[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
[May 16, 1999]
[Pages 797-800]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Las Vegas
May 16, 1999

    Well, thank you very much. First of all, we've already had a 
wonderful conversation. I want to thank all of you for that. I want to 
thank Brian and Myra for taking me in; and I want to thank Amy for coming back to work for me. [Laughter]
    Brian was up here talking, and I was thinking, you know, the only 
thing that has been sort of a required part of our friendship--besides 
his mentioning of the nuclear waste issue--is a regular golf outing. And 
I nearly never beat him. But I was thinking--after all, this is probably 
the fifth or sixth event we've done here in the last 6 years--I'm the 
most expensive golf partner he ever had. [Laughter] He would probably 
dearly like to reconsider this whole deal.
    But we've been friends for 30 years now, and then some, and I'm very 
grateful to be here. Every time I come here and I spend the night here, 
I feel a renewed gratitude. I also know that all of you felt as I did 
tonight, all of you who are from Las Vegas were delighted that 
Elias and Jody came 
over here and that they threw the reception over at their house, and we 
had a wonderful time with their children and their friends, and our 
prayers are with them. And I was very glad that they came over and spent 
a few minutes with us tonight.
    Since we've been talking at the table and because it's quarter to 
11, which for us three from the east coast over here is a quarter to 2 
in the morning on our body, I'll be quite brief. But I'd like to just 
ask you to think about a couple of things.
    The first is that our country has done very well these last 6\1/2\ 
years, economically and socially: crime rate's down; the welfare rolls 
are down; homeownership is at an all-time high;

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minority unemployment, the lowest ever recorded. A lot of things are 
going well. What I would like to say is that I first feel grateful that 
I've been able to be President, and I hope I have had something to do 
with that. And I believe we have.
    But the reason I'm here tonight, since I'm not running for anything 
anymore, is that I know that the reason we were able to follow good 
policies and do good things is that we started out with a vision and 
ideas that have now been embraced by my party, by the Democratic Party. 
And they make a difference. And they're different. They're different 
from what we were doing before, and they're certainly different--as you 
can tell if you just pick up the paper in the morning--from what the 
other party believes in Washington.
    Whether the issue is how to take the first big step to get rid of 
the deficit, or whether we should have a Brady bill or an assault 
weapons ban, or whether we should target a tax cut so that we can 
honestly say we've now opened the doors of college to all, because we've 
got--we've got some friends from Georgia here; we've got a national 
version of Georgia's HOPE scholarship now--or whether the issue is, now, 
in the aftermath of the terrible tragedy at Littleton, whether we should 
have a law passed that closes the loophole that allows, now, people with 
criminal or mental health histories to buy guns at gun shows they 
couldn't buy in gun stores or we should also require a background check 
for people who buy explosives, since we now know that's a very serious 
problem--we have had two examples, one at Littleton and one in Oklahoma 
City, which makes, I think, a very compelling case that it's hard to 
justify a background check on handguns and not have a background check 
on explosives. And I could give you lots and lots of other examples, but 
the point I want to make is that ideas matter and vision matters.
    And what we've been trying to do, Al Gore and our Cabinet and 
everybody associated with me for the last 6\1/2\ years, is to make real 
what we pledged to the American people in 1992, that we wanted a country 
where every responsible citizen would have opportunity and where we 
would be coming closer together, across all the lines that divide us, 
into a stronger community and where we continue to be the world's 
leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity. And we have largely 
been able to do that. So ideas matter, and that's why parties matter. 
And that's why I'm grateful for your presence here.
    The second point I would like to make is that it's very important 
for the Democrats to do two things: one, to keep working every day 
between now and 2000, and not to just get into the same-old, same-old in 
Washington I used to see, where the two parties fight all the time and 
nobody shows up for work. I sometimes think that everyone who works in 
Washington should be required to spend a week, a month somewhere else, 
because no other enterprise could survive if people spent all their time 
fighting and never had to do anything.
    So we need to produce results. We need to deal with the aging 
crisis, the educational challenges we face. I think we ought to pay the 
debt down dramatically. I think it will really add to our long-term 
economic health. There are lots of challenges out there. I'm going to 
work until the last hour, the last day I'm President to try to get 
things done.
    And the third point I want to make is that it's very important that 
we have good candidates adequately funded to implement these ideas in 
the 2000 election. Which is why I'm glad you're here and why I'm here.
    I said something over at the Ghanems' I'd like to close with. If 
tonight in the middle of the night I were to wake up and God were 
standing over my bed saying, ``I'm sorry, you can't do all this stuff 
for the last 2 years; I'm just going to let you do one thing--what do 
you want to do?'' In the aftermath of Littleton and what I've seen in 
Kosovo, I would say, ``Well, I think it's pretty ironic that in this 
glitzy, high-tech global economy age where we're about to uncover the 
mysteries of the human genome so we may all be able to map out our 
future and live to be 125, that the biggest problems we've got in the 
world today come from the hatred of the human heart and people's--rooted 
in our fear of people who are different from us, with religious or 
ethnic or racial or any other kind of differences.''
    And if you just think about America's most traumatic moments in the 
last several years--Oklahoma City, Timothy McVeigh, a government hater, 
whatever that is; think about poor Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, killed 
because he was gay, at the outset of his life; James Byrd in Texas, 
dragged and torn apart because he was black; even in Littleton there 
were suggestions that these young men felt disrespected

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by the athletes in their school and therefore they wanted to get even 
with them, but by the way, they needed to find somebody they could 
disrespect, so they disrespected the minority kids in their school and 
they targeted them, too.
    And I just want you to think about this. The oldest demon of humans 
living together begins with fear of people who are not in your clan--
literally, when we came out of the caves--people who are different from 
you. And once you fear somebody, it's not very far until you hate them. 
Then it's not very far from that until you can dehumanize them. Then 
it's not very far from that until you can justify killing them--not very 
far.
    We've had a lot of experience in that, in America. We had people who 
thought God told them to throw the Indian tribes off their lands. We had 
people who seriously preached in this country from the pulpit that God 
ordained the slavery that enslaved African-Americans here. We've had 
experience with what we now see going on in the rest of the world today.
    But what I want to say to you is it is not endemic, in the sense 
that it's inevitable. You know, when the Hutus and the Tutsis fought in 
Rwanda, and 700,000 people died in 100 days--almost all from machetes--I 
heard people say, ``Well, you know, those are African tribal wars, and 
the countries are all wrongly drawn, and everything.'' That's not true. 
In Rwanda, the borders have been pretty well the same for 500 years. And 
most of the time people got along.
    Now I hear in the Balkans, ``You know, those people always fought. 
They just can't get along.'' That's not true, either. For most of the 
last 600 years, those people did get along. They did work together. They 
managed their ethnic and their religious diversity.
    And I just want you to think about that. I want you to think about--
you know, we think about, we want our kids to know about computers and 
speak foreign languages and zip around the world and uncover all these 
great biological mysteries, and what a wonderful world it's going to be. 
And that's the world I've been working for. It is threatened by the most 
primitive impulse in human society, fear of people who are different 
from us.
    And if we want America to do good around the world, we have to be 
good at home, first. Second, if we want to lead the world for peace and 
freedom, we've got to stand up against ethnic cleansing and mass 
killing. That's what Kosovo is about. I know it's a thorny, complex 
problem--you and I, we talked about it around the table tonight. All I 
can--I can't answer every question, maybe, but I can tell you one thing: 
I'd a lot rather be answering the questions I'm answering tonight and 
sitting here having dinner with you, looking at those people being run 
out of their country and being killed and all that stuff, than with 
America and Europe sitting on its hands and not doing anything to help 
them. I prefer to answer the questions I'm answering tonight than the 
questions we would be answering had we done nothing.
    And I'll just close with this little story I've been telling the 
last few days. Last week, when I got back from Europe, and then I got 
back from Oklahoma, seeing the folks after the hurricane--I mean, the 
tornado. We had a fascinating meeting at the White House with 19 tribal 
leaders from the northern high plains. I've spent a lot of time with the 
Native Americans since I've been in office, trying to work through a lot 
of their challenges.
    And Senator Daschle, our leader, 
Democratic leader, and Senator Johnson and the 
two Democrats in North Dakota and Senator Baucus from Montana, 
they said, ``Well, would you please meet with these 19 tribal leaders 
from these three States, because they're the poorest Indian tribes in 
America; because it's very hard to get any investment up there, and it's 
cold and there's a lot of problems?'' If you don't have--not all Native 
American tribes have casinos and make fortunes; that's a big myth. So 
they said, ``You've got to meet with these people.''
    So we had our--a lot of our Cabinet people came. Then the tribal 
leaders said, ``Now, can we sit in a circle; that is our custom.'' So 
we're in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, which has Teddy 
Roosevelt's Nobel Peace Prize in it and a wonderful bust of Eleanor 
Roosevelt. It's a great little room. So we get rid of the table, and we 
all sit around in a circle.
    And they talked, you know, each in their turn about their--you know, 
it's the education issue or the jobs issue or the housing issue or the 
health care issue or whatever. And then at the end their spokesperson 
stands up--and his name was Tex Hall, which I 
thought was an interesting name for an Indian chief. But anyway, he 
said, ``Mr. President,'' he said, ``I have this proclamation here that 
our tribal leaders have signed,

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endorsing what you are trying to do in Kosovo.'' And he said, ``You see, 
we know something about ethnic cleansing.'' And he said, ``We'd like--
and here we are in the White House today, and we can't turn away from 
this.''
    And then this young man across the room 
in the circle stood up, and he said--he had this beautiful Indian 
jewelry around his neck. And I mean, when this guy started talking, it 
just took all the oxygen out of the room. He was very dignified, and he 
said, ``Mr. President,'' he said, ``My two uncles--I had two uncles. One 
was on the beach at Normandy. The other was the first Native American 
fighter pilot in our history.'' He said, ``My great-great-grandfather 
was slaughtered by the American 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee.'' He said, 
``We've come a long way from Wounded Knee, to my uncles, to me standing 
here in the Roosevelt Room, talking to the President.'' He said, ``I 
just have one child. He means more to me than anything. But I would be 
honored to have him go to fight against the destruction of the people of 
Kosovo, so they don't have to go through all that we have been 
through.''
    And I thought to myself, I just wish every American could see this. 
This is what I ran for President to lift up.
    So remember that. If we can learn to get along together and work 
together and stand for our common humanity, then you and talented people 
like you all over this country, you'll figure out how to solve the rest 
of this stuff. It's the most important thing.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 10:45 p.m. in a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Brian L. and Myra Greenspun, and 
their daughter, Amy; Nevada State Athletic Commission Chairman Elias 
Ghanem and his wife, Jody; Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted of bombing 
the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK; Tex Hall, 
chairman of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation (the Three 
Affiliated Tribes); and Gregg Bourland, chairman, Cheyenne River Sioux 
Tribe.