[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
[May 16, 1999]
[Pages 787-793]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in San Diego, 
California
May 16, 1999

    Thank you very much. I was hoping that no one in California had 
heard that joke I told. [Laughter] They liked it in Albany, however. 
[Laughter]
    Let me say to Irwin and Joan, first of all, I want to thank you for opening this 
wonderful home and for giving me a tour of the art and a tour of your 
family. [Laughter] What a wonderful, big, beautiful group they are. And 
I

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thank you for your philanthropy and for your commitment to so many good 
causes, and for bringing all of us together today. A lot of my old 
friends are here and some people that I've never had the honor to meet 
before. I appreciate that.
    I'd also like to say how glad I am to be here with Bob and Jane Filner. You know, I deal 
with a lot of Members of Congress--on occasion, even Members of the 
other party deal with me. I can honestly say that I have never met and 
dealt with any Member of the House of Representatives who was more 
consistent and persistent in trying to get me and the White House to 
respond to the needs of his district than Bob Filner. There isn't 
anybody else who works any harder at that, and you can be very proud of 
that. He's done a very fine job.
    I want to thank Assemblywoman Susan Davis 
for being willing to run for Congress; it's an arduous endeavor. It 
takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of heart.
    When I was 27 years old in 1974, I ran for Congress, and I lost. I 
wonder if I'd be here today if I'd won. [Laughter] But I remember, I ran 
against a man who had 99 percent name recognition and 85 percent 
approval. And I ran for 11 months, and 6 weeks before the election, I 
was still behind 59 to 23, and I lost--I got 48\1/2\ percent of the 
vote. I say that just to encourage you. Every election has a certain 
rhythm, and my instinct is, if you go out there and talk about the 
things you have done so well in the assembly, the passion you have for 
educating our children, the role that Federal Government needs to play 
to support our local schools, and the other issues, I think you'll do 
very well. And I hope we can be of help.
    I want to thank Joe Andrew and Beth 
Dozoretz and all the people on our team for 
working with the Democratic Party. And I'd like to say a word of 
appreciation to everyone in San Diego who is responsible for the 
selection of my friend of 30 years Alan Bersin, 
the new superintendent of schools. I thank you.
    When I saw Alan today--he's got a great gift for one-liners, which I 
have appropriated over the last 30 years. And so he came through the 
line today; he looked at me and said, ``And I thought you had a hard 
job.'' [Laughter]
    But let me also say I have a very special feeling about this 
community. I've had some wonderful days here. I've had some wonderful 
family vacation days here. As you noted, Hillary just got back from Macedonia and a trip to Northern 
Ireland--a brief trip to Northern Ireland, where we're working to try to 
close the last gaps in the peace process there--and couldn't be here. 
And I talked to her this morning on the way down, and she was quite 
jealous that I was coming back to San Diego. We have nothing but 
wonderful memories of this great place.
    Also, in 1992, when the Vice President and I carried this county, it 
was the first time since Harry Truman had carried it in 1948 that a 
Democrat had carried it--and looking at the signs, pro and con, on the 
way in today, I would say there's still some disagreement about what 
ought to happen. [Laughter]
    Let me say, you're here at a fundraiser for the Democratic Party. 
And I'm grateful for that. I'd like you to know why I'm here. I mean, 
I'm not running for anything. Maybe I'll try to get on a school board 
someday, but I won't be on the ballot in the year 2000.
    I am here because I believe in what I have done and because I 
believe that whatever good has come of the country because of my 
Presidency, I should be grateful for. But I am under no illusion that 
the most important thing was me. The most important thing was the vision 
that we shared for America and the ideas we pursued. And I believe it 
needs to continue. That's why I'm here. And when you leave, I hope 
you'll be convinced that that's why you were here.
    When I ran for President in late 1991 and '92, it was not something 
I had intended to do until just a few months before in that year. I was 
very concerned about the problems that our country was having and that 
there didn't seem to be any driving vision. And I don't think you can 
run any great enterprise without one.
    I also believed as a Governor--as President Bush said, a Governor of 
a small southern State--that most of the rhetoric I heard in Washington, 
unfortunately often from both parties, bore so little relationship to 
the world I was living in and the problems I was facing and the way I 
was having to deal with them. And it seemed to me that we needed to 
change the nature of the debate and to come up with some basic ideas 
that were not then driving policy in Washington, that were new but 
rooted in the very old-fashioned vision of our country.

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    I have always believed that when Americans widen the circle of 
opportunity for all responsible citizens, when they deepen the meaning 
of freedom, when they strengthen the bonds of community, we do well. And 
so I went out and said I want a 21st century America where every 
responsible citizen has the chance to live out his or her dreams, where 
across all of the differences we have we are bound together more closely 
as one community and where we are still the world's leading force for 
peace and freedom and prosperity. And I think to get there we have to 
think about things in a different way.
    For example, I think that we have to think about rewarding 
entrepreneurs in a way that expands the middle class and gives more poor 
people a chance to work their way into the middle class. I think we have 
to believe that we can grow the economy and preserve and even improve 
the environment. I think we have to believe that we can create a country 
in which people can succeed, not only at work but at home, in the most 
important job of any society, raising children. I think we have to 
believe that we can reduce the welfare rolls and put people in the work 
force in a way that does not require them to stop being good parents to 
their children. I think we have to reduce the crime rate, not only by 
doing a better job of enforcement, but a better job of prevention--
something Mr. Bersin did in his previous 
incarnation as your U.S. Attorney.
    Anyway, those are just some of the ideas. I believe that we had to 
be a much more active force for peace in the world, but I thought we had 
to be willing to use our power to stand up against terrorism, weapons of 
mass destruction, and ethnic and religious cleansing and killing. And 
most of the last 6 years have been an effort by the Vice President and 
our administration, our Cabinet, and all the rest of us, working with me 
to try to find ways to put those ideas into concrete policies and make 
them come alive in the country.
    Along the way, we've given the American people the smallest 
Government they've had since John Kennedy was President. Federal 
establishment is now the smallest it's been since 1962. But it is more 
active in trying to create the conditions and give people the tools to 
solve their own problems. And I believe that these ideas resonate pretty 
well with Americans, whether they're Democrats or independents or 
Republicans, because they make sense and because they are related to the 
world toward which we are moving.
    Now, there is a lot of the future present in this room in what you 
all do. It seems to me that the two most dominant elements in the world 
of the 21st century toward which we're moving, are the explosion of 
technology and the increasing interdependence of people across national 
lines. Even our biggest threats grow out of that. We are increasingly 
vulnerable because of the openness of our society and the openness of 
our technology to people who would use this for destructive forces.
    And what we have to do now is to look ahead to the unmet challenges 
of the country and bring sort of the same sort of commonsense commitment 
to that vision. It means politically we have to have good candidates 
properly financed to have a good message to run in the year 2000 for all 
of our positions. They have to know why they're running.
    You know, whenever anyone comes up to me and asks me if they should 
run for office, I always say, ``Why do you want the job?'' And you 
better be able to tell a total stranger in 30 seconds and then have a 5-
minute version on why you want the job. And if you can't answer that 
question, you shouldn't run. And if you can, ignore the polls and run.
    And so I think it's important that we do that. But in the last 
election, where we had a historic victory in the House of 
Representatives, you should know that we were out-spent by $100 million. 
But we still won seats in the House and didn't lose any in the Senate--a 
truly historic election--because we had a message. We knew what we were 
for; we knew what we were against; and we had enough to get it across. 
So it's very important that you're here.
    Now, as we look ahead, let me say that in the next 2 years, with all 
the energy I have, I'm going to do what I can to get our country to 
reach across party lines to deal with the aging of America, to reform 
Social Security and Medicare and do something about making long-term 
care more available, and helping people save for their own retirement 
more. I'm going to do what I can to make sure that we finish our work of 
modernizing our schools, help to modernize facilities; make sure we hook 
all the classrooms up to the Internet; provide more opportunities for 
more charter schools, like you have in this school district; and other 
things that will

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raise standards; and dramatically increase the resources we provide to 
local schools for after-school programs, summer school programs, 
mentoring programs, the kind of things that will help our kids, so that 
we can have more uniform standards of excellence in education. And there 
are many other things that I intend to do.
    The Vice President has a livability 
agenda we worked very hard on that we're going to try to pass to try to 
help all of our communities deal more with traffic problems, with having 
the need for more green space, as well as setting aside more land in 
reserve.
    I'm very--by the way, just parenthesis--I'm very proud of the fact 
that our administration has protected more land in perpetuity than any 
administration in the history of the Republic except those of Theodore 
and Franklin Roosevelt. And I think 50 years from now people will be 
very grateful--even the people in the red rocks area of Utah, who are 
still kind of mad at me about it, I think they will be grateful.
    So there are a lot of things that still have to be done. But I have 
to tell you, if you ask me to describe in a sentence what I think is the 
most important outstanding work of the country, I would say it is an 
attempt to get people to define community in terms of our common 
humanity instead of our evident differences, both at home and abroad.
    And if you look at what happened in Littleton, there are many 
tragedies. And doubtless, a lot of the elements, as it's all unpacked, 
will turn out to be highly peculiar to the two young men in question and 
the whole psychology of murder-suicide. But there is also clearly an 
element of--part of what drove them over the brink was the fact that 
they were in a group that was disrespected, and they developed a 
grievance against those they thought were disrespecting them. And then 
since they thought they were disrespected, they looked around and they 
found another group--the minority students in the schools, in this 
case--that they could then look down on.
    I was just in Texas with the daughter of 
James Byrd, Jr., the African-American who was dragged to death and 
virtually dismembered by people who killed him because he was black--you 
remember, about a year ago. I was, the other night in Washington, at the 
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights dinner with the mother of Matthew Shepard, the young man who was killed in 
Wyoming not so very long ago because he was gay.
    And I say this to point out, if America wants to do good around the 
world--I appreciate what Congressman Filner said about Kosovo, and I 
want to come back to that--but if you want to do good around the world, 
we've first got to try to be good at home. And we have to recognize that 
there is something deep within all of us that represents the oldest 
curse of human society, which is the propensity to hate the other people 
who are different from us.
    And if you look, isn't it ironic--here we are, you and I were 
talking about how we had to break everybody's mindset of believing that 
in order to grow the economy, you had to have industrial age energy use 
patterns. We had to modernize energy use. But if you look at what 
they're fighting about in Kosovo or what they fought about in Bosnia or 
what they slaughtered over in Rwanda or what the continuing turmoil of 
the Middle East is about or Northern Ireland, they're not arguing about 
who is going to get the franchise to sell solar panels or who gets to 
represent Microsoft.
    Interesting, isn't it? We're thinking--look at all the high-tech 
activity in this room. We're thinking about a 21st century in which we 
want our kids to have pen pals in every conceivable country of the 
world, travel around, you know, do unimaginable things because of all 
these technological wonders. We all expect to live to be 125 because 
by--within the next couple of years the human genome will be totally 
unpacked and the intersection of computer technology and biomedical 
discoveries will doubtless lead to breathtaking and, at present, 
unimaginable discoveries that will enable us to prolong life, prevent 
disease, cure disease.
    But the biggest problem we've got is the oldest problem of human 
society. First, people are scared of people that are different from 
them, and their fear leads them to hate them, and their hatred of them 
leads them to dehumanize them, and then that legitimizes killing them. 
And this has been a factor in human relationships since people first 
joined together in tribes--before there was any writing or any language 
or anything else. And here we are, on the edge of this great modern age, 
beleaguered with this.
    And so I say to you, to me that is very important. One of the people 
at our table was telling me that she was a native of Sarajevo and that

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these are old and deep differences here. That is true.
    I do not believe--if I could move to Kosovo for a minute--I don't 
believe the United States can intervene in every ethnic conflict. I 
don't think we can ask people to like each other. I don't think that can 
be a requirement of international law or a justification for military 
intervention. We can't even ask people not to fight each other if one 
group wants to secede and the other doesn't.
    But we can say that in the international arena there ought to be 
certain limits on this. And what is now euphemistically called ``ethnic 
cleansing''--when you unpack it, what does that word mean? That means 
you look at people who are of a different--in the case of the Balkans, 
religious group, and therefore--and with a different ethnic history--and 
you say, ``I'm afraid of you; I don't like you; I hate you; I dehumanize 
you, therefore, I can kill you; I can rape your daughters; I can blow up 
your mosques; I can blow up your museums; I can destroy your historical 
records; I can take your own property records, and I can burn them up. I 
can take the young people of military age and wrap them up and set fire 
to them while they're still alive. I can do these things because this is 
my land, and our greatness depends upon our ability to get rid of you.''
    And in the most benign form, ``We'll burn all your villages and run 
you by the hundreds of thousands off your land, because we can't share 
this land with you, because you're Muslims and we're Orthodox 
Christians; you're Albanians, and we're not. And, oh, by the way, 600 
years ago the Muslims came through here and had a big battle in Kosovo, 
and we've hated you all ever since.''
    Now, what our position ought to be in this is not that we're telling 
other countries how to live; not that we're telling them how--what their 
governmental arrangements have to be, but that in Europe--and by the 
way, I think, anywhere else that the United Nations or others have the 
power to stop it--we say we know there will be ethnic conflicts; we know 
there will be civil wars. There's a terrible, regrettable conflict going 
on right now between Eritrea and Ethiopia, who once were one and then 
split, and now they're, in effect, having their tribal conflict over the 
border.
    No one has suggested--10,000 people have been killed there--no one 
has suggested that some third party should intervene and fight both of 
them. That is not what is going on in Kosovo. That is not what Bosnia 
was about. That was about ethnic cleansing; it's a mass killing of 
people because of their ethnic and religious background. And if we can't 
stop that in the underbelly of Europe on the edge of the 21st century, 
then we're going to have a very difficult world ahead of us, because 
there will be a lot more of it. They will get aligned with organized 
criminals, with terrorists, with people who have access to weapons of 
mass destruction. They will use all this technology and all these open 
airports and all this other stuff, and these conflicts will not stay 
confined to the land on which they occur.
    So this is in America's interest, but it is also morally the right 
thing to do. Think about these children who were here today. What do you 
want their children's America to be like? What do you want their 
children's world to be like? The 21st century can and should be the most 
interesting period in all of human history, in a largely profoundly 
positive way. But it will not happen unless we find ways to deal with 
our differences which, after all, as we see in America, make life much 
more interesting if they can be respected and celebrated but limited in 
their impact.
    When there is no limit to what you can do to somebody else who's 
different from you, life quickly becomes unbearable. That is really what 
is at stake here. Yes, there are many difficulties in this endeavor we 
have undertaken, we and our NATO Allies, in Kosovo. And you may have 
many questions in your mind.
    But let me ask you this: How would you feel, in this gorgeous 
setting today, with the birds singing outside and the ocean before us, 
in all of our comfort, if I came here asking you to give money to the 
Democratic Party, and I was having to explain to you why we were sitting 
on our hands and not lifting a finger while those people were killed and 
uprooted and dislocated? I prefer to answer the hard questions about 
what we're doing than the hard questions I would never be able to answer 
to you if we had done nothing in the face of this travesty.
    But, remember what I said: We should have a higher standard for 
ourselves at home. Abroad we are simply saying, ``You can have your 
fights; you can have your arguments; but we're against ethnic cleansing 
and the slaughter that goes

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along with it--and if we can stop it, as an international community, we 
ought to.'' At home, we have to do better than that. We have to say, 
``The differences that we have make us stronger, make us better, when we 
respect and celebrate them, but when we're not consumed by them.''
    And therefore, I want to say again what I said yesterday and the day 
before. We need a national campaign to protect our kids from violence. 
We will never get there unless we first of all teach people respect for 
one another and, secondly, find a way to connect with every one of our 
children in a very personal way. A lot of people are strangers in their 
own homes, and they are lost to their parents, to their classmates, and 
to others. This is a very hard job.
    And we will never get there unless all of us ask not, ``Who is to 
blame?'' but ``What can I do?'' That's what the entertainment industry 
ought to do, not because any movie or television or video game caused 
those young men or others in these other school killings to do what they 
did, but because the average 18-year-old sees 40,000 murders by the time 
he or she is 18, because there are 300 studies now--300--which show that 
sustained exposure to violence diminishes--and it diminishes one's 
sensitivity to the consequences of violence; and because we know that we 
have a higher percentage of kids who spend more time in front of various 
media and less time with their families, or with their friends doing 
other things, than virtually every other country, and we have a higher 
percentage of kids who are at risk. And we don't give families the 
support we should give to balance family and childrearing--work and 
childrearing.
    So if you have more kids at risk, more vulnerable, and you bombard 
them with things that will desensitize them, you will increase the 
number who will fall over the line. It's just like the guns. The NRA 
slogan is actually, of course, literally true, that guns don't kill 
people, people do. That is literally true. But people with guns kill 
more people than people without them. [Laughter]
    And again, I say if you have more--if you have more vulnerable 
people and it's easier for them to get assault weapons, or other weapons 
they have no business getting their hands on, then more of them will 
fall over the line and you'll have more violence. A lot of you have been 
involved in that, and I would just close with this--the Government has 
its responsibility in this crisis, too. And one of our responsibilities 
is to give both law enforcement and citizens the help they need by 
having sensible gun restraint measures.
    There was a police officer out at the airport today when I stopped 
at the marine base on the way over here. And when he said, ``Mr. 
President,'' he said, ``I'm a police officer; I'm off duty today; I came 
out here with my family, and I just want to thank you for taking on that 
gun fight.'' He said, ``We need all the protection we can get out there 
and so do the kids.''
    And all we've done--look what I've asked them to do. I've asked them 
to close this gun show loophole so you can't buy a gun at a gun show if 
you can't buy it in a gun shop. We've asked them to--and the Senate has 
voted to close the loophole allowing big, multiple-ammunition clips to 
come in from foreign countries, and to raise the handgun age to 21.
    We've asked them to strengthen the Brady bill and reinstate the 3-
day waiting period. We've asked them to do a background check on people 
who buy explosives--which, after Littleton, you will see, is very 
important--very, very important--and do some other commonsense things 
that help us to trace and keep records on these weapons. This is crazy, 
that we would permit our society to put more children at risk than any 
other society in the world would when we already know we've got more of 
them that are fragile.
    Now, we don't have to point fingers at each other. We should all 
sort of say, ``Forget about who's to blame. We're showing up for duty 
tomorrow. What can I do?'' That's what everybody ought to be asking. But 
the Congress of the United States needs to pass this legislation, and I 
was very encouraged that some of the Senators, after the American people 
expressed their feelings, have begun to change their votes.
    But I want to see this as a part of our struggle to be one 
community. Most of the people--there was a great article in the Los 
Angeles Times today about a woman from Colorado, rural Colorado, who had 
her rifle and used it to run off wild wolves that were going to kill her 
livestock, and who felt so threatened in her way of life by all these 
city folks, like us, trying to regulate her guns. Well, of course, 
nobody's trying to regulate her guns. She'd just been told that. And if 
she needs something other--that

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she has to do a background check on, she's got nothing to fear.
    But I understand, there is that whole other culture out there of 
people who are law abiding; they pay their taxes; they show up for duty 
when we need them to fight for our country, to defend us, to do whatever 
else; and a lot of them just think that this is some big urban 
conspiracy to take their guns away. Well, it isn't. And we all need to 
be talking to each other. We need to quit this sort of--you know, trying 
to make this chapter 57 in the culture war for someone's political 
benefit.
    So I say that to you--hey, if you ask me, yes, I hope we get--before 
I leave office, I will be very disappointed if we haven't reformed 
Social Security, committed ourselves to pay down the debt over the next 
17 years, reform Medicare, pass my education and my environmental 
agenda. But the American people will get the rest right if we decide to 
do what it takes to be one America, if we decide to do what it takes to 
reach out across all the lines that divide us and say, ``You know, our 
common humanity is more important than our interesting differences.''
    And if we do that, then we will be able to lead the world to a 
better place and give our children the future they deserve. That's what 
I think my party represents. That's what I've worked for 6 years to 
bring to the American people. And when you leave here today, I hope 
that's why you believe that you came.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 3:15 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to luncheon hosts Irwin and Joan Jacobs; Joseph J. 
Andrew, national chair, and Beth Dozoretz, national finance chair, 
Democratic National Committee; Renee Mullins, daughter of murder victim 
James Byrd, Jr.; and Judy Shepard, mother of murder victim Matthew 
Shepard.