    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [March 23, 1999]
    [Pages 436-442]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner
    March 23, 1999

        Thank you so much. Walker, if I had any
    sense, I'd just quit while I'm ahead. That was a wonderful introduction.
    Thank you for your years of support and for being there for us when we
    couldn't have had such a successful dinner.
        I thank my longtime friend Governor Roy Romer,
    who like me put in a dozen years as the Governor of a State. And on the
    bad days I still think it was the best job I ever had. [Laughter] But
    there aren't many of them.
        I thank my longtime friend Mayor Archer, whom I met when he was an august judge working with my
    wife with the American Bar
    Association, for his service; and in her absence, Congresswoman
    Sanchez. And I know Congressman
    Matsui and Congressman Menendez meant to be here tonight, but they're still voting.
    And we're glad Congressman Menendez's daughter joined us. She'll be more affected by the decisions we
    make this year than most of the rest of us will. I'm glad all the young
    people who are here tonight are here.
        I would like to thank our new officers, Joe Andrew, Andy Tobias, Beth
    Dozoretz. I thank Janice Griffin, who is the vice chair of our Women's Leadership Forum.
    And I was glad that Roy acknowledged the presence
    of former Congressman Dave McCurdy here and
    also our former DNC chairman Chuck Manatt
    who, if every thing works all right, will be an Ambassador pretty soon.
    And you ought to talk to him tonight. I'm sure once he gets the title
    he'll be insufferable, but anyway--[laughter].
        Let me say, when Walker was up here talking and Roy mentioned Dave
    McCurdy, I thought about the years when some of
    you in this room worked with Dave and me and others on the Democratic
    Leadership Council. One of our goals was to try to prove that the
    Democrat Party could be a genuinely progressive party and be good for
    American business. But I want to make a larger point here and try to
    just talk for a few moments tonight.
        When I ran for President in 1991 and '92, I did so because I thought
    that the natural rhetoric of Washington, DC, had become increasingly
    polarized and divorced from the real experiences of ordinary Americans,
    and that there was--and I felt a lot of sympathy because I had spent
    enough time here as a Governor to know that Members of Congress, even
    the President--Congressman Menendez,
    welcome; I didn't know you were back. We're glad to see you. Thank you.
    But anyway, I spent enough time up here and then going back home to
    Arkansas to know that it was so hard on a daily

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    basis for people in public life to get their message out, that you knew
    maybe you would get your 10 seconds on the evening news.
        And it led to the sort of natural impulse to sharpen the rhetoric
    and to stay within the comfortable contours of conflict that had defined
    the two parties for so long, that it maybe worked for individual people
    in public life, but it wasn't working very well for America. And it
    didn't really match up to the world we were living in, and certainly not
    to the world that these young people will dominate when they come of
    age.
        And yet I saw people like Roy Romer in Colorado, a predominantly
    Republican State, mayors like Dennis Archer, finding ways to pursue
    progressive politics that try to include everybody and give everybody a
    stake and take care of people that needed to be taken care of and give
    people opportunity who didn't have it and still make the trains run on
    time, pay the bills, get the economy to work, deal with the difficult
    issues that keep our system going strong and growing and changing.
        And so what I tried to do in 1992 was to tell the American people
    there were enough hard choices in life to make that we shouldn't be
    going around making a lot of false choices. We shouldn't be defeating
    ourselves before we started by saying, for example, if you want to have
    a compassionate social policy, you have to run a big deficit. Why?
    Because sooner or later you don't have any money left to spend anyway,
    even with a deficit.
        And meanwhile, the very people you say you're trying to help, you're
    hurting, because every year the Congress has to spend more and more
    money they could spend on education or housing or health care, paying
    interest on the national debt--it was up over 14 cents on the dollar
    when I got here--keeping interest rates high, keeping economic growth
    low, depriving people of the best social program of all, a decent job.
        And the same thing was true about business and labor. It seemed to
    me that in a global economy, with also a phenomenal increase in
    productivity being driven by technology, with more and more benefits to
    labor being added by higher levels of education, and a lot of external
    challenges--not only competition but these environmental challenges that
    I'll say more about in a minute, just to mention a few--that the best
    course was to find out what was good for business and labor, and that
    the best companies in America had figured that out decades ago.
        And I could give you just example after example after example where
    I thought, yes, there were hard enough choices to make, but if we kept
    ourselves within these categories we were doomed to defeat. And so my
    idea was that, if I could ask America to join with me in a common
    vision, then we could ask ourselves, what will work to achieve that? And
    forget about the fights we've been having. Let's have some new fights.
        I once--the late Edmund Muskie, who was a distinguished Senator from
    Maine, nominee for Vice President, Secretary of State, once spoke to a
    Governors' Conference in Maine in 1983, and I'll never forget what he
    said. He said, ``In all my years in public life, I defined my success by
    whether I left my successor a new set of problems.'' You think about
    that. He said, ``You know, life is full of problems. There will never be
    an end to human challenges as long as people are around on this Earth.
    But if we had to keep retreading the same old ground, we'd never get
    anywhere.''
        So we said, ``We'll have an economic policy that will reduce the
    deficit and increase investment in education and technology and the
    other things that are important. We will have a trade policy that will
    expand trade, but value environment and humane labor conditions. We'll
    have an environmental policy that will clean up the environment, but
    will emphasize, insofar as humanly possible, market mechanisms and
    incentives and technology and creativity to clean the environment up, so
    that we don't overly burden the economic machine when we're doing it.''
        And to be fair, a lot of these things are possible today, and they
    might not have been possible in former years. For example, it is now
    literally possible, as a lot of our most innovative utilities have
    proven, to generate more energy capacity through conservation, through
    alternative sources of energy, through partnering with your customers,
    than ever before. It is also now possible to grow an economy without
    increasing the use of fuel that burn greenhouse gases. But most people
    don't believe it still, even in America, and certainly not in a lot of
    developing countries.
        And what I'd like to ask you to think about tonight just briefly is:
    Okay, I'm grateful, we've had a good economic policy. And Walker did

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    a better job of bragging on it than I should. And we did have something
    to do with that; so did all of you and millions of other people in this
    country.
        And we've got crime at a 30-year low. Why? Because we said that this
    is a false choice between whether you're going to try to rehabilitate
    people or keep them out of trouble in the first place or punish people
    who do wrong. The vast majority of serious crimes are committed by a
    very small number of people. They ought to be identified. They ought to
    be punished. Then we ought to kill ourselves trying to keep our kids out
    of trouble in the first place. And we ought to try to prevent as much
    crime as possible. That's why we put these 100,000 police out there on
    the street and sponsored after-school programs and other kinds of
    preventive programs.
        I'm glad that welfare is at a 30-year low. Almost half--it's been
    cut almost in half--partly by the growing economy and partly by a new
    welfare strategy that says: Now, we should keep the guarantee poor
    families have for health care and nutrition for the kids, but if a
    person is able-bodied, the person ought to go to work if there's a job.
        You know that one of the things that got lost in a lot of the
    rhetoric--the two welfare bills I vetoed would have taken away the
    guarantee of food and medicine and medical care for children. But I told
    the Congress if they would put those things back in, I would give the
    States the power to create their own designs, to figure out the most
    innovative ways of putting people to work.
        And these kinds of things actually do work. And for progressives, I
    would like to say we have the lowest poverty rate we've had in quite a
    long time. We have much lower poverty rates among minorities than we've
    recorded in 30 years. We're finally beginning to see in wages an
    increase in equality, with wages growing more rapidly for people in the
    lower income rungs. We've got 90 percent of our children immunized for
    the first time. The budget in '93 really worked to relieve the tax
    burden on the hardest pressed working families. The Family and Medical
    Leave Act has done the same thing. So it is possible to have a good
    economic policy, to be tough where you ought to be tough, and to have a
    more humane society.
        And what I have been trying to do is to get--not to say that I'm
    right about every issue but to get people to think in those terms. What
    kind of America do we want to leave our children in the 21st century? I
    think we want a country where every responsible person has an
    opportunity to live out his or her dream. I think we want a country that
    is genuinely committed to the idea of community.
        And I want to tell you what I mean by that. I mean a sense of
    belonging, a sense of being responsible to other people, not only
    because it's morally right but because we believe we do better
    individually when our friends and neighbors are doing better and because
    we believe that our differences, whether they're racial, ethnic,
    religious, or whatever, are quite exciting and interesting, but they're
    not nearly as important as the humanity we share.
        And that is a profoundly important issue as we become more and more
    diverse in a world that is being consumed, as you see in the Balkans, in
    the Middle East, in Africa, and elsewhere, by ethnic and regional--
    ethnic and racial and other kinds of divisions.
        And I think it is very, very important that America recognize that
    another false choice is trying to say, ``Well, I'm going to concentrate
    on domestic policy but not foreign policy.'' I said this all during the
    '92 campaign, and I don't think anyone ever heard this, but there is no
    longer an easy dividing line between our policy at home and our policy
    around the world--that the world is becoming a smaller place.
        And that's why we tried to establish new partnerships with Africa,
    with Latin America, a whole new, broader relationship with a lot of
    Asian countries we weren't involved with before, and a lot of other
    things that I've tried to do, to work with the Europeans to help them
    deal with these horrible problems in the Balkans and become united and
    free--because I know that if we want good trading partners, we've got to
    be good citizens of the world.
        And America, still--we've got 4 percent of the world's population
    and 22 percent of the income. If we want to keep it, the only way we can
    keep it is to sell some of what we provide to people beyond our borders.
    And for them to buy it, they need to be doing well, and they need to be
    safe and free and secure. And so, very often what is the right thing to
    do is also economically the right thing to do.
        Now, having said that, I'd just like to say that that is the
    perspective--that's the world

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    I've tried to leave for our children. And what I hope that all of you
    will be able to do as members of our Business Council is to keep us
    moving down that path, keep us making the tough decisions, but not with
    false categories, not with presuppositions about what has to be done,
    not with the idea that we can't reconcile a lot of these internal
    difficulties that are there.
        If you look ahead at the big challenges facing us in the 21st
    century--and I'd just like to mention a few of them, not all of them but
    a few of them, and what I'm trying to get this Congress to help me do. I
    think they are as follows, in no particular order: Number one, how to
    keep the economy going at home and how to build a better economy in the
    world; how to keep the difficulties in Asia from biting us here and
    taking America's economic engine down and, instead, how to grow
    together. And I would just say I think there are three things we have to
    do.
        One, abroad, I think we need to continue to expand trade. I think we
    have got to find a new consensus in America on trade. The Democratic
    Party should not be afraid of trade. It has generated more jobs than it
    has cost, and the jobs it has generated have higher wages. The
    Republican Party should not be afraid of the notion that we need new
    international understandings, just like we have national understandings,
    that lift environmental standards and lift labor standards, even as we
    expand trade so we have a race to a higher level of life, a higher
    quality of life, not a race to the bottom. And we've got to find a new
    consensus on it. But we can't run away from it.
        The second thing we need to do is to deal with the world financial
    problems. And I won't bore you with the long exegesis on that, but the
    G-7 countries, the big economies, are going to meet in Germany this
    summer, and I'm hoping that we will have the next big step to take there
    to try to stabilize the world financial system so we don't have the kind
    of rampant crash we had in Asia in the last few years.
        And let me just tell you what the basic problem is--and some of you
    who are involved in trading understand this. But if we're going to have
    a global economy where we have global trade and global investment, you
    have to move money around. And money is like anything else; if you move
    around enough of it, there will be a market for money. And farmers have
    known this for years with their crops, where they have to hedge against
    their crops.
        But today $1.5 trillion--trillion--is exchanged around the globe
    every day in currency exchanges. That's many, many times more than the
    aggregate value of total trade in goods and services every day. And when
    the people that set up this system 50 years ago--and those of us who
    have been working in it for many years never focused clearly enough on
    that until the last couple of years. But that's going to be very
    important, because you're not going to be able to keep support for free
    markets and maybe even for freely elected governments in some of these
    countries if they think in a month they could lose what they worked for
    10 years for, and all these people in the middle class all of a sudden
    are plunged into poverty.
        The third thing we have to do is to recognize that a lot of people
    in America have not yet been touched by our recovery, as sweeping as it
    has been, and that they offer us a market to continue to grow our
    economy in a non-inflationary way, whatever is happening overseas.
    That's the new markets initiative I talked about in the State of the
    Union. Essentially, what I have asked the Congress to do is to pass a
    series of tax credits and loan guarantees to get private capital into
    poor inner-city and rural areas that are underinvested in, where the
    unemployment rate is too high.
        The unemployment rate in this country is 4.4 percent. But there are
    neighborhoods in New York where it's 12 or 15 percent--and in most big
    cities in this country and in an awful lot of rural counties in this
    country, which are capable of getting investment and putting people to
    work.
        And let me just tell you how it works. For example, suppose--I'll
    just take--suppose Newark, New Jersey, wanted to build some big facility
    in an area of high unemployment, and it cost $100 million. If my
    proposal were adopted by Congress, the investors--if they put it in a
    high unemployment area and guaranteed a certain percentage of the jobs;
    people would be trained for them, and then the permanent jobs would be
    given to people who could compete in that area--would get a 25 percent
    tax credit and would get then two-thirds of the remaining investment
    with a guarantee. The investment would be guaranteed.
        That's just what we do with the Overseas Private Investment
    Corporation, Export-Import

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    Bank, other things. It seems to me that it's the least we can do in
    America is to give the same incentives to people who invest in
    underinvested areas in America we do to get them to invest in
    underinvested areas around the world. And I think that we ought to be
    for that.
        The second thing I think we ought to do is to continue our work in
    education. We've got the best system of higher education in the world.
    One of the proudest achievements of this administration is that we
    virtually opened the doors of college to all with the tax credits and
    loans and scholarships and the AmeriCorps program and all that. But
    nobody thinks that every American child has the best access to
    elementary and secondary education. So we need to have higher standards.
        And I recommended five things in the State of the Union Address,
    including ending social promotion, but giving children--all children--
    the right to go to summer school and after-school and mentoring programs
    if they're not learning, in return for the continued investment of
    Federal money. But I also want to continue putting more teachers in the
    classroom, to have smaller classes, and modernizing schools, hooking
    them all up to the Internet.
        I think we have to deal with the--[applause]. Thank you. I think--
    but see? That's the false--are you going to be for spending more money
    on education or higher standards? Why should we make that choice? Why
    shouldn't we be for spending more money and having higher standards? You
    know, a lot of people say it's not a money problem, but it's been my
    experience in life that anytime somebody tells you it's not a money
    problem, they're usually talking about someone else's problem, not
    theirs. So why should we make that choice?
        And I'll just give you one last issue, which goes back to economics,
    and that's dealing with the aging of America. There's been a lot of
    handwringing in our country for years about Social Security and
    increasingly about Medicare. But I hope you will forgive me when I tell
    you that these are very high-class problems. First of all, they're
    problems that we share with every other wealthy country in the world,
    because life expectancy is going up just at the time the baby boomers
    are aging. And medical science is providing people the opportunity to
    extend their lives and to extend the quality of their lives. But as you
    get older, you consume more health care, and if you access technology,
    it costs more.
        So we have to make some fundamental changes in both the Medicare
    program and the Social Security program. But first we have to recognize
    that we have to put some more funds in them, because by 2030, there will
    be twice as many people over 65, only two people working for every one
    person drawing Social Security.
        And what I've recommended is that we, in effect, use the surplus--77
    percent of it--over the next 15 years to pay the debt down in a way
    that, in effect, gives claim on that money in the ensuing years when it
    will be needed for Medicare and Social Security. Now, if you do that, we
    can take the amount of money we're spending on debt service in the
    budget--it will make it a lot more fun to be in Congress--you can take
    the amount of money you're spending on debt service from about, now,
    down to 13 cents, down to 2 cents in 15 years. We'll have the lowest
    debt as a percentage of our income we've had since World War I. And
    whatever happens to the global economy, interest rates in America will
    be lower; investment will be higher; incomes will be higher; and jobs
    will be more plentiful.
        So I think this is a very important thing. Now, it will sound a lot
    better when somebody else who comes along and the other party says,
    ``No, let's give half of it away in a tax cut.'' But we can give tax
    cuts to people who need it to keep body and soul together or who need it
    for specific purposes, like to deal with the climate change challenge or
    to deal with the challenge of long-term care in their families or to
    deal with the child care challenge and their families or to help more
    people save for their own retirement, and still save this money, save
    the bulk of this surplus.
        Look, we were in debt for 30 years; we had a structural deficit for
    12 years, and during that 12 years we quadrupled the national debt. If
    we were to pay it down two good things would happen to us economically.
    First, what I just said--we'd pay down the debt and have lower interest
    rates and higher investment. Secondly, we'd make it a lot cheaper for
    our trading partners to borrow the money in the world. And these poorer
    countries would get more money, get more investment. They would grow
    faster, and they'd buy more of our goods.

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        We've got someone here from Boeing tonight. You just talk to them
    about what the global financial crisis has done to them. Talk to the
    farmers in this country about what the global financial crisis has done
    for them. If our trading partners aren't doing well, they don't have the
    money to buy our output.
        So these are the kinds of things that I want to do, deal with these
    big challenges--the aging of America, the education issues, keeping the
    economy growing, the challenge of climate change--these huge, big
    challenges in a way that benefits all people, because we do recognize
    we're in a community.
        Now, I may not be right about all of this. But on the Social
    Security and Medicare and budget deficit, which will be the big
    questions we have to face this year, I think this administration is at
    least entitled to the benefit of the doubt based on the consequences of
    the policies of the last 6 years.
        On the other issues that are very important--the trade issues,
    particularly--I asked the members of the Democratic Business Council to
    work with our friends in labor, work with our friends in the Democratic
    Party, and remind everybody that one of the reasons we got where we are
    in the last 6 years is we became the greatest trading nation in the
    world again. And that's one of the reasons we're here.
        But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't do something for El Paso,
    Texas, if they lose 6,000 jobs. It's not a choice. You don't have to
    say, ``Oh, goodness, too bad about them. We're doing great.'' You should
    say, ``We should do what's best for the country as a whole and help
    them--because they're smart, too; they're hardworking, too; they're
    entitled to have their chance in the Sun, as well.'' So these are the
    kinds of thing we're trying to do.
        And one last thing. I gave a long speech about Kosovo today, and I
    don't want to talk about that in any detail tonight, but I will say
    this: It is interesting that at the end of the cold war with this
    incredible explosion of technology and opportunity to create wealth,
    that the world is convulsed by people obsessed with making their lives
    on holding other people down because they're different. That's why I
    think it's important that we continue the President's Initiative on
    Race, which we're doing; why I think it's important that we pass the
    ``Employment Non-Discrimination Act'' and the hate crimes law that I put
    before the Congress; why I think it's important we stand up against
    ethnic cleansing and keep fighting for peace in the Middle East.
        And the darkest nightmare--I told you my happy dream for the
    future--the darkest nightmares of the future are the marriage of modern
    technology and primitive hatred, because terrorists can figure out how
    to get on the Internet and make bombs. You can get on the Internet and
    figure out how to make that bomb that blew up the building in Oklahoma
    City. You can have a little biological lab in a garage somewhere if you
    know enough.
        And what we don't want to do is to leave our children with a world
    in which we've done a whiz-bang job with all the mechanical and economic
    things, but we haven't done anything to purge the collective spirit of
    our country and, insofar as we are able, the world of the foolish notion
    that our lives only can count when we've got our heel on someone else's
    neck, and we can say we're better than they are. This is a profound
    thing.
        This is--this goes back to prehistory, folks. When people first
    aggregated themselves in tribes, they had to be suspicious of the other.
    And we have different skin pigmentations today and different facial
    features and all that for reasons that go back thousands, even tens of
    thousands of years.
        And it falls now to America not to be a wild-eyed idealist but just
    to remind the people that we are trying to set a model for the world.
    And we're not perfect, but we're trying to say that any responsible
    citizen can be part of our community. And if we're going to have the
    world we want, that has to be true everywhere. America has to try to be
    good at home and to be a force for good abroad.
        And all the work we do on economics and technology and trade and
    everything else will, in the end, also have some very twisted
    manifestations, which will bedevil our children unless we also stand up
    for old-fashioned ideals. We believe in equality and freedom and our
    common humanity.
        That's what I want the Democratic Party to be in the 21st century,
    and I want you to be a big part of it.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:21 p.m. in the East Room at the Mayflower
    Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to former Gov. Roy Romer

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    of Colorado, general chair, Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, Andy
    Tobias, treasurer, Beth Dozoretz, national finance chair, Charles T.
    Manatt, former chairman, and Mayor Dennis W. Archer of Detroit, MI,
    general cochair, Democratic National Committee; Alicia Menendez,
    daughter of Representative Robert Menendez; and Walker Nolan, founding
    member, Democratic Business Council, who introduced the President.