    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [May 14, 1999]
    [Pages 773-779]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Portola Valley,
    California
    May 14, 1999

        Walter, I'd like to say something
    that I think a lot of us who've known you for many years could have been
    thinking. We laughed about how you've always been for losers and now
    you've had a few winners. But one of the reasons that we love you and
    admire you is that you stuck by the people with whom you agreed, whether
    they won or lost. A lot of people don't do that anymore; we appreciate
    that.

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        Let me say I'm delighted to be here with Governor Davis and with Sharon, Attorney
    General Lockyer, Mayor Brown--he's funny, isn't he? [Laughter] I would have come
    all the way out here tonight just to hear Willie do that little shtick
    he did, you know? [Laughter] When I start to get bored with politics and
    kind of tired I--and you know, it's 12:30 on my body clock, so I needed
    a little jolt. [Laughter]
        I want to thank Walter and
    Martin and Tom,
    Victoria, all the rest of you who put this
    dinner together tonight. I want to thank our Democratic Party officers
    for coming with me, Joe Andrew, Andy
    Tobias, and Beth Dozoretz.
        You know, today we were in Seattle before we came here. And we had
    all these exciting young people at this fundraiser we did, and a lot of
    them were kind of high-tech folks. And Joe Andrew got up and said, ``In
    2000 we're going to win every election, from President to dogcatcher''--
    as if that were a great distance. [Laughter] I was sort of hoping we
    would have a wider range than that myself. [Laughter]
        I want to thank Willie Mays for being here
    again. I want to thank Walter--one of the greatest things
    Walter ever did for me was arrange for me
    to meet Willie Mays. And a lot of you know I am a big sports fan, and I
    collect memorabilia. I've got 100-year-old golf clubs and all kinds of
    things, but the things that I treasure the most are the baseballs that
    Willie has autographed for me and my wife and my daughter.
        And I hope he won't be embarrassed by this,
    but I went to Atlanta the other day--oh, a couple months ago--to
    celebrate the 25th anniversary of the night Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's
    record. And Hank and Billye are friends of Hillary's and mine, and we like them
    very much. So I went down there, and Hank Aaron had 12 Hall of Fame
    baseball players there--Reggie Jackson and Frank Robinson, just a slew
    of great players.
        And we were sitting there, and I meet all of Hank's family and his in-laws and all these--there were
    thousands of people there. And I just, sort of off the top of my head, I
    said, ``Hank, who's the greatest baseball player you ever played with?''
    He said, ``Oh, that's an easy answer; it's not even close: Willie
    Mays.'' He said, ``Not even close!''
        And I personally would like to thank Willie
    and his wonderful wife for the work they have done
    since leaving baseball and for their concern for our children. And I'm
    delighted to see them.
        I just talked to Hillary not long
    before I came here. She's on an airplane coming back--you may have seen
    on the news today, she was in Macedonia visiting the refugees there. And
    I wanted to mention her, in particular, since we're all making jokes at
    Gray's expense--including himself making jokes at
    his expense. The very first person who ever told me he would be elected
    Governor when he had been written off by all of the experts was my wife,
    who came to California. And she said, ``Man, I've been out there and,''
    she said, ``I think he's going to win. He knows why he wants the job;
    he's done a good job, and he inspires confidence.'' She said, ``He
    inspires confidence in me, and I believe he would inspire confidence in
    other people.'' And sure enough, you have, and we're grateful to you,
    and we thank you.
        I would also like to thank Laura Tyson, who was the Chairman of my Council of Economic
    Advisers and head of my Economic Council, for being here. And she's now
    an academic, which means that sooner or later, she will have to
    criticize something I'm doing on the economy. [Laughter] So I'll give
    her advance dispensation.
        Ladies and gentlemen, the hour's late and most of you have heard me
    give this speech before. [Laughter] I'll tell you a story, one more
    story. One night in the mid-1980's--I can't remember exactly when it
    was--Tina Turner came to Little Rock, Arkansas, to do a concert. And you
    all remember, you know, she sort of faded from the scene, and then she
    made this huge recovery with an album called ``Private Dancer.'' I
    remember because she had a saxophone player in her band who was a weight
    lifter. Remember that guy, the guy with the great big arms? He had arms
    as big as my neck, and he wore chains and stuff--it was a weird deal.
    [Laughter] But the guy could play.
        So she comes to make this concert and she was playing at the
    Arkansas Fairgrounds and, I forget, Hillary had to go some place that
    night. So I had six tickets, and I took all these friends of ours and we
    went. And usually the guy who ran the concert put me sort of 15 rows
    back in the middle, so I had a real good seat but I wasn't conspicuous--
    because I was the Governor, after all. But he knew I loved Tina Turner.
    So this night he completely embarrassed me by putting all six of us on
    the front row in the middle. And behind us there was a lady I later
    found out was a hairdresser in a small

    [[Page 775]]

    town about 50 miles away, dressed in a tiger outfit--[laughter]--
    complete with ears and tail and everything. It was an interesting night,
    all right. [Laughter]
        But anyway, here's the point I made about the speech--you all
    laughed when I said you'd all heard the speech. Tina Turner sang all of
    her new songs, and everybody loved them. Then at the end of the concert
    the band started playing the introduction to her first hit, ``Proud
    Mary.'' And as she walked up to the microphone, with all that energy
    packed into her, the crowd just went crazy before she ever said
    anything. So she backed off, and then she walked up again. The crowd
    went crazy again.
        And she looked at the crowd, and she said, ``You know, I have been
    singing this song for 25 years, and it gets better every time I do it.''
    So I thought, that's something I'll try to remember as I rock along
    through life. [Laughter]
        I want to make a case tonight that I hope you can remember. We were
    talking at our table, and I was looking at all of you, and I remembered
    little conversations we shared when you came by and we took the
    pictures. I always am interested as to what motivates people to get
    involved in politics, to make their contributions, to come to events
    like this. And when you go home tonight, I want you to think about why
    you came and what you're going to do tomorrow and in the days ahead.
        I am gratified by what has already been said, what the Governor
    said, what Walter said. I've loved being President. I love working with
    people like Mayor Brown, because we think we're supposed to actually
    enjoy what we're doing. And Gray is actually beginning to enjoy what
    he's doing. [Laughter] I hope it doesn't destroy his whole sort of
    persona, you know. [Laughter] But it is a great privilege to be in
    public service. You know, everybody talks about what a great burden it
    is. Well, nobody made us do this. It is a great privilege. It's an
    honor.
        And I am so gratified that the economy is in the shape it's in. I
    saw the pain in the faces of the people in California when I was running
    for President in 1992. And I wanted people here to believe that
    California was the cutting edge of tomorrow again. I wanted them to be
    full of optimism and hope and taking all these initiatives to meet the
    challenges of our country.
        And I'm grateful for the progress we've made in crime and welfare
    and education and so many other things. I'm glad that 90 percent of our
    kids are immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time
    ever. I'm glad that we've got 100,000 young people in AmeriCorps. Many
    of them have served in northern California. It took the Peace Corps 20
    years to get 100,000 volunteers. We got that many in the domestic
    national service program in 4\1/2\ years. I'm proud of that. And I'm
    grateful for the chance to serve.
        But I want to make this point: Whatever role I had in this was not
    as important as the fact that in 1992, our party united behind a vision
    and a set of ideas that we have then all worked like crazy for 6 years
    to make real in the life of America.
        And the reason you should be here tonight--because I'm not running
    for anything--the reason you should be here is not because you're glad I
    was President and you feel good about what's happened in California but
    because you understand that--that there is no indispensable person, but
    there are indispensable ideas and indispensable attitudes.
        I ran for President, and I was happy as a clam at home with Hillary
    and Chelsea and the life we had. But I was very concerned that our
    country had no driving vision of what we were going to be like in the
    21st century and no strategy to get us there. And I didn't like what I
    saw in Washington. Everybody was having the same old political debate
    over and over, sounded like a broken record every day. And if I was
    bored with it, I can only imagine how people who aren't addicted to
    politics, like I am, felt.
        And we tried to change all that. I really do want our children to
    live in a world in the next century where everybody has a chance to live
    out their dreams, where everybody is expected to be a responsible
    citizen, where we join together across all the lines that divide us--
    celebrating the differences but appreciating even more our common
    humanity, and where America is trusted enough and strong enough to
    continue to lead the world to greater peace and freedom and prosperity.
    That's what I want. It's pretty simple.
        And I believed in 1992, and I believe more strongly today, that to
    have that kind of world, we had to have a different approach to
    politics. First, we had to believe we could grow the economy and
    preserve the environment at the same time. Second, we had to believe we
    could

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    grow the economy in a way that had more entrepreneurs like you have in
    this part of our world, and at the same time make life better for
    ordinary middle class people and give more poor people a chance to work
    their way into the middle class.
        I believed there was a way you could lower the crime rate not just
    by prosecuting crime but by preventing it. I believed that we ought to
    put more money in education, but we had to raise standards, and I was
    tired of seeing poor people patronized, because I believe all of our
    children can learn. And lots of other things like that.
        I think a lot of times, the debates we have in Washington, they
    don't resonate very well with the real-world experience people have in
    California or Arkansas or anywhere else in the country. And the story of
    this administration has been the story of a relentless effort for over 6
    years now to take these basic ideas and that vision and turn them into
    real, concrete actions and results for the American people.
        Now, we still have a lot to do. I'm doing my best to get the
    Congress to address the challenges of the aging of America, to reform
    Social Security and Medicare and help people with long-term care, and
    help people save for their own retirement. I'm asking the Congress to do
    it in a way that pays down the Government's debt. Did you ever think a
    politician could even talk about that? Because I believe that we can get
    the Government debt down in 15 years to its lowest point since before
    World War I. And if we do, interest rates will be lower; investment will
    be higher; there will be more businesses, more jobs, and higher incomes.
    And we will be relatively less dependent on the vagaries of the world
    financial markets.
        I believe that we have to do more to help people balance their work
    life and their family life. So when I talk about child care or family
    leave or the Patients' Bill of Rights, what I'm really saying is, most
    parents are working, and I think it's important for people to succeed at
    home and at work because the most important work in America is raising
    good children. And if it doesn't work out, as we often see, there is a
    grievous price to be paid.
        I am concerned in the aftermath of what happened at Littleton, but I
    am also hopeful because we had all these school shootings last year and
    people wanted to do things, and a lot of things were done. But I think
    for the first time, the whole country now believes that what happened
    with those children could happen in any community. And I believe the
    whole country wants to do better and also recognizes that many of our
    children fall victim every year, not in stunning, tragic, big ways but
    in quiet alleys or in drive-by shootings or in other ways where they can
    almost die anonymously. And I want us to have a national campaign to
    make our children's lives less violent.
        And I'd like to close with just a reflection on that and what we're
    doing in Kosovo and point out what I think is--in addition to economic
    opportunity for all and educational opportunity for all and the sense of
    general community--I think the most important thing about the Democratic
    Party on the eve of the 21st century is our vision of what community
    means at home and our relationship to the rest of the world. And if you
    take these two difficult events and break them down, maybe I can make
    some sense of that.
        What I honestly believe about the Littleton situation--and I've
    spent a lot of time thinking about it. I have been overwhelmingly
    impressed by almost all of the people I've seen from that community
    talking on television and going to the townhall meetings, some of the
    brave parents actually already--who lost their children--already able to
    try to make some contribution to a safer future for the rest of us. One
    father who lost his child was with
    Hillary last week, the day before
    Mother's Day, to be part of this whole antiviolence movement.
        But what I think is that we now understand--I hope we do, as a
    people--that if we're going to make America a safer place for our
    children, we have to stop pointing the fingers at one another and start
    assuming responsibility. We have to--instead of saying, ``I wish someone
    else would do something,'' we have to say, ``Okay, I've shown up for
    duty. What am I supposed to do?''
        Because this is an exceedingly complex thing--Willie and I could
    have an argument. I could take--you know, we have the--is it the
    entertainment culture or is it the gun culture? And he could take one
    side and I could take the other, and then 5 minutes later we could
    switch roles. We all know how to point fingers--we're good at that--and
    shift the blame.
        Let's start with the facts of life today. For whatever reason, there
    are more children in the

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    United States, of all races and in all socioeconomic groups, that are at
    risk of being victims of violence. You would all accept that, I presume;
    that is a fact, for whatever reason. And there are also children,
    therefore, at risk of being victims of violence from other young people.
    Therefore, there are a higher percentage of children in the United
    States than in most other advanced countries who are themselves
    vulnerable to violent conduct.
        Now, if we start with that, and we say, ``Shouldn't we all be doing
    something,'' I think we can move to ``yes'' very quickly. One of the
    things that you see in all these tragic stories--it's heartbreaking--is
    how easy it is for children as they come of age and naturally seek their
    own independence to be strangers in their own homes and not to have
    people in their schools or their communities that are so connected to
    them that they can't drift off into the darkness.
        So the fundamental thing is, we have to still do a better job trying
    to help parents understand what it means for children to move into
    adolescence and to drift away, and to be given both independence and
    still be held accountable and be involved with their parents and their
    lives. And we have to help the schools do a better job of connecting and
    telling kids how they can find nonviolent ways to deal with their
    conflicts and how they can count no matter what group they're in and how
    they can be treated with respect no matter what group they're in.
        I don't see how anybody can dispute the fact that it's crazy to have
    a country where, you know, criminals can buy guns at gun shows they
    can't buy at gun stores. I mean, I think that's a pretty hard case to
    defend.
        I think it's a hard case to defend to say we've abolished assault
    weapons--thanks in no small measure, by the way, to a citizen from San
    Francisco named Steve Sposato, who lost his
    wife in a shooting, a man who happened to be a Republican. I met him and
    his daughter. So we abolished assault
    weapons, but we let people keep bringing in these big ammunition clips
    and selling them legally as long as they were imported, as opposed to
    homegrown. How come these things are in the law? These things don't
    happen by accident, folks. I did the best I could back in 1994. I pushed
    that thing as hard as I could push. So now we have a sense all over the
    country we should close the loopholes.
        Florida, not normally known as a raving liberal State, voted 72
    percent in a public referendum to close the gun show loophole, and we're
    having trouble getting it done in Washington. That's not good. It's not
    going to kill the NRA to change its position. The gun manufacturers did,
    and I applaud them. They deserve a lot of credit. There have been--one
    of the most outstanding groups in this whole debate are the gun
    manufacturers, coming and saying, ``Okay, let's clean up this business.
    Let's have responsible, commonsense controls. We want people to be able
    to hunt; we want to support the rights of sportsmen; but we don't need
    that. We need to deal with this.''
        So they have their responsibility. But so, too, does the
    entertainment industry. You can say if you start from their perspective,
    just like you can say if you start from the gun perspective, ``Guns
    don't kill people, people do.'' Right? If you start from the
    entertainment perspective, you can say, ``Well, we show these movies and
    we sell these video games in Europe and you don't have this level of
    violence.'' You can say that--in other words, from anybody else's
    perspective, you can always say this.
        But here is the thing. Start with the kids. We have more kids
    getting hurt and more kids hurting other kids. Start with the facts. And
    we now have over 300 studies that show that the volume of sustained
    exposure to violence through the media--and now increasingly through
    interactive video games--is so great that it desensitizes children
    dramatically to the impact of violence and the real consequences of it,
    and therefore makes the most vulnerable children more likely to go over
    the edge.
        Now, having said that, we have to find some commonsense things we
    can do. For example, you could change the whole advertising strategy of
    a lot of these games and other media outlets and not have a lot of the
    problems you have. But lots of other things can be done. I'm trying to
    make a larger point here. How we respond to this and whether we take on
    something really big and important like this and do what the Mothers and
    Students Against Drunk Driving did to drive down drunk driving; or do
    what the 10,000 business people did to hire 400,000 people off welfare
    so people wouldn't be just thrown in the streets--how we respond to this
    and whether we respond to this as one community coming together instead
    of pointing the finger at each other will define in large measure what
    kind of country we're going to be in the 21st century.

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        And the same is true of Kosovo. What in the world have these two
    things got in common? Well, in both cases, there at least is some
    evidence that part of the problem was one group of people looking down
    on another group of people and getting to where they hated them and then
    getting to where they thought it was legitimate to take them out. And if
    you look all over the world today, from the Middle East to the Balkans,
    to Rwanda and Africa, to the still unresolved conflict in Northern
    Ireland, what is at the root of most of the world's problems on the edge
    of the 21st century? Is it that the Kosovar Albanians don't have as good
    computers as the Serbs? Are we fighting over some software secret in
    central Africa? Not on your life. The economics are bringing people
    together. That's one of the reasons we're going to get this thing done
    in Ireland this year.
        What is dividing people on the edge of this brave new brilliant
    high-tech interdependent world are the oldest demons of human society,
    our hatred and fear of people who are different from us. First, you're
    scared of them; then you hate them; then you dehumanize them; then it's
    okay to kill them. And isn't it ironic that we're sitting here a stone's
    throw from Silicon Valley, dreaming about the marvels of modern
    technology and at risk of being held hostage to the oldest, most
    primitive human designs?
        So you want to know why we're in Kosovo? Because it's in Europe,
    where we were pulled into two wars in the 20th century and the cold war;
    and because we had the capacity to stand against that kind of ethnic
    cleansing and slaughter; and because when we couldn't get it done for 4
    long years in Bosnia, there was a trail of 2\1/2\ million refugees and a
    quarter of a million people dead, and we still had to get in and put
    Humpty Dumpty back together again and tell people they had to stop
    killing each other because of their different religious and ethnic
    background.
        But I'm telling you, there are common threads to what is there--the
    hatred of those boys built up in Littleton, hatred looking up at the
    athletes, hatred in their minds looking down at the minorities; the
    hatred in what happened when that poor man, James Byrd, was murdered in
    Texas and his body was torn apart; hatred in what happened to Matthew
    Shepard in Wyoming. It's all the same thing.
        We're all scared. Not anybody in the world is not scared from time
    to time. How many days do you wake up in a good mood? And how many days
    do you wake up in not such a good mood? Every human being has got a
    little scale inside. It's like the scales of justice and hope and fear.
    And some days the scales are just perfectly in balance, some days
    they're just--you're crazy with hope, and some days you're gripped with
    fear.
        And the more fearful you are, the more people who are different from
    you seem to present a threat. And here we are. Look at California. Look
    at San Francisco. Look at Seattle, where I was today. Look at the
    diversity of our population, racial and otherwise--religious, all the
    differences you can imagine--sexual orientation, the whole 9 yards. Look
    at all the differences in our population.
        In our dreams, all people get a chance to become what God meant for
    them to be and we pull together. In other words, we finally got a chance
    to be the country our Founders said we ought to be when they knew darn
    well we weren't. I mean, when only white men with property could vote,
    they said all are created equal, and they knew what they were doing.
    These guys were not dummies.
        Every now and then, I go over to the Jefferson Memorial and read
    what Thomas Jefferson said, ``When I think of slavery, I tremble to
    think that God is just.'' He knew exactly what he was doing. They knew
    that this whole struggle would be sort of an endless effort to try to
    make real these ideals. And here we are about to do it. And are we going
    to let the whole thing go haywire because of the most primitive impulses
    in human society, both inside our country and beyond our borders?
        That man that blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City, he was
    poisoned with hatred and a sort of blind irrational notion that if you
    worked for the Federal Government there was something inherently bad
    about you. And I believe the distinguishing characteristics of our
    country in the 21st century has to be that we constantly, consistently
    reaffirm that for all the differences among us--we don't have to like
    each other, but we have to respect each other, we have to tolerate each
    other, and we have to actively affirm each other's common humanity. And
    if you want all this modern technology to be put at the service of your
    children's dreams instead of terrorists and madmen, then you have got to
    say this is one thing America

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    will stand for, overall, above all, beyond everything else.
        And that is what all these incidents have in common. We must not let
    the great promise of the modern world be undermined by the most ancient
    of hatreds. We cannot fundamentally alter human nature, but we can alter
    the rules by which all of us let our nature play out. And we can call
    forth our better selves. That is what we have worked for 6\1/2\ years to
    do. And you know as well as I do, if the economy works better it's
    easier to do.
        But when you go home tonight and you get up tomorrow and somebody
    says, ``Why in the world did you write a check and go to that thing?''
    Tell them, ``Because I believe in the vision and the ideas that the
    country has followed in the last 6 years. We have a lot more to do, and
    most important of all, I really want America to be a community and a
    model to the world, because I want my children to have a future more
    like my dreams than the worst nightmares we see in the paper.''
        We can do it, but not unless we work at it.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 9:25 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to dinner host Walter Shorenstein; Bill Lockyer,
    State attorney general; Gov. Gray Davis of California and his wife,
    Sharon; Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco; dinner cochairs Martin
    Maddaloni and Tom and Victoria O'Gara; Joseph J. Andrew, national chair,
    Andy Tobias, treasurer, and Beth Dozoretz, national finance chair,
    Democratic National Committee; baseball legends Willie Mays and Hank
    Aaron and their wives, Mae and Billye, respectively; Tom Mauser, whose
    son, Daniel, was killed in the Columbine High School shooting by gunmen
    Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold; gun control activist Steven Sposato and
    his daughter, Meghan; and Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted of the
    Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City, OK.