    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [December 9, 1999]
    [Pages 2247-2252]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner
    December 9, 1999

        Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. It's been a long but a
    wonderful night. I am delighted to see you all. The most important thing
    I can say is, thank you. I thank Joe Andrew
    for his increasingly energetic leadership. [Laughter]
        I thank Ed Rendell. For those of you
    who don't know him, you will get to know him. Philadelphia had lost jobs
    for 30 years before Ed Rendell became mayor, and now they're gaining
    jobs rapidly. They had lost population; they had had a crime rate going
    up--everything. Do you

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    remember how the Vice President used to say in the '92 campaign,
    everything that should be up is down, everything that should be down is
    up? That was Philadelphia times five. Now everything that should be up
    is up, thanks to Ed Rendell, and he's going to keep our party up, as
    well.
        I want to thank Loretta Bowen and John
    Cooke and John Merrigan and Carol Pensky for this
    dinner tonight. It was wonderful. And I want to thank my friend Walter
    Shorenstein. You have already honored
    him, and you heard the Vice President talk about the big achievements in
    his life. I think it is remarkable: He reflects, first, a characteristic
    I've seen in so many of you. You've been so phenomenally generous. Many
    of you in this room tonight could be making more money in a short run
    under the other party's policies. You know it as well as I do. And you
    came here because you believe that we all ought to go forward together
    and that we ought to keep our eye on the long run, social justice and
    the long-term strength of America. And Walter has stood for that all of
    his life.
        He is also an uncommonly decent
    person. I'll just tell you two things. First of all, not very long ago I
    was out in Northern California, and I had a day to kill, and I hadn't
    seen my little girl in a long time. And it's
    inconvenient for the President to go any place quietly. Walter had a
    place south of San Francisco; he let me go there and spend the day with
    my daughter. That meant more to me than anything he could do for me.
    I'll never forget it as long as I live.
        And I'll tell you something else. You heard the Vice President say
    he helped to save the Giants. I was
    talking to Walter one night and I said, ``You know, Walter, I think the
    greatest baseball player that ever lived was Willie Mays.'' Next time I go to dinner at Walter's house, Willie
    Mays is there. [Laughter] And I might add, number 8 on ESPN's list of
    the 50 greatest athletes of the 20th century. Almost high enough.
        So this guy has never lost his sense
    of personal things, which I think matter most to us all when it's all
    said and done. And I thank you for honoring him. I hope that all of you
    feel honored, to some extent, through him. Sometimes I think we take and
    take and take, and we don't take enough time to give and to say thank
    you. And I'm honored that we could do this for Walter and, through him,
    for all of you who stick with us through thick and thin.
        I also want to say a word about the Vice President and Mrs. Gore. I have spent a lot
    of time studying the history of our country and the institutions that
    have made it work. When I became a candidate for President, Hillary and
    I talked about a lot of things. I said, ``I'll tell you one thing I'm
    going to do. If I win this nomination, I'm going to appoint somebody to
    be my running mate that I would feel good if I dropped dead, if
    something, God forbid, happened to me, that I am convinced would be a
    great President. And in the meanwhile, I'm going to make it a real
    job.''
        You know that when Harry Truman became President, he did not even
    know about the atomic bomb? A lot of people don't know that. Franklin
    Roosevelt had a lot of great qualities, but we had lost a lot of
    Presidents up to then, and they were still just picking Vice Presidents
    for the most sort of shallow political reasons. Thank God, Harry Truman
    turned out to be a great man and a great President.
        And then it got a little better. When John Kennedy picked Lyndon
    Johnson, he was ready for the job. When Dwight Eisenhower picked Richard
    Nixon, he had broader responsibilities. And then when Jimmy Carter
    picked Walter Mondale, he qualitatively increased the role of the Vice
    President. And to his credit, President Reagan followed his lead in
    giving more responsibility to then-Vice-President Bush. But I want every
    person in this room to know that Al Gore
    has had, 2, 3, 4, 5, times as much responsibilities as any person who
    has ever held this office and he has done a superb job discharging every
    single one of them.
        You know, we've had a lot of fun together over the years, and we kid
    each other mercilessly. When Arkansas plays Tennessee, he usually wins; sometimes I do. And he always says, ``You
    know, the difference between you and me,'' he said to me, ``is you don't
    have a vote in Congress, and I do.'' [Laughter] ``At least, every now
    and then I do. And whenever I vote, we win.'' [Laughter]
        Well, we're all celebrating this economy, but he cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to make it a
    reality. And when we were fighting to pass commonsense gun legislation
    in the Senate after Columbine, and all we wanted to do was to apply the
    Brady background checks to

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    the gun shows and the urban flea markets, require child trigger locks on
    the guns, he cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to pass it.
        One day we were sitting around in one of our weekly lunches--which I
    miss now, as I confessed in my press conference--he said, ``You know,
    we've got to do something about getting more computers into the schools,
    and not just a computer for their educational programs. We've got to
    hook them up to the Internet, and it will revolutionize educational
    opportunities. But if we don't do anything about it, only wealthier
    schools will get it.''
        So he came up with this idea that the
    FCC, now that we're revolutionizing telecommunications--something else
    he was the lead on our administration when we rewrote the
    telecommunications law for the first time in 60 years, or he created
    300,000 new high-wage jobs in America--he said, ``We've got to give a
    discount to the poor schools, to the hospitals, to the libraries, so
    they can afford to hook on the Internet. And we need to try to get the
    business community in. We've got this whole private sector group to come
    help us get the connections done.''
        Now, when we started this in 1994--it was his idea--3 percent of the classrooms and 14 percent of the
    schools were connected; most schools just had one connection in the
    library or something--1994, 3 percent of the classrooms, 14 percent of
    the schools. Today, thanks to him, over 50 percent of the classrooms in
    over 80 percent of the schools in America have an Internet connection.
    And I could go through what he's done in helping us to reduce the
    nuclear threat and dealing with a whole wide range of foreign challenges
    and the environment. We set aside 40 million roadless acres in our
    national forests not very long ago. This administration has now
    protected more land than any administration in the history of the United
    States, except those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, thanks to his
    leadership on the environment.
        So what I want you to know is, he has
    been a good and faithful servant of the people of this country. And he
    knows more than any person who has ever held that job. And he's had more
    experience than anybody who's run in my lifetime that is relevant to
    this work.
        The other thing I would like to say is, his wife has given us, Hillary and me, personally, but our
    administration and this country, many gifts. I want to thank them for the family conference that they run every
    year in Tennessee, that many of you have been a part of. What they
    taught us about family leave and child care, health care for children,
    many other issues. And I want to thank her for forcing me to recognize
    the woefully inadequate response that the people of the United States
    have to the needs of mental health in this country, and taking a lead
    and making us do better.
        I say this because this is a political dinner, but most of us are
    here--and we're Democrats instead of Republicans because we're motivated
    by these kinds of issues and because we think America should go up or
    down together. And one way or the other, if we're going up, we've got to
    go up together. And I honor them, and I thank them for that.
        I will be very brief in what I want to say to you. There's no point
    in my reciting what you already know about the progress of the last 7
    years. Except I will say that there is something special about the fact
    that it was done by our party, because we believe you can advance the
    economy and social justice at the same time.
        So it's not just 20 million jobs and the longest peacetime expansion
    in history; in February it will be the longest one in history. Look
    underneath that: the lowest female unemployment in 40 years; the lowest
    single-parent household poverty in 42 years; the lowest African-American
    unemployment and poverty ever recorded; the lowest Hispanic unemployment
    ever recorded, the lowest Hispanic poverty in a generation; the last 3
    years, finally people in the bottom of the income groups, with their
    income rising as fast or faster than those in the top. This is a
    democratic recovery, and we're going forward together.
        I want to say this about the next 14 months of my term and the
    decision the American people will make about the leadership of this
    country, the Presidency and in the Congress for the next 4 years. Over
    Thanksgiving I had my whole extended family with me, and then we had a
    few friends come up to Camp David and a lot of kids around, and I just
    love that.
        And this beautiful little 6 year old girl looked at me, and she
    said, ``Now, how old are you, really''--6 year old girl. [Laughter] And
    I said, ``I'm 53.'' And she said, ``That's a lot.'' [Laughter] And
    lamentably, she's right about that. And I want to say this, and I want
    every one of you to think about it. In my lifetime, in my

    [[Page 2250]]

    53 years, our country has never had the blessings and the opportunities
    and, therefore, the responsibilities it has at this moment. We have
    never had at the same time a strong economy, an improving social
    climate, strong self-confidence among the American people, with the
    absence of crisis at home or threat abroad.
        We had an economy that was very strong in the early sixties that
    came a cropper because of the competing demands of civil rights and
    poverty at home and the war in Vietnam abroad. You can go back all
    through the 20th century, and you will not find a time when we've had
    prosperity, social progress, national self-confidence, the absence of
    internal crisis or external threat.
        And what I want to say to you is, that imposes on our party not
    bragging rights for the last 7 years but an enormous responsibility to
    keep the American people focused on the future. Anybody can take a deep
    breath and summon themselves to great efforts in tough times. The great
    British essayist Samuel Johnson said, ``Nothing so concentrates the mind
    as the prospect of one's own destruction.''
        Every one of us can remember when times were tough and we got right
    at it. But also, most people can remember a time in your personal life,
    your family life, your business life, when things were going so well,
    you just lost your concentration or became indulgent or got distracted.
    This country faces a great choice here.
        The Vice President talked about the tax cut that Congress passed
    that I vetoed. I was so proud of the American people because times are
    good and people have been through tough times. And a lot of people still
    have difficulties in their own lives, and they could have said, ``Hey,
    give us a break here. Don't tell me about paying off the debt for the
    first time since 1835 or this other rigamarole. Just show me the
    money.''
        But they didn't do it. They said just what he said, that we like
    what we have and we want to go on. We want to leave a stronger America
    for our children. We want to get out of debt. We want to deal with the
    aging of America. We want to be able to invest in our children's
    education. What I want to tell you--I think that's what is at stake
    here: whether we will assume the responsibility of our success or
    indulge ourselves and squander it.
        Yes, you know, you can say whatever you want to about how I say
    whatever I say about the Vice President.
    Everything I said was true, and I believe it. But I'm a lot more
    interested than the whole country in our children and grandchildren even
    than I am him. I'm sitting here talking to you about whether we're going
    to make the most of this prosperity. And I've been here for 53 years.
    And like the kid said, that's a lot. And we've never had this kind of
    chance before.
        Are we going to deal with the aging of America or not? We're going
    to double the number of people over 65 in 30 years. I hope to be one of
    them. We could take Social Security out beyond the life of the baby
    boomers by doing one simple thing: Just take the interest we're saving
    on the debt from not spending the Social Security surplus and put it
    into Social Security. And we ought to do that. We can lengthen the life
    of Medicare; we can provide prescription drug benefits to the 75 percent
    of our seniors who can't afford the medicine that they need.
        We can radically improve our schools. We can deal with the challenge
    of global warming and all the other environmental challenges and do it
    with new technology and smart investments that will grow this economy
    faster, not weaken it. We can extend economic opportunity to the people
    and places that have been left behind. In spite of all the happy talk,
    unemployment tonight is 73 percent on the Pine Ridge Reservation in
    South Dakota. I'm going home to the Arkansas Delta tomorrow, right
    across the river from Memphis, where the Vice President spent countless
    days. And he can tell you that, except for the Native American
    reservations, the poorest parts of America are still in the Delta
    between Memphis and New Orleans or in Appalachia or in any number of our
    inner cities or upstate New York, which would be 49th in job growth if
    that were a separate State, or the rural areas of New England and any
    number of other places. So I think we ought to give people big
    incentives to invest there, the same incentives we give them to invest
    in poor areas in Latin America and Asia and Africa, to try to grow the
    American economy now in the places that have been left behind.
        No, it's not fashionable to talk about, because when I talk about
    trade, I make everybody mad. And he's doing
    a pretty good job of it, too. [Laughter] But let me just say, I think
    I'm right

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    about saying that labor standards and the environment ought to be a part
    of the global economy. And you know I'm pro-trade. I don't think you can
    make a serious case that the world is not better off. And globalization
    is not a bad thing if you do it right.
        You look at the places he mentioned. Do you really believe that we
    would have had to go to war in Kosovo and use our military power in
    Bosnia to stop slaughter there if the Balkans were the richest place in
    Europe, instead of the poorest? Do you believe we would have had 800,000
    people slaughtered in 90 days in Rawanda in a tribal war if their
    incomes were 10 times higher than they are?
        And I have to say--you mentioned Ireland. I'm very proud of the role
    we played in the Irish peace process. And I'm very proud of Senator
    George Mitchell. [Applause] But I want to
    tell you something. You can clap for him. But make no mistake about it,
    the fact that some American banks were sending their data processing to
    be done in Northern Ireland by poor people who didn't have any other
    jobs, the fact that the Irish Republic had the fastest growing economy
    in Europe, and all those young people saw what was going on in the rest
    of Europe, and they said, ``This is nuts. Let's let it go.'' That had a
    lot to do with that.
        So we have to find a way to put that human face on the global
    economy. And we've got to decide who we trust to do it and how to get
    there.
        Finally, there are lots of other things we could talk about. We've
    got to be willing to take on some difficult questions in the future. You
    know, all that nice talk Al said to me about all these tough decisions
    that I had to make. When we first got together after the election he
    said, ``You know, I've spent a lot more time in Washington, and I'm
    going to tell you, you can't imagine how hard these decisions are going
    to be. And it's just like developing muscles; it's going to be agonizing
    for you at the beginning, and you've just got to grit your teeth and
    make them, and it will get easier and easier and easier.''
        And like so many things he told me, it
    turned out to be right. But it was a lot easier because he was there
    with me, helping me. He was right when we took on guns. He was right
    when we took on big tobacco. He was right when we took on the health
    care industry on the Patients' Bill of Rights and on so many other
    issues. So we have a lot of things to do.
        Now, I just want to make one last point. I'm going to keep working
    for the next 14 months, and I think the best thing I can do for all of
    our candidates, from top to bottom, is to try to be the best President I
    can be. And I'll do my best to do that. And I am profoundly committed to
    renting back the House and Senate because a lot of those people lost
    their seats, a lot of those people lost their seats because they voted
    for the economic plan and they voted for the Brady bill and they voted
    for the assault weapons ban and they took the tough decisions. And
    unfortunately, they had to stand for reelection in 1994, before the
    American people knew we were right. And we owe it to them. And besides
    that, I've got a minor interest in what happens in New York. [Laughter]
        But let me say to all of you, if I had this proverbial encounter
    tonight, and somebody said, ``Well, you can't stay 14 months. You've got
    to go.'' And the genie showed up and said I could have not three wishes
    but one. It wouldn't be anything I've said on this list. I would wish
    for an America that is truly one America, that can bridge the lines of
    race and gender and religion and sexual orientation, all these things
    that divide us.
        If you look around the world today--that's why we're going to try to
    pass the hate crimes bill. That's why we're going to try to pass the
    employment and nondiscrimination act. Because if you look at the world
    we're living in at the end of the cold war, when people are not
    artificially bound into blocks where they feel threatened by their very
    existence, it was inevitable that we'd have an upsurge of nationalism
    and some of the things that have happened.
        But it is unconscionable that on the verge of a new millennium, when
    there are 20,000 people making a living on eBay trading, when we're
    about to decode the whole mystery of the human genome, when some people
    think we'll find out what's in the black holes in space in a few years,
    it is unconscionable that the biggest problem society faces is the
    oldest problem of society, which is that we're afraid of, prone to hate,
    prone to dehumanize, and prone to brutalize people who are different
    from us.
        There is so much hope around the world. I announced yesterday the
    resumption of talks next week between the Israelis and the Syrians.

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    I know they're working hard to make peace between the Israelis and the
    Palestinians. We even have the Greeks and the Turks talking about
    Cyprus. We've got all kinds of things going.
        And for all of the hate crimes and terrible things that have
    happened in America, we're not bedeviled like that, but it's still there
    under the surface. One of our major newspapers today had two
    breathtaking pictures, side-by-side, on the front page of the young
    soldier that was beaten to death and the other young soldier that was
    convicted of killing him. He was beaten to death because he was gay.
        And you know, I'm not running for anything; I'm just telling you I
    felt as a human being. I looked at that and my heart ached for that
    young man whose life was extinguished. Then my heart ached for the young
    man whose life was ruined, because somewhere along the way people taught
    him--you're not born feeling this way--people taught him that it was
    okay to dehumanize that other young person, who wore the uniform of his
    country. Both of them have committed to die for this country if I send
    them some place, God forbid, which might cost them their lives. And yet,
    that happened.
        So I say to you, not to bring you down but to lift you up, the
    reason I am working as hard as I can to be a good President, the reason
    I'm here with you, besides to thank you, the reason I feel as strongly
    as I do about the Vice President and all of
    our campaigns for the Senate and the House is that we may never have
    this chance again. And we have to make the most of it. And we owe it to
    the American people to get out there and get our message out, stand up,
    fight, show up for them every day. Never forget that the people we're
    really fighting for are the people that served our food here tonight and
    their children. And countless other people who will never have a chance
    to come to an event like this.
        And I'm telling you, if you do what you know to do next year and you
    tell people what the record is and what we stand for, then we'll have a
    great 14 months, and we'll have a great celebration in November of 2000.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:30 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom at the
    Washington Hilton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Joseph J.
    Andrew, national chair, and Mayor Edward G. Rendell of Philadelphia,
    general chair, Democratic National Committee; dinner cochairs Loretta
    Bowen, director of political affairs, Communications Workers of America,
    John F. Cooke, president, the Disney Channel, Carol Pensky, former
    treasurer, Democratic National Committee, and John Merrigan, cochair,
    Democratic Business Council; Walter Shorenstein, president, Shorenstein
    Company LP; and former Senator George J. Mitchell, who chaired the
    multiparty talks in Northern Ireland.