    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [August 29, 1999]
    [Pages 1475-1479]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Bridgehampton, New
    York
    August 29, 1999

        Well, thank you very much. [Laughter] I must say, I thought
    Hillary was going to say, ``If you
    think it's windy now, wait until Bill gets up to talk.'' [Laughter] I
    feel badly about this wind. It came up about the time I was explaining
    the finer points of voodoo around our table--[laughter]--and the
    conviction that Haitians and others have that the spirits of light and
    darkness are more or less in equal balance, and they manifest themselves
    in all kinds of physical ways. And all of a sudden the lights started
    moving and--[laughter]--so we'll just have to hope the good guys win
    tonight.

    [[Page 1476]]

        Let me just say first to Craig and
    Jane, I'm very, very grateful to be in their
    home here. I've also been in their home in New York City. Thank you,
    Brian; thank you, Robert. They're quite wonderful people. Among other things,
    when I came to see them in New York they provided me, since I had a
    little down time, with a tenor saxophone, and so I played a tune for
    them. So I got here tonight, and the horn was here again. But I didn't
    put them through it again. [Laughter] But it was very touching, and I
    thank you for that.
        I also want to thank all of those who are here. Jon, thank you and Richie for
    entertaining. Jon Bon Jovi has been very good to me. He has played for
    me a number of times over these last 6\1/2\ years, and I thought they
    were terrific tonight, and I thank them for being here. I want to thank
    the people who prepared the wonderful dinner and all those who served it
    and all the volunteers who have been part of this tonight. And I would
    like to just make a couple of brief points.
        Somebody will ask you tomorrow why you came here tonight. And I
    wonder what you will say: ``I wanted to see their house; it looked kind
    of interesting.'' [Laughter] ``I wanted to hear the music. I hear the
    food was going to be great. The restaurant was closed tonight.''
        I'd just like to offer a few things that I hope you'll think about.
    First of all, New York has been very, very good to me and to Hillary, to
    Al and Tipper Gore, to our whole administration. We had a wonderful
    convention here in '92. I had a very interesting, eventful primary here
    in '92, but it came out okay. And then the State voted for us big in '92
    and then, breathtakingly in '96, and I'm very grateful.
        But in 1992 I asked the country and I asked the people of this State
    to take a chance on me, on my family, my Vice President, my
    administration, and on a whole new direction for the country. I saw a
    survey the other day which said that things had been going so well in
    our country for so many years now, nobody could--people have no memory
    of what it was like in '91 and '92. They've forgotten entirely.
        But the economy was in the tank, and the country was divided, and
    the social problems were worsening. And we had a lot of challenges
    around the world that weren't being addressed. And, you know, I lived a
    long way from Washington, DC, but it seemed to me that we were working
    on the wrong things and not working on the right things. And I asked the
    American people to give me a chance to create a country in which there
    was opportunity for all who were responsible, in which we could build a
    community of all Americans, in which we could be a force for peace and
    freedom and justice around the world. And so you took a chance.
        The first thing I hope you'll say--and one of you said this to me
    tonight--when you go home and they ask you why you came, is that it was
    a good chance to take and it worked out all right; that we've got the
    longest peacetime expansion in history and the lowest crime rate in 26
    years and the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years and the lowest minority
    unemployment ever recorded and the highest homeownership in history;
    that our country has been a force for peace and freedom, from Northern
    Ireland to the Middle East to the Balkans; that we have tried to include
    all Americans in our future.
        The second thing I hope you'll say--because, as Joe Andrew said
    earlier, politics is always about tomorrow--is that you think we're
    right about the things we're talking about for today and tomorrow. You
    know, I'm not running for anything anymore. Joe Andrew used to have a great line in his speeches: ``Bill Clinton
    doesn't have to be here; he's not running for anything anymore.'' That's
    where Hillary started running for
    something. Now I do have to be here--[laughter]--in a different role.
        But I believe this anyway, and I want you to think about this. Once
    in a lifetime--once in a lifetime--if you get real lucky, maybe twice--a
    country, like a person, has a moment that is either seized or
    squandered. You may have a lot of wonderful moments, but some will be
    greater than others. Mr. DeNiro has made a lot
    of great movies, but some were greater than others. Steven
    Spielberg and Kate
    and I, we were talking with Hillary
    and Chelsea on the way over about the
    greatest moments of his movie career. Countries are like that, just like
    in your personal life.
        A time like this comes along once in a lifetime, where we went from
    having--we quadrupled our debt in 12 years, and now we've got the
    biggest surplus we ever had. And we project for 15 years or more we'll
    have it. Oh, there will be ups and downs in the economy but, on average,
    it will be there. Now, what are we going to do with it?

    [[Page 1477]]

        Our friends in the other party, they say that all that's not
    attributable to Social Security taxes; we ought to give it back to you
    in a tax cut. And that's very popular, especially in this crowd. Some of
    you will say you ought to have your head examined, because every one of
    you should be over there with them tonight.
        We say we ought to face the challenges facing our children. And I'll
    just give you three real quick. The aging of America: there will be
    twice as many people over 65 in 2030 as there are now. I hope to be one
    of them, so do most of you. If we don't save Social Security and
    Medicare and do it in a way so that the children of the baby boomers
    don't have to support them so they'll be free to support their children,
    we're going to have an enormous amount of heartache and difficulty in
    this country. But if we do it, you'll have people living longer and
    better than ever before. The children of the baby boomers will be free
    to pursue their own destiny, and they'll be free to raise their
    grandchildren in the best possible way.
        The second thing we ought to do is face the fact that we've got more
    kids in this country in school than ever before, over 53 million of
    them. More of them come from families whose first language is not
    English than ever before. But it's a godsend in a global society if we
    can give every single one of them a world-class education.
        The third thing we ought to do is figure out how we can keep this
    economy going and how we can bring it to people who haven't felt it yet.
    Because I can tell you, in spite of all the prosperity the last 6\1/2\
    years, there are inner-city communities, there's the Mississippi Delta,
    there are places in Appalachia, there are all these Indian reservations
    in America, there are small towns in upstate New York--which, if it were
    a separate State, would rank 49th in job creation in the last 5 years--
    where the sunshine of all this prosperity has not reached. We all hope
    there won't be other interest rate increases. We say, ``Gosh, let's keep
    interest rates down and keep growth going.'' You want to expand the
    economy with no inflation, invest in the places that haven't had any
    growth. These are big deals.
        Now, my view is we ought to take most of this surplus in the next 15
    years and reform and save Medicare, run Social Security's life out to
    about 2053--that ought to take care of all the baby boomers; I'm the
    oldest of the baby boomers. I don't think I'll be alive in 2053; I'd
    like it awfully well if I was. But most of us will be gone by then, and
    we'll return to some more normal population distribution. And meanwhile,
    our children will not have to worry about taking care of us in our
    dotage, and our grandchildren will have a better future.
        We ought to invest in education, in the things we know that work,
    and recognize that the poorest children in this country need the richest
    education if we're going to have the kind of future we want.
        We ought to pay this country's debt down. You know, we could get out
    of debt in 15 years for the first time since 1835. And we'd have low
    interest rates for a generation, and people like us would do just fine
    if we did that.
        Now, we also ought to do things that bring our community together.
    Congressman Forbes changed parties because
    he got sick and tired of the leadership of his party turning a deaf ear
    when he said we're going to have more and more people in managed care,
    and we may have to do it. It may not be a bad thing. But you've got all
    these hospitals going broke. You've got doctors wanting to quit or join
    unions. And you've got people who are tearing their hair out. We've got
    to have a Patients' Bill of Rights so that we have quality care as well
    as properly managed care. Because he thought we ought to be investing in
    education, not cutting it.
        Carolyn McCarthy, another Congresswoman
    from Long Island, was a Republican, became a member of our party because
    she lost her husband, had her son subject to
    grievous injury--because this is the only big country in the world that
    has no sensible restrictions on firearms, until we passed the Brady
    bill, which was vetoed in the previous administration, which kept
    400,000 people with criminal backgrounds from getting guns and saved God
    knows how many people. But we still have serious problems in the law.
    That's important to me.
        I supported an increase in the minimum wage, because I don't think
    anybody that works for a living and has kids at home ought to be in
    poverty. And I believe those people should get big tax increases--tax
    cuts, I mean--people who have modest wages and have children at home.
    They got the biggest tax cuts, percentagewise, of anybody in this
    administration in the last 7\1/2\ years, because I don't think anybody
    who works full-time and has a child

    [[Page 1478]]

    at home should be in poverty. And I don't think you do, either.
        Now, these are major issues. What kind of a community are we? Look,
    can you believe this? With all the good fortune we've had and just a
    couple of weeks ago, some guy listens to some racist kook and goes out
    and murders an African-American former basketball coach, shoots Asian
    students in the street. This guy the other day in Illinois and Indiana,
    going on that shooting spree. Then we had another shooting, of the
    children at the Jewish child center in Los Angeles. And the same guy
    murdered a Filipino-American because he was Filipino and because he
    worked for the United States Government and the Post Office. We had that
    young Matthew Shepard being killed in Wyoming. The Democratic Party
    wants to pass hate crimes legislation. We want to pass employment
    nondiscrimination legislation. We want to have people in our future
    without regard to their race, their sexual orientation, their politics,
    or anything else.
        Now, why? Because we need all those people. Because we--if you
    believe in free markets and free societies, you have to believe that
    everyone should freely have the chance to live their dreams, and that
    there ought to be a framework which makes it possible for them to do it.
        I want to close--before we get blown away--[laughter]--with one
    story. I went to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota the
    other day--some of you may have seen it--on this new markets tour,
    organized by a man, Gene Sperling, my National
    Economic Counselor, who also happens to be in the audience here.
        Before I did that, I had the 19 tribal leaders from the northern
    high plains come to see me, from North and South Dakota and Montana.
    They are probably the poorest of all of our Indian tribes. And they had
    this meeting with the President--and I had five and six Cabinet members
    there. And they went through their little presentation, you know, and
    everybody said what they had to say about what their needs were.
        And at the end, Harold Salway stood up, who is the president--they
    now call them presidents--of the Oglala Sioux, the tribe of Crazy Horse,
    in South Dakota. And he was standing there, and he said that the chiefs
    wanted to tell me that they supported what I had done in Kosovo, in
    saving the Kosovar Albanians.
        And he started talking. He's not very tall, but he's very dignified,
    and you could have heard a pin drop. And he said, ``Mr. President,'' he
    said, ``my great-great-grandfather was massacred at Wounded Knee. We
    know something about ethnic cleansing. But,'' he said, ``I had two
    uncles. One was on the beach at Normandy. The other was the first Native
    American fighter pilot in the history of the United States military.''
    He said, ``And now I am here in the White House meeting with the
    President. I have only one son, and he means more to me than anything in
    the world, but I would be proud to have him wear a uniform and go fight
    for the freedom of the people of Kosovo, to be free from being
    slaughtered because of their ethnic background or the way they worship
    God. This is America, and I'm proud of what we're doing here.''
        I hope tomorrow, if somebody asks you why you were here, you'll say,
    ``Because we took a chance, and it worked out; because we've got the
    chance of a lifetime to do the right things for the future; and because
    more than anything else.'' Believe me, if I could leave office with one
    wish for America, it would be that somehow we would find a way to lay
    down all these idiotic ways of looking down on one another, and find
    some way to lift each other up.
        And the last thing I want to say is this. I have been privileged in
    my life to work with thousands of people in public service. And
    notwithstanding the intense partisan rancor of the last few years, my
    experience is that what you have been subject to is atypical. Most of
    the people I have known in public life, Republicans and Democrats, were
    honest, hard-working, decent people who had honest differences of
    opinion, and got up every day and tried to make this country a better
    place.
        But I'm telling you, of all the people I have ever known in public
    life, the ablest, the smartest, the most passionately dedicated, is the
    person who wants to be the next
    United States Senator from New York.
        Thank you, and goodbye. Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 10 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Craig Hatkoff, Jane Rosenthal,
    Brian Ward, and actor Robert DeNiro; musicians Jon Bon Jovi and Richie
    Sambora; Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, Democratic National
    Committee; movie producer/director Steven Spielberg and his wife,

    [[Page 1479]]

    actress Kate Capshaw; and Congresswoman McCarthy's son, Kevin.