    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [July 23, 1999]
    [Pages 1306-1312]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1306]]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Cincinnati, Ohio
    July 23, 1999

        Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, first, let me say that I
    think in the spirit of candor, I should tell you that the real reason
    that the air-conditioning is not on tonight is that it's part of my
    continuing effort to convince the American people that Al Gore is right about global warming. [Laughter] And I
    hope you will join us now in this crusade.
        When Stan gave me this purple shirt,
    I thought instead of saying, ``no one more regal,'' I thought he was
    going to say, ``I'm going to give him this purple shirt, because no one
    is more wounded than him.'' [Laughter]
        Joe Andrew, every time he says that
    line about we're going to win everything from President to dog catcher,
    as if that's a wide gulf, I said, plenty of times in the last few years,
    I thought that was a very short distance, those two positions.
    [Laughter]
        I'd like to begin, if I might, by saying a few thank-you's. I want
    to thank Stan and his whole family, and I
    want to thank Dick and his wonderful
    family. And to Jim, I want to thank you and all
    the people that are associated with you and have been there for me and
    for my party for all these years. I'm grateful to the people of Ohio who
    have voted for me and for Al Gore twice, under what would normally seem
    to be adverse political conditions, when the Republicans were doing
    pretty well here statewide, and conventional wisdom would have it that
    we wouldn't do so well.
        I want to thank Joe Andrew for agreeing
    to leave the security of his home in Indiana and take on the challenge
    of the Democratic Party. And David Leland,
    who in '96, had what I thought was the cleverest idea. He had a $96
    fundraiser for the Democrats, and as I remember, he had 4,000 people
    there, which was a pretty impressive turnout, and I knew we were going
    to carry Ohio again.
        I want to thank Jody Richards, my longtime
    friend, who was the Speaker of the House in Kentucky. We were working on
    education together back when I was a young Governor with no gray hair
    and no reasonable prospects of this happy occasion. And I want to say a
    special word of thanks to Tony Hall, who is not
    only one of the finest Congressmen but one of the finest human beings I
    have ever known in my life, and Ohio can be very, very proud of him. And
    I thank you, sir, for all you've done and all you have been and the way
    you have been there for me as a friend as well as an ally.
        And I want to thank my friend Bill Daley for serving in the Cabinet, being a brilliant Secretary of
    Commerce, a great political leader, and I think that even though I have
    to retire in a year and a half, you haven't heard the last of him.
        As you know, this has been a highly emotional week for me and for
    Hillary and for Chelsea. We are friends of Senator Kennedy and his family. We knew and had the greatest
    respect for John Kennedy. I had a
    wonderful, long evening with John and Carolyn. We thought the world of Jackie Kennedy. And we're
    Americans, so we went through this last week experiencing it both in a
    personal way and experiencing it just in the same way every other
    citizen did. So I'm not going to give you a whoop-dee-doo tonight; I'm
    going to ask you to think about why you're here and what you will say
    tomorrow if someone asks you why you came.
        When Senator Kennedy--and I was just
    told at the table tonight that the eulogy for his nephew is now
    available on the Internet. It may be printed in full in your paper
    tomorrow. Somehow, you ought to get the whole thing and read it.
        The last sentence in the eulogy was this: ``Like his father, he had
    every gift but length of life.'' I say that not to be morbid or even
    sad, because it was actually quite a wonderful service, but to remind us
    all that life is fleeting and fragile; things we don't deserve happen to
    us, both good things and bad things, and our only obligation can be to
    get up every day and try to be children of God and do the best we can
    with the life we have.
        I believe that the work that we have been engaged in, the political
    work of the country, is good work. I believe most people who do it in
    both parties are good people and personally compassionate, by the way. I
    believe that. I despair that so much of the politics of the last few
    years has been about, you know, personal attacks, because it diverts the
    attention of the

    [[Page 1307]]

    public from the life we share in common and the obligations we have to
    each other and to our children and to our country.
        And today I left that church, that beautiful old church, thinking
    that all of us, including me, ought to do more every day to remember
    that life is fleeting and fragile, but a great gift; with all of its
    troubles and tears, it's a great gift.
        And so when I think about what I'd like to say to you, it is this,
    that in 1992 when I ran for President--and early on in the race I saw
    John Kennedy, Jr., and his mother at
    events for me when I didn't know them, really, and I was running fifth
    in the New Hampshire primary--I did it because I felt the country needed
    to change direction. And I offered some ideas to the American people
    based on the premise that we ought to be trying to create a country in
    the new century where every responsible citizen has the opportunity to
    live out his or her dreams, and where we're coming closer together as an
    American community even as we grow more diverse in our racial and ethnic
    and religious characteristics, and where we do more to be the world's
    leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity. Now, I am very
    grateful that those ideas, when put into action, turned out to have
    pretty good results.
        You know what has happened in the economy. We also have a 30-year
    low in welfare and a 26-year low in the crime rate. A lot of our social
    problems, our evading teen pregnancy and drug use, are down. Our test
    scores are beginning to rise after years and years and years in our
    schools; last year in the 4th, 8th, and 12th grade they were all up in
    both reading and math for the first time in a long time. Ninety percent
    of our children immunized against childhood diseases for the first time
    in the history of our country. The air and the water is cleaner; the
    food is safer. We've set aside more land from the Florida Everglades to
    the California redwoods than any administration except those of Franklin
    and Theodore Roosevelt. And I am very, very grateful to have had the
    chance to serve.
        I would like to say, because now that we're in a political season,
    many of those who spent the last 6\1/2\ years telling the American
    people I had no business being President now say, ``Oh, well, Clinton's
    like Michael Jordan; he just jumps higher than the other Democrats now.
    The natural order of things will reassert itself, and we Republicans
    will rule America again.''
        I want you to understand that I'm glad I had the chance to serve.
    But I could give the best speech in the world, and if the ideas were
    wrong or if there were no implementation, we would not have been able to
    turn the country around. And I want you to understand that very little
    of what I did could have been done if I hadn't had the Vice
    President I did, who knew a lot more than I
    did when we started about a lot of the things we had to work on; if I
    hadn't had people like Bill Daley and his
    great predecessor, Ron Brown, and a lot of other people helping us; if I
    hadn't had allies like Tony Hall in the
    Congress. And I say that to make this point: Tomorrow when they ask you
    why you were here, I hope you will say, ``Because I like the ideas they
    had, and they worked for America. And I'm not just supporting Bill
    Clinton; I'm supporting what we all believe.'' And we have the proof
    now. We no longer have to debate these things; we now have evidence.
        The second thing that I'd like you to think about is, we now are in
    a great hazardous period. We human beings are all inherently weak in
    some way or another, and sometimes the worst thing in the world for us
    is the illusion that everything is perfect and can't go bad. And so we
    have all this prosperity now, and I would argue that's a hazardous time,
    because prosperity and security can lead people to arrogance and
    shortsightedness if they're not careful. I used to carry around with me
    when I was a Governor 10 little written rules of politics, and one of
    them was, ``You're always most vulnerable when you think you're
    invulnerable.''
        And so I say to you, we have this huge surplus. We had a $290
    billion deficit when I took office. We've got almost a $100 billion
    surplus this year. We have projected surpluses for a long time to come.
    The big question now is, what are we going to do with our prosperity?
    We've got the country working again; now what are we going to do? And
    there's this big debate going on in Washington. The Republicans
    basically say, ``Okay, we'll agree with the President. We'll save the
    Social Security tax surplus for Social Security, and we'll use that to
    pay the debt down.'' And I want to give them that, and I appreciate the
    fact that they've agreed with me today; they've agreed to pay it down
    some. ``But we want to give the whole rest of the surplus to a tax
    cut.''

    [[Page 1308]]

        We say, even though we're in an election season already, that's a
    mistake, because if you look at the real, long-term challenges of
    America, you can't honestly say we can afford a tax cut that big. What
    are those challenges? Let me just mention a few. One is the aging of
    America. The number of people over 65 in this country will double in 30
    years; I hope to be one of them.
        Anybody in America who lives to be 65 today has a life expectancy of
    82. A child born in America today has a life expectancy of nearly 77
    years. Within 3 years, we will finish the decoding of the human gene,
    and young mothers who take their babies home from the hospital will have
    a roadmap that will tell them--you have a fine, healthy young boy, but
    his genetic makeup makes him highly likely to develop heart disease in
    his thirties or forties. Therefore, you should do these things. Your
    daughter is beautiful, but she has a gene which predisposes her to
    breast cancer at an early age. Therefore, you should do these things.
        It is not inconceivable that within a decade, the average life
    expectancy of newborns will be over 80--and keep in mind, that takes
    accounts of all the accidents and the diseases and everything that can
    happen to people. It is at our peril, therefore, that we pass up the
    chance to stabilize Social Security and Medicare and to reform Medicare
    so that it fits the needs of modern medicine with a prescription drug
    benefit and getting much more of our seniors to take preventive tests
    for everything from osteoporosis to cancer, because we can avoid a lot
    of the expensive medical bills if we prevent things from happening in
    the first place.
        So I think we ought to not only set aside a substantial amount of
    the surplus for Social Security but also for Medicare, and that we
    should take the interest reduction when we pay down the debt--that means
    less interest, right? I think we ought to take all the interest savings
    and put it into Social Security so we can run the life of the Social
    Security Trust Fund out for more than 50 years. Right now, Medicare is
    projected to go broke in 2015, Social Security in 2034. Under my plan,
    we could take Medicare out for more than 25 years; we could take Social
    Security out for more than 50 years.
        The second thing we have to think about is how to keep the economy
    going. You know, I'm sure you've all noticed, particularly those of you
    in business, the last 2 months, there's been this real debate about
    whether the Federal Reserve should raise interest rates to try to head
    off inflation that is not at all in evidence now, because nobody can
    imagine that we've had this economy growing this long in peacetime at
    this high rate.
        Bill Daley and I kind of like it. It's
    our job. But people say, ``Well, you know, you haven't''--they say,
    ``You know, Clinton may have a good team, but they didn't repeal the
    laws of economics, so I mean, don't we have to raise interest rates,
    slow the economy down to stop inflation, because if we have inflation,
    then we'll have a huge increase in interest rates and the thing will
    crater.'' And you've been seeing all this debate.
        So I ask myself all the time: What can we do to keep the economy
    going, to minimize the effect of the next slowdown, to ensure that the
    next pickup will be quicker? And I have two things that I think are
    quite important that are inconsistent with the Republican plan.
        One is, I don't want to just pay down the debt. I want to pay it
    off. And under my plan, we'll be out of debt in 15 years for the first
    time since 1835. Now, why does that matter, and why would the more
    liberal of the two parties be for it? How does that help ordinary
    people? How does it help wealthy people? Why is it worth more to you
    than a tax cut? Why? Because in a global economy where money moves
    around in the flash of an eye all over the world, if we're out of debt,
    what does that mean?
        It means interest rates will be lower for business; it means there
    will be more business investment; it means there will be more people
    hired for jobs; it means there will be more money available for wage
    increases and for ordinary middle class people or people struggling to
    work their way into the middle class; it means the interest rates they
    pay on homes, cars, credit cards, and college loans will be lower. It
    means the next time there are a lot of problems around the world like
    this financial crisis in Asia a couple of years ago, that our friends
    around the world will be able to get the money they need to get back on
    their feet at lower interest rates. It means--God forbid--if we have
    another terrible economic crisis in America sometime in the future and
    we have to go into debt, we'll be able to get lower interest rates, and
    then we'll be able to get out of debt again in a hurry because we won't
    be borrowing money

    [[Page 1309]]

    just to pay the bills every week, as we have been since 1835--and
    especially for the 12 years before I took office.
        So this is a huge deal. The other big thing we can do to keep the
    economy growing without inflation is to bring economic opportunity to
    the people in the neighborhoods, the inner-city neighborhoods, the small
    towns, the rural areas, and the Indian reservations that haven't felt a
    lick of prosperity in spite of all we've enjoyed. And that's why I took
    that trip across America to Appalachia, to the Mississippi Delta, to the
    Indian reservation, and to the inner cities to highlight the fact that
    as well as we are doing, there are still places that haven't felt the
    sunlight of our prosperity.
        And I have asked the Congress to pass a tax cut that is affordable,
    that includes giving people in this room who have money the same
    financial incentives through tax credits and Government loan guarantees
    to invest in an Indian reservation or in Appalachia or the Mississippi
    Delta or the inner city that we give you today to invest in the
    Caribbean, in Africa, in Latin America, or in Asia. I don't want to take
    away those incentives. I want to help those people, too. But I think we
    ought to have the same incentive to give poor people in America a chance
    to be part of the economic mainstream. And that's what I think we ought
    to do.
        And let me just mention two other things. We have made great
    improvements in education. With tax cuts already provided, we've given
    tax credits to everybody, practically, for the first 2 years of college
    and, indeed, for the next 2, and for graduate school. But we still don't
    have the best school system in the world for everybody, and until we
    have world-class education for everybody, this country is going to be
    held back. And as we've grown more diverse and more and more of our kids
    have a first language not even English, we're going to have to work
    harder to have a good school system.
        If the Republican plan passes, we will literally have to cut back on
    our present level of support for excellence in education at a time when
    we're trying to hook up all of the classrooms to the Internet, build
    modernized schools, raise standards, end social promotion, but give the
    schools money for summer school and after-school programs. We will have
    to have a huge cut in national support for education if this tax plan
    passes.
        The last thing I'd just like to mention is the crime rate going
    down. I don't know if you remember this, but I had a huge fight with the
    Members of the other party in '94. When Tony
    and others joined together, we passed this crime bill. They said if we
    put 100,000 police on the streets, it wouldn't have any impact on the
    crime rate. Well, they were wrong.
        Now, I've got a plan that would put 50,000 more police on the street
    and target them in the areas that have still real high crime. We
    actually have a chance to make this the safest big country in the world
    in the next 10 years. But if this tax cut passes, we'll have to make big
    cuts in what we're doing now in law enforcement and the support we have
    in State and local law enforcement and the work Federal law enforcement
    does.
        So it seems to me--and I could give you lots of other examples--now,
    does that mean we can't have any tax cut? No, I actually presented quite
    a sizeable tax cut to the Congress. I said, but let's do first things
    first. Let's save Social Security and Medicare. Let's pay the debt off.
    Let's make sure we can do what we have to do in education, law
    enforcement, medical research, national defense, the environment. What
    we have to do--not big increases, but what we have to do--and then give
    the rest of it back to the taxpayers. That's the way I did it.
        And there's a substantial tax--[inaudible]--worth hundreds of
    dollars a year to a lot of people for child care, for long-term care, to
    save for retirement. Now, one of my staff members said, ``But you see
    what we're doing, don't you? We haven't saved Social Security. We
    haven't saved Medicare. We haven't secured these other things. What are
    we debating first? Their tax credit.''
        One of the guys that works for me says this is kind of like a family
    sitting down saying, you know, ``Let's take the vacation of our dreams
    to Hawaii, and when we get back, we'll figure out whether we can pay the
    home mortgage and send our kids to college.'' [Laughter] I mean, that's
    what we're doing here. And so I say to you, I think we're right. But why
    are you here? I'm telling you, everybody in this room--just about
    everybody in this room--would be better off--you ought to be at their
    deal, because for the first year, you'd be better off with their deal,
    because I think two-thirds of the benefits of their plan go to the top 2

    [[Page 1310]]

    percent or something of the economy. You'd be a lot better off in the
    short run with their deal. Why are you here?
        Most of us believe--I think all of us believe--that those of us who
    are fortunate do better in the long run when everybody else does better,
    that we not only have a moral obligation to make sure everybody has a
    chance, but we actually do better. And guess what, we now have evidence.
        I've got a friend in New York who runs one of the biggest companies
    in this country. He's going around to Wall Street, now that all these
    Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates are raising money, and
    all these Wall Street guys are saying, ``You know, you've got to go for
    the Republicans this time.'' And he says, ``I'll tell you what you do:
    If you paid more in taxes after 1993 because of Bill Clinton's deficit
    reduction package than you've made in the stock market, be for the
    Republicans.'' [Laughter] ``But if you haven't, you'd better think about
    it.''
        But this is not a selfish--it is actually true that we all do better
    when we help each other. And so if you think about it--I think the one
    thing that defines the difference between the two parties today is how
    we think of our national community. I think they honestly believe--I
    don't mean this in a critical way--I think they honestly believe that
    they see the national community as people who say they believe the same
    things. We say the national community is everybody who is a responsible
    citizen, working together, trying to help each other reach our full
    potential. And we believe the Government has a role to play when there
    is no other way to do it. They call us the party of Government; I've
    given you the smallest Federal Government since John Kennedy was
    President. I've privatized more programs and eliminated more than
    Presidents Reagan and Bush did.
        The percentage of jobs created in the private sector in the Clinton
    administration is significantly higher than the percentage created in
    the two previous Republican administrations. We don't believe the
    Government can solve all the problems, but we believe in things like
    family leave. We believe that. We believe that's a good thing for
    America. We believe in the Patients' Bill of Rights.
        We think if people are going to go into managed care, they ought to
    know they can see a specialist if the doctor says so. And if they get
    hit in an accident coming out of the concert in Cincinnati tonight, they
    ought not to have to go past two hospitals to get to the emergency room
    just because the first two aren't covered. We believe that. That's what
    we really believe. And I'm willing to pay what the Republicans say it
    would cost, 2 bucks a month on my health insurance, so somebody else can
    see a specialist and go to the nearest emergency room, and I think most
    of you are. And I think we're all better off when people are healthier.
    They're more secure; they feel better at work; they feel better about
    their country. That's the difference.
        I believe we'd all be better off if we could end 100 years of
    oppression of the Native Americans, and they could actually make a
    living on those Indian reservations instead of haggling over a deal made
    over 100 years ago that was a disgrace to the United States. We believe
    that we are bound up together. And I hope that if somebody asks you
    tomorrow why you came here, you'll be able to tell them that.
        I'll close with just these thoughts. I'll tell you three stories
    real quick.
        I was in Iowa a few days ago, and I remembered the first time I went
    to Iowa after I became President--I believe it's the first time--was
    when they had that 500-year flood in the Mississippi River. Do you
    remember that? And the Mississippi just flooded its banks in '93--500-
    year flood.
        So I go to Des Moines and I'm going out there, stacking those
    sandbags, feeling good--you know, I'm being a good citizen, doing it and
    trying to set a good example. And I look up and there is this
    child standing there who was then 13 years
    old, who was about this tall, even though she's 13 years old. And the
    bones in her head were bulging through her skin, and her elbows and
    knees were knobby and her knuckles were bony, because she was born with
    brittle bone disease. She's had dozens of bone breaks, all kinds of
    operations. Every bone in her body could have been shattered. And she's
    there with the people and the sandbags.
        And I asked this child, I said, ``What
    are you doing here?'' I said, ``Do you live in Des Moines?'' She said,
    ``No, sir, I'm from Wisconsin.'' She said, ``But these people need
    help.'' And I don't know if you've known any children with brittle bone
    disease; some of them never get out of bed. This girl's really
    relatively strong, but still, she could--was in great danger, always.

    [[Page 1311]]

        And I said, ``Aren't you afraid to be here?'' She said, ``I've got to go on living. These people need help. I
    asked my parents if I could come down here, and we came.'' That young
    woman went to the National Institutes of Health, twice a year, every
    year after that, so I kept in touch with her. Her name is Brianne
    Schwantes.
        Last year I went out to American University in Washington to make a
    speech and I looked up, and there she was,
    an 18-year-old freshman, introducing me to all of her roommates. Now, I
    feel better that a child like that could get some of our tax money at
    the National Institutes of Health, and I think this country is better
    because of it.
        I'll tell you another story. When I was in Iowa, I looked out, and
    on the second row of this speech I gave at this school--there were
    hundreds of people there--there is this radiant young African-American
    girl, about 8 years old now, tall, beautiful. Her name is Jimiya
    Poisel. The first time I met her, she was a
    little baby in her mother's arms in 1992 in
    Cedar Rapids, Iowa. There was this huge rally there. And so I went to
    the crowd and I was shaking hands the way I always do, and there was
    this very tall white lady holding this African-American baby.
        So I said, ``Whose baby is that?'' She
    said, ``This is my baby.'' And I said, ``Well,
    where did you get that baby?'' She said, ``From Miami.'' I said, ``Well,
    why, how?'' She said, ``Well, you see, this baby was born with AIDS; so
    nobody wanted it, and I thought somebody ought to give this baby a
    home.''
        I later found out this woman--that her
    husband had left her; she had two children of her own; she was living in
    an apartment, barely able to make ends meet, but she had enough heart to
    take this little baby. And a couple of times a
    year, every year between now and then, they came to the NIH--this child
    with AIDS. She is a beautiful child. And once every year or so, they'd
    come by to see me and I'd keep up with her, and when I'd go to Iowa
    she'd always be there. She was there in the audience, faithfully, like
    she always is.
        The lady had a better turn in her life;
    good things have happened to her and her family. I think we're better
    off that that little girl found a home, that
    she had a woman who had more problems than most of us have ever had in
    her life, but she still had enough room for her, and that her Government
    helped her raise this child. And she got a $500 tax credit because of
    the Balanced Budget Act. That the child will be able to go to college,
    and that, thank goodness, because of medical research, she'll probably
    live to go to college.
        Last thing. When I went to the Indian reservation, I was introduced
    by the chief of the Oglala Sioux; they now call him the President. His
    name is Harold Salway. Before I went to Pine Ridge, Mr. Salway and 18
    other tribal leaders from Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, the
    high plains, came to see me at the White House. And we were sitting
    there, and they all went through all their concerns--you know, about
    education and the economy and everything. And then at the end, Salway
    stands up. And he's not a very tall man, but he's very dignified and he
    stood there like this, and he said, ``I have something I would like to
    say.'' He said, ``We are supporting your position in Kosovo.'' The
    poorest Americans. He said, ``You see, we know something about ethnic
    cleansing.'' [Laughter] But he said--let me finish--he said, ``But this
    is America.'' He said, ``My great-grandfather was massacred at Wounded
    Knee. I had two uncles. One was on the beach at Normandy. The other was
    the first Native American fighter pilot in the history of the military
    in the United States. And here am I, their nephew, with the President of
    the United States.'' He said, ``I have only one son, and he means more
    to me than anything. But I would be honored to have him wear the uniform
    of my country to fight against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.'' Community.
    Humanity.
        Thirty-one years ago Senator Kennedy gave another eulogy for his
    brother, Robert. Those of us who were grown then, many of us have a
    clear memory of it. And I want to close with this. I've thought about it
    a lot today. That man has borne a lot of burden. But after Robert
    Kennedy's campaign for President in 1968, where he'd gone into the coal
    mining areas of Appalachia, where he went to the Indian reservation,
    where he went to places and people that had been forgotten, Ted Kennedy
    said that he and his family hoped that what their brother was to them
    and what he wished for others would someday come to pass for all the
    world. I heard it 31 years ago; I have never forgotten it. That's why
    I'm here tonight, and why I hope you are.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    [[Page 1312]]

    Note: The President spoke at 7:55 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Stanley M. Chesley and Richard D.
    Lawrence; Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, Democratic National
    Committee; James Evans, director, senior vice president, and general
    counsel, American Financial Group; David J. Leland, chair, Ohio State
    Democratic Party; and Jimiya Poisel's mother, Laura.