    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [December 11, 1999]
    [Pages 2280-2283]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Reception for Representative Alcee L. Hastings in Fort Lauderdale, Florida
    December 11, 1999

        The President. Thank you very much. Whoa! You will have to forgive
    me; you can hear that I have a cold, and so I can't talk very loud. So
    if you talk, I can't talk. If you like my speech very much, I can't
    talk, because I can't get over all the cheers. But let me say to all of
    you, first of all, I want to thank the Keiser family and the leadership
    of this college for welcoming us here. I want to thank the president of
    the student body, Dean Samuels, who met me and
    gave me a gift from the students.
        I believe in the audience we have, in addition to Representative
    Hastings, another candidate for Congress on our ticket in an adjacent
    district, State Representative Elaine Bloom. I
    think she's here, and there she is. I want you guys to help her.
        Let me say to all of you, I have had a wonderful day in Florida. I
    don't think I ever had a bad day in Florida. This is the first time I've
    ever been in Florida in my life that I've been sick, and I had a good
    day in spite of it, because, this morning, I went up to Orlando to the
    Democratic State Convention. Now, I attended the Democratic State
    Convention in Florida in 1981 and in 1983 and in 1987, when I was just a
    Governor and a friend of your Governor's, and they were good enough to
    invite me. And I always had a big time, and Hillary had two brothers living down here then, and I was
    always looking for a reason to come and always learning about what was
    going on in Florida, and thinking, this is the beginning of what will
    happen in America.
        So, anyway, 8 years ago this week--8 years ago--in December of 1991
    Hillary and I came down to the Florida Democratic Convention, which was
    holding the first election of the primary season, a straw poll. I was
    running fifth--fifth--in the country in the primaries at the time, but I
    got over 50 percent in the Florida Democratic straw poll. And it's been
    all uphill ever since, thanks to all of you, and I'm very grateful.
        Now, I'm glad to be here tonight with Alcee Hastings, and I'll tell
    you why and ask you to help Elaine Bloom.
    Because I know the President sometimes gets the blame when things go
    wrong, but the President also gets the credit when things go right. And
    you heard Alcee talking about all those good things. I want to run over
    them again in a minute for you, but the good things that have happened
    here to the American people would not have happened had I not had the
    support of the Democrats in Congress, particularly those that were
    really strong-willed and outspoken, that had influenced the others, and
    Alcee Hastings is such a leader in the United States Congress.
        And I want you to know that his influence extends beyond the Florida
    delegation, beyond the Congressional Black Caucus, because he is an
    intelligent man; because he cares about the rest of the world; because
    he believes that you can care about the education of our children and
    saving Medicare and Social Security for our seniors and protecting the
    Florida environment, and still care about decency and humanity all
    around the world and the end of not only racism at home but racial and
    ethnic and religious hatred all around the world. He is one of the most
    exceptional people in the House of Representatives, and I want you to
    help him.

    [[Page 2281]]

        Now, I'm going to give a short speech so I don't lose my voice, but
    you're more likely to remember it. I've got 14 months left, and then
    you're going to have an election to chart America's course in a new
    millennium. Here's what I want to say to you about it.
        We just passed the first budget of the 21st century. We got 100,000
    teachers for smaller classes in the early grades. We got 50,000 more
    police to keep the crime rate coming down. We got 60,000 more housing
    vouchers to help poor people move from welfare to work. We've doubled
    the number of after-school programs to help kids stay in school and
    learning and out of trouble. We gave States for the first time help to
    help turn around or shut down schools that are failing our children,
    because all our schools can do better. We moved forward on the
    environment. We paid our dues to the U.N. We gave debt relief to the
    very poorest countries in the world. We are moving forward.
        Then, there's a lot of stuff we didn't do that I want to next year:
    the Patients' Bill of Rights, the minimum wage increase, the hate crimes
    legislation.
        We had a great year in foreign policy. You know, I'm Irish. We saw
    the completion of the Irish peace process this year, and I'm very happy
    about that. And just last week, I announced that--earlier this week, a
    couple of days ago--that next week Israel and Syria will resume their
    peace negotiations in Washington, DC, in a couple of days.
        So we're going to keep working to the last hour of the last day. But
    I want you to step back a minute, because what happens in these
    congressional elections, whether Bill Nelson gets elected United States
    Senator from Florida, whether Elaine Bloom gets
    elected United States Representative from Florida, whether we hold the
    White House--and I believe we will--but it all depends on--I wish I
    could be more whoop-dee-doo. I'm doing the best I can. It all depends on
    what the voters think the election is about.
        Now, I want you to remember this. We put in our economic program in
    1993, and the Vice President broke the tie
    in the Congress, and the Republicans said it would be a disaster. Now,
    we have 20 million jobs, the longest peacetime expansion in history, the
    lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 32
    years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the lowest African-American
    and Hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded, the lowest female
    unemployment rate in 40 years. Now, that's the first thing.
        The second thing I want to say is, we have the lowest crime rate in
    25 years; 90 percent of our kids immunized against serious childhood
    diseases for the first time in history; over 2 million more kids covered
    under the Children's Health Insurance Program. We've cleaned up 3 times
    as many toxic waste dumps as the predecessor administrations, both of
    them. And we now have the lowest output of waste that is terribly
    damaging to the environment that we've had in 20 years. Twenty years ago
    we had 50 million fewer people.
        We've had 150,000 young people serve this country in AmeriCorps, 7
    million young people take advantage of the HOPE scholarship to go on to
    community college and to other college education. We've had 10 million
    people get the benefit of the minimum wage, and over 20 million get the
    benefit of the family and medical leave law. This is a better, stronger,
    more together country than it was 7 years ago.
        But what I want to say--I'll stay the course. I want you to stay the
    course. And then what I want you to do--wait, wait--what I want you to
    do is go out here and find your fellow Floridians who may not be
    Democrats, who may not be voters, and not only do I want you to stay the
    course; I want you to teach the course.
        You know, we had an idea that we ought to have a country with
    opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and a community of all
    Americans. And almost everything that we fought for we were opposed by
    the leaders of the other party. And I've been willing to work with them.
    And when we've worked with them, I've always given them credit for what
    they've done. But I think we have proved that we're a stronger country
    when we go forward together across racial lines.
        So what are they trying to give you in Florida? Mr.
    Connerly wants to come here and try to abolish
    affirmative action when we've proved that going forward with affirmative
    action in the right way strengthens the economy and the society and
    makes us all better off. So I want you to think about that.
        So the first thing I want you to tell folks is it's not like we
    don't have evidence here. It's not like there's no evidence about which
    approach works. I'll never forget how the NRA went after Congressmen in
    States like Florida

    [[Page 2282]]

    after we passed the Brady bill and I signed it, because my predecessor
    vetoed it. And they told the awfulest stories about how people are going
    to lose their guns. Well, 470,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers did
    lose their handguns, but not a single Florida hunter missed a day of
    hunting season because of it. They did not tell the truth about that.
    This is a safer country because of it.
        Okay, so here's the issue. What's the election about? What's the
    election about? In my lifetime--in my lifetime--there has never been
    this much economic prosperity, social progress, national self-
    confidence, with the absence of a domestic crisis or a foreign threat.
    It has never happened. So what's the election about? It's about what
    we're going to do with that.
        What do we propose to do with our prosperity? The Republicans gave
    us their answer in the last session of Congress when they passed a tax
    cut so large it would have prohibited us from saving Social Security and
    Medicare and prohibited us from ever paying down the national debt.
        But when I vetoed it, the American people supported me, and Alcee
    supported me, and the Democrats in Congress supported me because they
    said, ``No, no, no, that's not what we're going to do with our
    prosperity. What we're going to do with our prosperity is ask ourselves
    an honest question: What do we want America to look like in 10, 20, and
    30 years? How are we going to build the America of our dreams for our
    children? What are the big challenges out there?'' And let me just tell
    you what I think they are.
        Number one, you've got to deal with the aging of America. You've got
    to save Social Security and Medicare for the baby boom generation, add a
    prescription drug benefit, let people over 55 buy into Medicare if they
    don't have health insurance. We've got to do this. We have got to do
    this. I'm telling you, every baby boomer I know is plagued by the
    thought that our retirement will burden our children and their ability
    to raise our grandchildren. Now, we've got the money now, folks, to take
    the Social Security Trust Fund out beyond the life of the baby boom
    generation, and we ought to do it.
        Look at these young people. Look at the young people that are here,
    18 to 23 or 24, the young people in that age group. Do you really think
    when they get old enough to have their children and they start raising
    families that they should be burdened in what they can do for their
    children because they're having to take care of us, their parents, when
    there is no earthly excuse for it?
        All we have to do is take the savings that we get from paying down
    the debt with the Social Security surplus and put those interest savings
    into the Trust Fund, and it will take it out beyond the life of the baby
    boom generation--no controversy, no heat, no nothing. We ought to do it,
    and we ought to do it next year.
        The second thing we ought to do is to deal with the children of
    America. Ironically, we're growing at both ends, in our elderly and in
    our children. We've got the largest number of school children in our
    schools in our history. They are the most racially, ethnically, and
    religiously diverse school children in our history, and every one of
    them deserves a world-class education, and we ought to give it to them.
        The third thing we ought to do is take a different approach to
    crime. Now, you all clapped when I said we had the lowest crime rate in
    25 years; we've got the lowest murder rate in 31 years. Does anyone here
    think the crime rate is low enough?
        Audience members. No!
        The President. No. Now, when I became President, nobody thought we
    could get the crime rate down. They thought the crime rate went in one
    direction only--up. Okay, now we know it goes down. I propose that in
    the year 2000 we have a decent goal. We say we're going to keep working
    till America is the safest big country in the world.
        I believe there are lots of other things I could say--and I'm trying
    to save the Everglades, you know--and I just want to say this one thing
    about the environment. The young people here, if they're going to have
    the kind of America they deserve, are going to have to accept the fact
    that you can improve the environment and grow the economy at the same
    time. And as soon as we--look, since I became President, the air's
    cleaner; the water's cleaner. We've set aside more land than any
    administration except those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. We've
    cleaned up all these dumps. Let me tell you something. We better start
    thinking that we should be improving the environment as we grow the
    economy, not destroying the environment as we grow the economy.

    [[Page 2283]]

        But the last thing I want to say is this. I'll just give you one
    other. You ought to go home tonight and ask yourself what you think the
    big challenges are. Go home and make your own list. But I'll tell you,
    if somebody said to me tonight, ``Well, Mr. President, you don't have 14
    more months; you've got to leave tomorrow. But I'm the genie, and I'll
    give you one wish. You can do anything for America you want, but only
    one.'' What I would choose is for us to be one America, across all the
    lines that divide us, for two reasons. First of all, we'll never be what
    we ought to be as long as we still have hate crimes where some guy in
    the Midwest that belongs to a church he says doesn't believe in God but
    believes in white supremacy, goes out and kills in rapid succession an
    African-American former college basketball coach, and then kills a
    Korean Christian walking out of his church; an angry guy out in Los
    Angeles shoots a bunch of Jewish kids going to a church school, a
    synagogue school, and then goes out and murders a Filipino postman, and
    the guy thought he had a two-fer: he had an Asian and somebody who
    worked for the Federal Government; James Byrd gets dragged to death in
    Texas; Matthew Shepard gets put on a rack.
        Yesterday, all over America, there were gripping pictures of these
    two young soldiers, one 21, one 18. The 21-year-old, a gay soldier who
    the 18-year-old beat to death with a baseball bat. And I thought to
    myself, looking at these two young boys--keep in mind, I look at them in
    a certain way not only because they're young enough to be my own sons,
    but because I have a lot of your sons under my command. Those young men,
    when they put on that uniform--both of them--when they put on that
    uniform, they basically took an oath that says, ``If Bill Clinton tells
    me to, I will go halfway around the world to fight and die.'' That's
    what it means. Let's not kid. That's what it means.
        So here are these two kids. They make the same pledge. They've got
    their whole lives before them. One of them is dead, and the other one's
    life is ruined. And frankly, I ached for both of them. And the young boy
    that murdered the other one because he was gay, he wasn't born feeling
    that way; somebody taught him to do that. So that's the last thing I
    want to tell you.
        You guys are smart. That's why I always say what government ought to
    do is create the conditions: get rid of the debt; give people the same
    incentives to invest in poor areas we give them to invest in poor areas
    in Latin America and Asia and Africa; give people empowerment, and they
    will do the job. But, first and foremost, we must be one America.
        That is also the way we can have the biggest influence in resolving
    the crisis in the Middle East, in Kosovo, in Bosnia, the tribal warfare
    in Africa, you name it. This old world is still burdened down with
    people that can't get along without hating somebody who is different
    from them. And we all know better. We all know better.
        So I tell you, if you go out there and you make the subject of the
    election the record of the last 7 years and what are we going to do with
    our prosperity--and the answer is, we're going to deal with the aging of
    America, the children of America, make America the safest big country in
    the world, put America out of debt for the first time since 1835, bring
    genuine economic opportunity to the poorest people in the country, and
    be one America--we will come home next time, too.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 6:50 p.m. in the auditorium at Keiser
    College. In his remarks, he referred to Ward Connerly, chairman,
    California civil rights initiative.