[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
[May 19, 1999]
[Pages 807-813]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in New York City
May 19, 1999
Thank you very much. First of all, I want to say a real thank you to
Jack and to Phyllis for
having us here. I've been in their home in New Jersey; I've never been
here before, and I wanted to come. And as you can see from the pictures
on the wall, the Vice President has been
here. [Laughter] And I've been rather jealous of this. [Laughter] To say
this is an interesting house would be an understatement. [Laughter] And
I'm just delighted to be here. And I thank them for opening their home
to us.
I also want to thank Gerry Ferraro
for being here. And Congressman Kostmayer, thank you for being here. And I want to thank Joe
Andrew and Beth Dozoretz and Fran Katz and everybody at the
DNC for the work they've done.
You know, Joe and I, we just finished a western swing; Joe and Beth and I, we've
been out on the west coast. And about every time he got up to introduce
me, he said, ``You know, we're going to win every election from the
White House to dogcatcher.'' And I keep pointing out to him that that is
not such a great distance. [Laughter] He acts like that's such an
encompassing term, you know. He hasn't been paying attention to
Washington lately. [Laughter]
But let me say, I just came--a lot of you know this, but I just came
from a remarkable event with Senator Moynihan and the Governor and a
lot of the transportation authorities here. We announced new plans for
the new Penn Station and the old Farley Post Office Building. And a lot
of you--you probably saw, the last day or 2, the New York Times had a
nice piece on the architectural plans and what was going to be done. But
this is something that Pat Moynihan talked to me about way back in '93.
And I also announced that we were going to put $60 million in our budget
over the next 3 years to help pay more of the Federal share to build
this. But I wanted to sort of use it as a metaphor for the point I want
to make here.
For whatever reason, I think nearly everybody who has been involved
in this project has been captured by the idea of it. And most everybody
with any sense of the past at all deeply regrets the fact that the old
Penn Station was destroyed, and with it a lot of memories of New York
and a magnificent architectural creation.
And so anyway, this little project, it was like a lot of Pat
Moynihan's ideas. It was a little
bit ahead of its time, and it took a while to catch hold. But I signed
on early and told him to just call me back when there was something to
do.
[[Page 808]]
And so slowly it sort of picked up steam, and people kind of got
together. So we announced it today, and everybody felt so good about it.
And I was trying to think to myself why they felt so good about it. I
think it's because it captures the past, and it also throws people into
the future in a way they feel good about, because beautiful public
spaces really help us to build a community across all the lines that
divide us; maybe because nearly everybody alive can remember sometime in
his or her life, maybe when we were all much younger and had more free
time, when we were sitting in a train station just watching people go
by, felt free and kind of elevated by it.
But I say that because, to me, what I've tried to do for the United
States is to give us a sense that we could meet all our challenges but
that we had to meet them together. That meant that everybody had a role
to play and some citizen responsibility. It also means that with all of
our diversity, which ought to be celebrated, not just tolerated but
celebrated, we have to realize that what binds us together is even more
important.
And the story of the last 6 years has been an effort to try to take
the ideas that I developed over a long period of time and that I
developed a belief in, and that I talked to the American people about in
'92 and again in '96, and turn those ideas into policies that then could
be made real in the lives of the American people.
And I'm very grateful for the good things that have happened in this
country. But I came here today to say to you that for whatever role I
played in it, I think the far more important contributing factor was
that we had the right ideas, rooted in the right vision of America, and
we had a good team, and we showed up for work every day--[laughter]--and
we intend to continue doing it down to the last day.
That elicited a few laughs, but anybody that's ever watched any
national capital in politics knows that it's no small achievement to get
your team to show up for work every day, because an enormous amount of
time and energy is always devoted to trying to divide your team and
distract them and wonder who's dropping the dime on whom in the morning
paper, so they won't work. Instead, they'll spend all their time calling
each other names or being torn up and upset or worrying about something
other than the people's business.
So I am here today because for whatever role I have played in this,
I know the most important thing was that we had the right vision and the
right ideas, and we brought teamwork, and we showed up for work every
day. And we need to keep doing that.
And America needs to make that decision again. And every time you
give the people a chance to have a referendum on whether they want
politics to be about politicians and the politics of personal
destruction or whether they want it to be about people and progress and
unity, they always make the right choice. But you have to put the choice
before them, which means we need good candidates and they have to be
adequately financed, and we have to keep the message out there.
The other point I'd like to make rather briefly is that I think it's
quite important for us, even though we have now reached a point where
Presidential elections almost take 2 years, which I think is wrong--I
actually--I announced in October of '91, 13 months before the election.
And that was a short campaign. I waged a short campaign. But I think
it's very important, particularly for the Democrats, because we have
been the party of vision and progress and of trying to pull the country
together and not drive wedges among the people--it's particularly
important for us to keep working, to keep working, to keep producing.
There are things which won't wait until 2001. For example, Jack
mentioned that we'd balanced the budget, and we now have the biggest
surplus ever. I have offered the Congress a plan that would save Social
Security and Medicare and actually pay the publicly held debt of the
United States down to its lowest point since before World War I in 15
years.
Now, why do I think that's a good idea? Because I think it will keep
interest rates lower and investment higher and create more jobs and
raise incomes. It will also make us relatively less dependent on
international capital markets at a time when I am doing my very best to
stabilize them, so we don't have another Asian financial crisis, and we
don't have to worry about spending an enormous amount of money to keep
it from spreading to Brazil or all the things that those of you in
finance know we have been working on the last 2 years.
But I can't say for sure what will happen 10 years from now. I can
say for sure, 10 years from now, that if we have a terrible recession
[[Page 809]]
and we have to deficit spend, it will be a lot better to do it if we've
got a much lower debt base than we have. I can say for sure that if
there's another round of global turmoil 10 years from now, we'll be much
more immune to it if we've got a smaller debt and our interest rate
structures are smaller.
So these are important things. We need to do them now. We don't need
to be waiting around. We need to continue our efforts at educational
excellence. Today I introduced a bill into Congress--I announced it just
before I came up here--every 5 years we have to reauthorize the general
bill by which we give Federal money to public schools in New York and
everywhere else. It's called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
By and large, this money is given to help schools that have a lot of
poor kids or a lot of kids whose first language is not English or a lot
of kids who have special needs--disabilities--their targeted aid. And a
lot of it is given to provide for other kind of special purposes,
technology in the schools and things like that.
None of it, however, is related to results. I have been working for
6 years to get everybody to embrace the idea that we had to have
standards and accountability, and we ought to do a better job making
sure teachers know the subjects they're teaching and all this. But we've
never really been able to move these standards into the schools. So it's
basically--whether they're being observed or not is a function of the
character of the local leadership or the commitment of the local
political leadership or the State leadership.
We now have a chance to actually change the way schools work. If we
say, okay, for the next 5 years we're going to take all the research
that has been done and take the uncontestable findings and make the
pursuit of those findings a condition of the money--no social promotion
but don't say the kids are failures; give them all summer school or
after-school programs--this works. Identify the schools that are failing
and turn them around or close them down, let the kids go some place
else. Have charter schools, have districtwide school choice. Do
something to give the kids other choices.
Those are just a couple of examples of the kinds of things that I
think we have to do. We also--I have to tell you, though, it's not--the
Federal Government and others are going to have to find a way to put
more money into teaching because we're going to have a 2-million teacher
shortage the next decade, with more kids coming into the schools.
Now, we already have too many teachers out there teaching science
and math courses, especially, for which they have not been academically
prepared and in which they, themselves, have not passed performance
exams. So it's all very well--we've got to invest more money in this,
and we've got to be more flexible about getting people into teaching, in
all kinds of ways, that actually know the subjects we expect them to
teach.
So these are some of the things that are in this bill. I think this
is quite important. This could have a lot to do with what America looks
like 10 years from now. If we can't give--everybody knows we've got the
best higher education system in the world and, relatively speaking, a
higher percentage of people going into colleges than other countries. No
one seriously believes that we're giving all of our kids the best
elementary and secondary education in the world. And until we can do
that, we won't be able to take full advantage of this astonishing
diversity in our student body.
And I think this is, by the way, a huge asset for us in the global
economy, to have all these kids from all these different countries. Just
go to the New York school system and look. This is a big deal. This is a
plus, not a minus. This is a good thing in a global society to have this
but only if we can give these kids a chance to learn what they need to
know to do well in the world they will become adults in.
Let me just mention one or two other things. The aftermath--Hillary
and I are going out to Littleton, Colorado, tomorrow. And the aftermath
of that shooting, I think, has had an even more profound impact on the
country than all the school shootings last year did. And you can see it
by what is happening in the Congress now. I think there is finally a
feeling that it's time for everybody to stop making excuses; it's time
for everybody to stop trying to place blame and instead just basically
say, ``I would like to assume whatever my share of responsibility is for
giving a safe childhood back to our children.''
And there's something for the gun people, the entertainment people,
and the Government people to do. There's also something for the school
people and the parents to do, and the
[[Page 810]]
kids, themselves. But I would just like to make a couple of points.
Number one, the American people can take a lot of pride in the fact
that in the United States Senate--that would never have passed any
reasonable gun control on a bet 6 months ago--over 70 Senators last
night voted to impose child trigger locks on the gun manufacturers. They
voted to raise the age of handgun ownership to 21. And they voted on--I
don't like the bill they voted for because it's got too many loopholes,
but at least they're moving toward closing the gun show loophole.
The Speaker of the House yesterday
came out for closing the gun show loophole and for raising the gun
ownership age to 21. This is good. The Democrats who have been for this
for years should reach out the hand across the aisle and say, ``Look,
this is good.''
We've come a long way since 1994 when one of the principal reasons
we lost the House of Representatives in the '94 election was the
lobbying of the NRA against our Members who voted for the crime bill,
with the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. Ask the gentleman from
Pennsylvania; he knows. We lost at least
a dozen and perhaps as many as 20 seats solely because of this. This is
a different country than it was then.
And the grieving of the American people for these children and the
recognition that these two young men, who had gone to such a dark place in their own minds,
had a Tec-9 and were making bombs, large numbers of them, I think it
really registered on people. And we have a chance, therefore, to do
something good.
While I was in California last weekend, I told the entertainment
community I thought that they should stop advertising what is violent
that might be shown to kids who couldn't see the movies or rent the
movies or the video games; that the advertising--people who are exposed
to the advertising ought to be rated in the same way that the people who
are exposed to the underlying product, and that the whole rating system
ought to be reevaluated in terms of gratuitous violence.
Now, this doesn't mean that the people that manufacture guns or the
people that manufacture movies or video games are personally responsible
for anything. But it does mean--we know this--we know that kids are
spending more time on their own, less unsupervised time, that their
parents, when they're with them, are more tired because they're often
working two jobs, than at any previous time. We know this. And
therefore, we know that there will be more of them who will be
vulnerable.
And if that is true and you have easier access to guns and
explosives, on the one hand, and on the other hand, you have now over
300 studies that say that sustained exposure to violence--and the
average 18-year-old has now seen 40,000 televised murders on movies or
TV or a video screen--40,000--and we know that the vulnerable among us
are made more vulnerable, then the whole mixture is a caldron out of
which some dramatically terrible things will happen.
And you don't have to blame anybody personally for this, but we all
have to say, ``Look, we've got to do something about this.'' Then I
think there has to be a national grassroots campaign in every community
involving religious institutions and schools and other groups patterned
on what the Mothers and Students Against Drunk Driving did, patterned on
the national anti-teen-pregnancy campaign--grassroots, value-based,
personal contact with all these kids to try to really dramatically
reduce this. And believe me, it can be done.
The last thing I'd like to say is, I've been in a lot of schools and
there are--some schools do better than others with counseling programs,
with peer mediation programs, with intervention programs that ultimately
lead to mental health for the kids who need it, and also with just
trying to set an environment in which people are encouraged to be in
groups, but the groups are not encouraged to look down on one another
and provoke social discord. I mean, there's a lot that can be done in
the schools by the students.
And finally--a person came up to me the other day--everybody says,
we need to do more to try to make it easier for parents not to lose
touch with their kids. And anybody who has ever raised a child through
adolescence knows that it's an interesting challenge. I mean, you want
your child to become independent, to have space, to begin even to have
things that aren't necessarily shared with you. But you don't want to
lose the connecting cord.
And we have--it's interesting, isn't it, that we think we should get
help in education and instruction and support for everything from losing
weight to improving our athletic skills, to figuring out how to use a
computer to how to make money in the stock market. And yet,
[[Page 811]]
we don't think anybody ought to have instruction in the most important
things in life. And this grassroots campaign ought to be out there
helping parents to deal with the challenge of having their children come
of age and get that independence they're entitled to without severing
the cord that they don't want severed. This is a big deal.
And you know, our family and Al and Tipper Gore, we've worked on a
lot of these issues for years and years and years. And we're going to
spend a lot of time on this in the next 18 months.
The last thing I'd like to say--I'd like to say just a word about
the world, because people are so interested, especially in the crisis in
Kosovo now. We have tried in the last 6 years to be a force for peace,
from Northern Ireland to the Middle East to Bosnia. We've tried to be a
force for reducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction, and we've
made a lot of progress in that and for standing up against terrorism and
the emerging threats of biological and chemical weapons in the hands of
organized criminals or terrorists. We've worked on all that. And we've
tried to expand global prosperity through trade initiatives.
But I think it's ironic--and Jack said it at lunch, he said, ``It's
interesting to me, in this great, modern world we live in, we still
can't figure out what to do about genocide''--since that's what World
War II was really about. And I think if you think about what
characterizes the modern age in a positive sense--an explosion of
technology, especially in the telecommunications area; computer science
increasingly being merged with the biological sciences, so that when the
human genome project is completed we'll be able to get a map of--the
genetic map of ourselves and our children and our grandchildren, and it
should move us very rapidly over the next 15 years to another dramatic
increase in life expectancy. So that's the first thing, this explosion
of technology and its immersion with telecommunications and with the
biological sciences.
And then the second thing is the world getting closer together,
national borders becoming more porous, the interconnections of people
becoming closer. Isn't it ironic when we're dreaming of our children all
learning how to speak different languages, having E-mail pen pals in
Asia and Africa and Latin America, and all this sort of interesting
stuff that we want to dream about, that the number one problem we're
facing in the world today is the incredible, durable persistence of the
oldest demon of human society, the fear of people who are different from
us. And the fear leads to loathing. The loathing leads to
dehumanization. The dehumanization leads to the justification of
killing. And the justification of killing then often leads to the
justification of systematic killing, based on racial or ethnic or
religious difference.
But it is the oldest problem of human society. And it is a true
irony that when we--I look at these young people here, and I think:
Gosh, the world they'll live in 30 years from now will be full of things
that I can't even imagine. Will they really be burdened by this
primordial madness that manifested itself in Bosnia or in the little
villages of Rwanda, where 700,000 people at least were hacked to death
in a hundred days, in a country not a colonial creation, those people
had been living together for 500 years, or Bosnia, where a quarter of a
million people died, and 2\1/2\ million people were made prisoners, and
mosques were burned, and libraries and museums were burned up, and books
were destroyed that were priceless--or what's going on in Kosovo?
Will the people of Northern Ireland take the last step that's still
hanging them up to make peace? Will the evident desire of the voters in
Israel for peace and security find a concrete expression in the next few
months?
The biggest problem to all of it is when it gets right down to the
lick log, it's hard to hold hands with somebody who's really different
from you and jump off into a common future. It's hard.
And I know a lot of people that question what I have done and how I
have done it in Kosovo. All I can tell you is I'm convinced that I've
done the right thing in the best available way. And one of the things
you hire a President to do is to think about all the implications of all
the options that are available. But I would far rather be here today
answering the questions that I have to answer to the American people and
to the press about what we have done and why we have done it and how we
have done it, than I would like to be here today asking you to
contribute money to our party and to our cause if I were sitting on my
hands and letting those people be butchered and thrown out of their
homes and plundered and their records erased.
[[Page 812]]
And I think the fact--it's amazing to me how many American Jews have
told me they support what we are doing for Kosovar Muslims. It is a
great thing. It is something special. We have no territorial ambitions
there. We have no economic ambitions there. We, in fact, are going to
have to spend more money to help them rebuild the area and build it
higher than it was. What we want is for our children to be able to live
in the world where they can maximize the explosion of technology and
maximize the openness of borders, and you cannot do that in a world
where you're worried about being blown up by a terrorist who is driven
by ethnic, religious, or racial hatred.
That is what this is about. It's very much in our security interests
to do this. But it's because of the world toward which we're going. If
this were 1950, it wouldn't be. The world we're going to live in does
not need a Europe consumed, even at its edge in southeastern Europe, by
this kind of hatred.
Let me just close with this story. I've been telling this for 5 days
now, but I was overwhelmed last week. I had an experience which to me
embodies the best in this country. Last week, at the request of our
leader in the Senate, Senator Daschle, and
the other four Democratic Senators from North and South Dakota and
Montana, we hosted in the White House a meeting of 19 Native American
tribal leaders from the upper plains States.
They are the poorest of all of our Indian tribes. And most of them
don't have any gambling. They don't have any population density. And
it's long way from here to there, so they don't get a lot of new
investment. And they haven't been part of this great booming economy.
They haven't noticed that the stock market went from 3,200 to 11,000 in
the last 6\1/2\ years. It just totally escaped them. I mean, they
haven't felt this.
So they came to the White House. And the first thing they did was,
they said, well, now--and we met in the Roosevelt Room, which is a room
that some of you have been in--it's commemorated, basically dedicated to
Franklin and Eleanor and Theodore Roosevelt. And Theodore Roosevelt's
Nobel Peace Prize is on the mantelpiece there, which he got for helping
to end the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.
So they say, ``Well, can we get all this stuff out of here and sit
in a circle? That's our custom.'' So we get the table out, and everybody
is sitting in a circle. And a lot of Cabinet members were there. And
their spokesperson was a 6'6'' tribal chief named Tex Hall--not exactly your Native American name, but
anyway, that's his name. [Laughter] So he gets up and speaks, and then
everybody speaks, and they talked about the education concerns and the
health care and the economic concerns. And I came in about midway
through the meeting; they all were talking. So at the end, Chief Hall,
he stands up again, and he said, ``I want to tell you something.'' He
said, ``There's something else we want to do before we go.'' He said,
``We have a proclamation here we have signed, supporting what you are
doing in Kosovo''--representing the poorest Americans, right, and the
first Americans. He said, ``You see, Mr. President, we know something
about ethnic cleansing. And our country has made a lot of progress, and
here we are today, and we think we should stand up against it.''
And then this other young man said that
he wanted to speak. And he represented one of the tribes in South
Dakota. He wasn't very tall, and he had this beautiful piece of Indian
jewelry on around his neck, silver jewelry. And he said this--you think
about this when you leave here today, about what kind of country you
want in the 21st century--he said, ``Mr. President, I had two uncles.
One of them was on the beach at Normandy. The other was the first Native
American fighter pilot in the history of the American military. My
great-great-grandfather was slaughtered by the 7th Calvary at Wounded
Knee,'' he said, ``and here I am in the White House.'' He said, ``We
have come a long way from my great-great-grandfather to my uncles to
this day. I have only one son, and he means more to me than anything. I
would be proud for him to go and fight against ethnic cleansing in
Kosovo.'' He said, ``We know what is right now.'' And you could not hear
anyone breathe in that room.
I ask you to think about that. This is a different country than it
was 6\1/2\ years ago. It needs to be a different country 6\1/2\ years
from now. We have still so much to do. But If you made me choose one
thing I could do in the next nearly 2 years I've got left, it would be
to bring the American people closer together, not to give up our fights
and our disagreements and our arguments but to just remember this is
quite an extraordinary place. We have had quite a journey. We have a lot
to do at home
[[Page 813]]
and abroad, and we'll be able to do it if we don't forget that what
binds us together is more important than all the things that divide us.
Thank you, and God bless you.
Note: The President spoke at 1:55 p.m. at a private residence. In his
remarks, he referred to luncheon hosts Jack and Phyllis Rosen; former
Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine A. Ferraro; former Congressman
Peter H. Kostmayer; Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, Beth Dozoretz,
national finance chair, and Fran Katz, national finance director,
Democratic National Committee; Gov. George E. Pataki of New York;
Columbine High School gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold; Tex Hall,
chairman of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation (the Three
Affiliated Tribes); and Gregg Bourland, chairman, Cheyenne River Sioux
Tribe.