    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [October 6, 1999]
    [Pages 1699-1704]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a New Democrat Network Dinner
    October 6, 1999

        Thank you. I hope I have Joe Lieberman's remarks on the White House television camera back there
    somewhere. Thank you so much, Senator Lieberman, for--we're about to
    start our 30th year of acquaintance, Senator Lieberman and I are. When I
    first met him, I had no gray hair. Now I have more gray hair than he
    does.
        I thank Joe Lieberman and Cal
    Dooley for their leadership of this
    organization; my friend Simon Rosenberg, who
    has come a long way since he was in the Clinton-Gore war room in 1992.
    And he did a great job there. And I, too, want to acknowledge Al
    From and thank him for the inspiration he's given
    all of us.
        I want to thank all the Members of Congress who are here and the
    candidates here who aspire to be in the House or the Senate. I want to
    reiterate what Joe Lieberman said, and I didn't think I could say this 6
    months ago, but we now have, I believe, a reasonable chance to pick up
    enough seats not only to have a majority in the House, which everybody
    knows and even our adversaries acknowledge, but even in the Senate,
    thanks in no small measure to the extraordinary people who are running
    for the Senate seats on our side.
        Now, let me say, I suppose I don't have to say much tonight because
    I'll be preaching to the saved. But I think it's worth analyzing where
    we are and where we're going and why the New Democratic coalition is
    important and why it's important to us to keep faith with the ideas that
    got this group started, with the ideals, and to keep always pushing to
    tomorrow.
        You know, there are a lot of people who say, ``Well, this election
    is going to be about change, even if they think the Clinton-Gore team
    has done a good job or the Democrats have done a good job. This election
    is about change.'' Well, I think it ought to be about change, too. The
    question is, what kind?
        I was educated about this issue very well about 10 years ago. Some
    of you heard me tell this story before, but it's one of my favorite and
    most instructive political stories. When I was Governor of my State,
    every year in October, this month, we'd have a State Fair. And I always
    had Governor's day at the State Fair, and I'd go out there and give an
    award to the oldest person there and the couple that had been married
    the longest and the person with the largest number of great-
    grandchildren. And then I'd go in this big old shed and get me a little
    booth, and I'd sit there. And anybody who wanted to come by could talk.
        And in October of not--it was '89, and there was a Governor's race
    the next year, and I had been Governor by then for 10 years. And this
    old guy in overalls came up to the Governor's

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    booth, and he said, ``Bill, are you going to run next year again?'' And
    I said, ``I don't know, but if I do, will you vote for me?'' He said,
    ``Oh yeah, I will.'' He said, ``I always have, and I guess I'll keep on
    doing it.'' And I said, ``Well, aren't you tired of me after all these
    years?'' He said, ``No, I'm not, but everybody else I know is.''
    [Laughter]
        And I got kind of--[inaudible]--and I said--you know how politicians
    are, we hate it when somebody says something like that. So I got kind of
    hurt, and I said, ``Well, gosh, I mean, don't you think I've done a good
    job?'' He said, ``Oh yeah, you've done a good job, but you got a
    paycheck every 2 weeks, didn't you?'' [Laughter] He said, ``That's what
    we hired you to do. What we've got to figure out is whether you've got
    anything left to do.'' Very instructive.
        No matter how good a job you do, elections are always about
    tomorrow, and they should be. America has been changing and sort of
    reinventing itself on the great pillars of the Constitution and the Bill
    of Rights and the Declaration of Independence for over 200 years, and
    that's why we're still here. And this coalition came into being and the
    whole sort of New Democrat/Third Way movement came into being because we
    thought not that our party should abandon its principles but that we
    should break out of a shell and adopt policies that would bring us
    together and move us into the future.
        I just want to make a few points as we look to that future. First of
    all, in 1992, when I went out to the people in New Hampshire and all
    these other States and into the country and asked then-Senator
    Gore to join me, and we said, ``Look, we've
    got this vision of America in the 21st century. We want this to be a
    country where everybody who is responsible enough to work for it has
    opportunity, where no matter how diverse we get, we're still coming
    together in one community, where we're still the world's leading force
    for peace and freedom and prosperity. We want to take this opportunity,
    responsibility, community agenda and come up with concrete policies and
    ideas to get the economy moving again, to bring the crime rate down, to
    bring the welfare rolls down, to empower poor people, to get more young
    people into college, to raise the standards of our schools and have more
    choice and competition there. We've got some ideas. Give us a chance.''
        And all we were doing is making an argument. And against our
    argument, what the Republicans said was what they've been saying about
    Democrats for 30 years, you know, ``They're too liberal. You can't trust
    them with your money. They'll raise your taxes. They never met a
    Government program they didn't like. They sleep next to a bureaucratic
    pile of rules at night. You know, they wouldn't defend the country if
    their life depended on it.'' You know, you've heard all that stuff.
        They had this sort of cardboard cutout image of Democrats that they
    tried to paste on every candidate's face at election time. But all we
    had was an argument. And things were sufficiently bad in this country--
    the economy was in terrible shape; the society was divided; the crime
    rate and the welfare rolls were exploding--that people decided to take a
    chance on the argument.
        And then we set about trying to turn this country around and made
    some very tough decisions. And some of our Members paid very dearly for
    it for the '93 economic plan to turn this country around, for voting for
    the Brady bill and the crime bill to bring the crime rate down. They
    paid dearly. But we kept chugging along.
        And about 4 years later, the people decided to give us a--they
    renewed our lease because they could feel things were beginning to
    change. And then in '98 we had a historic victory in the congressional
    elections because we had an agenda to keep building on it. We said,
    ``Now give us a chance to save Social Security and pass a Patients' Bill
    of Rights and build and modernize schools. Give us a chance to do some
    things that will really make a difference here.''
        And now we come up to 2000, and I want to make the following points.
    Some of them have been made before. You need to memorize this. This is
    not an argument anymore. And the members of the other party unanimously
    opposed our economic policy; almost all of them are against our crime
    policy. We finally, thank goodness, reached an accord on welfare policy,
    after two vetoes, and that's good. But still there is this sort of
    partisan rancor when we have evidence that the direction we've taken is
    right.
        This is not an argument anymore. The people in this room have been
    part--the Members of Congress in this room have been part of the longest
    peacetime economic expansion in history, the lowest unemployment rate in
    29 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years, the lowest poverty rates
    in 20 years, the first back-to-back

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    budget surpluses in 42 years, and the lowest crime rates in 26 years.
    This is not an argument anymore.
        And along the way we've brought some real new ideas into American
    politics: the family and medical leave law, which the previous
    administration vetoed; doubling the earned-income tax credit; the
    empowerment zone program, which the Vice President has done so ably; the community financial institutions
    that are making loans to people that couldn't get money otherwise; the
    charter schools--we're up to 1,700 from one when I took office; the HOPE
    scholarships that have opened the doors of college, at least the first 2
    years, virtually to every person in this country now; AmeriCorps, which
    has given over 100,000 young people in its first 5 years a chance to
    serve their communities, something it took the Peace Corps 20 years to
    do.
        So we have been full, all of us, of these ideas, and we've worked
    along. And it's been exciting. It's not an argument anymore. So when we
    go into this election cycle, I want you to say, with all respect, you
    have to make a decision about not whether to change. Things are changing
    so fast, that's not an option.
        Since I signed the telecommunications bill, over 300,000 new high-
    tech jobs have been created. We got this E-rate so we could provide
    discounts to rural schools and poor schools in the inner cities, so we
    could hookup all of our classrooms and libraries to the Internet by the
    year 2000, and it looks like we're going to make it.
        I was out in California last weekend doing some work for our
    congressional and Senate candidates in our party, and I was with a lot
    of people. This great company, eBay--you all ever buy anything on eBay
    on the site? It's interesting. It's an interesting thing. Not working
    for the company, over 20,000 Americans are now making a living doing
    business on eBay. They don't work for eBay. They're just doing business
    on eBay. Over 20,000 people making a living, including a substantial
    number of former welfare recipients.
        So what we've tried to do is to come with new ideas and policies
    that will really work, and it's not an argument anymore. That's the
    first thing I want to say. So say to people, ``We're for change. The
    question is, what kind of change are you for?''
        And the way I look at it, we've spent the last 6\1/2\ years trying
    to turn the country around and get it going in the right direction, and
    things are going well now. But I would like to suggest that the change
    we need is to say, ``Okay, now we're moving in the right direction.
    Let's reach for the stars. Let's write the future of the 21st century.
    Let's imagine every challenge and every opportunity we've got out there
    that's really big and go get it. Let's don't change by taking a U-turn
    and going back to what got us trouble in the first place.'' That is the
    issue.
        You can trust this coalition of people to deal with the aging of
    America. We're going to double the number of seniors in 30 years. I hope
    to still be one of them. [Laughter] The baby boomers will then be with
    us for at least another 20 years. We may or may not ever get an
    agreement with the Republicans on Social Security reform, but in good
    conscience, with this surplus, we must at least take the life of Social
    Security out beyond the reach of the baby boom generation. We have to do
    that.
        If we don't agree on anything else, all it takes to take the life of
    the Social Security Trust Fund beyond the life of the baby boom
    generation is to commit to take 5 years of interest savings from saving
    the Social Security taxes, sometime in the next 15 years, and put them
    in the Social Security Trust Fund. If we don't do anything else, it'll
    take us out to 2050, and we ought to do it.
        We ought to modernize Medicare. We ought to employ the most modern
    practices that you find in the private sector, and I think we ought to
    add a prescription drug coverage because if we were creating that
    program today, we would never create it without drug coverage. And 75
    percent of the seniors in this country don't have affordable drug
    coverage. It will keep a lot of them out of hospitals. It will lengthen
    and improve the quality of their lives. It is the right and decent thing
    to do, and we can do it if we're also prepared to have some savings in
    the traditional program. We ought to take the lead in this. We should do
    it.
        The second thing we ought to do is to keep working on the schools.
    We ought to have more charter schools. We ought to have a no social
    promotion policy. But we ought to give every kid who needs it an after-
    school program or a summer school program. We ought to modernize these
    schools, and we ought to hire the 100,000 teachers.

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        You know, if you ever wonder what the difference in the parties is,
    you ought to look at the debate going on in education now in the House
    of Representatives. Now, when the electorate was breathing down their
    throat in 1998 at the end of the congressional session, the Republicans
    worked with us to make a huge downpayment on 100,000 teachers to lower
    class size. And we gave the States money for 30,000 of them. And you
    ought to read the glowing statements made by such Democratic
    sympathizers as Dick Armey. [Laughter] In
    1998, just last year, the chairman of the House Education Committee,
    lots of others say, ``This could have been a Republican program. There
    is no bureaucracy here. This is a wonderful thing. We're helping these
    teachers.''
        They thought it was a great idea at election time. No electorate
    breathing down their throat, they have refused to fund the program
    anymore and taken out the dedicated funding for the teachers that's
    already there. This is about big ideas. We've got the largest student
    population, the most diverse student population in history. They need
    more and better trained teachers. They need higher standards. They need
    accountability and they need options so that the kids who aren't cutting
    it don't fail, but find a way to succeed. It's a huge issue.
        We have the crime rate, the lowest rate in 26 years. That's very
    good. Does anybody think it's low enough? Why don't we have a real goal
    now? Why don't we adopt as a national goal that we're going to be the
    safest big country in the world?
        If we have--we've got--you may think that's crazy, but everybody
    thought it was crazy when we said we'd balance the budget, too. I could
    never have been elected President if I said, ``If you will vote for me,
    within 6 years I'll give you two surpluses in a row.'' [Laughter]
    People'd say, ``He seems like a nice young fella. We'd better send him
    home and get him a little help. He's disturbed.'' [Laughter] ``He's out
    of his mind.''
        If you don't envision this, it won't happen. Why should we say,
    ``We've got the lowest crime rate in 26 years. It's good enough?'' It's
    not good enough. It's nowhere near good enough. But if we're serious
    about it, we're going to have to do more in prevention. We already have
    the highest percentage of people behind bars of any country in the
    world. We're going to have to say there's no rational distinction
    between a flea market and a gun show and a gun shop. We're going to have
    to put 50,000 more police out there in the neighborhoods where the crime
    rate is still too high. We're going to have to do things that help
    communities that are driving their crime rates down do it everywhere.
        But I think the Democrats ought to say, ``We're not satisfied with
    the lowest crime rate in 26 years. We'll never be satisfied until
    America is the safest big country in the world, and we think we can help
    to make it that way.''
        I think this is important. Let's talk about the economy. It's
    probably the best economy we've ever had. But I'm not satisfied with it
    for two reasons: Number one, not everybody is a part of it; and number
    two, it's changing so fast, if we don't keep working we can't keep the
    growth going. So let me just offer you a few ideas that I think are
    important.
        I think our new markets ideas are important. These empowerment zones
    are wonderful, and I want to get more of them. But it isn't fair for all
    the places that aren't part of it not to have some help from us to bring
    enterprise there.
        If we've learned one thing, we've got the strongest recovery of the
    last 30 years, also the highest percentage of private sector jobs. We
    have the smallest Federal Government since President Kennedy was here.
    But we have not yet figured out how to bring enterprise to every
    community that hasn't been part of this recovery.
        So for those of us who represent and live in the Mississippi Delta
    or in Appalachia or in--represent many of the inner-city areas or a lot
    of the small towns and rural areas all over this country or the Native
    American reservations, I have proposed a modest but, I think, important
    plan. What I want the Congress to do is to pass laws that give us the
    same incentives to Americans with money to invest in poor areas in
    America, we give them to invest in poor areas in Central America and the
    Caribbean and Africa and Asia and throughout the world. I think it is a
    very, very good thing to do.
        The second thing I'd like to say is that I like what we're doing,
    hooking up all these classrooms to the Internet, and the E-rate allows
    us to hook them up in rural areas and poor urban areas. But if you think
    about it, I believe we could revolutionize the economy of these left-
    behind places if access to the Internet were

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    as pervasive as access to telephones. So why don't we adopt that as a
    goal, study it, figure out how to achieve it, say we will not permit
    there to be any digital divide. That's the policy we've taken with
    regard to our schools. That's what the E-rate's all about. No digital
    divide for our kids in the schools.
        But what if their parents all had it, too? What if their parents had
    access to that? What if we--why should we be content with the economy we
    have? If we don't reach our goal, it will be a lot better than it would
    otherwise, and we'll keep things going. I think we ought to think of
    that.
        Let me just mention two other things. First of all, I want to
    mention something that may be sort of politically impolite, but one
    issue in which our caucus, in my view, is still divided too often in the
    wrong way, and that's the issue of trade.
        Here's what I think. But there's a reason for that. You see it all
    over the world today. There is a move toward protectionism all over the
    world today, even in places that are doing well. Why? Because we have
    not figured out how to put a human face on the global economy. Because
    we haven't figured out how to tell people that, sure, there will be more
    dynamism in this economy, but here's what we're doing to protect the
    basic rights of working families. Here's what we're doing to try to
    protect the basic integrity of the environment. Here's what we're trying
    to do to make sure everyone can benefit from this.
        So our party needs to take the lead in pushing for trade, but for
    doing it in a way that says we're determined to put a human face on the
    global economy. Because if we don't, it's not just in America; you see
    this everywhere. I see it in the Europeans. I see it in Asia again. I
    see it--the economy is now the strongest, here, it's been in a long
    time, and yet, the impetus for continuing to trade is not there.
        Yet, you don't have to be a rocket scientist. We've got 4 percent of
    the people and 22 percent of the wealth. So if we want to keep strong
    and wealthy and growing, we've got to do something with the other 96
    percent of the people out there. And I think it's very important.
        I've got this big trade meeting coming up--we all do--in Washington
    State, in Seattle, in December. And I hope we can try to break down some
    barriers in other countries. But why should people break their barriers
    down if they think America's trying to have it both ways? So I think we
    have to go back at this.
        And lastly--and I think maybe the most important thing of all for
    the next generation--I vetoed that tax bill that the Congress passed,
    the Republicans in Congress passed, because I was convinced that if I
    signed it we not only could never meet our obligations to our children
    and to our seniors and to our future in our investments in science and
    technology, I was convinced we would never finish the work of paying
    down our debt. Now, we're paying down our debt now. And if we stay on
    the plane that I asked Congress to adopt in the budget, we will be debt-
    free in 15 years, for the first time since Andrew Jackson was President
    in 1835.
        Now, why should the Democratic Party be for that? In conventional
    terms, we're the more liberal party. Why should we be for that?
    Everybody in this room who is 40 years of age or older, who studied
    economics in college, was told that a Government should always carry
    some debt. We were all taught that. Why? Because we're living in a
    global economy.
        You look at what happens to these countries that try to hide their
    money; people still get it out. Interest rates are set in a global
    economy. If we get America out of debt, it means that all the Americans
    can borrow more cheaply. If the Government is out of debt, it means
    lower interest rates for businesses in this country, for home loans, for
    car loans, for college loans. It means more jobs and higher incomes. It
    means when our friends overseas who aren't as fortunate as we are get in
    trouble the way the Asians did in the last 2 years, they can get out of
    trouble at lower cost. And we'll start growing again more quickly.
        I believe, if we do this, it would do more than anything else we
    could do to guarantee a whole generation of prosperity. Whatever happens
    in the future, we know not every day of every month of every year from
    now on will be as good as the last 6\1/2\ years have been, but whatever
    happens in the future, it won't be as bad as it would have been if we
    keep getting this country out of debt.
        So I hope all of you will support that. We should not do anything
    that undermines our ability to shoot for that big idea, a debt-free
    America, an America with its lowest crime rate,

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    an America where everybody has economic opportunity. These are big
    ideas, and they're worth fighting for.
        So, yes, we ought to be changing. But just remember, you don't have
    to make an argument with anybody anymore. You have the evidence on your
    side. We were right. So tell them, ``If we're going to change, don't
    make a U-turn. Reach for the stars.''
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:40 p.m. in the Regency Room at the Hyatt
    Regency. In his remarks, he referred to Senator Joseph I. Lieberman and
    Representative Calvin M. Dooley, cofounders, and Simon Rosenberg,
    executive director, New Democratic Network; and Al From, president,
    Democratic Leadership Council.