    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [November 30, 1999]
    [Pages 2166-2169]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Luncheon in San
    Francisco, California
    November 30, 1999

        Thank you very much. Thank you, Bill;
    thank you, Sally; thank you, Leader
    Gephardt; and thank you, Nancy
    Pelosi, for always being so wonderful to
    take all of your various charges from the D-triple-C to the DNC to your
    President into San Francisco and find your friends and help us.
        It's good to be back here. I was here, as Bill said, a couple years
    ago. And we had a beautiful dinner here, and I love this place. But it's
    even more beautiful in the daylight. And I want to thank all the Members
    for coming. Chairman Torres, thank you for being
    here. And I want to thank the mayor for
    coming.
        I am so indebted to California, and particularly to San Francisco,
    for being so good to me and Hillary and the Vice President and Mrs.
    Gore. And I've also learned so much. Every time I come to northern
    California I learn something new, so I'm less technologically
    challenged. [Laughter]
        And I've learned a lot from Willie Brown. I've learned how to dress better. [Laughter] I never
    thought I would live long enough to see him in a race where somebody was
    running to the left of him; this is a great, great day. [Laughter] I
    don't know how there is any oxygen left over there. [Laughter] I'm still
    learning from you, and I thank you, Mr. Mayor.
        Let me say also, this is the first opportunity I've had in public to
    thank Dick Gephardt and all the others
    who are here in our caucus, and Senator Boxer,
    for their stalwart strength in fighting for our budget priorities. I
    just signed yesterday the first budget of the 21st century. And I think
    it's worth mentioning that because, and only because, they stayed with
    me, we got our continuing commitment to 100,000 teachers; we doubled,
    more than doubled, the funds allocated to after-school and summer school
    programs for children, something that Senator Boxer has fought for a
    long time; we've, for the first time ever, got funds to States that will
    agree to target failing schools and give them money to either shut them
    down or turn them around.
        This was a remarkable thing. We got 50,000 more police for our
    neighborhoods with the highest crime rates. We passed the remarkable
    bill called the Kennedy-Jeffords bill, which will enable disabled people
    to go into the workplace and keep their Medicaid health insurance so

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    that they can work and become taxpaying citizens. They would be totally
    uninsurable otherwise. We even got some money to pay for people who are
    not disabled yet but who are uninsurable--people with HIV, people with
    Parkinson's who can't be legally declared disabled--because they stuck
    with me. And we got for the first time a big chunk of money for the so-
    called lands legacy initiative that the Vice President fought so hard for, to set-aside funds. And a lot of
    other things.
        We also left a lot of things undone. We didn't pass the Patients'
    Bill of Rights yet. We didn't pass the minimum wage increase yet. We
    didn't pass the hate crimes legislation yet or the employment and
    nondiscrimination act yet. And we haven't yet taken the strong action I
    would like to see to extend Social Security beyond the life of the baby
    boom generation and to reform and modernize Medicare and add a
    prescription drug benefit.
        We beat a huge and irresponsible tax cut, which enables us to
    continue to pay down the deficit, and we are now on the track to make
    America debt-free for the first time since 1835, which means that all
    these entrepreneurs in northern California will be able to get money at
    lower interest rates for another generation and to get us a whole
    generation of prosperity.
        But what I want you to understand is it happened only because they
    were willing to stick with me. Otherwise, there would have been no
    100,000 teachers, no 50,000 police, no disability employment bill. It
    would not have happened. We wouldn't have gotten the lands legacy money.
    All the environmental riders would have been attached to the legislation
    that we beat back. All of that would have happened. They stayed.
        Now I want to put that in the larger perspective of where we've
    been, very briefly, for the last 7 years and where we're going, because,
    you know, people sometimes look at me and say, ``What are you doing
    here? You're not running for anything.'' And I am, too. I'm running for
    what Mr. Gephardt said; I want to be a good citizen. And I'm here
    because I believe in Dick Gephardt's
    leadership, Nancy Pelosi's leadership, and
    the potential of our party.
        One of you when you went through the line said to me, ``Do you have
    any regrets?'' And I said, ``Just a few;'' and I'm here trying to
    rectify one of them. I regret that we lost the congressional majority in
    1994. And it happened because, frankly, because I pushed the country and
    the Congress to deal with some major challenges simultaneously: to deal
    with this awful budget deficit, without giving up on our commitment to
    invest more in the health care, in the education, in the environment of
    our country; to take on the issue of guns, which no administration, no
    Congress had taken on since Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were
    assassinated; and to deal with the health care crisis.
        One of Dick's colleagues said to me
    the other day--he slapped me on the back and said, ``You know, they told
    me if I voted for your health care program, health care would become
    more bureaucratic and fewer people would be insured at work. And I voted
    for it and, sure enough, that's what happened''--[laughter]--``health
    care has become more bureaucratic and fewer people are insured at work,
    because it didn't pass.'' [Laughter]
        So I say to you, look at the record that these people have helped us
    to establish. In 1992, just remember what California was like and the
    country was like: economic distress, social division, political drift,
    Government discredited. Don't let anybody forget that as we come into
    this session. Just ask them to remember what it was like in '91 and '92:
    economic distress, social division, political drift, Government
    discredited.
        And you gave Al Gore and I a chance to work with them. And we said
    we want a country where there is opportunity for all, responsibility
    from all, and a community of all Americans, where everybody can be a
    part. And we had all these ideas. But you just bought an argument. Well,
    7 years later, there is not an argument. There is evidence. And I think
    that it's worth repeating, because--I know I'm preaching to the choir
    here, but you need to go out and share this. In February we'll have the
    longest--not peacetime; the longest--expansion of any kind in our
    history. We have 19.8 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment rate in
    30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest poverty rates
    in 20 years, the highest homeownership in history.
        In addition to that, the society is healing. We have the lowest
    crime rates in 25 years, the lowest teen pregnancy rates in 30 years. We
    have the lowest female unemployment rates in 40 years and the lowest
    poverty rate among single-parent households in 40 years. And we've

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    set aside more land than any administration except those of Franklin and
    Theodore Roosevelt, including 40 million roadless acres in the national
    forests. The land is safer; the water is cleaner; the air is cleaner.
    We've cleaned up three times as many toxic waste dumps as the previous
    two administrations. We have 90 percent of our kids immunized for the
    first time in history; 20 million people have taken advantage of the
    family and medical leave law, which was vetoed by the previous
    administration. Four hundred thousand people who shouldn't get guns have
    not been able to buy handguns because of the Brady bill, which was
    vetoed by the previous administration.
        So I say to you, this is not an argument anymore. There is evidence,
    and I want you to remember those numbers. And when you talk to the
    skeptics and you talk to the doubters, you need to go out and tell
    people what the evidence is. And if you look ahead, the real issue is--
    and Dick talked about this--you know I want them to be in the majority
    because of the issue of education, because there is still a lot more to
    be done. I want them to be in the majority because I do believe they
    will help to conduct their business in a way that will promote the one
    America that I believe is so important.
        I am very proud of the fact that the United States has played a
    major role in trying to reconcile warring and hating factions from
    Northern Ireland to the Middle East to the Balkans to Africa. But I want
    us to do that at home, too, which is why I want this hate crimes
    legislation to pass. You only have to look at what happened at the
    Jewish school in Los Angeles or to the Filipino postman who was murdered
    there or what happened in the rampage in the Middle West, where
    everybody from the former African-American basketball coach at
    Northwestern to a Korean Christian walking out of his church--these
    people were killed--James Byrd dragged to death, Matthew Shepard
    stretched out on a rack. There is still a lot of that in us.
        And what I would like to just ask you to think about and what I
    think about all the time is, okay, we've had all these good things
    happen to us, and our country now, thanks to a lot of you and
    technology--I should have mentioned when I became--when we started
    NetDay here in 1994, 15 percent of our schools were connected to the
    Internet; 89 percent are now, thanks to a lot of you and the E-rate. I
    could just go on and on. You need to remember these things and talk to
    people about them.
        But the big question is, what are we going to do now? What will we
    do with a moment of prosperity that is, in my lifetime unprecedented.
    Never in my life have we had this much economic strength, this much
    social progress, this kind of opportunity free of external threat or
    internal crisis to shape the future for our children. What are we going
    to do about it?
        And there will be all kinds of siren songs in the election season to
    kind of distract people from that or to get us to lower our sights or be
    more selfish or be more shortsighted. And the truth is, I bet you every
    one of you can cite some point in your personal life, your family life,
    or your business life when you got in trouble because things were going
    well and you broke your concentration. You relaxed; you got diverted;
    you got divided; you got indulgent.
        Well, the country is no different. We have to realize this is a
    truly precious moment. In my lifetime, it has never happened. And the
    reason I want Dick Gephardt to be the
    Speaker is I think that we ought to--yes, we made a lot of advances in
    education, but we don't have a world-class education for all our
    children, and we shouldn't stop until we do. Yes, we continue to pay
    down the debt at record rates, and we've got the first back-to-back
    balanced budgets in 42 years. But we haven't extended Social Security
    beyond the life of the baby boom generation; we haven't extended
    Medicare and added that prescription drug benefit when 75 percent of the
    seniors in this country can't afford the medicine they're supposed to
    take. So we haven't dealt with the challenge of the aging of America as
    much as we should.
        We haven't done everything we should do to make this the safest big
    country in the world. We ought to close the gun show loophole in the
    Brady bill. We ought to pass the child trigger lock legislation. It's
    not just crimes that are the problem. We have the biggest accidental
    death rate by guns in the world. And to give you an idea of how bad it
    is, the American death rate, accidental death rate from guns, is 9 times
    the rate of the next 25 biggest industrial economies combined. So I
    think it's worth a little extra to have those child trigger locks.
        We've still got serious challenges in health care. We ought to pass
    the Patients' Bill of Rights. We ought to let people over 55 who

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    don't have health insurance anymore buy into Medicare. We ought to
    continue our work to help children, enroll children in our health
    insurance program and cover other people who don't have it.
        We've got a chance to do something serious about poverty for the
    first time in a generation. One of the things that I'm most encouraged
    about on our side in the Presidential debate is there is an almost
    complete consensus that part of our bounty ought to be used to
    drastically cut child poverty in this country. And that's good. We also
    have an opportunity that we have not had in my lifetime to bring free
    enterprise and investment into the most distressed areas of the country.
    And I have been going around the country trying to highlight these
    things.
        I consider this a big opportunity. And as all of you who live on the
    Internet know, technology gives us a chance to bring economic
    opportunity to people and places that were hitherto too isolated to take
    advantage of it.
        Now these are just some of the big challenges that are out there.
    And I promise you, I fought through this last budget. I've been through
    this thing now from can 'till can't for 6 years. I'm here because I do
    not believe my country will realize its full potential unless they are
    in the majority and unless he is the
    Speaker. And I think if he is, they will.
        So I ask you, tell people what was in the budget and why. Tell
    people what's happened in the last 7 years and why. And most important,
    tell people what we can do in the future if we have the right people
    representing you, and help them win. It is profoundly important.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 1:45 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Bill and Sally Hembrecht; Art
    Torres, chair, State Democratic Party; and Mayor Willie L. Brown, Jr.,
    of San Francisco.