    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [March 12, 1999]
    [Pages 359-363]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Reception for Representative Max Sandlin in Texarkana, Texas
    March 12, 1999

        The President. Thank you very much. Thank you. You know, I told
    Leslie, I said, ``Max is doing so well I
    don't need to say anything. If I say anything now, it's going to be an
    anticlimax.'' [Laughter] He had me halfway believing that stuff by the
    time he got through. [Laughter]
        Let me say to all of you, I am delighted to see such a large crowd.
    I'm sorry, apparently some people had to be turned away; I wish I could
    have seen them as well. I thank you for coming. I thank you for coming
    to see me and for coming to support your Congressman. I want to thank--
    Mr. Mayor, thank you for making me feel so
    welcome. And I thank the whole committee that was involved in this: my
    longtime friend Judge Ed Miller--thank you,
    Judge--Molly Beth Malcolm and Willie
    Ray and all the others who are here on the host
    committee.
        I want to thank my friend of many years, once my law student, John
    Rafaelli, who has got a lot more money than
    I do and is putting us up in this beautiful hotel now. I thank him for
    that.
        Let me say just a couple of words. You know, I came today for two
    reasons. I came here to help Max, and I also went home to Hope to
    dedicate the birthplace that the local foundation there set up. They
    restored the old home that I lived in from the time I was born until I
    was 4 years old. And it was an interesting day. You know, it was cold
    and rainy, and the wind was blowing. I said, you know, I always got
    humbled when I came home, but this was the worst. I mean, for 5 years
    I've been trying to convince the American people that this global
    warming was for real. [Laughter] And we have the coldest March day in
    100 years in Hope; I don't know how much ground I lost today on that.
    [Laughter]
        But as you might imagine, it was a very emotional day. A lot of my--
    my brother and his wife and my wonderful young nephew
    came in from California. My stepfather was
    there; a lot of my kinfolks from all over southwest Arkansas and from
    Texas came in on my mother's and my father's side of the family. And
    last night, when I was coming back from a remarkable trip I had to
    Central America to see the victims of the hurricanes there and the
    associated disasters and to reaffirm the partnership that we have for
    the future, I sat and tried to write down a few things that I wanted to
    say. And I had, surprisingly, since I was 4 when I moved out of that
    place, a lot of memories still of that wonderful old house.
        And it occurred to me that in that little town where I was born and
    where I spent so much time in the intervening years, when I was a kid,
    nearly 50 years ago, there were two things that we were raised to
    believe in that town that I have tried to bring to this country and that
    I have tried to get every child in this country to believe: One is to be
    optimistic, to believe that you can create a life for yourself and live
    out your dreams. The other is to have a sense of belonging, to believe
    that we are part of one community in our towns, in our States, in our
    country, and increasingly with like-minded people all around the world,
    that we belong, and that because we belong we have a responsibility not
    only to ourselves and our loved ones but to others, and that the better
    our neighbors do, the better we'll do.

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        I've tried to convince every child in this country that both those
    things are true. And the evidence is I may have done better out in the
    country than I have in Washington, DC--[laughter]--but making the effort
    has been a joy for me.
        I can say without any hesitation that much of the good things that
    have happened I was a part of, but certainly not solely responsible for.
    Many of the things which Max talked about could not have been achieved
    if I hadn't had strong allies in the United States Congress.
        And I came here for him today not simply because he is a member of
    my party but because we share the same values, the same convictions, the
    same vision for the future of the country, because he fights for you up
    there, because he--and he does it, I think, in three ways. Number one,
    on issues that are specific to this district, he speaks to me about
    them.
        Number two, he believes in things that are good for America that
    will have a special impact here: our efforts to lower class sizes in the
    early grades, our efforts to open the doors of college to all people
    with the tax credits and the student loans and the other initiatives of
    the administration. He believes that we ought to have a Patients' Bill
    of Rights to protect the quality of health care for people in managed
    care programs throughout the country. And I do, too. [Laughter] He
    believes in the proposal I made to save Social Security and Medicare
    before we spend the surplus, and I want to talk about that a little in a
    minute.
        And finally, in this last year, even though he is a very junior
    Member of the United States House of Representatives, he was one of the
    most serious, substantive, thoughtful, and effective advocates, asking
    all the Members of Congress to read the Constitution, read the history,
    and uphold their oath to protect the kind of Government that we have
    preserved in this country for over 220 years. For all those reasons, you
    should be very, very proud of your Congressman, who is a remarkable
    person.
        Now, I'm having a great time. You know, I can now go around, and I
    can go to fundraisers like this, and none of them are for me. [Laughter]
    And I love that. I love the idea that if I can stay healthy, I can spend
    quite a few years trying to give back to this political system and to
    candidates and to people that I believe in who have given me so much.
        I want you to know that in the 2 years I have left, what I'm going
    to try to do is to take advantage of the good times we have now and the
    optimism and the self-confidence we have to ask the American people to
    look at the big, unmet challenges this country still has ahead of us
    when we start this new century.
        You know, when I ran for President in 1991 and 1992, we had to get
    the country working again--literally, working. The unemployment rate was
    too high. Real wages for working people hadn't gone up in 20 years. The
    crime rate was going up. The welfare rolls were exploding. We had
    increasing social tensions between people of different racial and
    religious groups, manifested in civil disturbances in some of our
    cities. And it seemed to me that we clearly had to stop doing the same
    things we've been doing for the last dozen years and take a different
    course. And we did, and the results have been good, and Max talked about
    them.
        But now we have to say, ``Well, so now what?'' Should we just sort
    of, like being at school, should we call a recess and just say, ``Gee,
    we feel good. We're going to go out and play a while?'' I think that
    would be a big mistake. I think it would be a big mistake for several
    reasons. Number one, we've still got some unaddressed problems. Number
    two, there are big challenges looming ahead of us that are not right in
    front of us now. Number three, the world is changing very, very fast,
    and people get punished for sitting on their laurels. You don't hire
    people to be Presidents, Senators, Members of Congress, Governors,
    mayors, hold other positions of responsibility, to go around and smile
    and say how great things are.
        I never will forget one time in 1990 I was trying to decide whether
    to run for Governor again in Arkansas, and I had been Governor 4 times,
    and I had served 10 years. And I used to have Governor's Day at the
    State Fair, and I'd just sit out there in a little booth, and anybody
    that wanted to come by could come by and talk. And this old boy in
    overalls came up to me, looked to be about 70 years old, and he said,
    ``Bill, are you going to run for Governor again?'' And I said, ``I don't
    know. If I do, will you vote for me?'' He said, ``I guess so. I always
    have.'' ``Well,'' I said, ``aren't you sick of me after all these
    years?'' He said, ``No, but everybody else I know is.'' [Laughter] And I
    said--it's a true story. And I said, ``Well''--and I was sort of hurt,
    you know. I said, ``Well,

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    don't you think I've done a good job?'' He said, ``Yes, but you also
    drew a paycheck every 2 weeks, didn't you?'' He said, ``That's what we
    hired you to do. What I want to know is what you're going to do
    tomorrow.'' Interesting point. Smart guy. Smart man.
        And so while it's important to take our time to do what I did
    today--to honor our past, to water our roots, to cherish the ties that
    bind--it's also important to realize that the fundamental obligation of
    life is to make the most of today and tomorrow and to always be thinking
    ahead.
        Now, let me tell you about this Social Security issue, for example.
    Here are the big challenges I think we face, and there are more, but
    I'll just say a few. Number one, we've got to figure out how to keep
    this economy going, because it's beginning to work for people. I mean,
    average people are finally beginning to get pay raises, with inflation
    under control, and we're beginning to get jobs to people who haven't
    been able to get jobs. So we've got to keep the economy going, and we've
    got to bring opportunity to people who haven't had it. There are still
    urban areas, there are still small towns, there are still rural areas,
    there are still Indian reservations where you couldn't prove it by the
    people who live there that we've got 18 million new jobs.
        And we've got to figure out--one of the reasons I went to Central
    America, one of the reasons I travel around all over the world is, a
    bunch of our growth comes from our ability to sell what we make to other
    people, and if half the world is in a recession as they are today, it's
    hard. I'm telling you, we've got a lot of farmers in terrible shape--
    terrible shape--record low prices for commodities--but partly because
    we've been selling a ton of stuff to Asia and a lot of stuff to Latin
    America, and they can't buy, in the case of Latin America, as much as
    they did, and in some cases in Asia they can't buy anything they were
    buying before because of the economic problems. So I want to deal with
    that.
        Now, the second problem we've got is the aging of America. Now, the
    older I get, the more I see that as a high-class problem. [Laughter] But
    the truth is, the average age in America today is over 76 years. If
    you're in this audience tonight and you're over 60 years old, if you're
    still in pretty good shape, you have a life expectancy of 80 or more.
        Audience member. I hope so.
        The President. Yeah. [Laughter] That's right.
        So it's a high-class problem. This is the kind of problem every
    society wants. Wouldn't it be terrible if our friends--and I say that in
    a serious way. Our friends in Russia who are struggling to make their
    democracy stay alive and get their economy going again, because they've
    had such terrible economic problems, because their health care system
    has been in terrible disrepair, their life expectancy is going down;
    they don't have a Social Security problem. You wouldn't like it. This is
    a high-class problem, okay? So let's just--we have a challenge to Social
    Security and Medicare because we're going to have twice as many people
    over 65 in 30 years as we've got today. But it is as a result of the
    hard work of the American people, of our economic success, of better
    health care habits by ordinary citizens, and of stunning advances in
    medical science.
        Nonetheless, we've got to deal with it. In about 30 years, there
    will only be about two people working for every one person drawing
    Social Security. In 10 years, if we don't do something, Medicare is
    going to run out of money. And there are a lot of people who wouldn't
    have the life they have today if Medicare weren't in good shape. So the
    aging of America is a big challenge.
        We've got the economy. We've got the aging of America. The third
    thing we have to realize is that for the future, more and more people
    are going to work and have children, and we have a big stake in seeing
    them do well at both jobs. If we have to choose, if parents have to
    choose between succeeding at home and succeeding at work, we're in
    trouble, because the most important job of any society is raising
    children well--ever--and because if people are sick at heart worrying
    about their kids when they're at work, they're not going to be very
    effective on the job.
        So we have to do more in that regard, to help people with quality
    child care, to get them some time off without losing their job if the
    kids are sick or they've got sick parents or other problems. We have to
    do this to make sure we do continue to raise the minimum wage where it's
    appropriate, so people who work 40 hours a week and are doing the right
    thing and paying their taxes, they're not still living in poverty. These
    things are important.

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        The fourth thing we have to do is to make sure we give all our kids
    a world-class education. We now have the most diverse student population
    in history. At this little grade school in Hope, Arkansas, just up the
    road, named for me, there are 27 immigrant children in that little
    school--27 in Hope, Arkansas. In the school district across the Potomac
    River from Washington, DC, we now have people--listen to this--from 180
    different national, racial, and ethnic groups. I went out to a school
    the other day, not very far from Washington, where the principal was
    elated to have me there talking to the students and all their parents,
    and the only thing that made her sad was we weren't able to arrange for
    a consecutive translation of my remarks, first in Spanish and second in
    Arabic.
        Now, this is a good deal in a global society if, but only if, you
    can educate every child to world-class standards. I'm not trying to tell
    the Texarkana school district how to run their business, but I know we
    need more teachers. I know we need after-school and summer school
    programs so kids can learn, instead of just passing them whether they
    learn or not. I know that. So the education of our children is
    important.
        And the fifth thing we have to do is, we've got to commit ourselves
    to live in the world of the 21st century, which means we have to deal
    with environmental challenges like climate change. It means that we
    can't run away from our responsibilities to try to be a force for peace,
    whether it's in Europe or Latin America or Northern Ireland or you name
    it--the efforts I've made in the Middle East. It's all in our interest.
        It means that we have to stand up against terrorism and chemical and
    biological weapons and all these things that most people would rather
    not think about. My first National Security Adviser, Tony Lake, used to tell me that the most important thing a
    President could do to protect the security of the country was to have a
    lot of dogs that don't bark--in other words, for me to be able to go to
    Texarkana and tell you I'm working on a biological weapons issue, and
    you're not quite sure what I'm talking about because the dog has never
    barked.
        But the President needs to keep those dogs at bay. So what I've
    tried to do and what I tried to do in the State of the Union Address,
    what I try to do in my conversations with Members of Congress, like Max,
    is to say, ``Look, we've got these big issues out there, and if we can
    take care of them, we're going to be all right.''
        I just want you to think about one--I'll just give you one example,
    though. We do have a surplus that is very strong. Now, you know when the
    economy is good, you have more surplus because you've got more people
    working and fewer people spending Government money and more people
    paying taxes. And then if the economy goes down, then you may run a
    little deficit because you've got fewer people paying taxes and more
    people on welfare and taking Government assistance.
        But what happened to us for the first time in the 1980's was we made
    a decision to run a big deficit every year. And for 12 years we
    quadrupled the debt of the country, and we had high interest rates, and
    wages wouldn't go up. You all remember. And then when the economy went
    down, we couldn't spend our way out of it. We just got stuck in high
    unemployment. So I wanted to balance the budget so we wouldn't have to
    worry about that, so we could keep interest rates down.
        Now I'm asking the American people to help me do something that may
    be hard for a lot of people to do. I think we ought to take about three-
    quarters of this surplus we've got and save it to do two things. We
    should save it in the next few years and save it in the following way:
    We should be buying back the public debt--in other words, pay our debt
    down--and as we do it, in effect, give a certificate of obligation for
    that money to Social Security and Medicare for 15 years, after which the
    Congress can do whatever they want to about it.
        But let me tell you what will happen. If you do that, we can help to
    solve the Social Security problem. We can make Social Security solvent
    until 2050 or beyond; we can make Medicare solvent until 2020. We still
    ought to make some other changes in it, but we can do those things. We
    can keep interest rates down. That means more business loans, more jobs,
    lower car payments, lower mortgage payments, lower credit card payments,
    lower college loan interest rates, paying the debt down. It means that--
    you know what Max has to do every year when he votes on a budget? The
    first thing he's got to do this year is to take over 13 cents of every
    dollar you pay in taxes and put it to the side to pay interest on the
    debt we've run up. So when

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    you think about what we're spending money on and you say, ``Well, Max, I
    want more for education,'' or, ``Max, I want a tax cut,'' or, ``Max, I
    want you to spend more money on building us some more highways here''--
    just keep in mind, you're thinking, ``Well, I'm giving him $100, right,
    in taxes.'' Well, you're not. You're giving him $87 in taxes, because
    you've got to take 13 off the top just to pay interest on the debt we've
    run up.
        Now, if we do what I'm suggesting, not only can we deal with the
    financial crisis in Social Security and Medicare, 15 years from now--
    and, again, it won't be me, I won't be there--but 15 years from now the
    Members of Congress will only be taking 2 cents on the dollar for
    interest on the debt. They'll be spending the money on Social Security,
    Medicare, education, investing in a peaceful world, giving you tax cuts,
    whatever. But don't you think it makes sense for us to take care of the
    Social Security and Medicare problems and to pay the debt down and to
    secure our economic strength? I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense.
        So I came here today to help a man I admire. I came here today to
    thank you for sticking with me and for giving me the chance to serve and
    giving the country the chance to have these good things happen. And I'd
    like to make just a whoop-de-do speech. But I owe it to you to tell you
    that this new century will present us with unparalleled new
    opportunities and unforeseen new challenges. And our predecessors, the
    people that were here 5 years ago and 10 years ago and 15 years ago were
    up to their ears in alligators. They did not have the opportunity that
    we have to take the confidence, the economic success, the things we've
    got now, and think about the long-term welfare of the country.
        And if you believe what I said when I started and you clapped--50
    years ago I was raised to believe that everybody could live out their
    dreams, but that we had responsibilities to one another to live in one
    community--then let's act like that now and give those gifts to our
    children.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 5:20 p.m. in the Stephen F. Austin Ballroom
    at the Four Points Hotel Sheraton. In his remarks, he referred to Leslie
    Sandlin, wife of Representative Sandlin; Mayor James W. Bramlett of
    Texarkana; event cohosts former Bowie County Judge Edward Miller, Texas
    Democratic Party Chair Molly Beth Malcolm, and Texarkana City Council
    member Willie Ray; John D. Rafaelli, owner, Four Points Hotel Sheraton;
    the President's brother, Roger Clinton, and his wife, Molly, and their
    son, Tyler; and the President's stepfather Richard Kelley.