[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
[April 16, 1999]
[Pages 572-575]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Majority 2000 Dinner in Weston, Massachusetts
April 16, 1999

    Well, first of all, I would like to thank Senator Kennedy and Senator Daschle 
for their introductions. [Laughter] I don't want Senator Kennedy to be 
upset at Senator Daschle. I told Senator Daschle I did not want Kennedy 
to introduce me. [Laughter] And he drew the wrong conclusion--I just 
didn't want Patrick up here making those 
gestures introducing me. [Laughter]
    I tell you, Patrick, I have never heard you so funny; you've got a 
second career. [Laughter]
    Like everyone else, I want to thank Alan and Susan and all of the others 
who helped to raise the funds tonight. I'd also like to thank the people 
who provided our meal and those who served it. And I want to thank our 
wonderful, wonderful musicians, Gary Burton and 
his pianist. They were terrific. Thank you very 
much. You guys were great. Thank you.
    As Senator Kennedy said, I am profoundly indebted to the people of 
Massachusetts. Massachusetts has been wonderful to me and to Hillary, to 
Al and to Tipper Gore, to give our administration the support that we 
need and to send such remarkable people to the Congress. A majority of 
all of the Congress people from Massachusetts, all the Democrats, are 
here tonight. And I thank Congressman 
Moakley, Congressman Delahunt, 
Congressman Meehan, Congressman 
Markey, and Congressman Tierney, along with Congressman Kennedy.
    We're also glad to be joined tonight by Congressman Earl 
Blumenauer, who is from Oregon. He's a long 
way from home, and we're glad he's here. Thank you very much. And our 
wonderful Democratic whip, Dave Bonior, who 
took me to his district in Michigan today to meet with the Albanian-
Americans and to hear their stories, along with Congressman 
Gephardt. I, too, want to say how 
profoundly grateful I am for what Senator Kerry said, how much it means, and for what he does for you, and 
for Senator Kennedy.
    And as others have said, we could not have better leaders in the 
United States Congress than Senator Daschle and Congressman Gephardt. 
I could give you 1,000 examples. But suffice it to say that I do not 
believe that we would be here tonight in the position we're in, with the 
country in the position it is in, had it not been for their leadership and their 
support for me, and their always willingness to come

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in and have these fascinating discussions and, even when they think I'm 
wrong, to tell me they think I'm wrong. And we try to work it out, work 
together, and go forward together. And it's been a remarkable 
partnership.
    I also would say, to echo something Dick Gephardt said--and I want 
all of you to know--you know, most of you have been to enough of these 
political fundraisers that you're used to politicians getting up and 
blowing smoke over one another, you know, and saying that they think 
this one is the greatest person since the redwoods began to grow in 
California and all of that--[laughter]--the other one was born in a log 
cabin he built himself--all of those. [Laughter] You're used to hearing 
all that sort of stuff. I know that. And you think that we all leave, we 
go back to telling bad stories on one another and cutting each other 
down.
    I'm telling you, the team of leaders we have now and the people that 
represent you in Massachusetts--there is a profound mutual respect born 
of shared goals and shared dreams for the American people.
    I told all my folks when I became President, I said, ``I didn't work 
in Washington before, and I'm going to make my fair share of mistakes. 
But one of the great advantages that I have is that I lived in a little 
State where I was expected to show up for work every day, and where I 
didn't have to spend half my time worrying about what was in the 
newspaper that day and who was up and who was down and who was leaking 
and who was not.'' And my theory is, if we stay together and work 
together and we're loyal to each other and we air our differences 
honestly and we show up for work every day, eventually something good 
will happen for the American people.
    Now, I think the evidence is that that happened. But what you need 
to know is, that's the sort of leadership we have in our party. 
Dick and David and Tom and the rest of our 
crowd, they're like what you expect from the Massachusetts delegation. 
They show up for work every day. They do not get paralyzed by this story 
or that story or spending all their time trying to manipulate who's up 
and who's down in Washington today. They have an agenda rooted in their 
concerns for you and our children's future, and they show up.
    And it's just like any other job. I know we'd like for you to 
believe that you've got to be just one step short of Albert Einstein to 
do all these jobs we do. But a lot of it is deciding what the right 
thing to do is, clearly laying it out, and going at it day-in and day-
out, year-in and year-out.
    So I want to thank you for investing in the future of the Democratic 
majority in the Congress, because they have proved for 6 long years that 
they have good ideas, good values, and great work habits, and they will 
deliver for the United States of America, thanks to your help. And I 
thank you very much.
    I also want to say, Alan, thank you 
very much for collecting the money for the relief effort in Kosovo. Let 
me just briefly say, the camps in Albania are teeming. Tiny Macedonia, 
with its own ethnic difficulties to deal with, trying to preserve its 
democracy, it's deeply strained. We need all the help we can get. And 
frankly, the relief agencies are very, very good; they are very 
efficient; they don't waste the money. And cash is better than in-kind 
contributions, because the needs shift daily. And anything you can do to 
help that, I hope you will.
    Now, I'm not going to put you through another speech of any length, 
but I want to take 5 minutes and ask you to think about why you should 
want these people in the majority in 2000. And when it happens, I'm 
going to miss it. [Laughter] But I just want to tell you for 5 minutes, 
I want you to think about this.
    Yes, our economy is going well, and I'm grateful for it. And the 
welfare rolls are about half what they were, and I'm grateful for it. 
And the crime rate is at a 30-year low, and I'm grateful for it. America 
is working again. And we've been a force for peace from Northern Ireland 
to the Middle East and to Bosnia, and I'm grateful for it. We've asked 
the world to join with us in fighting the more modern threats of 
terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and global warming. And we've 
got a direction that we're on that's good, and I'm grateful for it.
    But I want to ask you to just take a couple of minutes and think 
about why you should want these people in the majority. Because in the 
year 2000, when the voters are asked to vote, there will be those who 
come forward and basically say, ``Well, things are rocking along, and 
I'll tell you what you want to hear, and I'll give you what you want to 
get, and let's just go back to business as usual.''
    The worst thing we could do is to forget what got us here over the 
last 6 years. What

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got us here was taking on the hard problems and working like crazy, day-
in and day-out, week-in and week-out, and challenging the American 
people and challenging the elite leaders of all the major sectors of our 
society to think about unmet problems and unseized opportunities.
    And as I look ahead to the 21st century, I am grateful America is 
working again. I'm grateful that the economy is benefiting ordinary 
people more than ever before. We have the lowest unemployment rate we've 
ever recorded among minorities in this country, since we started keeping 
separate statistics almost 30 years ago. I'm grateful for that. But we 
have some big unmet challenges, and I won't go through our whole agenda, 
but we've got an agenda to deal with every one.
    The aging of America is a huge challenge. And if we don't deal with 
Social Security and Medicare and long-term care, and do it in a 
responsible way, then when all of us baby boomers retire, we will put an 
unconscionable burden on our children and their ability to raise our 
grandchildren. We have a strategy that will deal with it.
    We have more and more families who work and raise children at the 
same time, both single-parent and two-parent households. We have not 
done enough in the United States to help people balance work and family. 
We are better than any other major country at creating jobs. We have 
many strengths that other countries would give anything to have. But we 
have not done as well as we should, and as well as we can without in any 
way hurting economic growth, in helping our families to balance their 
childrearing responsibilities and their work responsibilities. We have 
to do more in health care, more in child care, more in providing leave 
time from work without losing jobs. We must do it. There is no more 
important work than raising our children, and we can do better.
    The third thing we have to do is to make sure--we're Democrats; this 
is our job--we have to make sure everybody gets a chance to be a part of 
the new economy. As low as unemployment is, there are still places where 
it's high. There are places where there has been no new investment.
    We have a strategy to keep the economy growing and to spread the 
benefits of it. For one thing, if our plan prevails over the Republican 
plan, we're going to pay the debt of this country down to its lowest 
point since before World War I, over the next 15 years. That means low 
interest rates, high investment, and more jobs everywhere. And we're 
going to give the same incentives for people to invest in poor parts of 
America we give them today to invest in poor countries in the rest of 
the world. I think that is nothing but right. Don't take it away from 
the rest of the world; just give the poor parts of America a chance to 
get their piece of the American dream, as well. And I think that is 
terribly important, and Democrats ought to be for that.
    We have to keep working to prove we can clean up the environment and 
grow the economy, and we have an agenda to do that.
    The most important thing I want to say to you tonight is that we 
have a job to do at home that mirrors the job we are trying to do in 
Kosovo today.
    Isn't it ironic that, on the verge of a new century and a new 
millennium, where most of us--most of the people in this room have this 
great dream of a 21st century world that is more peaceful, more 
prosperous, and more free than any time in all of human history; where 
people work together across national lines to lift each other up and 
solve problems together, whether they're the spread of disease or 
climate change or the threat of terrorism or narcotrafficking or weapons 
of mass destruction. We're working together to make good things happen 
and to press bad things down. And this whole vision, with this explosion 
of modern technology and science, is threatened by the prospect that we 
will marry modern technology with the most ancient hatreds known to 
human society, rooted in the fear of people who are different from us.
    Now, we are in Kosovo--I think Dick referred to this, to the E-mails 
we were reading coming out of Albania. We're in Kosovo, first of all, 
because innocent people are being driven from their homes, having their 
villages burned down, having their family records destroyed, with their 
children being raped, and people being murdered; because we think we can 
help to stop it; and because we have learned the hard way in the 20th 
century, if something like that's going on and you think you can help to 
stop it and you don't, in that part of the world, it's just going to get 
worse. So it's a humanitarian thing.

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    But it's also a part of what we want the 21st century to be like. 
Doesn't it seem bizarre to you that on the one hand, we talk about the 
Internet being the fastest growing human communications instrument in 
all of human history. We talk about having our kids study halfway around 
the world. We relish in the ethnic and racial and religious diversity of 
Boston. Detroit, we used to think of Detroit as being diverse because--
and I can say this because I'm from the South--because Southern blacks 
and Southern whites couldn't make a living in the South after the Second 
World War, so they went to Detroit to get a job in the auto plant. That 
was our definition of diversity. Wayne County now has people from 150 
different national and ethnic groups--not Chicago, not New York, not Los 
Angeles--Detroit.
    And we're sitting here worried about people who still want to kill 
each other over 600-year-old grievances. They want to fight over smaller 
and smaller and smaller pieces of land instead of thinking bigger and 
bigger and bigger about how, if they all got together, what a future 
they could make for their children.
    And so I tell you that we're there for humanitarian reasons. We're 
there for strategic reasons. And we're there because we do not want our 
children to live in a 21st century world where very smart people filled 
with very narrow hatreds can access technology, weaponry, missile 
technology, and torment the world because they're growing smaller in 
spirit, when they should be growing larger in vision--especially in the 
heart of Europe, which is so critical to our security.
    And we have to keep working against it here, which is why the 
Democrats are for stronger hate crimes legislation and for the 
``Employment and Non-Discrimination Act,'' and why we have supported 
national service.
    Alan Khazei is here; he founded City Year. 
I'm the biggest flack he's got. I go all over the world talking about 
City Year. I knew when I ran for President in 1991 and 1992 that one of 
the things that we needed to do was to build a stronger sense of 
community in America, across racial and cultural and religious and 
economic lines. And I had this vision that we could get young people 
involved in service and help them go to college. And I went to City Year 
in Boston, and I knew what it was I wanted America to do. I'm very proud 
of the fact that in its first 4 years the national service program, 
AmeriCorps, has had as many volunteers as the Peace Corps did in its 
first 20 years. And you owe that to them.
    Now, I want to close with this thought. One of my favorite lines 
that President Kennedy ever spoke was the speech he made about Germany 
and the cold war in Berlin. Most people remember, ``Ich bin ein 
Berliner,'' and all that. But he said this--I want you to think about 
this in terms of Kosovo--in the middle of the cold war, John Kennedy 
said, ``Freedom has many difficulties, and our democracy is far from 
perfect, but we never had to put up a wall to keep our people in.''
    Now the Berlin Wall is down. The barriers of communism have fallen. 
But all over the world today, there are places where people are building 
walls in their hearts because they feel that they only count if they can 
look down on somebody who is different from them. And those walls are 
every bit as powerful as the Berlin Wall was, and in a profound way, 
harder to tear down.
    America must both do good and be good on this issue of community and 
our common humanity. It is our great challenge and perhaps the most 
compelling reason that the Democratic Party should be America's majority 
party in the 21st century.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 10:15 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Alan D. Solomont, former national 
finance chair, Democratic National Committee, and his wife, Susan; and 
pianist Makoto Ozone.