    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [September 24, 1999]
    [Pages 1586-1592]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1586]]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Meeting
    September 24, 1999

        Thank you. Well, I'm glad to see you. And I seemed to have recovered
    enough of my voice to get through this, so I'll try to do that.
        Governor Romer, Representative
    Sanchez, Mayor Archer, Joe Andrew, Andy
    Tobias, and Beth Dozoretz, and all of our team. I wanted to begin by saying a
    simple thank you to all the members of the DNC and to the leaders. I
    want to say a special word of thanks to the finance staff, with whom I
    have been dealing a lot lately; we've been working hard, and they've
    done a very good job, and we've done a good job under pretty difficult
    circumstances, raising the funds that our candidates and our party
    needs. And I want to thank them for their work.
        I want to congratulate the convention team that was announced,
    Governor Romer, Lydia Camarillo, Don Foley, all the others;
    thank you for your determination to make Los Angeles a great success.
    And I want to thank my friend of many, many years, Roy Romer, for the
    work that he has done for our party.
        I will recommend to the DNC tomorrow that, as Governor Romer moves on to this new responsibility, we elect Mayor
    Rendell of Philadelphia to the position of
    general chair. For those of you who know him, he has provided an
    absolutely astonishing leadership for us there. We've not had a Governor
    in Pennsylvania since I've been President. In the last election we
    carried the greater Philadelphia area by 370,000 votes, I think, about
    20,000 votes more than our margin in the State of Pennsylvania. And in
    the city of Philadelphia in 1996, for the first time, the Vice President
    and I had the same victory margin that President Kennedy did in 1960,
    when there were 400,000 more people there. I say that to tell you I
    think our party has been well led and will be well led.
        I just want to mention one thing that Roy Romer will always have on his resume. In 1998, when we gained
    five seats in the midterm elections, though we were outspent by $100
    million--$100 million--and all the pundits said--I want you to remember
    this, as you're treated to more punditocracy over the next year--
    [laughter]--all the pundits said we were going to be wiped out. They
    were on all these shows, ``I believe they'll lose 20 seats.'' ``No, I
    think they're going to lose 30 seats.'' [Laughter] ``No, I believe they
    might lose more.'' ``And they're certainly going to lose five or six in
    the Senate. They'll never be able to stop anything there.'' I heard it
    for a year.
        It was a terrible Senate election for us in terms of who was up, who
    was not. We lost no Senate seats. We gained five House seats, and it was
    the first time since 1822 that the party of the President had won seats
    in the midterm of a second term.
        So for all of you that were part of that, I thank you. I thank you.
    And I want to just take a few moments to try to talk about where we are
    in this moment as a country, as a party, by referring briefly to the
    recent past and by looking at the present and the future.
        When I first announced for President--it's amazing how much quicker
    things are happening now. You know, I did not even announce for
    President until October of 1991. It's September; I feel like I've been
    going through this campaign all my life. [Laughter] And I'm not even
    running. [Laughter]
        But anyway, back to the subject at hand. In 1991, when I announced,
    I asked for change in our party, in our national leadership, and in our
    country. I asked America to embrace the new challenges that we faced
    with new ideas based on old-fashioned values of opportunity for all,
    responsibility from all, and a community of all Americans.
        I asked that we have a new role, a clearly defined role, for our
    National Government, that didn't say we could solve all the problems,
    but didn't say we could walk away from them either. I asked us to stop
    demonizing Government, on the one hand, but to stop defending everything
    Government did, on the other, and instead to focus on what we could do
    to give the American people the tools to meet their challenges, to solve
    their problems.
        And then I asked the Vice President to
    join the ticket. We put out our economic plan, and we asked the American
    people to give us a chance to put people first. People gave us a chance
    in '92. We made a lot of very tough decisions. We passed an economic
    plan, I would

    [[Page 1587]]

    remind you, with not a single Republican vote, with the Vice President
    breaking the tie in the Senate. And they told everybody in America we'd
    raise their taxes--even though, for most people, we hadn't--and that it
    would be a disaster and that a recession was on the way.
        Then we passed a crime bill to put 100,000 police on the street, to
    ban assault weapons. We passed the Brady bill. They told everybody in
    America we were going to come take their guns away. [Laughter] Didn't
    they? And in 1994 they put out their Contract With America, and they
    thumped us good, they beat us good, because the voters had not felt the
    benefits of the economic plan. We had just passed the crime bill a
    couple of months before, and for all they knew, some Government
    bureaucrat was going to knock on their door and take their guns away.
    Probably--that alone probably cost us the House of Representatives. And
    everybody said--same crowd said, ``Oh, these guys can't win; they're
    history.'' Remember that, all their, ``It's over?''
        I always believed if we got up every day and thought about the
    American people, the kind of people I met in New Hampshire that were
    being evicted from their homes, and we just thought about the people
    that nobody else in Washington seems to think about and we kept asking
    ourselves, what is the right thing to do for them, that we could marry
    good politics and good policy, and it would work out all right.
        Well, 1996 came around, and the economy was cooking, and the country
    was pulling back together. And I went to New Hampshire, where they beat
    a Congressman who voted for the crime bill with the assault weapons ban
    in it. And I never will forget this. I went in '96 to New Hampshire. You
    know I have a special feeling about the place. [Laughter] They voted for
    me twice, and they normally don't vote for Democrats.
        And I got all these people there, and a bunch of them were kind of
    big, old rural guys in their plaid shirts, obviously hunters. And I
    stood up before this crowd in New Hampshire, and I said, ``You know, in
    1992 you voted for me to give me a chance. Then in 1994 you beat a
    Congressman who voted for my crime bill; I caused him to get beat,
    because they told you that we were going to take your guns away, and I
    feel terrible about it. So here's what I want you to do. If any one of
    you suffered any inconvenience at all at hunting season since we passed
    that bill, I want you to vote against me, too. But if you didn't, they
    lied to you, and you need to get even.'' [Laughter]
        And so a majority of the voters in New Hampshire, a State where both
    independents and Republicans outnumbered registered Democrats, agreed.
    Then in 1998, as I said, under the leadership of our team, we ratified
    the course the country was on.
        I think it is very important--a lot of you, almost all of you come
    from somewhere else. You actually live in America, with real people--
    [laughter]--and you go about your business every day. And it seems that
    a huge part of our job every year is to make sure that people can think
    for themselves and follow their own instincts and see the world as they
    experience it and not be swayed too much either by the financial
    advantage of other side or the conventional wisdom that emanates out of
    Washington. So I want you to be of good cheer and proud, because America
    is a better place than it was in 1992.
        You know, I saw a survey the other day that said that times had been
    so good for so long, the American people couldn't remember when it was
    bad and tended to give everybody good ratings on the economy, Bush,
    Hoover, the whole crowd. [Laughter] It's been good a long time.
    [Laughter]
        So let's take just a little walk down memory lane here, shall we?
    [Laughter] In the 12 years before I become President, the
    administrations told the American people the Government was the problem,
    and they railed against the Government. But under them the Government
    got bigger, not small; and the deficits got bigger. They said that
    supply side economics would overcome the laws of arithmetic--
    [laughter]--that if you cut taxes and increased spending, it would
    somehow balance the budget. And boy, we stuck with that theory for a
    long time. We just kept doing the same thing over and over again. And
    after 12 years, we had quadrupled the debt of the United States of
    America. We had very high interest rates.
        And it actually did work in the short run. My retired senior
    Senator, Dale Bumpers, used to say, ``If you let me write a couple
    billion dollars' worth of hot checks, I'll show you a good time, too.''
    [Laughter] So, you know, it worked for a while; I mean, you know, we had
    all this money, and who knew where it came

    [[Page 1588]]

    from? They just kept throwing this old money out there at us.
        And so we got out of the early recession and got through '84 and got
    through '88. Then, lo and behold--but we never could get a recovery
    really going. We kept falling back, kept falling back, and lo and
    behold, after the '88 election, we found ourselves in the worst
    recession since the Great Depression, and wages were stagnant, and
    unemployment was high, and unlike previous recessions, we couldn't
    exactly go into deficit spending, because that's what got us there in
    the first place.
        So the Vice President and I went to the American people, and we
    said, ``Look, we're going to have to get rid of this thing, and here's
    our plan to cut it in half, and after we do that, we'll go on and get
    rid of it. We've got to do it because otherwise, for the people who care
    about the business economy; we're never going to get interest rates
    down; we're not going to be competitive in the global economy. And for
    our liberals that want the Government to have money to invest in social
    programs and education, we're never going to do it because the budget's
    paralyzed by the deficit.'' And we'd gotten to the point where we were
    spending about 15 cents of every dollar you pay in taxes just to pay
    interest on the debt.
        So we said, ``We'll find a way to do it. It won't be easy, and we'll
    make a lot of people mad. We might have to get rid of a bunch of stuff.
    But if you vote for us, we'll go after the deficit. We'll continue to
    invest in the education of our children, science and technology, and
    helping the environment. But we'll get rid of a bunch of stuff, too, and
    we'll give you a new Government that's smaller, but more active in the
    ways it needs to be.''
        And the people gave us a chance. And it was an argument when we were
    elected; that is, we made an argument to the American people, and in
    '94, in their lives it was still an argument. And we won the argument in
    '92; we lost the argument in '94. But the reason we won it in '96 and
    '98 is it wasn't an argument anymore. There were facts out there in
    people's lives. So the debate took on a whole different turn when
    people's lives, real people's lives, had been changed.
        And now we have the longest peacetime expansion in our history,
    instead of the worst recession since the Great Depression. We have over
    19 million jobs, instead of a handful. We have rising wages instead of
    stagnant wages. We've got the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the
    lowest welfare rolls--rates in 32 years, and the lowest crime rate in 26
    years. Folks, this is not an argument anymore. It's a fact, and you
    should be proud of it.
        Instead of a $290 billion deficit, we've got a $99 billion surplus
    and projected surpluses into the future for years. The air is cleaner.
    The water is cleaner. The food is safer. We've cleaned up 3 times as
    many toxic waste dumps as they did in 12 years. Ninety percent of our
    kids are immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time
    in the history of this country. Nearly everybody now can afford to go to
    college because of the HOPE scholarship and the other college aid we've
    provided.
        The strategy has been validated. You can get rid of the deficit and
    still invest in the things you have to invest in. We've eliminated
    hundreds of programs but nearly doubled investment in education, while
    getting rid of the deficit. You can expand trade in ways that help
    ordinary people. You can balance the environment and the economy, and
    you can balance work and family.
        And I think this is very, very important for the American people to
    make the decisions now about where we go from now to 2000, because, you
    know, a lot of political rhetoric, since people always want to change--
    and that's a good thing, not a bad thing, by the way. But a lot of
    political rhetoric is premised on the fact that we were all born
    yesterday; the older I get, the more I wish that was true. [Laughter] It
    would be nice for individuals like me but very bad for a country. So we
    can't allow a collective amnesia here.
        There is a history here. There was a clash of ideas. Then there was
    a test of ours, just like there was a test of theirs. So the question is
    not whether we're going to change but how are we going to keep changing.
        Here, now, what are we going to do with this surplus? I vetoed their
    tax bill yesterday; you all know that. But, you know, I will say again,
    I still believe there is the opportunity for us to work together. This
    is not an election yet. I mean, the election may be going on in the
    newspapers every day, but here, in the minds of the American people,
    they still think we should be drawing a paycheck to work for them. Where
    you live, for most people, the election is not going on. If you live in
    Iowa or

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    New Hampshire, it's already going on. If you live in Arkansas, you're
    still worried about the price of cattle, you know?
        So we got hired to show up for work, and we still get a paycheck
    here every 2 weeks; all these guys in Congress and me, we still get
    paid. And I believe that it is imperative; the reason I vetoed the tax
    bill is it would make it impossible for America to meet our long-term
    challenges, and we can do a lot of that now, before the next election.
        What are they? Number one, the aging of America. We're going to
    double the number of people over 65 in 30 years. I hope to be one of
    them. [Laughter] The aging of America; that's a big problem not only for
    those of us in the baby boom who are going to age but for our children
    and grandchildren. Why? Because we're the biggest generation in American
    history until the kids that are now in school. They're bigger than we
    are, but it took that long.
        So now that we have the funds, I believe we ought to save Social
    Security. By that I believe we ought to do some special things. Most
    importantly, we ought to run the life of that Trust Fund out at least 50
    years. That will take you through the life span of the baby boomers when
    the generational balance will tend to right itself.
        I think we ought to do something for elderly women who are retired.
    They're the fastest group of seniors, and they tend to be poorer than
    the rest of our seniors and living on their own. And I personally would
    like to see the earnings limitation lifted, because I think we ought to
    encourage our seniors who want to work--who want to work--to work, and
    not penalize them for doing so.
        I think we ought to do something about Medicare. It's supposed to go
    broke in 15 years. And as all of you know if you deal with health care
    at all, in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, as we feared, the one thing
    that hasn't worked out very well is, it's clear to me that the cuts in
    Medicare, in terms of teaching hospitals, rural hospitals, therapeutic
    services, nursing homes, that the cuts were too severe. And we have to
    put some more money back in it.
        So we've give the Congress a plan that would lengthen the life of
    the Medicare Trust Fund to 2027, and that's the longest it's been alive,
    believe me, the Trust Fund, in--[inaudible]--who knows when. And it
    would provide for a modest, affordable, but significant prescription
    drug coverage.
        Now, this is a big deal. If you were designing a Medicare program,
    if there were no Medicare and we were creating it today, we would
    absolutely have a drug benefit in it, because a lot of people can stay
    out of the hospital; a lot of people can stay alive longer; a lot of
    people can stay healthy longer. We would never consider having such a
    program without covering prescription drugs. And because we don't, about
    75 percent of our seniors don't have affordable, adequate coverage.
        And we can do this now. And we can do it without breaking the bank,
    because there are also some structural changes we can make which will
    save a lot of money over the next few years.
        I believe--that's the first thing. I think we need to meet the
    challenge of our children's education. We have the largest and most
    diverse group of children in the history of America. Every one of them
    needs a world-class education--every one of them. If we--if I had
    allowed this tax bill to become law, we would have had to have huge cuts
    in education or spend one-half of the surplus attributable to Social
    Security taxes, which would have really put us in a pickle, with the
    seniors about to retire, the baby boomers about to retire.
        So I gave the Congress a plan that would save Social Security and
    Medicare, continue to invest in education and defense and the other
    things that are important, and do it in a way that over the next 15
    years would pay down the debt so that in 15 years, for the first time
    since Andy Jackson was President, we'd be out of debt as a country, debt
    free.
        Now, they think that's a bad idea on the other side, and they're
    supposed to be the conservative party. Why should the progressive party
    be for getting us out of debt? Why should the Democrats be for--I mean,
    we're supposed to be more liberal than them. We want to help poor
    people. Why in the wide world should we be for that? I'll tell you why.
    We live in a global economy where interest rates are set globally.
        You saw what happened to Asia a couple of years ago, when everybody,
    all of a sudden, overnight, decided it wasn't such a good place to
    invest, and all of a sudden, all of these countries that thought they
    were doing a good job woke up with a severe headache.

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        And we've seen this sort of thing happen. No, the decisions aren't
    always rational or fair. But we know that money is an international
    commodity, and interest rates, therefore, are globally set, although we
    can all influence them. Obviously, the Federal Reserve can influence
    them; others can.
        If we could take ourselves out of debt, publicly held debt, which is
    what I propose, for the first time since 1835, here's what would happen.
    For the next generation, even if we had a recession and we had to borrow
    some money then later to keep things going, interest rates would be much
    lower, because the Government wouldn't be competing with you for the
    money. That means all the working people, people like those who work in
    this hotel here, their credit card bills would be lower. Their monthly
    car payments would be lower. Your home mortgage payment would be lower.
    Your college loan payment would be lower. All the people we represent
    would be better off if we could have long-term low interest rates and
    lower inflation. And that's why we ought to be for this.
        Now, people that have lots of money and don't have to work very
    hard--I hope I'll be one of them one day, too; I doubt it--[laughter]--
    you know, they're okay with high interest rates. They just move their
    money around and make more money. But we should be for this conservative
    position, because we have a progressive conscience and heart.
        And so this is a plan that the Vice President and I and our
    administration have asked Congress to adopt. There are plenty of things
    that we can work together with the Republicans on, to work this out, but
    we ought to save Social Security and Medicare, keep investing in
    education, and get this country out of debt.
        And if we could make an agreement, I might say there's another
    reason the Republicans ought to be for it. So if we could make this
    agreement and keep the thing going on, then all their campaign speeches
    for the 2000 elections would make more sense. [Laughter] Because right
    now, every one of their Presidential candidates is out there telling us
    that they want to spend more money on defense or pay our service men and
    women more; you know, they don't want to stop investing in education or
    whatever it is they're saying out there. And every one of them are for
    this tax bill that I vetoed. And if it became law, they'd all be stuck.
    Every one of their campaign speeches would be bogus, because there would
    be no money to pay for all these things they're out there promising the
    voters. So they ought to be for what I'm doing, too. I'm saving them a
    red face in 2000. [Laughter] Everybody ought to be for it.
        But just think of this: Think of how proud we can feel if we were to
    lift the burden not only off the baby boomers but off our children and
    grandchildren of the baby boom retirement by saving Social Security and
    Medicare, if we were to guarantee a generation of lower interest rates
    and greater investment and more jobs and higher incomes by getting this
    country out of debt; if we really committed ourselves to a world-class
    education for every child in this country, without regard to their race
    or their background or where they lived. These are big things, and we
    have to lay the foundation now.
        And as you look ahead, just remember there really are differences
    between these two parties that are honest and heartfelt. You know, we
    want to save Social Security, not privatize it and leave individual
    seniors to the luck of their own investments. We want to save Medicare,
    not force seniors, by pricing systems, into managed care plans. And the
    people that want to do that don't even want to vote for a Patients' Bill
    of Rights. We want a real, enforceable Patients' Bill of Rights, and
    their leadership and a lot of their folks are still trying to find a way
    not to do that.
        Keep in mind, this is the party that opposed family and medical
    leave before. Now they're against the Patients' Bill of Rights. Remember
    how they told us family and medical leave is going to bankrupt the
    country; it's a terrible thing. Millions of people--millions of people
    have taken time off now--millions--because of a baby being born or a
    parent being sick--millions of people. And every year, we've set a new
    record for new small businesses formed. They were wrong, and we were
    right about that.
        We want to close the gun show loophole in the Brady bill. Why? Why?
    We want to do that because now 400,000 people who have criminal
    backgrounds or were otherwise unfit to get a handgun have been blocked
    by the Brady bill, but as they know that, more and more people are going
    to use the gun shows or the urban flea markets. So we want to close the
    loophole and do background checks.

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        It's the same old thing, you know, and the same old crowd's against
    it. And it's so interesting; it's funny to me. When they were against
    the Brady bill, they told us that crooks didn't buy guns in gun shops
    anyway, so the Brady bill was a total waste. It was just a burden on
    poor gun shop owners and poor gun buyers because no crooks--the guns--
    the crooks, they said, they all get their guns at the gun shows and the
    flea markets. [Laughter] That's what they said then.
        So now, I say, ``Okay, let's do the background checks,'' and they
    say, ``Oh, we can't do that. It's too burdensome.'' And when we asked
    the leadership of the other party to do it, when we asked the candidates
    running for President to do it, they flew like a covey of quails back to
    the nest of the NRA. There are differences between the two parties.
        And again, in '92 it was an argument, because this issue of what is
    a sensible way to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children
    had not been seriously debated for 30 years, since--or then, 24 years,
    since Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, and we
    had a brief, all-too-brief burst of focus on this, thanks to the
    leadership of President Johnson, who, like me, came out of a hunting
    culture and, like me, understood what was true about what the other side
    was saying and what was not. As a result, they don't like either one of
    us very much. [Laughter]
        But I'm telling you, folks, this is a big deal going forward. This
    is a big deal. We have given you the lowest crime rate in 26 years by
    doing what law enforcement people and community leaders say makes sense.
    But this country's still too dangerous. There are still too many people
    getting killed, with people that have mental health problems walking
    around with guns.
        A lot of these horrible killings we're seeing here, we need to do
    more to help these people; we need people identifying these people and
    getting them help quicker and doing things. You're trying to stop some
    of this stuff from going on. But you know, we can create a country in
    which everybody that wants to go hunting, can go hunting, everybody that
    wants to be a sport shooter can do it, and we can still stop putting
    weapons into the hands of children, criminals, and people who are
    unstable. We can do that.
        We got the crime rate down to a 26-year low, but it's too high. We
    can make this the safest big country in the world. And the American
    people will make that decision in the next election by the decision they
    make. There are honest differences between us.
        And what I want to say to you is, thank you. Let's get as much done
    as we can. People still, where you live, most of them don't think we're
    in a Presidential election. That's something that happens after the
    conventions. They think that they're paying good taxes to pay our
    salary, and they'd like us to work a while longer. And so let's do that.
        And as you go into the next election, don't fight with people when
    they say we need a change. Tell them we certainly do; we always need a
    change. The question is not whether we're going to change but what kind
    of change we're going to make. And are we going to change based on all
    the good things that are going on in America now? Or would we instead
    take a U-turn and go back to the stuff that got us in so much trouble
    before the Vice President and I came here and got the help of the fine
    Members of Congress and others who have worked with us? That is the
    issue. And you don't have to argue so much anymore. You've got evidence.
        Now, we'll be at a financial disadvantage, of course. One of the
    interesting consequences of the recovery of our administration, the
    economic recovery we sparked, is we've given all those Republicans a lot
    more money to spend on politics. [Laughter] You know, every time I see
    the total amount of money they're spending, I think, there's one more
    statistic for our economic plan. [Laughter] And some more evidence that
    some folks never learn. So we'll do that.
        The last thing I want to tell you is, be of good cheer. Let me tell
    you something. I come to this hotel and give a lot of speeches, as you
    might imagine. And today I came in, and they had six working people from
    the hotel in their uniforms to greet me, not the executives, not the
    management, people that work here. And they gave me my very own employee
    ID card. [Laughter]
        They're the people we're fighting for. You just imagine you had an
    employee ID card every day when we fight for the minimum wage and we
    fight to save and reform Medicare and Social Security and we fight for
    the education of our children, when we fight to let disabled people keep
    their Medicaid when they go to work, so they can go into the work force.
    We fight for

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    all these things. When we fight for one America across all the lines
    that divide us, when we fight for the employment nondiscrimination act,
    when we fight for the hate crimes legislation, when we fight for these
    things, it's because we identify with each other.
        It's a long time between now and November of 2000. In June of 1992
    you know where I was in the polls? Not behind, third--third. [Laughter]
    This is not a horse race. You don't collect any money if you show.
    [Laughter] But you know what I thought? I'll never forget, June 2, 1992:
    We win the California primary, and we win in New Jersey, and we win in
    Ohio, and we have enough votes to be nominated on the first ballot. And
    the story the next day is, ``Oh, but we did exit polls in California,
    and what they really want is Mr. Perot and not Governor Clinton.'' And
    you know, I got that probably because I'd had such wonderful national
    press during the entire nominating process. [Laughter]
        But then, what happened? Then the election started for the real
    people. Then it wasn't--they weren't, you know, sort of saying, ``Well,
    this is what I've heard,'' and this is sort of this vaguely--thing; then
    it became real. And people began to look and listen. And they opened not
    just their minds but their hearts, and they get--feel about these
    things, you know. And the American people nearly always get it right.
    That's why we're still around here after all this time. That's why we're
    still around here. It's the longest lasting great democracy in history.
    They nearly always get it right.
        But you have to help them make sure that they hear every element of
    our side. A lot of times, young people come to me and ask me for advice
    on running for office. And I say, I always had one rule: I wanted to
    make sure that by election day, everybody that voted against me knew
    exactly what they were doing. [Laughter] You think about that. In a
    democracy, that's what you want. That's what you want.
        Our party has been revitalized. People all over the world now are
    trying to do their versions of what we have done, to marry fiscal
    responsibility and a strong national posture involved in the rest of the
    world with compassionate policies at home that bring people together and
    lift people up. And it's working.
        You think about having your own employee ID card. And let's not ever
    forget who we're here for, why we belong to our party, and why we did
    all this. And let's just work like crazy, keeping a good frame of mind.
    And I'll bet you anything, it will come out all right.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:50 a.m. in the Jefferson Ballroom at the
    Washington Hilton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to former Gov. Roy
    Romer of Colorado, general chair, Representative Loretta Sanchez and
    Mayor Dennis W. Archer of Detroit, general cochairs, Joseph J. Andrew,
    national chair, Andrew Tobias, treasurer, and Beth E. Dozoretz, national
    finance chair, Democratic National Committee; Lydia Camarillo, chief
    executive officer, and Donald J. Foley, chief operating officer, 2000
    Democratic National Convention; and Mayor Edward Rendell of
    Philadelphia.