[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
[April 27, 1999]
[Pages 650-653]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Chevy Chase, 
Maryland
April 27, 1999

    Thank you very much. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been 
an atypical and thoroughly enjoyable fundraiser. [Laughter]
    First of all, when I was introduced, Father, to you, I thought to myself, how did the conversation go 
when Tommy Boggs asked you to come 
and pray over all these politicians, lobbyists, and fundraisers? And I 
think it must have gone something like this: He asked you, and you said, 
``Well, if I can pray over you, Tom, I can pray over anybody.'' 
[Laughter]
    Let me say--we were having a conversation here at the table, and I 
was telling Pat Kluge, Tom, how much I liked your whole family and how much I 
admired your late sister Barbara and treasured the brief occasions I had 
to be with her, how I will always cherish the fact that I was with your 
remarkable father on the last weekend of his life, in San Antonio, 
Texas, when I was a very young man--and I was completely enamored of 
him--and how your unbelievable mother took me under her wing and didn't shed me when a lot 
of other people were, in 1992. [Laughter] And now she represents me to 
the Pope--[laughter]--and is maybe the only person on the Earth--
[laughter]--who could convince the Pope that I am worth dealing with. 
[Laughter] So, anyway--so I love the Boggs family. [Laughter]
    And I understand that one of the things that Lindy's going to do before she leaves the Vatican 
is to nominate you for sainthood, Barbara. 
[Laughter]
    But let me say to all of you, I appreciate, Tom, what you said in the introduction. But I would like to 
say that I hope all the people who came here, who are not rank-and-file 
Democrats, would just consider a few things.
    We had a remarkable NATO Summit here over the weekend, the largest 
number of world leaders who had ever been gathered in Washington, heads 
of government and heads of state, at one time, not only to deal with the 
immediate crisis of Kosovo but to envision the world of the 21st century 
that we want to make--a world in which Europe, for the first time in 
history, is undivided, democratic, and free, and at peace; a world in 
which people are working together and cherishing both their diversity 
and their interdependence; a world which offers our children the promise 
of greater peace and prosperity than any age in human history.
    And at the end of that summit, Al From and the 
Democrat Leadership Council sponsored a forum in which Governor 
Romer spoke about his experiences as Governor and 
the new labor commissioner in Georgia--
the first, along with

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the attorney general, the first two 
African-Americans ever elected to statewide office in Georgia--talked 
about the work he had done to move people from the welfare rolls to the 
work rolls.
    The mayor of Denver, an African-
American in a city where African-Americans are decidedly in the 
minority, talked about the work he had done to get the unemployment rate 
in the city of Denver down to 3.9 percent and what they'd done to try to 
knit the community together and build support for the schools.
    And the Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, Kathleen Kennedy 
Townsend, talked about, among 
other things, the work they were doing to try to keep more people out of 
prison but to make people with drug-related offenses be drug tested 
twice a week as a condition of being out of prison, and how much it had 
reduced the growth of imprisonment, reduced the crime rate, and reduced 
the recidivism rate.
    And it was a remarkable thing. But what really is interesting about 
it is, the discussion was not partisan in any conventional sense. And I 
brought to the discussion the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the Chancellor of Germany, 
the Prime Minister of Italy, and the Prime 
Minister of The Netherlands, all of whom represent 
the same sort of movement that came to our country when Al Gore and I 
were elected in 1992.
    I say that to make this point: Every major country has to confront 
the challenges of creating as much opportunity as we can in the global 
economy and at the same time preserving the cohesion that any decent 
nation and any decent community has. How do you get the benefits of all 
this exploding technology and entrepreneurialism and global economics 
and retain and strengthen the benefits that come from supporting 
families and communities, raising children well?
    And I believed in 1992, when I ran for President, and I believe it 
more strongly today, that we had to break the citizens of this country 
from the grip of an outdated political debate; that it would be 
possible, if you followed the right policies, to balance the budget and 
increase your investment in education and health care. It would be 
possible to preserve the environment and improve it and grow the economy 
at a more rapid rate. It would be possible to move the world toward 
peace and still use force in a disciplined way to stand up for peace and 
to stand against the resurgence of ethnic and racial and religious 
hatred in the world.
    And insofar as we have had any success, I am thankful that I could 
be the instrument of that in the White House for the 18 million new jobs 
and the lowest unemployment in 29 years and the first surplus since 
1960, now to the biggest peacetime surpluses ever. I'm grateful for 
that.
    I'm grateful that we have over 90 percent of our children immunized 
against serious childhood diseases for the first time in the history of 
the country. I'm grateful for the tax credits and other advances which 
have opened the doors of college virtually to every person in America.
    I'm grateful that the air and water is cleaner and that we've set 
aside more land in perpetuity than any administration in history except 
those run by the two Roosevelts. I'm grateful for all that.
    But it all started with a set of ideas, that we had to find a way to 
guarantee opportunity for every responsible citizen, to reinforce 
responsibility, and to build a genuine sense of community so that we all 
felt not only that we had obligations to one another that crossed all 
the lines that divide us but that we would all actually be better off if 
our neighbors were better off.
    And we are trying to carry that into the world, into working for 
peace, from the Middle East and Northern Ireland to the Balkans; trying 
to help our friends in Asia get over their financial crisis and keep it 
from spreading to Latin America; in trying to make sure that the 
economic growth that has still escaped some of the inner cities and poor 
rural areas and Native American reservations in our country can at long 
last be extended to them; in trying to guarantee that every child in 
this country has an excellent, world-class education; in trying to deal 
with the challenges of aging by reforming Social Security and Medicare 
for the 21st century and at the same time continuing to pay down our 
debt, so that we can liberate our children from excessive dependence on 
high borrowing at high interest rates and excessive reliance on all the 
turbulence that may yet still engulf the global economy.
    All of that started with a set of ideas, with a group of people who 
were prepared to think in a different way and to have values without 
having ideology, to have ideas that were tested

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not only by whether they were consistent with those values but by 
whether they in fact worked or not.
    Today we had a truly astonishing meeting in the White House with 40 
Members of Congress that included three Republicans--three brave 
Republicans--to talk about something I had planned to do for some time, 
before the terrible tragedy in Colorado, about what we had to do to 
strengthen our protection that guns won't fall into the hands of 
children.
    And I said then and I will say again, I believe very strongly that 
there are things in our culture that have to be challenged and that 
there is too much ready violence in the culture. And between Hillary and 
Al and Tipper Gore, we have worked on this hard, now, for 6 years. We've 
got the TV rating system and the V-chip that will soon be in all new 
televisions.
    We've made a lot of headway even on the Internet, in giving parents 
the tools to screen out certain websites on the Internet. The technology 
is there. I have to say parenthetically, with the head of the National 
Education Association here, our biggest 
challenge is going to be trying to teach the parents of this country to 
be half as good on computers as their kids are. But if we can do that, 
the technology is there. We've worked on these things. There are 
cultural issues, all right, and we need to do more there.
    But it is also true that there is another culture in America, made 
up of people who are overwhelmingly God-fearing citizens who pay their 
taxes and obey the law and show up when they're needed and who love to 
hunt, and they use their guns for sporting purposes and have been, I 
think, welded into a political force designed to stop us from dealing 
with the objective things we can do about guns to make our society 
safer.
    They've been convinced that every little thing we do, no matter how 
small or modest, is the camel's nose in the tent, and somebody's going 
to come get their hunting rifle. And as a result, our society has 
plainly failed to do what any great and sensible country would do.
    And today I said I was going to go back and try to get the waiting 
period of the Brady bill back, even though we have the insta-check, that 
we were going to try to apply the Brady law and its prohibition on 
handgun ownership to juveniles who have been convicted of violent 
offenses, that we were going to try to plug some loopholes in the law 
that relates to assault weapons and gun shows, where there is no 
background check, and a lot of other things.
    But I want to make a general point. I come from a culture, as do 
some of these--Tommy Boggs was--I 
thought I was going to see him a few weeks ago, and he was down at Beryl 
Anthony's hunting lodge instead of with me. So we come out of this 
culture. I was 12 years old the first time I ever shot a .22 at a can on 
top of a fencepost in the country.
    But I promised myself, when I got elected President, that because of 
my background, I was in a position to try to take on the positions that 
the NRA had taken and at least have a halfway decent chance of 
explaining it to the American people. And I'm proud that we've done 
that. We've got the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. And I hope 
we get some more things like that.
    But the point I want to make to you is, that took a decision, and I 
had to have a party that backed me up. And I lost some House Members. 
One of the reasons we're sitting here worrying about whether we can pick 
up six more House Members is, more than six lost their seats in 1994 
because they stood up and voted for the Brady bill and they stood up and 
voted for the assault weapons ban. And there are children alive in 
America today because of it. And we were right about that.
    So you don't have to be all attached to party labels to believe that 
ideas matter in politics and conventional wisdoms have to be challenged 
if the country is going to go forward and become what it ought to be.
    And so, I just want all of you to know here that for those of you 
who have been with us all along, I am grateful. For those of you who are 
here for the first time, I am very grateful.
    I'm not running for anything. I'm here because I believe in what 
we've done, and I know there's a lot more to do, not only in the 2 years 
I have remaining on my term but in the years ahead. And this country 
needs to be led from a dynamic, vital center rooted in a concern for 
these basic ideas, not the politics of left and right but how to get 
opportunity to every responsible citizen and how to build a genuine 
sense of community in which we care for other people because it is 
morally right to do, but we also are smart enough to understand that 
we'll all do better if other Americans do better. That unleashes a flood 
of good ideas. And if

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you can only get half of them done, the country is in a much better 
place.
    So when I look back on the last 6 years, when I look to the next 2 
years, when I look ahead to the next 10 years, I believe the philosophy 
we have brought to America is the right one. And I believe our country 
would be better served if we had more people who believed in it and 
worked for it every day. That's why I'm here supporting Joe and Beth and 
Loretta and Roy and 
Andy and all of our fine team, because I believe 
that with all my heart.
    And if you believe that this is a better country in the last 6 
years, I appreciate it if you think that I had something to do with it. 
But I was the instrument of the ideas that, when implemented, made 
America a better place. And we need more people who can carry those 
ideas and have the ability to implement them.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:22 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to Father William L. George, assistant to the 
president of Georgetown University for Federal relations; dinner hosts 
Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr., and his wife, Barbara; Patricia Kluge, 
president, Kluge Investments; Corinne Claiborne (Lindy) Boggs, U.S. 
Ambassador to the Holy See; Commissioner of Labor Michael L. Thurmond 
and State Attorney General Thurbert E. Baker of Georgia; Al From, 
president, Democratic Leadership Council; Mayor Wellington E. Webb of 
Denver, CO; Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom; Chancellor 
Gerhard Schroeder of Germany; Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema of Italy; 
Prime Minister Wim Kok of The Netherlands; Robert F. Chase, president, 
National Education Association; Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, Beth 
Dozoretz, national finance chair, Representative Loretta Sanchez, 
general cochair, former Governor Roy Romer of Colorado, general chair, 
and Andy Tobias, treasurer, Democratic National Committee; and former 
Representative Beryl Anthony of Arkansas.