    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [April 16, 1999]
    [Pages 572-575]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Majority 2000 Dinner in Weston, Massachusetts
    April 16, 1999

        Well, first of all, I would like to thank Senator Kennedy and Senator Daschle
    for their introductions. [Laughter] I don't want Senator Kennedy to be
    upset at Senator Daschle. I told Senator Daschle I did not want Kennedy
    to introduce me. [Laughter] And he drew the wrong conclusion--I just
    didn't want Patrick up here making those
    gestures introducing me. [Laughter]
        I tell you, Patrick, I have never heard you so funny; you've got a
    second career. [Laughter]
        Like everyone else, I want to thank Alan and Susan and all of the others
    who helped to raise the funds tonight. I'd also like to thank the people
    who provided our meal and those who served it. And I want to thank our
    wonderful, wonderful musicians, Gary Burton and
    his pianist. They were terrific. Thank you very
    much. You guys were great. Thank you.
        As Senator Kennedy said, I am profoundly indebted to the people of
    Massachusetts. Massachusetts has been wonderful to me and to Hillary, to
    Al and to Tipper Gore, to give our administration the support that we
    need and to send such remarkable people to the Congress. A majority of
    all of the Congress people from Massachusetts, all the Democrats, are
    here tonight. And I thank Congressman
    Moakley, Congressman Delahunt,
    Congressman Meehan, Congressman
    Markey, and Congressman Tierney, along with Congressman Kennedy.
        We're also glad to be joined tonight by Congressman Earl
    Blumenauer, who is from Oregon. He's a long
    way from home, and we're glad he's here. Thank you very much. And our
    wonderful Democratic whip, Dave Bonior, who
    took me to his district in Michigan today to meet with the Albanian-
    Americans and to hear their stories, along with Congressman
    Gephardt. I, too, want to say how
    profoundly grateful I am for what Senator Kerry said, how much it means, and for what he does for you, and
    for Senator Kennedy.
        And as others have said, we could not have better leaders in the
    United States Congress than Senator Daschle and Congressman Gephardt.
    I could give you 1,000 examples. But suffice it to say that I do not
    believe that we would be here tonight in the position we're in, with the
    country in the position it is in, had it not been for their leadership and their
    support for me, and their always willingness to come

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    in and have these fascinating discussions and, even when they think I'm
    wrong, to tell me they think I'm wrong. And we try to work it out, work
    together, and go forward together. And it's been a remarkable
    partnership.
        I also would say, to echo something Dick Gephardt said--and I want
    all of you to know--you know, most of you have been to enough of these
    political fundraisers that you're used to politicians getting up and
    blowing smoke over one another, you know, and saying that they think
    this one is the greatest person since the redwoods began to grow in
    California and all of that--[laughter]--the other one was born in a log
    cabin he built himself--all of those. [Laughter] You're used to hearing
    all that sort of stuff. I know that. And you think that we all leave, we
    go back to telling bad stories on one another and cutting each other
    down.
        I'm telling you, the team of leaders we have now and the people that
    represent you in Massachusetts--there is a profound mutual respect born
    of shared goals and shared dreams for the American people.
        I told all my folks when I became President, I said, ``I didn't work
    in Washington before, and I'm going to make my fair share of mistakes.
    But one of the great advantages that I have is that I lived in a little
    State where I was expected to show up for work every day, and where I
    didn't have to spend half my time worrying about what was in the
    newspaper that day and who was up and who was down and who was leaking
    and who was not.'' And my theory is, if we stay together and work
    together and we're loyal to each other and we air our differences
    honestly and we show up for work every day, eventually something good
    will happen for the American people.
        Now, I think the evidence is that that happened. But what you need
    to know is, that's the sort of leadership we have in our party.
    Dick and David and Tom and the rest of our
    crowd, they're like what you expect from the Massachusetts delegation.
    They show up for work every day. They do not get paralyzed by this story
    or that story or spending all their time trying to manipulate who's up
    and who's down in Washington today. They have an agenda rooted in their
    concerns for you and our children's future, and they show up.
        And it's just like any other job. I know we'd like for you to
    believe that you've got to be just one step short of Albert Einstein to
    do all these jobs we do. But a lot of it is deciding what the right
    thing to do is, clearly laying it out, and going at it day-in and day-
    out, year-in and year-out.
        So I want to thank you for investing in the future of the Democratic
    majority in the Congress, because they have proved for 6 long years that
    they have good ideas, good values, and great work habits, and they will
    deliver for the United States of America, thanks to your help. And I
    thank you very much.
        I also want to say, Alan, thank you
    very much for collecting the money for the relief effort in Kosovo. Let
    me just briefly say, the camps in Albania are teeming. Tiny Macedonia,
    with its own ethnic difficulties to deal with, trying to preserve its
    democracy, it's deeply strained. We need all the help we can get. And
    frankly, the relief agencies are very, very good; they are very
    efficient; they don't waste the money. And cash is better than in-kind
    contributions, because the needs shift daily. And anything you can do to
    help that, I hope you will.
        Now, I'm not going to put you through another speech of any length,
    but I want to take 5 minutes and ask you to think about why you should
    want these people in the majority in 2000. And when it happens, I'm
    going to miss it. [Laughter] But I just want to tell you for 5 minutes,
    I want you to think about this.
        Yes, our economy is going well, and I'm grateful for it. And the
    welfare rolls are about half what they were, and I'm grateful for it.
    And the crime rate is at a 30-year low, and I'm grateful for it. America
    is working again. And we've been a force for peace from Northern Ireland
    to the Middle East and to Bosnia, and I'm grateful for it. We've asked
    the world to join with us in fighting the more modern threats of
    terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and global warming. And we've
    got a direction that we're on that's good, and I'm grateful for it.
        But I want to ask you to just take a couple of minutes and think
    about why you should want these people in the majority. Because in the
    year 2000, when the voters are asked to vote, there will be those who
    come forward and basically say, ``Well, things are rocking along, and
    I'll tell you what you want to hear, and I'll give you what you want to
    get, and let's just go back to business as usual.''
        The worst thing we could do is to forget what got us here over the
    last 6 years. What

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    got us here was taking on the hard problems and working like crazy, day-
    in and day-out, week-in and week-out, and challenging the American
    people and challenging the elite leaders of all the major sectors of our
    society to think about unmet problems and unseized opportunities.
        And as I look ahead to the 21st century, I am grateful America is
    working again. I'm grateful that the economy is benefiting ordinary
    people more than ever before. We have the lowest unemployment rate we've
    ever recorded among minorities in this country, since we started keeping
    separate statistics almost 30 years ago. I'm grateful for that. But we
    have some big unmet challenges, and I won't go through our whole agenda,
    but we've got an agenda to deal with every one.
        The aging of America is a huge challenge. And if we don't deal with
    Social Security and Medicare and long-term care, and do it in a
    responsible way, then when all of us baby boomers retire, we will put an
    unconscionable burden on our children and their ability to raise our
    grandchildren. We have a strategy that will deal with it.
        We have more and more families who work and raise children at the
    same time, both single-parent and two-parent households. We have not
    done enough in the United States to help people balance work and family.
    We are better than any other major country at creating jobs. We have
    many strengths that other countries would give anything to have. But we
    have not done as well as we should, and as well as we can without in any
    way hurting economic growth, in helping our families to balance their
    childrearing responsibilities and their work responsibilities. We have
    to do more in health care, more in child care, more in providing leave
    time from work without losing jobs. We must do it. There is no more
    important work than raising our children, and we can do better.
        The third thing we have to do is to make sure--we're Democrats; this
    is our job--we have to make sure everybody gets a chance to be a part of
    the new economy. As low as unemployment is, there are still places where
    it's high. There are places where there has been no new investment.
        We have a strategy to keep the economy growing and to spread the
    benefits of it. For one thing, if our plan prevails over the Republican
    plan, we're going to pay the debt of this country down to its lowest
    point since before World War I, over the next 15 years. That means low
    interest rates, high investment, and more jobs everywhere. And we're
    going to give the same incentives for people to invest in poor parts of
    America we give them today to invest in poor countries in the rest of
    the world. I think that is nothing but right. Don't take it away from
    the rest of the world; just give the poor parts of America a chance to
    get their piece of the American dream, as well. And I think that is
    terribly important, and Democrats ought to be for that.
        We have to keep working to prove we can clean up the environment and
    grow the economy, and we have an agenda to do that.
        The most important thing I want to say to you tonight is that we
    have a job to do at home that mirrors the job we are trying to do in
    Kosovo today.
        Isn't it ironic that, on the verge of a new century and a new
    millennium, where most of us--most of the people in this room have this
    great dream of a 21st century world that is more peaceful, more
    prosperous, and more free than any time in all of human history; where
    people work together across national lines to lift each other up and
    solve problems together, whether they're the spread of disease or
    climate change or the threat of terrorism or narcotrafficking or weapons
    of mass destruction. We're working together to make good things happen
    and to press bad things down. And this whole vision, with this explosion
    of modern technology and science, is threatened by the prospect that we
    will marry modern technology with the most ancient hatreds known to
    human society, rooted in the fear of people who are different from us.
        Now, we are in Kosovo--I think Dick referred to this, to the E-mails
    we were reading coming out of Albania. We're in Kosovo, first of all,
    because innocent people are being driven from their homes, having their
    villages burned down, having their family records destroyed, with their
    children being raped, and people being murdered; because we think we can
    help to stop it; and because we have learned the hard way in the 20th
    century, if something like that's going on and you think you can help to
    stop it and you don't, in that part of the world, it's just going to get
    worse. So it's a humanitarian thing.

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        But it's also a part of what we want the 21st century to be like.
    Doesn't it seem bizarre to you that on the one hand, we talk about the
    Internet being the fastest growing human communications instrument in
    all of human history. We talk about having our kids study halfway around
    the world. We relish in the ethnic and racial and religious diversity of
    Boston. Detroit, we used to think of Detroit as being diverse because--
    and I can say this because I'm from the South--because Southern blacks
    and Southern whites couldn't make a living in the South after the Second
    World War, so they went to Detroit to get a job in the auto plant. That
    was our definition of diversity. Wayne County now has people from 150
    different national and ethnic groups--not Chicago, not New York, not Los
    Angeles--Detroit.
        And we're sitting here worried about people who still want to kill
    each other over 600-year-old grievances. They want to fight over smaller
    and smaller and smaller pieces of land instead of thinking bigger and
    bigger and bigger about how, if they all got together, what a future
    they could make for their children.
        And so I tell you that we're there for humanitarian reasons. We're
    there for strategic reasons. And we're there because we do not want our
    children to live in a 21st century world where very smart people filled
    with very narrow hatreds can access technology, weaponry, missile
    technology, and torment the world because they're growing smaller in
    spirit, when they should be growing larger in vision--especially in the
    heart of Europe, which is so critical to our security.
        And we have to keep working against it here, which is why the
    Democrats are for stronger hate crimes legislation and for the
    ``Employment and Non-Discrimination Act,'' and why we have supported
    national service.
        Alan Khazei is here; he founded City Year.
    I'm the biggest flack he's got. I go all over the world talking about
    City Year. I knew when I ran for President in 1991 and 1992 that one of
    the things that we needed to do was to build a stronger sense of
    community in America, across racial and cultural and religious and
    economic lines. And I had this vision that we could get young people
    involved in service and help them go to college. And I went to City Year
    in Boston, and I knew what it was I wanted America to do. I'm very proud
    of the fact that in its first 4 years the national service program,
    AmeriCorps, has had as many volunteers as the Peace Corps did in its
    first 20 years. And you owe that to them.
        Now, I want to close with this thought. One of my favorite lines
    that President Kennedy ever spoke was the speech he made about Germany
    and the cold war in Berlin. Most people remember, ``Ich bin ein
    Berliner,'' and all that. But he said this--I want you to think about
    this in terms of Kosovo--in the middle of the cold war, John Kennedy
    said, ``Freedom has many difficulties, and our democracy is far from
    perfect, but we never had to put up a wall to keep our people in.''
        Now the Berlin Wall is down. The barriers of communism have fallen.
    But all over the world today, there are places where people are building
    walls in their hearts because they feel that they only count if they can
    look down on somebody who is different from them. And those walls are
    every bit as powerful as the Berlin Wall was, and in a profound way,
    harder to tear down.
        America must both do good and be good on this issue of community and
    our common humanity. It is our great challenge and perhaps the most
    compelling reason that the Democratic Party should be America's majority
    party in the 21st century.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:15 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Alan D. Solomont, former national
    finance chair, Democratic National Committee, and his wife, Susan; and
    pianist Makoto Ozone.