    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [June 30, 1999]
    [Pages 1046-1051]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Chicago
    June 30, 1999

        Thank you very much. First, let me thank the leaders of the
    Democratic National Committee who are here, Joe Andrew and Beth Dozoretz, and say to
    our former chairman and my 1992 campaign manager, David
    Wilhelm, and Deegee, I'm glad to see you and all my other friends and many
    of you who were formerly associated with our administration.
        I want to thank Lew and Susan and Lou and Ruth Weisbach and
    Fred Eychaner for their work on this dinner
    tonight. This has been kind of an emotional day for me. I--Bruce and I
    and Hillary, we did drag in here one night about 7 years ago, and you
    know, I thought--I was totally out of gas when I got here, and I had
    virtually forgotten why I was even thinking of running for President; I
    just wanted to go to bed. And then I came in here, and I got all pumped
    up. I saw all this art that I didn't know anything about, and it
    certainly was interesting. [Laughter] And I sort of began to get
    educated. And then I went into the library and went nuts over the books,
    and I certainly approved of their reading tastes. And then we got to
    talking about health care and first one thing and then another, and
    before you know it, we were sort of off and going and forming a
    friendship that has stood the test of 7 years' time. And I'm very
    grateful that you had us back tonight, and I thank you.
        I want to thank all of the rest of you for being here, and I want to
    thank Chicago for being so wonderful to Hillary and to me and to Al and
    Tipper Gore, for giving us--for me, I basically won the Democratic
    nomination on Saint Patrick's Day in 1992. And I must say, I learned a
    lot from my friend Al Gore, who did well on
    Super Tuesday and then had difficulty going after that in 1998, so I
    later told him when I asked him to join the ticket, I said, ``Now, don't
    ever forget what I learned from your campaign.'' I spent enormous
    amounts of time in Illinois and Michigan. Of course, it helped that
    roughly 30 percent of the primary voters in both States were born in
    Arkansas and couldn't make a living there

    [[Page 1047]]

    and had to come up here. [Laughter] That was of some modest benefit to
    me at the time. But I'm very grateful for that and grateful for the way
    that this city and this State have stayed with us through thick and thin
    in the life of this administration.
        I appreciate something Joe Andrew said--apart from the fact that the
    party's out of debt; that's good news. I'm here tonight, in a way,
    because I can't run for reelection. But I believe in what I've spent my
    life doing, what Hillary and I have spent our lives doing, what Al Gore
    and I have spent 7 years working to do, and I believe in what still
    needs to be done.
        I believe that politics is a good thing for America, not a bad
    thing. It is what makes democracy work. And it becomes public service
    when it is dominated by good values, good ideas, and the ability to turn
    those ideas into action. I enjoy a good contest if it is a contest of
    ideas. And I don't mind receiving the verdict of the electorate as long
    as I'm absolutely sure that everyone who opposes us actually know
    precisely what they're doing. And I think that is something that we all
    ought to have in mind as we approach this election season.
        I say--I think I see Senator Carol Moseley-Braun smiling, and I thank her for her loyal support and
    leadership for her time in the Senate, the first 6 years of my
    administration. I'm glad to see John Schmidt
    here tonight. I thank him for his service in the administration and for
    still caring enough to be here after having run for office, which is, by
    any standard, an exhausting enterprise. And I thank Neil
    Hartigan and the whole Hartigan family for
    being here and always being there for me. And Billy Singer--I see all these people who do not presently hold
    elective office but have participated in this process.
        I'm here for the same reason you are. And if the Democrats want me
    10 years from now, I'll be there then, because I knew when I got into
    this that it was a temporary job. [Laughter] I never had any illusions
    that I could be President for life, although I confess that I love the
    job, even on the worst days. [Laughter] But what I want you to focus on
    just for a minute with me tonight is that I am grateful that time and
    circumstance and the wonderful help of my friends and a lot of gifts
    from the good Lord and my family gave me the opportunity to serve as
    President at this time of profound change in our country. And if I have
    contributed in some way to what has happened that is good for America, I
    am grateful for that as well.
        But I have to tell you something. I think that good things happen
    when good people establish good teams, and they have a good vision, they
    have a good strategy, they have good ideas, and they're good at turning
    their ideas into reality. And I used to tell our people all the time in
    the darkest days, in the early days when we were in Washington, don't
    worry about what they're saying about you today; worry about what it
    will look like 3 or 4 years from now. We need--the test of what we're
    doing is whether it improves the lives of the American people, whether
    it makes us a more secure, more humane country with a better future for
    all of our people.
        And that's why I hope you're here, because we had certain ideas that
    our party held to that basically our friends in the other party didn't
    agree with. And one of the reasons I believe, I will always believe,
    that there was so much intense effort made in Washington to try to sort
    of go after not just me but many of us, personally, and try to divert
    the attention of the American people, was they were afraid they couldn't
    compete with our ideas, and they knew they were working. And the better
    the country did, sometimes their more partisan members--the better we
    did, the madder they got, and the better the American people did, the
    madder they got.
        So let's step back from all that now, because I won't be a candidate
    in 2000. What were the ideas that were--that drove us, and what were the
    consequences? The first thing we decided is that the Democratic Party
    had to become the party of fiscal responsibility again. We could no
    longer participate in a kind of unspoken deal with the Republicans where
    we would both allow these intolerable deficits to go on because we
    wanted to spend money and they didn't want to raise any money. And
    they'd let us spend money and we'd let them avoid raising it, and the
    deficit would get bigger and bigger and bigger, and we were driving the
    country into the ditch. We quadrupled the debt in 12 years. And the
    Democrats in Congress, by the way, to their everlasting credit, tried to
    stop it. They actually spent less money than the Republicans asked them
    to, in the White House.
        And we said, we're going to bring the deficit down; we're going to
    cut spending, but we're

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    actually going to increase our investment in education and in research,
    environmental protection, and things that are fundamental to our future.
    And most people didn't think we could do it.
        Well, 6 years later, we've gone from a $290 billion deficit to, in
    1999, a $99 billion surplus, $142 billion next year. And we have cut the
    Government to its smallest size since Kennedy was President. But we have
    almost doubled investment in education and training for our children.
        It was an idea, and it worked. And we've got the strongest economy
    in a generation, maybe ever, because the idea was right. And we had a
    lot of Members of Congress actually lay down their seats in the '94
    elections because we didn't have a vote to spare when our party took the
    lead on that kind of economic policy.
        Then we had an idea about crime, that the Democrats were for law and
    order. We wanted to save streets; we wanted to save schools. And we knew
    from what was already beginning to work in a lot of our cities that what
    we needed was more police on the street and more guns off the street and
    out of the hands of kids and criminals. And we knew we needed to give
    our children something to say yes to, not just something to say no to.
        And so we fought for the Brady bill, and we fought for the assault
    weapons ban, and we fought for 100,000 police on the street. And the
    leaders of the other party said that it would have no effect on the
    crime rate, that nothing good would happen, that we would never see
    these police on the street, that no guns would be kept out of the hands
    of criminals because criminals didn't buy guns in gun stores anyway. I
    heard all that. And one of the reasons that our friends in the other
    party are in the majority today in the House is that they beat somewhere
    between 12 and 15 of our House Members, the NRA did, in 1994, scaring
    the living daylights out of rural people, saying we were going to take
    their guns away.
        Well, 6 years later, we've got the lowest crime rate in 25 years; we
    finished putting 100,000 police out there, under budget and ahead of
    schedule; 400,000 gun sales have been canceled to criminals, felons,
    fugitives, and stalkers. And this is a safer, better, stronger country.
    We were right about that. And it's an important issue going forward,
    just like the management of the economy is.
        I'll give you just two other examples--I could give you 10--where we
    had different ideas. We believed we could grow the economy and not just
    maintain but improve the environment. And a lot of people don't believe
    that to this day. But compared to 6 years ago, the air is cleaner; the
    water is cleaner; the drinking water is safer; the food supply is purer.
    We have immunized 90 percent of our kids against serious childhood
    diseases for the first time in the history of the country and set aside
    more land in perpetuity than any administration except those of Franklin
    and Theodore Roosevelt.
        And the economy is stronger. We did not hurt the economy; we helped
    the American economy by doing what was right by the environment. And we
    had to fight the other party to do that. There was an honest
    disagreement. That is relevant for us going forward.
        In the area of education, we fought for tax cuts that would, in
    effect, open the doors of college of all Americans: $1,500 tax credit
    for the first 2 years of college, other tax credits for other years. We
    fought for better student loans and more work-study positions. We fought
    to hook up all the classrooms in this country to the Internet.
        And now we're fighting to have a national ratification of what
    you're doing here in Chicago, with no social promotion but not blaming
    the children for the failures of the system, and instead giving them all
    access to summer school and after-school programs. I want to this year
    say we are only going to give Federal aid to education to States and
    districts that end social promotion but don't dub the children failures,
    and give them the after-school or summer school programs and the support
    they need to succeed.
        I'll just give you one last idea. We had an idea that we could best
    solve our social problems in this country, generally, not by asking the
    Government to do it and not by leaving the Government out of it but by
    forming new partnerships with the private sector and with individual
    citizens. So we started AmeriCorps, the national service program. We
    said, we'll give young people some money to go to college if they'll
    give a year or two of their lives to serving in their communities.
        I believed the young people, the so-called Generation X-ers, were
    not selfish people, as

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    they were caricatured. I thought they were passionately committed to the
    future of this country. And in 4\1/2\ years, we have had 100,000-plus
    volunteers for AmeriCorps; it took the Peace Corps 20 years to get that
    many. And the man who started it, Eli Segal, is
    here with us tonight, and I thank him for that.
        Then I gave Eli another job. I said, we're
    going to reform welfare, and we're going to say, ``If you're able-
    bodied, you've got to go to work,'' but we don't want to hurt children.
    So we're going to say, ``If you go to work, we will give you child care;
    we will give you medical care; we will give your kids nutrition; but
    you've got to go to work.'' And then I realized that not all these
    people would be able to go to work, because they had no real experience.
    No one had ever said, ``Here's how you interview for a job; here's how
    you show up; here's how you relate to people at work.'' We had some
    serious problems there.
        So I asked Eli if he would help me go out and
    challenge the business community of this country to actually take
    personal responsibility for hiring people off welfare. We started with 5
    companies; then we had 100; then we had 1,000. In 3 years, he has gone
    from 5 companies to 12,000 businesses, hiring half a million people off
    welfare. And here's a little shameless plug. We're coming to celebrate
    this in Chicago on August 3d, and we need more help.
        So what's the point of all this? The point of all this is, this
    country is doing well, but we all know there are still challenges out
    there. It seems to me that the Democratic Party is entitled to the
    benefit of the doubt of the American people. When we go to them in the
    Congress races, when we go to them in the Presidential race, we need to
    make it clear that there is a connection between the values and the
    ideas and the actions we have taken and the consequences we see in every
    community in this country.
        And that is why we need your contributions and why we need your
    voice. This is not an accident. We cannot see this coming election as
    just sort of a--independent of the reality of the last 6 years. But our
    party also has a solemn responsibility between now and then in
    Washington to keep trying to get things done for the American people. We
    shouldn't be caught playing politics, waiting for the next election. Our
    belief is that we get paid by the American people every week, not just
    in the seasons where there is no politics--every week. They pay us to
    show up and produce.
        That's why you heard me say yesterday, ``We've got the new surplus;
    all right, here's my plan for Medicare. We'll make it stable until 2027;
    we'll provide preventive services for free, screenings for everything
    from osteoporosis to cancer screenings and all kinds of other preventive
    services; we will employ modern means of competition, but we will have
    adequate funding to keep the quality up; and we will provide a
    prescription drug benefit for the first time in history to our
    seniors.'' I think that's a big idea.
        I also think that it is a big idea to take this surplus and say to
    our friends in the Republican Party, ``Can you have a tax cut? Of course
    you can. But first things first. First, let's save Medicare and save
    Social Security and pay the debt of the country off by 2015 so that our
    children and our children's children will have a stronger economy and a
    stronger society. Then there will be money left over; we can argue about
    what to do with it, and you'll have some that you can give in a tax cut.
    But let us save Social Security and Medicare and deal with the baby boom
    generation and pay the debt of the country off.''
        Now, these are ideas. These things have consequences. So when people
    ask you, ``Why did you come tonight?'' I hope you say, ``Well, you know,
    Chicago took Bill Clinton to the race a long time ago.'' Or, ``He made a
    pretty good talk.'' I hope you say that. But I hope you'll be able to
    tell people, ``Look, I am a Democrat for the 21st century. Here are my
    ideas. Here is why I write checks to do this. This is what I believe in.
    And, oh, by the way, it works. It makes a difference. My children will
    have a better future.''
        And I could go through issue after issue after issue. But if you
    just look at--you just look at the issue of Social Security, Medicare,
    and paying off the debt. Why should a liberal Democrat be for putting
    America out of debt? Here's why: because we live in a global economy.
    And if we have no public debt, then the Government will not be competing
    not only with you but with every poor, blue-collar worker of all races
    in this country for money for a home mortgage, for a car payment, for a
    credit card payment, for a college loan, for a business loan. And if we
    don't have any public debt, interest rates will be lower in America,
    which means there

    [[Page 1050]]

    will be more investment, more jobs, higher wages, and less debt for
    ordinary people.
        It means, furthermore, that the next time we have a global financial
    crisis like we had in Asia 2 years ago, the United States will be less
    vulnerable, and our friends in the developing countries will be able to
    get more money at a lower cost because we won't be taking any away from
    them. And that's good, because as they get richer, they can buy more of
    our stuff. So I'm making a good Republican argument for my position
    here.
        This is a big deal. You need to go tell--this is a huge idea. Do you
    know when the last time the country was out of debt? 1835. [Laughter]
    This is a big idea. And we can do it in a way that saves Social Security
    and Medicare. But liberals, as well as conservatives, should be for it,
    for the reasons I said--big idea--matters. It matters.
        It matters whether we close this gun show loophole. The same crowd
    that said nobody, no crooks, bought guns at gun stores--and now they
    know they were wrong, because we've got 400,000 sales were canceled in 5
    years--now they say that we shouldn't do background checks where they
    admit the crooks do buy their guns, not just gun shows but also urban
    flea markets. And we're for it, and the leaders of the other party are
    against it.
        This is an important issue; this is a big idea. Kids' lives are at
    stake--not just in scenes of carnage, like what happened at Littleton,
    but every day of the world, 13 kids die from gun violence--nameless,
    faceless kids you don't know because they die one and two at a time. A
    lot of them are poor kids in inner cities, that don't have any votes,
    any influence, nobody to speak up for them if we don't do it.
        It matters. This is a big idea. This is not some trivial thing,
    that, oh, these parties are having a little dispute. This matters. And I
    believe we're right. And I think all the evidence is that they're wrong.
    And I could go through the environment and health care and the Patients'
    Bill of Rights and every other issue, and make the same case.
        You go home tonight, and you just think about the three things I
    talked about. Think about the economy; think about Social Security and
    Medicare; think about education policy, what I said--what a difference
    it's made to Chicago that you've finally got your schools getting juiced
    up again because somebody believes that all kids can learn, and somebody
    believes that kids should be held to high standards, and there are
    consequences, and you don't just get patted on the back whether you know
    what you're supposed to know or not--but we don't point the finger at
    kids and call them a failure when the system is failing them.
        You just think about this stuff. It matters what you do in life.
    Politics is no different than your family life, no different than your
    business life, no different than your school life. This matters. And on
    the great ideas of the age, we have been right in preparing America for
    the 21st century. It's not Bill Clinton being President. It is, we have
    a party that is best for all the American people, that has become a
    party of permanent change, of restless, constructive, positive change.
        And this is a better country because of that, because people like
    you are thinking about tomorrow. You know, nearly everybody here would
    be better off, in the next 6 months, in the next year and a half, going
    to a Republican fundraiser. I mean, they'll give you a bigger tax cut
    than we will. [Laughter] They will. You'd be better off in the next year
    and a half going to a Republican fundraiser. It wouldn't be--the house
    wouldn't be as interesting as this. [Laughter]
        You know, the people that were good enough to serve us dinner
    tonight, they're the ones that we're going to help immediately. We're
    trying to make sure their parents can afford to have prescription drugs
    so they don't have to bankrupt their kids and their ability to raise
    their grandkids. We think we ought to raise the minimum wage. We think
    their kids ought to be able to go to college.
        But most of you who paid to get here tonight would be better off in
    the short run if you were over with the Republicans. But you aren't
    because you know that in the long run and in the not-so-very-long run,
    people who think about what's best for all Americans and how we reach
    across the lines that divide us and how we think about our children's
    future--that is what is best for us.
        If I told you--suppose you'd all been here with Lew and Susan, back in 1991, and
    I'd said, ``Now here, folks, I want you to vote for me for President.''
    Just keep in mind, 1991, we're in this big old creaking recession, and
    everybody is feeling bad, and there's about to be a riot out in Los
    Angeles in a few months.

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    And I said, ``Now, I want you to vote for me, and in 7 years you'll have
    nearly 19 million jobs and the longest peacetime expansion in history
    and a $100 billion surplus and trillions expected in the surplus over
    the next 15 years. And we'll be able to solve the problems the baby
    boomers present to Social Security and Medicare. And along the way,
    we'll have a 25-year-low in crime, and we'll cut the welfare rolls in
    half. And we will be a leading force for peace, from Bosnia to Kosovo to
    the Middle East to Northern Ireland. And we will have extra money to
    make sure we're working hard to be prepared for the security problems of
    the future. But we will double our investment in education, clean up the
    environment, and we'll be moving this country forward.''
        If I'd told you all that, you'd have said, ``There's another lying
    politician, if I ever heard one.'' [Laughter] Wouldn't you? You would
    have said, ``That kid needs to go home to Arkansas. He's, you know, he's
    not living in the real world.'' We did better than I thought we could.
    Why? Because we didn't do it alone. All we did was to unleash the
    incredible potential of the American people and give everybody a chance.
        So I say to you, I thank you for being here. I thank you for what
    you've done for me, for Hillary, for Al and Tipper. I thank you for what
    you will do. But don't kid yourself; part of the reason that we've done
    as well as we have is that people like you, with good values and good
    common sense, with an ability to see the future, had the right ideas.
    And you hired us, and we turned them into action. And when you go home
    tonight and you go about your business tomorrow, and people ask you why
    you came and why you're a Democrat, you tell them, ``Because we've got
    good ideas, and they've changed America for the better, and here's what
    we want to do tomorrow and next year and in the new century.''
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:07 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, Beth Dozoretz,
    national finance chair, Democratic National Committee (DNC); former DNC
    chair David Wilhelm and his wife, Deegee; dinner hosts Lewis and Susan
    Manilow; Lou Weisbach, chief executive officer, HA-LO Industries, Inc.,
    and his wife, Ruth; Fred Eychaner, president, Newsweb Corp.; Bruce
    Lindsey, Deputy Counsel to the President; former Senator Carol Moseley-
    Braun; John R. Schmidt, former U.S. Associate Attorney General; Neil
    Hartigan, former State attorney general; and attorney William S. Singer,
    member, Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the
    United States.