    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [October 1, 1999]
    [Pages 1657-1659]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1657]]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Palo Alto
    October 1, 1999

        Thank you very much. I am delighted to be here in this beautiful
    home and this beautiful tent. I think I should tell you Eric and Wendy and their daughters
    have opened their home to us; they have also opened their swimming pool
    to us. We're on top of the swimming pool; I say that not to make you
    nervous--[laughter]--because we all know that this is a community where
    technology reigns supreme. There will be no failure of the technology
    here.
        You might be interested to know that the White House press room,
    where you sometimes see me answering questions at briefings, that's also
    on a swimming pool. The President used to have a swimming pool there.
    And when President Nixon got in, he thought that he should do something
    for the press and give them closer access to the White House, so he
    covered up the swimming pool and gave it to the press, which resulted in
    his getting a lot of really good press as a result of that great and
    generous gesture. [Laughter] I said that because I always like to see
    the reporters laugh, and they're over there. [Laughter]
        I am delighted to be here. I thank Joe Andrew and Beth Dozoretz and
    Governor and Mrs. Romer and
    all the people from the Democrat Party for being here. I'm glad
    Congresswoman Anna Eshoo got home. I don't
    know when she got back, but they have been voting like crazy for a long
    time. I want to thank John and Ann Doerr and Sandy Robertson and
    Scott Cook for their help on this event tonight,
    as well.
        Let me say, what we're going to do tonight is what I prefer to do,
    which is after we have dinner, we're just going to have a little
    conversation. And so I won't speak very long. I want to thank
    Eric for what he said. I have tried to be a
    good President, to support the growth and opportunities of this
    community, although it is not true that I'm not technologically
    challenged; I am. But I understand a lot of things I can't do. Most of
    you do, too. So I try to understand well enough to be a good President,
    and I've had an enormous amount of help from the Vice President, from others, and from many people here.
        I think that a lot of people in this community who have been working
    with us since 1991 would genuinely be surprised at how very much
    influence and input you have had in the decisions that we've tried to
    make for America over the last 7 years. And you've also had very
    articulate voices speaking up for you, including Anna Eshoo, Zoe Lofgren, Ellen
    Tauscher, and others, and I thank them
    all.
        The other thing that I would like to say is that I am very grateful
    for the opportunity I've had to serve as President, to have a chance to
    help to give you the chance, and people like you all over America the
    chance to do all the marvelous things which have occurred in the last
    6\1/2\ years. I especially feel that way about the technology community
    which represents--the high tech community represents about--directly;
    not indirectly, but directly--about 8 percent of our economy, but 30
    percent of our growth since 1993. And it's something that you can be
    very proud of.
        So what I tried to do for this community--I also was very mindful--
    was something we were doing for all of America, that it would benefit
    all of America, that it would lift our country and broaden the horizons
    and possibilities of the future for our children.
        The last point I would like to make is this, and I hope we can talk
    more about it inside. The central issue for the American people as
    citizens, as we head into a new election season, and the first one in a
    long, long time I haven't been a direct part of, is not whether we will
    vote for change, but what kind of change we want to embrace.
        You know here, as well as any group of people in America, that
    avoiding change is not an option; if we all do nothing, we're going to
    change because the way we work and live and relate to each other and the
    rest of the world is changing at a breathtaking pace. So the question
    is, what deliberate decisions will we make about the nature of change
    that we hope to shape and we hope to grasp?
        The argument I've been trying to make to the American people, I
    think with some success, to the Democrats in Congress with some success
    and to the Republicans in Congress with more

    [[Page 1658]]

    limited success, is that we ought to identify the largest challenges
    facing our country that we now are in a position to grasp because of our
    current prosperity and the projected financial lines that we see in the
    future.
        The biggest ones I believe are, number one, the demographic
    challenge caused by the retirement of the baby boomers. We have to
    lengthen the life of the Social Security Trust Fund, as well as to make
    it easier for people to have more private savings so that when people my
    age and younger retire, the baby boomers, we don't bankrupt our kids and
    undermine their ability to raise our grandkids. Number two--and that
    requires not only Social Security but some changes in Medicare as well.
        Number two, we have to deal with the education of the most diverse
    and the largest group of schoolchildren in our history. Eric told you
    that he was at the education summit that the Governors had, the second
    one over the last 4 years. It was the 10th anniversary of the first
    education summit we had at the University of Virginia when I represented
    the Democratic Governors and President Bush was in office, and we set
    goals.
        And then we argued that there ought to be standards to achieve those
    goals, and now, when I became President, only 16 States, led by Governor
    Romer, who was the leader of the Governors on
    education, had really enforceable standards; now, 50 do--in 4 years.
    That's good. Only 11 States had real accountability for schools and
    teachers and students. Now we still only have 16. So the next big thing
    we've got to do is get more charter schools out there, more options, and
    then assist them where you end social promotion, but give kids the
    support they need. And you have to turn around failing schools or shut
    them down, but there are options like charter schools if the schools
    aren't working. That's the next big frontier there, but that's very
    important.
        The third big challenge I think we face is the global environmental
    challenge. Many of you in this room work on technologies which
    demonstrate to you every day that modern developments have broken the
    link between economic growth and putting more greenhouse gases into the
    atmosphere. But a lot of people don't believe that.
        A House subcommittee last year made us spend something like $400,000
    trying to defend our position on global warming, which was not taxes,
    not regulation; it was markets and tax incentives to basically
    accelerate the development and the widespread use of available
    technologies that would grow the economy while improving the
    environment. And they think it's some dark conspiracy to take us back to
    the stone age economy. And we see this all over the world, and it will
    be a terrible problem for our children unless we do something about it.
        There's a new book out by Paul Hawken and
    Amory and Hunter Lovins, and it's called ``Natural Capitalism,'' that I
    commend to all of you. No one could read it and come away with any
    conclusion other than we could actually accelerate the growth of this
    economy if we got very serious about energy conservation and the
    development of alternative energy sources. We would accelerate, not slow
    down, the growth of the economy. So it's a huge issue, I think.
        The fourth thing that I would like to say is I think that we have
    got to find a way to sustain--to keep pushing the limits of the business
    cycle. When I became President, I was told by my own economists that if
    we got the unemployment rate below 6 percent for 6 months or more, we'd
    have inflation. And it's been below 4\1/2\ percent for 2 years, and we
    don't have much. I don't think we've repealed all the laws of economics
    here. I don't even think you can do that. But what we have done is to
    plug into the global economy and emerging technologies in a way that
    make it possible to fundamentally change the parameters of business
    cycles and the heaves of supply and demand. In order to do that, what I
    think we have to do among other things, in Government, is to keep paying
    down the debt.
        And I've given the Congress a proposal that, if they would adopt it,
    would deal with these other challenges I've mentioned, provide for a
    modest tax cut and still enable us to get America out of debt by 2015
    for the first time since 1835. And I think it would be very good
    economics, because with interest rates set by global markets to have in
    America a situation where the Government wasn't competing with you for
    money, and we were going to have lower interest rates for a generation,
    in my judgment would lead to higher standards of living, more business
    growth, more jobs, and a more stable future.
        So I think this idea of paying down the debt, which sounds like a
    very old idea in the context of the global economy, is actually a new
    one.

    [[Page 1659]]

    There are a few of you here in this room that are almost as old as I am,
    and anybody who is--certainly anybody who is 40 or over who went to
    college and took any number of economics courses, was taught by people
    that we ought to have a healthy amount of debt; every country needed a
    certain amount of debt because you were always borrowing to invest in
    the future.
        Then, in the 12 years before I took office, we borrowed just to put
    food on the table as a government, which was a disaster. We may need to
    do that again someday. But right now, in this global economy, we'd be
    better off getting out of debt.
        The last point I want to make is this is something you should all
    ponder--no it's not, it's the next to the last point I want to make is--
    [laughter]--not everybody has participated in this economic growth. Yes,
    we've got the lowest poverty rate in 20 years, the lowest African-
    American poverty rate ever recorded, the lowest Hispanic poverty rate in
    20 years, and I'm proud of all that. But there is a huge number of
    working people and their children in poverty and skirting on the edges.
    They have not participated in this recovery, and we just have to face
    that. Even though unemployment is the lowest it's been in 29 years. And
    a lot of them are physically isolated in inner cities and the Delta of
    the Mississippi River and Appalachia and Indian reservations. Technology
    can have a lot to do with how we overcome that. But we have got to find
    a way to bring enterprise to poor people, because the distribution of
    intelligence in this country is fairly even. We have to figure out a way
    to make the distribution of usable opportunity even enough to get a core
    of enterprise in these poor areas here and around the world.
        This really is the last point. One of the most ironic experiences I
    have had as President is that I have been privileged to work with you
    and others to build a truly modern economy for America, an economy for
    the 21st century. But so much of my personal leadership in foreign and
    domestic policy has been required to deal with the emotional and
    practical and national security demands caused by the eruption of
    primitive hatreds, from Bosnia to the Middle East to Northern Ireland to
    African tribal warfare to the Oklahoma City bombing to this whole spate
    of the ethnic and racial and religious and antigay violence we've had in
    America in the last 2 years.
        It's quite interesting, isn't it? I mean, here you are out here; all
    you think about is the new millennium. You just gave me a book about the
    these hard questions to ask about the next thousand years. Isn't it
    ironic that the thing that's holding us back most in fulfilling our
    shared potential is our inability to form a community around our common
    humanity because of our vulnerability to mankind's most ancient fears:
    the fear of the other? And so I think we need to deal with that.
        I'm very proud that I believe my party is on the right side of all
    those issues, and I thank you for being here to help us tonight.
        Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:35 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Eric and Wendy Schmidt; Joseph J.
    Andrew, national chair, Beth Dozoretz, national finance chair, and
    former Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado, former general chair, Democratic
    National Committee; Mr. Romer's wife, Bea; attorney John Doerr and his
    wife, Ann; Sandford Robertson, founder and chair, Banc Robertson
    Stephens; and Scott Cook, founder and director, Intuit, Inc.