge the families of this country not to give up on
    communicating with our kids when they start to drift away from them
    naturally and move into independence. It's still important to maintain
    some kind of knowledge of what's going on in there.
        The third thing I'd like to tell you is I think that there are
    things schools can do which will at least minimize youth violence, over
    and above zero tolerance for guns and other things. I visited a very
    impressive school in Virginia the other day, in Alexandria, that has a
    phenomenally diverse student body. They have a very active peer
    mediation group where the kids try to solve each other's problems. They
    have comprehensive counseling services. They have access to mental
    health services for kids who need it.
        And I think it's very important--Tipper Gore
    is going to have the White House Conference on Mental Health in
    Washington in the next few days, and she had a very courageous article
    in USA Today, today. If you haven't read it, I urge you to read it. I
    was really proud of her, talking about the whole issue and how it
    affected her life and her family's. I think that's very important.
        I'll tell you something else this school had; this school had a 1-
    800 hotline so that if the children suspected that some other students
    in school were maybe going to do something destructive or wrong, they
    could call the hotline and have certainty that the lead would be
    followed up on but that they wouldn't be outed as somebody who was
    talking about their classmates.
        So I think we have to continue to work with the schools, as the
    Secretary of Education and the Attorney
    General have done. I think that there are
    challenges for those who influence our culture, including the
    entertainment community. When we trivialize or brutalize relationships
    or trivialize violence or, particularly in the intimacy of the Internet
    and the video games, run the risk that kids who are already isolated
    create a whole alternative reality that at the same time desensitizes
    them to violence, I think that's a problem.
        And I also believe, finally, that there ought to be some more laws
    that will minimize the chances that the kinds of weapons those kids had
    will get into the hands of children who will do bad things with them.
    And I hope we can avoid yet another big fight in Washington between the
    NRA and others. This should not be the culture war we have going on. It
    makes common sense, it seems to me, to reinstitute the waiting period of
    the Brady bill, along with the insta-check. It ought to apply to people
    that buy explosives as well as people who buy handguns.
        We ought to close the loopholes in the assault weapons ban law. We
    have an assault weapons ban, but it's got a couple of loopholes in it
    big enough to drive a truck through. We don't need--if the law is a good
    law, then we ought to make it work. We ought to do background checks at
    gun shows. I've been to gun shows in rural America. I know a lot of
    people that run them think this is going to be a terrible headache. It's
    not. The technology is there. We can fix it, so we can do it.
        But the main thing I want to say is, I do not believe there is any
    one answer here. I believe there is a responsibility in the
    entertainment community. I think there's a responsibility in the
    Internet community. I think there's a

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    responsibility for the gun manufacturers and law enforcement. I think
    there is a responsibility in the schools. I think there is a
    responsibility with the parents. I think a lot of us have something to
    do.
        But what I would like you to think about here, instead of being
    despondent about the magnitude of the problem, is, first of all, look at
    the courage and character of the overwhelming majority of the people in
    Littleton that we have seen manifest in so many different ways under
    such adversity.
        And secondly, look at the example that Americans are capable of
    solving their social problems by grassroots movements. That's really why
    the teen pregnancy rate is dropping, because there's a grassroots
    effort, a comprehensive effort that is sweeping the whole country.
    That's why drunk driving went down--Mothers Against Drunk Driving,
    Students Against Drunk Driving.
        So there is no magic bullet here, and the most important thing is
    having a magic attitude of not taking any solution off the table because
    it would require you to do something, but not falling into the easy trap
    of pointing the finger at someone else. But the lesson here is that if
    we want to be a strong and great nation, we must continue to deal with
    the problems, and they're not all economic problems. And there is
    nothing more important than the quality of our children's childhood.
        Now, let me close with Kosovo. There are some people who may not
    understand why we would be so concerned about what happens in a small
    place a long way away, where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of
    people have been uprooted, had their homes burned, the records of their
    very existence burned, their religious and cultural sites destroyed,
    sometimes people literally wrapped in bundles and burned alive, lots of
    children raped, solely because of their ethnic and religious background.
    And it is a reprise of what happened just a few years ago in Bosnia.
        Why should we care about it? First all of, because it violates our
    most fundamental values. And if we have the capacity to stop something
    like that, we ought to.
        Secondly, because we have learned the hard way that people, when
    they behave that way, think that that behavior--if they get away with
    it, they think it's rewarded, and other people will follow their lead.
    And all over the world today, at the end of the cold war, when communism
    is gone as a competing ideology, if there is nothing positive to
    organize people and pull them together, then one of the things that is
    most likely to pull them apart are racial, ethnic, and religious
    differences, used to demonize other people, almost exclusively by people
    who don't really believe it as much as they are trying to mobilize
    people to get political power or wealth or both.
        Now, we fought two wars in Europe in the century that's about to
    end. We want Europe to be united, to be free, to be democratic, to be at
    peace. If they are, they'll be our friends. They'll be our partners.
    They'll be better trading partners. They'll also help us solve problems
    in other parts of the world. There are all kinds of practical reasons we
    should do this. There are all kinds of practical reasons.
        But when you get right down to it, if we are going to say we are
    grateful that America has emerged from the cold war as the world's only
    superpower, if we're going to be grateful for the good fortune we have
    enjoyed in the last 6 years, we have to be willing to spend a small
    percentage of our good fortune and a significant percentage of our
    credibility to be good allies with our European friends who asked us to
    come and help, and do this.
        I also believe in a world where religious differences have bedeviled
    the Middle East and Northern Ireland and so many other places, it speaks
    volumes that the United States and our European friends and Canada are
    willing to stand up for people who are overwhelmingly of the Muslim
    faith, and say, they have rights, too; they are people, too; they are
    children of God, too; and they deserve the right to have their life, to
    go home, to be safe, to have the autonomy that they deserve. And that's
    what we're fighting for in Kosovo.
        If you think about--there's one little baby here, or was here a few
    minutes ago--you imagine that the world this baby is going to live in
    when she gets out of college and goes into the world. Do you want it to
    be a world where, frankly, more and more people have a lot of the
    economic prosperity we've enjoyed? I do, because that means we'll do
    even better if we have more partners who are doing better, which is
    characterized by people knowing each other across national lines,
    sharing economic opportunity, sharing educational opportunity, working
    together in common cause to deal with the continuing challenges of the
    world. Or do we want

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    it to be a world where we feel like we're under siege all the time
    because everywhere people are falling victim to their most primitive
    impulses, that they're using modern technology and modern computers to
    figure out how to get modern weapons to kill somebody because of some
    ancient hatred? I don't think it's a close question.
        And one of the things that I have learned as President is that you
    cannot draw an easy dividing line between what is a domestic issue and a
    foreign issue in a world that is getting smaller and smaller and
    smaller. You can't just do that. You can't say, ``Well, it's great that
    international trade helps most of us,'' and forget about those that are
    not helped by trade. You have to give them the education, the skills,
    the training, the opportunity so that no one will be left behind. That's
    a domestic and a foreign issue. And believe me, this is, too.
        The greatest thing this country has got going for it today is that
    we have all different kinds of people that all have their chances. But
    we have to stand against hatred and for harmony. We have to say,
    ``Whatever our differences, our fundamental common humanity is more
    important than anything else.''
        I was reading coming down here today that here in the legislature,
    Texas is debating this hate crimes law named after James Byrd. You know,
    for me as a white southerner, the thought that a man could be murdered
    because of his race in 1999 is heartbreaking. But it is a sober reminder
    that human nature may improve, but we'll always have problems. And it is
    the country's organization, the country's dominant values, the country's
    leadership, the country's direction that matters.
        I hope that law will pass and become law here. I hope that Texas
    will say, ``We don't want people to be hurt because of their race,
    because they're gay, because of whatever. And when people are hurt in
    that way, we stand against it.''
        But in a larger sense, I hope that we will become a more effectively
    caring society. I hope we'll find some ways to put on the brakes when
    the speed's too fast for our children's childhood, and they're hurtling
    toward isolation in a destructive way.
        And I think we can do that and still get all the benefits of this
    modern world that's opened up to us. But it will depend upon the right
    ideas and the right values. It is not dependent upon any one person.
        I am so grateful that I have been the instrument, as President, of
    some of the good things that have happened in America. I am more
    grateful than you know. But what matters is that we have the right
    values and the right ideas, and when something works, we do not abandon
    it; we stick with it.
        That's why I'm here. That's why I hope you will continue to support
    our party. Because what we have stood for has made a lot of difference,
    and it will make more difference in the future if you and I do our part.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 3 p.m. in Le Grand Salon de la Comtesse at
    La Colombe d'Or restaurant. In his remarks, he referred to F. Kenneth
    Bailey, Jr., event chair, and Joseph J. Andrew, national chair,
    Democratic National Committee; Molly Beth Malcolm, State Democratic
    chair; Gov. Frank O'Bannon of Indiana; Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma;
    Mayor Lee Patrick Brown of Houston, TX; and Stephen Zimmerman, owner, La
    Colombe d'Or restaurant.