[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.