    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [September 18, 1999]
    [Pages 1556-1559]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Dinner
    September 18, 1999

        Ladies and gentlemen, the main thing I want to say tonight is, thank
    you. Thank you to the Congressional Black Caucus for your leadership and
    your partnership, for your genuine friendship. Thank you to Jim
    Clyburn; to my friend of 27 years Eddie
    Bernice Johnson; to Eva
    Clayton; to the dean of the delegation, John
    Conyers; to your retiring member and a
    great champion of education and human welfare, Bill Clay; to Corrine Brown and Elijah
    Cummings and Sheila Jackson Lee and all the other members of the CBC, I thank you
    for your kindness, your friendship, your support to me, to Hillary, to
    Al and Tipper Gore, to what we have done together. I thank Senator Carol
    Moseley-Braun for her continuing
    willingness to serve.
        I welcome and congratulate the award winners, my friends Julius
    Chambers and Alvin Brown and Tom Joyner. Can you imagine
    Tom Joyner and his son thanking Al and me for
    being on his radio program? [Laughter] You know, even the people that
    don't like us don't think we're stupid. [Laughter] And I want to thank
    and congratulate Rear Admiral Evelyn Fields,
    who has done such a great job. She started as a cartographer and went on
    to chart a new course of opportunity not only for African-American women
    but for all women. And thank you for honoring them.
        I also would like to welcome the President of Haiti here, President
    Rene Preval. We're delighted to have him here,
    and we thank him for his friendship.
        There are so many people here who have been associated with our
    administration, and they were all asked to stand. You know them well. I
    want to just mention two, if I might. One is my chief speechwriter,
    Terry Edmonds, because he's the first
    African-American to ever hold that job, and the reason I'm introducing
    him is, since Al and Eddie Bernice and Jim talked, I can't give half the
    speech that he wrote for me, so the least I can do is acknowledge that
    he did it. Thank you my friend. You're doing great.
        The other person I want to thank for his extraordinary leadership as
    our special representative to the continent of Africa is Reverend Jesse
    Jackson, and I want to thank him very much for
    that and particularly his role in ending the disastrous conflict in
    Sierra Leone.
        I want to congratulate some of the current judicial nominees, more
    than half of whom are women and minorities, including Judge James
    Wynn, who would be the first African-
    American to serve on the fourth circuit; Judge Ann Williams, the first African-American on the seventh circuit; and
    this week I nominated Kathleen McCree Lewis to serve on the sixth circuit. I congratulate them.
        There are just two more people I want to thank. I want to thank my
    wife for her love, her friendship,
    and for her leadership for our children and our future; for the way she
    has represented us around the world and for having the courage to stay
    in public service. After all we've been through, she would be the best
    United States Senator you could ever elect to anything.
        I also want to thank all the members of the administration here, the
    Cabinet members; some are African-American, some are not. But one of the
    most interesting things that anyone ever said to me is--the Presidential
    scholar, that the Vice President and I knew, came from Harvard one night
    to a dinner at the White House, and we were pretty low. It was after we
    had been waxed in the '94 congressional elections; and this man said,
    ``I have been studying administrations for a long time, and you should
    know that I believe that yours will be reelected; and one reason is, you
    have the most loyal Cabinet since Thomas Jefferson's second
    administration.'' So to all who are here--Secretary Slater, Madame Attorney General,
    Secretary Herman, any other members of the
    Cabinet who are here,

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    our Veterans Affairs Secretary, all the
    others--I want to thank them.
        And finally, and most of all, I'd like to thank the Vice
    President, without whom none of the good
    things we have accomplished together would have been possible. He has
    been, by far, the most influential, active, passionate, intense,
    effective Vice President of the United States in the history of our
    Republic, and I am very grateful to him.
        Now, you know, this has been an exciting year for African-Americans.
    A lot of things have happened. I mean, Serena Williams became the first black woman since Althea Gibson to
    win the U.S. Open; Ken Chenault was named the
    first black CEO of American Express; and this is very important--I want
    you all to listen to this--the magnificent African-American writer Toni
    Morrison agreed with an extreme rightwing
    journalist that I am the first black President of the United States.
    [Laughter]
        Chris Tucker came to see me today--
    [laughter]--and I was in stitches. He's here somewhere tonight. Where
    are you? Stand up there. [Applause] So Chris Tucker is in there; he
    looks at me with a straight face and says he's coming in to case the
    Oval Office because he's about to make a movie in which he will star as
    the first black President. I didn't have the heart to tell him I had
    already taken the position. [Laughter]
        I want to make a couple of points. Most of what needs to be said has
    been said. One of the most interesting books of the Bible is the Book of
    James. It challenges us to be ``doers of the word, and not hearers
    only.'' This truly is a caucus of doers. And I'm grateful for all the
    things that have happened that everyone else has mentioned. But none of
    it would have been possible without you.
        Now we come again to what has become a fairly usual moment in the
    last 2 years--the end of another budget year in which we must all make
    an accounting of ourselves to the American people for what we have done
    and what we are about to do and what we are going to do with the money
    they give us from the sweat of their brow.
        Now, our Republican friends have sent me a tax bill, and it is quite
    large. The middle class and working class and lower income relief in it
    is, oh, about the size of our bill, but their bill is more than 3 times
    the size of ours. And people in upper income groups who are doing pretty
    well in the stock market get all the rest of the relief.
        But the main thing is that the bill makes choices. We all make
    choices in life, often when we pretend not to and often when we deny
    that we are, but we do. And so even when things don't seem to be
    happening, sometimes decisions of the most momentous consequences are
    being made. The Vice President courageously
    presented himself for public office, for the highest office in the land.
    Many of the rest of you will be running this year; perhaps the First
    Lady will be among you.
        But while we are doing these things, which we know are big,
    decisions will be made in this Congress which will affect what they can
    do if the American people are good enough to send them into office.
        Why do I want to veto this bill? Not because I enjoy these
    interminable partisan fights; I frankly find them revolting most of the
    time. It's not really what the framers had in mind. They wanted us to
    debate our differences in advance and then figure out what we could
    agree on and go on and do it. But there are choices here.
        Do you know the number of people over 65 is going to double in the
    next 30 years? I hope to be one of them. [Laughter] When that happens,
    there will be two people working for every one person drawing Social
    Security and Medicare. We ought to use this surplus to deal with the
    challenge of the aging of America and take care of Social Security and
    Medicare and give a prescription drug benefit.
        Do you know we've got more kids in our schools than ever before? You
    heard the Vice President talk about what our agenda is and what he wants
    to do. Well, you can't do it if you give away the store first. We ought
    to invest in our kids. We have the most diverse, largest group of
    children ever in our schools, and they are carrying our future in their
    little minds every day when they show up. And we need to give them all a
    world-class education.
        And if we do this right, believe it or not, we'll be paying down the
    debt. We could actually make America debt-free for the first time since
    Andrew Jackson was President in 1835. Now, here's why progressives ought
    to be for this: Because if we do that, we'll drive down interest rates,
    and we'll be able to get more people to go invest money in places that
    haven't yet felt our prosperity. We'll keep interest rates

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    down for homes, for college loans, for car loans, for credit cards.
    We'll guarantee that we'll have a generation of prosperity. We will pass
    something on to our children. This is a choice.
        What I want to say to you is, I want us to get as much of this done
    as we can so that we leave for our successors in office the chance to do
    something meaningful. Nothing, in some ways, is more important than
    trying to make sure every American has a chance to participate in our
    prosperity. I was so proud of Alvin Brown
    tonight when I was listening to his speech on the film, getting ready to
    give him his award; so grateful that the Vice President gave him a chance to lead our empowerment zone and
    enterprise community programs; so glad that we are continuing to try to
    involve businesses. The Vice President is determined to bridge the so-
    called digital divide and put computers in every classroom in America,
    not just those who can afford it on their own, and make sure they can
    afford to use them. Thank you, Chairman Kennard, for what you've done on that.
        It's very important that we fund the next round of empowerment
    zones, that we fund the new markets initiative, that we give Americans
    the same incentives to invest in poor neighborhoods here we give them to
    invest in poor places overseas. I want to continue with all these
    incentives. I wish we did more for the Caribbean, for Central America,
    for South America, and for Africa. I just want to do the same thing for
    the poor neighborhoods of Appalachia, of the Mississippi Delta, of the
    Indian reservations, of the cities that have been left behind.
        All the things that have been mentioned, I just want to say, me too.
    To the fair and accurate census, me too; to making sure that our
    children have safe and good places to learn, me too; to meeting the
    challenge of quality health care and passing an enforceable Patients'
    Bill of Rights and doing more in the battle against AIDS, here at home
    and around the world, and restoring trust between the community and
    police, passing the hate crimes legislation, and passing the other
    things that we talked about.
        I want to say a few words, seriously, about a topic that the Vice
    President touched on, and I really appreciated it. And I don't want to
    trivialize this. I think the killing of innocent people, en masse, in
    America has been the most painful thing that he and I and our families
    have had to endure in discharging our responsibilities to the American
    people--the bombing at Oklahoma City; the terrible school violence at
    Littleton, Colorado; and before that, across the country, Arkansas and
    Mississippi, all the way to Oregon, and all the other places that were
    affected; this awful spate of race-related killings, and then,
    apparently, people just with their anger out of control, from Illinois
    and Indiana out to Los Angeles, over to Georgia, and back to Fort Worth,
    Texas.
        None of us should seek to make any capital out of this, but all of
    us should seek to make sense out of it. That's why we started this big
    grassroots campaign against youth violence that I hope all of you will
    be involved in. Two or three people came up to me tonight and said you
    were doing things back in your home communities, and I'm grateful.
        But the Vice President brought up this subject about whether it was
    evil rather than guns, since that is the debate as it has been posed in
    the paper and by some others, to explain the terrible thing that
    happened in the church in Texas, and many of these other things. And he
    said, essentially, both.
        I just want to ask you to think about this, because you think about
    how many times in your life you're in a--[inaudible]--and you would like
    to avoid taking responsibility for something that you could actually do
    something about, in your personal life, in your work life, as citizens.
    You can always find some other cause for the problem that you can still
    do something about.
        You know, our country has the highest murder rate in the world. And
    here, I'll tell you another thing you probably didn't know. The number
    of children who die accidentally from gun deaths in the United States is
    9 times higher than the number who die in the next 20 biggest economies
    combined. Now, if you believe this is about the human heart, you must
    believe two things: If the murder rate is higher here and the accidental
    death rate is exponentially higher, you must believe that we are both
    more evil and more stupid than other countries. Don't laugh. I know it's
    kind of funny, but don't laugh.
        The point I'm trying to make is, the NRA and that crowd have got to
    stop using arguments like this as an excuse to avoid our shared
    responsibilities. It may be true that if we had passed every bill that I
    have advocated, and every bill that the Vice President says he'd pass

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    if he were President, that some of these killings would have occurred.
    But it is undoubtedly true that many would not. And that is what we have
    to think about.
        And when we go into this political season, where everybody will turn
    up the rhetoric, you ought to have your antennae working real good, and
    ask yourself, are these people looking for a way to assume
    responsibility, or to duck it? And when I say that, I mean no disrespect
    to anyone.
        Of course, it is because something horrible had happened to that
    man's heart that he walked into that church in Texas and killed those
    people, of course it is. And the same things that happened to the
    children in Los Angeles and the Filipino postalworker, and the same
    thing that happened to all those people in Illinois and Indiana, of
    course it is. But we cannot use that as an excuse not to ask ourselves,
    what's the difference between our setup here and everybody else's setup?
    And is it worth the price we're paying, or is there something we can do
    collectively to make America a safer place and make it clear that more
    of our children are going to grow up safe and sound and healthy? That's
    what we ought to be doing. Make this election year about assuming
    responsibility, not ducking it, for America's future. You can do it, and
    we need you to do it.
        Finally, let me just say for the record and for the press here, most
    of the things the Congressional Black Caucus has really worked for in
    the nearly 7 years I've been privileged to be President have not
    benefited African-Americans exclusively, sometimes not even primarily.
    Most of the things that you have fought for were designed to give all
    Americans a chance to live up to the fullest of their God-given
    capacity, designed to give all Americans a chance to live on safe
    streets, designed to give all Americans a chance to come together.
        And in that sense, it may be that, in the end, the efforts we have
    made--now manifested in our office for One America in the White House,
    that Ben Johnson leads--to bring
    this country together as we move forward may be the most important of
    all. You know, no one can foresee the future. I have loved doing this
    job, and I'm going to do it to the best of my ability every day that I
    have left on my term. I am going to do it to the best of my ability. I
    am going to be a good citizen for the rest of my life and tell people
    exactly what I think.
        But no one can see the future, and no one has all the answers. But I
    know this, and you do, too. If every American really believed that we
    were one nation under God, if every person really believed that we are
    all created equal, if every person really believed that we have an
    obligation to try to draw closer together and to be better neighbors
    with others throughout the world, then all the rest of our problems
    would more easily melt away.
        And so I ask you, as we go through the last difficult and
    exhilarating challenges of this year, as you head into the political
    season next year, keep in your mind--especially those of you in this
    Congressional Black Caucus--the enormous potential you have to reach the
    heart and soul of America, to remind them that we must be one.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at approximately 10 p.m. in the ballroom at
    the Washington Convention Center. In his remarks, he referred to
    Representatives James Clyburn, chair, Eddie Bernice Johnson, first vice
    chair, and Eva M. Clayton, John Conyers, Jr., William (Bill) Clay,
    Corrine Brown, Elijah E. Cummings, and Shelia Jackson Lee, members,
    Congressional Black Caucus; Tom Joyner's son Oscar; and actor Chris
    Tucker. The transcript was released by the Office of the Press Secretary
    on September 20.