    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [July 14, 1999]
    [Pages 1205-1213]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic Leadership Council National Conversation in
    Baltimore, Maryland
    July 14, 1999

        The President. Thank you very much. You guys look good out there.
    [Laughter] I want to thank Al for inviting me, and
    thank you, Cruz, for your wonderful remarks
    and your generous introduction. One thing I like about the California
    Lieutenant Governor is he doesn't beat around the bush; you know what's
    on his mind. [Laughter]
        I shouldn't do this because it's not really Presidential, but I'm
    going to do it anyway. I have really--you've got to give it--this
    ``compassionate conservatism'' has a great ring to it, you know. It
    sounds so good. And I've really worked hard to try to figure out what it
    means. I mean, I made an honest effort. And near as I can tell here's
    what it means; it means: ``I like you, I do.'' [Laughter] ``And I would
    like to be for the Patients' Bill of Rights, and I'd like to be for
    closing the gun show loophole. And I'd like not to squander the surplus
    and save Social Security and Medicare for the next generation. I'd like
    to raise the minimum wage. I'd like to do these things. But I just
    can't, and I feel terrible about it.'' [Laughter]
        Oh, that will come back. [Laughter] I would like to thank--you don't
    have to give me credit if you repeat that back home. [Laughter] I want
    to thank you all for being here today. We have five Governors: Governor
    Glendening, Governor Barnes, Governor Carnahan, Governor
    Carper, Governor Vilsack; Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is here, along with Lieutenant Governor Cruz
    Bustamante; Mayor Schmoke, the leaders of the Maryland legislature, Senator Mike
    Miller and Speaker Casper
    Taylor; any number of other officials.
        I brought a large delegation from the White House, including
    Secretary Glickman and a number of people who
    have been particularly close to the DLC, including Sidney
    Blumenthal and your old hands, Bruce
    Reed and Linda Moore. And I brought a person who joined the DLC with me back in
    1985, although he says he joined before I did: my first Chief of Staff
    and the former Special Envoy to Latin America, Mack McLarty. So we're old hands, and I thank them all for
    coming with me today.
        This is the third national conversation about a talk that Al
    From and I have been having for nearly 15 years now.
    Today, we can have a very different conversation than we had 15 years
    ago or even half that long ago because of the proven success of New
    Democratic ideas.
        When I first ran for President back in 1991, I asked for a change in
    our party, a change in our national leadership, a change in our country.
    The American people have been uncommonly good to me and to Hillary, to
    the Vice President, to Tipper, to our administration, and thanks to
    their support, we have changed all three things. The ideas of the men
    and women who are here today are rooted in our core values of
    opportunity, responsibility, and community. They have revitalized our
    party and revitalized our country.
        We won the Presidency in 1992 with new ideas based on those values,
    because the American people could see and feel that the old ways weren't
    working. We won again in 1996 because, with the help of a lot of people
    in this room, we turned those values and ideas into action. And they did
    work to get our country moving again; or in the words of Cruz
    Bustamante, they did help real people.
        Now, as we move into a new era and a new millennium, these ideas, as
    all of you well know, have spread around the world. They've helped
    center-left parties to take power in Great Britain

    [[Page 1206]]

    and France and Germany and Italy and Brazil. They have sparked the kinds
    of debates and discussions that you have been having in virtually every
    country in the world where people take politics seriously. The Third Way
    has become the way of the future.
        And when you hear our friends in the other party sort of use the
    same words in the same way, if imitation is the sincerest form of
    flattery, that, too, is something we should welcome.
        I told the little story at the first because, as the Lieutenant
    Governor said, rhetoric and reality are sometimes two different things,
    and it's better when they're not, when they are the same thing. But it
    shows you the grip that the idea of a dynamic center has on thoughtful
    people throughout the world. It shows you how desperately people want
    new ideas, experimentation, an end to bitter partisanship, a genuine
    spirit of working together. And wherever that exists, it is a good
    thing.
        As we move into the information age, we really, as Democrats, have
    reclaimed the true legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, which is not a
    particular set of programs but a real commitment to bold
    experimentation, to the idea that new times demand new approaches and
    often a different kind of Government.
        America was ready to listen to that back in 1992. You know it's
    almost hard to believe now, and we may have to remind our fellow
    citizens in times to come just what it was like back then, how high the
    unemployment was; how stagnant the wages were; how steeply growing the
    inequality was; how fast the social conditions were worsening.
        Then, the Democrats were seen too wedded to the programs of the past
    to make the necessary changes for today and tomorrow. The Republicans
    were too committed to the idea that Government was the cause of all of
    our problems, and neglect, therefore, was the right response.
        They won election after election at the national level by sort of
    dividing our people and putting up cartoon caricatures of our Democrats
    as somehow not really American, not really in touch with the values of
    ordinary citizens. And they were so good at it, they came to see the
    White House as their private fiefdom. I'd always get a little kick out
    of the fact that our friends on the other side of the aisle rail and
    rail about entitlements; they really don't like them. But actually they
    thought the White House was their entitlement until the DLC came along.
        Now, Al Gore and I had a different idea. We thought power should not
    be vested in any party but in the people. We thought that we should use
    the power of our office and the power of Government to take a different
    direction for the country. We believed we could do it with a smaller
    Government; and it is now, as all of you know, the smallest Federal
    establishment since John Kennedy was President in 1962. That's the last
    time the Federal Government was this small. But we have been much, much
    more active, trying to be a catalyst, trying to be a partner, trying to
    give people the tools and to create the conditions so that our people
    could meet their own challenges and live out their own dreams. We have
    been called New Democrats; our approach has been called the Third Way.
    But I think it is important to remember that we too do not want to get
    trapped in our rhetoric. We were the first to point out that labels
    should not define a politician or a person or a political movement;
    ideas do. And every time, every age in time requires a continuous
    infusion of new ideas. We took on the hard work of creating real
    solutions. We worked hard to make politics and policies and to put both
    in the service of progress.
        Now, I think it's worked pretty well. We did everything we could to
    reject forced, false choices between work and family, between the
    economy and the environment, between being safe and being free, between
    recognizing what makes us interesting and individual and different as
    people and what we have in common. We tried to solve problems rather
    than score partisan points. We have done our best to restore the
    people's faith in our Government but, more important, to restore their
    faith in the limitless potential of America.
        Now, I think it's worked pretty well. Along the way, we had the '94
    election setback, and we had to fight a rearguard action to beat back
    the Contract With America. Then we worked with the Republicans to pass
    welfare reform and the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, and I was
    encouraged. Lately, I have been discouraged, obviously, because the
    Republican majority in Congress has taken, I think, very, very wrong
    actions in killing the Patients' Bill of Rights and in killing the
    sensible gun control measures embodied in our legislation, among other
    things,

    [[Page 1207]]

    to close the gun show loophole. So, there are still profound differences
    among the parties.
        Cruz listed a few of these, but I would just like to say that, as
    you go back home and the people you represent ask you for your thoughts
    about what's going on in Washington, I would like to respectfully
    request that you at least ask them to give us the benefit of the doubt,
    because our friends in the other party said if we implemented our
    policies, it would be a disaster for America. They said it over and over
    and over again. They said, when the deficit was $290 billion and we
    passed our economic program, it would get bigger and we'd have a deep
    recession. Now we have the biggest surplus in our history; almost 19
    million new jobs; the longest peacetime expansion in history; the
    highest homeownership and the lowest minority unemployment ever
    recorded; wages are rising; crime is at a 26-year low; the welfare rolls
    at a 30-year low; teen pregnancy, teen smoking, teen drug abuse are all
    declining; air and water are cleaner; the streets are safer; 90 percent
    of our kids are immunized against serious diseases for the first time;
    we've opened the doors to college to virtually all Americans through the
    HOPE scholarship that we modeled on what Georgia did; and we have had
    over 100,000 young people serve our country and their community through
    AmeriCorps, another big DLC idea. From the California redwoods and the
    Mojave Desert to the Florida Everglades, this administration has
    protected or set aside more land than any administration in history
    except those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. We have worked for
    peace from Bosnia and Kosovo to the Middle East to Northern Ireland.
    We've worked to expand trade on fair and freer terms. We have worked to
    build partnerships with Latin America and Africa and people who often
    feel that they're not even in our radar screen or in our orbit. We have
    worked to give our children a safer world by combating terrorism and the
    other threats which they will face in their lifetime.
        We've done this--and I appreciate the reception you gave me when I
    came in--but we have done this because we had the right ideas. I am
    grateful that I was given the opportunity, in my time, to be the
    instrument of implementing those ideas. If anybody is responsible for
    the intellectual renaissance which possesses the politics in this
    country, in this world, it really is Al From and all
    the true believers with the DLC who stayed there all those years.
        But you're here because we believe that you can do these jobs. You
    can do the jobs you have. You can be Governors; you can be Senators; you
    can be President. The most important thing is that we keep the ideas
    coming, consistent with our core values, always looking at the real
    facts, always looking at the long-term future. And what I am trying to
    get the American people to focus on now, and the Congress, is that, in
    the remaining days of this century and this millennium, we will either
    explicitly or implicitly make some very large decisions that will affect
    our country for a long time to come.
        I think that we have shown by results that our Third Way is the
    right way for America, for our economy, and for our society. In the
    weeks to come, around the budget, we will have a huge debate over great
    national priorities. We will have to make a choice that 5 or 6 years ago
    you never would have believed we'd be making, which is how are we going
    to use the fruits of our prosperity. If somebody had told you, 6 years
    ago, the biggest debate in Washington will be what to do with the
    surplus--[laughter]--you would never have believed it.
        Now, I think the answer is to stick with the economic strategy that
    brought us to this great dance and to deal with the great challenges
    still before us. So I gave the Congress a budget that will do big
    things: that will meet the challenge of the aging of America by saving
    and reforming Social Security and Medicare; that will do it in a way
    that will make this country debt free for the first time since 1835;
    that will raise educational standards and end social promotion but
    provide for summer school, modern schools, and 100,000 more teachers and
    hooking up every classroom to the Internet by the year 2000; that will
    make America safer with even more community policing and more efforts to
    keep guns out of the hands of criminals; that will make America more
    livable with the Vice President's
    livability agenda; that will provide genuine tax relief to the people
    and the purposes who really need it at a price we can afford, without
    undermining our prosperity, including our new American markets
    initiative designed to give Americans the same incentives to invest in
    the poor areas of America we give today to invest in the Caribbean and
    Latin America and Africa and Asia. I think that's a very important thing
    to do.

    [[Page 1208]]

        I might say, all of you would have gotten a big kick seeing Al
    From and Jesse Jackson
    walking arm in arm across America last week. [Laughter] It was good for
    America. It was good for the Democratic Party. It was good for the
    people that lived in Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, in East St.
    Louis. Mayor Powell, I'm glad to see you here
    today. We had a wonderful time there. Thank you for coming.
        She gave such a great speech when we
    visited East St. Louis, I told her she ought to show up for this
    conference, and lo and behold, she did. So I thank you for coming.
        We went to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. We went to
    south Phoenix. And I know we've got some legislators from Arizona here
    today, and I thank you for being here--the block over there. And we
    ended in L.A. These are big things. These are big, big things. And we
    will decide, directly or indirectly, whether to embrace them. The
    decisions cannot be escaped.
        You all know the basic elements of my plan. I want to use the bulk
    of the surplus to save Social Security. I want to set aside 15 percent
    of it to reform Medicare and to begin with a prescription drug benefit,
    which would have been in any program if it were to be designed today
    from the start. I want to provide substantial tax relief, $250 billion
    of it, targeted to help families save for retirement, to deal with child
    care and long-term care needs, to help to deal with some of our larger
    challenges including modernizing our schools, adjusting to the challenge
    of climate change, and as I said, investing in America's new markets.
        If we do it the way I have proposed, this country will be out of
    debt in 2015. Now, I would like to tell you very briefly why I think
    that is a good idea. First of all, you all know we live in a global
    economy. Interest rates and capital availability are set in global
    markets. If a wealthy country like the United States is out of debt,
    what does it mean? It means interest rates will be lower; it means there
    will be more business investment; it'll be more jobs; it'll be higher
    incomes. It means that, for ordinary citizens, their car payments, their
    house payments, their credit card payments, their student loan payments
    will be lower. It means the next time there's a financial crisis in the
    world, we won't need to take money, and the needy, vulnerable countries
    will be able to get the money they need at lower interest rates, which
    means not only their people will be better off, but they will be better
    trading partners for us, and their democracies will be more likely to
    weather the storms. This is a progressive idea today, and we ought to
    stick with it.
        Now, I realize 16 months before an election the allure of ``I've got
    a bigger tax cut than you do; come look at my tax cut''--[laughter]--I
    mean, that's got a lot of appeal, you know. And it doesn't take very
    long to explain. You can put it in a 5-second ad: ``Our tax cut is
    bigger than theirs.'' But I'd just like to remind the American people,
    number one, look at the results we have achieved in the last 6\1/2\
    years by looking to the long run and doing the responsible thing. Number
    two, every ordinary American citizen, and virtually every wealthy
    American, will be better off over the long run with lower interest
    rates, a more stable economy, a more growing economy, than with a short-
    term tax cut.
        I'm not against a tax cut. We've got a good one in here. But if we
    don't fix Medicare and Social Security and we let the baby boom
    generation retire and worry about whether these systems are going to go
    haywire and we impose on our children the burden of taking care of us
    when it is absolutely unnecessary, undermining their ability to raise
    our grandchildren, we will never forgive ourselves, just because there
    is an election in 16 months. It's wrong.
        The Vice President and I had a meeting
    with the Republican and the Democratic leaders of Congress Monday, and
    we told them that we wanted to work with them. And we have worked with
    them in the past, as I said, with welfare reform and the Balanced Budget
    Act. But we've got to stay on this new way. I think that, on this issue,
    they're still committed to their old ways.
        Yesterday the Republican leadership unveiled a tax plan that I
    believe could wreck our economy. It would certainly wreck our fiscal
    discipline. Let me explain what is wrong with their plan. Their tax plan
    would devote just about all of the surplus that doesn't come from Social
    Security taxes, all the non-Social Security surplus to a tax cut. First
    of all, if they did that, it would leave no money for Medicare. Every
    responsible analyst of Medicare says there are just so many people
    drawing and so few people paying in; as the baby boomers retire, that
    will be twice as many people over 65 in 2030 as there are today.
    Everybody says you've got to

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    put some more money in. So there would be no money for that.
        Secondly, it would require, as our economy grows, real cuts in
    education, defense, the environment, research, technology, the kinds of
    things that we have invested more in. We have almost doubled investment
    in education and technology as we have shrunk the size of the Government
    and gotten rid of the deficit and eliminated hundreds of programs. So it
    won't work.
        The second big problem with it is that if you look at the next 10
    years, not just the first 10 years--that is, the 10 years when the baby
    boomers will retire and when we ought to be paying off the debt--their
    tax cut will really be big, and it will put us back into debt.
        So remember now, I'm not going to--I hope I will be one of the
    people just out there drawing my check, you know. I'll be out of here.
    But think about this, especially the younger people in this audience. In
    the second decade of the 21st century, just when the baby boomers start
    to retire, just when Social Security and Medicare begin to feel the
    crunch, just when we could be debt-free for the first time since 1835,
    at that very moment, their tax cut would swallow the surplus and make it
    impossible to meet our basic commitments.
        I have asked the Treasury to report as soon as possible to me on
    what their tax cut costs in the second 10 years of this decade. We
    should not undo our fiscal discipline. We should not imperil our
    prosperity. We should not undermine Medicare. We should not make big
    cuts in education, defense, research and technology, and the
    environment. I won't allow that sort of plan to become law. It wouldn't
    be right.
        Now again I say, we can have a tax cut. We ought to have a tax cut,
    but we ought to do it in the right way for the right reasons, and we
    ought to put first things first. We should save Social Security and
    Medicare, meet our responsibilities for the next century, before we go
    off talking about the tax cut.
        You know, some of this is basic arithmetic. We had years and years
    in the 1980's when people said there is no such thing as basic
    arithmetic. There is supply-side economics, or whatever, and they said
    supply-side economics would dictate a huge recession after our '93
    economic plan passed. But the American people don't have to guess any
    more. We tried it their way; we tried it our way. There is evidence.
        And I'm telling you, I don't care if the election is next week,
    never mind next year; we have worked for too long to get this country
    out of the hole. We are moving in the right direction, and we must not
    compromise the future of America and the next generation just for the
    next election. It would be wrong, and I want you to help us get that
    message out there.
        The same thing is true on crime. The DLC had a lot to do with our
    ideas about fighting crime, and you remember what they were. We wanted
    100,000 police. We used to go--our DLC trips, we'd go to these places,
    and we'd go look at these community policing operations that were
    already bringing crime down in cities in the early nineties. We wanted
    the Brady bill; we wanted an assault weapons ban; we wanted targeted,
    tougher punishment and broad prevention programs for our young people.
    And the program is working.
        The real choice, as the Vice President pointed out in his speech
    Monday, is not between stronger punishment and better prevention. The
    real choice is to do both. But I hope the DLC will not give up its ideas
    on fighting crime just because we're at a 26-year low. Because, if
    you're one of the victims, the crime is still too high.
        We could make this country the safest big country in the world if we
    would do the right, sensible things to do it. I thought the Vice
    President put some great ideas forward on
    Monday. And that's what this election ought to be about. Even the
    commentators on the other side point out that, so far, he's the only
    person who has actually said what he would do if the people gave him the
    job, which I think is a reasonably good idea to do. You probably ought
    to tell people what you're going to do when you get the job, and then
    you would be more likely to do it.
        And I believe one of the central reasons for the success that we
    have enjoyed is that we worked--Al and I and others and my folks at home
    in Arkansas--we worked for years to think about exactly what ought to be
    done. And so, if you look at what he said, that we ought to apply
    reforms that are working in the private sector at many levels of
    government to revolutionize the justice system, we ought to take the
    next step on licensing people who own handguns to make sure that they're
    trained to use the guns and that they should have them; and that

    [[Page 1210]]

    would solve all these loopholes because, if you had a bad background,
    you couldn't get a license, you couldn't own one.
        This is not going to keep anybody from being a hunter or sportsman.
    This is not going to undermine the fabric of life in America; it's going
    to make it safer. And this is a very serious issue, so I would urge you
    to keep up your interest not only in the economic issues, not only in
    the entitlement reforms, but also in the question of how we can make
    America the safest big country in the world.
        When I was running in '92, we were just trying to get the crime rate
    down. Everybody thought it was going to go up forever. Now, we know we
    can bring it down. I think we ought to commit ourselves to making
    America the safest big country in the world. When I was running in '92,
    everybody said we've just got to get the deficit down, got to try to
    balance the budget. Now, we can imagine making America debt-free. We can
    do things that are not imaginable at the moment if we will have good
    ideas and work on them in a disciplined way.
        So I think that the other candidates ought to follow the Vice
    President's lead and tell us where they
    stand on these crime issues and on the other issues as well. There will
    be clear choices here. Will we have commonsense gun laws, or Government
    by the gun lobby?
        I'll never forget when I went to New Hampshire in 1996. Just for all
    you elected politicians who think you can't survive this stuff, they
    voted for me by one point in '92, and I was grateful, because they
    normally vote Republican. So my first meeting, we had a couple of
    hundred, largely, men in this audience in their plaid shirts, waiting
    more for deer season than the President's speech. [Laughter] And so I
    told them, I said, ``You know, in '94 you beat a Democrat Congressman up
    here, and you did it because he voted for the Brady bill and the crime
    bill and the assault weapons ban. And I want you to know he did that
    because I asked him to. So if you have, since 1994, experienced any
    inconvenience whatever in your hunting season, I want you to vote
    against me, too, because he did it for me. But if you haven't, they lied
    to you, and you ought to get even.'' [Laughter]
        In New Hampshire, our margin of victory went from one percent to 13
    percent. You can do this. Tell the American people the truth about these
    things. Just go out and tell people the truth about these things.
        I feel the same way about welfare. I had to veto two bills that the
    Congress passed, because I thought they were too tough on kids. They
    took the guarantee of nutrition and health care benefits away from
    children. After we put that back in, I believe the welfare reform bill
    was right, because I thought we ought to require able-bodied people to
    work, and because letting the States have the money for the benefits was
    not a big deal since the States had radically different levels of
    benefits anyway. And remember, in our welfare reform bill, we left the
    States with the same amount of money they had in February of 1994 when
    the welfare rolls were at an all-time high, even after the rolls
    dropped, so that they could be free to put the money back into training,
    to child care, to transportation, to the things people need.
        We've still got work to do to make sure that work pays. With the
    strong support of the DLC back in '93, we doubled the earned-income tax
    credit; then we raised the minimum wage; we put more into child care.
    But I want to do some other things.
        First of all, we are changing the rules, so thousands of poor
    working families won't be denied food stamps, as they are today, just
    because they own a reliable car. We're going to change those rules, and
    we should be for them. We're also going to get rid of some of the old
    reporting rules and launch a national campaign to make sure that working
    people know there is no indignity in taking public assistance to help
    feed their children if they're out there working 40 hours a week. And
    finally let me say, I hope you will really give a lot of thought to the
    project that Al and I and others were on last week. How can we go across
    that bridge to the 21st century together? How can we bring the spark of
    enterprise and opportunity to every community? There are still a lot of
    people that haven't participated in this recovery and a lot of places
    that we didn't visit last week. There are still a lot of small and
    medium-sized towns that lose just a factory, but have real trouble
    restructuring their economy.
        We presented this new markets initiative, which I said I think is
    very good, because it will give the same incentives to people nationwide
    that they only have in the empowerment zones today to invest in those
    markets. But we need to do more. A fertile, fertile ground for

    [[Page 1211]]

    DLC endeavors is involving everyone, every single American who is
    willing to work in American enterprise. We can do that.
        And let me just make one last point as we segue into the next part
    of the program. The DLC now takes a lot of justifiable pride in the fact
    that the ideas we have long championed are now being debated in Berlin
    or London or some other world capital. But that's not why we got into
    this. We got into this to prove that politics had a positive purpose in
    the lives of ordinary citizens, and therefore, it is far more important
    for us what is happening in Sacramento or in countless other
    legislatures and city halls across America. You are still on the
    frontline of the battlefield of ideas. You must lead us forward.
        I have taken enormous pride in the work of Lieutenant Governors like
    Cruz Bustamante and Kathleen Kennedy
    Townsend. I have taken enormous
    pride in watching mayors like Kirk Wilson in
    Austin and Don Cunningham in
    Bethlehem. I see my former colleagues in the Governors' Association
    continuing to do remarkable things and people in other State offices.
    Don't forget that.
        I close with these words. Robert Kennedy, who I believe was trying
    to do something like what we've been doing when his life and career were
    cut short in 1968, said, ``Idealism, high aspiration, and deep
    conviction are not incompatible with the most practical and efficient of
    programs. There is no basic inconsistency between ideals and realistic
    possibility, no separation between the deepest desires of heart and mind
    and the rational application of human efforts to human problems.'' That
    is a good statement of what we believe and what you were doing.
        I thank you for your hard work, and I ask you to remember, you can
    celebrate our achievements all you want, but the American people hire us
    for tomorrow.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    [At this point, the conversation proceeded.]

        The President. Well, first of all, I would like to thank
    Kirk and Don and Ember and
    Mike for their presentations. They
    pretty well made the point I was trying to make, that--and I think
    they're four people who could do just about any job, and I think that
    the jobs they are doing are changing people's lives.
        I would just like to make a couple of points about what was said by
    each of them. First of all, if I could go back to the point I made about
    paying the debt down and the general condition of the economy. If we can
    keep this going, pretty soon this peacetime expansion, which is the
    longest peacetime expansion in history--we'll have the longest expansion
    of any kind in our history, including wartime, pretty soon. Now, I do
    not for a moment believe we have repealed all the laws of economics. But
    I do believe that the technological revolution underway in America, and
    the fact that we have relatively open borders, and therefore, have
    consistent competition, has kept inflation down as we've had growth.
        But if you look at what they said from the perspective that I have
    to take every day--you know, we sit around here all the time, and we
    argue how much more can the American economy grow without getting
    inflation going up. And you remember, every time the Federal Reserve
    meets now, that's the big argument. People say, are they or are they not
    going to raise interest rates? Well, there's no evidence of inflation
    now, but surely we can't keep doing this on and on and on.
        We've now got unemployment under 5 percent for 2 years in a row.
    Well, if you think about it, how could we continue to grow without
    inflation? And if you posit for the moment the potential of technology,
    there are the following ways: You can look at what Austin is doing: you
    have to continue to expand the base of people that make a living in the
    most powerful part of the economy now. Eight percent of our economy is
    in high-tech, 30 percent of our growth. And since it, by definition,
    is--the whole thing that makes it work is continuing explosive increases
    in productivity. So that's one thing you can do.
        The second thing that you can do is to sell more of what we make
    around the world, which is why I've tried really hard to build a
    consensus among our party and to reach out to the others by continuing
    to expand trade, but to do it in a way that lifts labor and
    environmental standards around the world, so it's a race to the top, not
    a race to the bottom.
        The third thing you can do is to reach out to discrete population
    groups, and that's what Michael does.
    The two biggest discrete population groups in the country that are still
    not in the work force are the people who still

    [[Page 1212]]

    haven't moved from welfare to work, although we moved another million
    and a half last year. And they are the hardest to reach. That's why what
    you said about the work force act is so important. Every Governor now
    has been given the opportunity to work with labor commissions and others
    to design a training program that we hope will eventually lead to a
    lifetime educational training program, so that whenever anybody's
    changing jobs at any age, they'll always be able to get the training
    they need. But the two big population groups anywhere are people on
    welfare and disabled people who want to go to work.
        One of the things that I think will come out of this Congress, there
    appears to be almost unanimous bipartisan agreement that we ought to let
    people on disability who get Medicaid health insurance keep their
    Medicaid when they go in the work force. Now, that's a good deal for the
    States, because we're going to pay their Medicaid anyway--State and
    Federal Government--but if they're working, they'll be paying taxes
    back. They'll be happier; they'll be part of it.
        Seventy-some percent of the people who are disabled in this country
    want to go in the work force. I met--in New Hampshire, I met a guy who
    was an Olympic skier once who had a terrible skiing accident, was
    confined to a wheelchair. He had $40,000 in medical bills a year, and
    that was slightly more than he was going to make on his job. We're
    better off if he takes a job. But on the welfare--I don't want to
    minimize the difficulty of this--he's got a big challenge now, because
    most of the easy movement from welfare to work has occurred. So if you
    want to move people now, you've got to really work at it.
        And then, to go to what the mayor of Bethlehem said, the other thing
    we've got to do is to find a way to enable people who lose their
    economic base to create one more quickly. People like me who come from
    the Mississippi Delta area--I see Mr. Eastland over there--that's what happened to us. We never--we
    lost the economic base that once gave everybody a job, even though a lot
    of those people were working for substandard livings, and we--that's a
    part of our country that's not yet reconstructed its economic base.
    That's why I think the DLC ought to be working on it.
        The reason we were celebrating East St. Louis the other day is it
    was the first--this Walgreens store is going to anchor this big
    development down there--it's the first development they've had in
    decades--not years, decades. We cannot afford, in an economy that's
    moving literally at the speed of light, to wait decades to figure out
    how to bring enterprise to places that have been left behind. We have to
    figure out how to do that better. And what you're doing will work, but
    it needs to be done everywhere.
        The last point I'd like to make is that, going to what Ember said,
    when I became President, there was one charter school in the whole
    country--one in Minnesota. Minnesota was also the first State in the
    country to have statewide school choice before the charter schools.
    Arkansas was the second; I stole the idea from Minnesota. So I said,
    well, let's have 1,000 charter schools. Then I asked the Congress to
    give me enough money to help people set up 3,000 charter schools for
    this next year. We're going to be at 1,500 this fall. I think next year
    will be actually quite close to 3,000 nationwide, which is enough to
    have a profound impact.
        But we won't really have a successful system until the things that
    make the charter schools work can be found in the other schools. And the
    voucher movement will never go away if people feel that they're trapped
    in failure. I've worked for school choice. I've worked for the charter
    schools. I believe in accountability. Actually, there is no evidence--
    and there is quite a bit of evidence out there now on how well kids do
    who opt out and go to private schools--there is no evidence that they're
    doing better. But if people feel their schools are unsafe or they're
    inadequate, the voucher movement will be out there, and it will be a
    difficult political issue for Democrats, for Republicans, for people who
    love public education.
        We have got to prove that--the one thing that we have never done,
    and I've worked for 20 years on this deal now, more than 20 years now--
    we have not succeeded as a country in taking what works in public
    education in one place or two places or 10 places, modifying it for
    local conditions, yes, but implementing it somewhere else. And so you
    have to assume that parents and others who would go to the trouble to
    set up the charter schools wouldn't go to all the trouble unless they
    were committed to learning, unless they were really committed to what
    works.

    [[Page 1213]]

        But if I could have waved a magic wand as Governor, when I was
    Governor and solved any problem in my State, it would have been that. I
    had poor little rural schools, I had some schools in poor urban areas
    that were doing stunningly well. But I never could either set up the
    systems or set up the incentives or convince people that everybody else
    ought to run through what they were doing and do it. Because this is not
    rocket science. This is not the same as walking on Mars within 5 years.
    In some ways, it's more difficult because it deals with the human psyche
    and all these human difficulties, but people can understand what works.
        And I just think that the work you've done in Minnesota and what
    you're pushing now, this whole concept of charter districts--I never
    even thought about it before you said it today, but that's the sort of
    thing we need to be doing. We will never bring everybody into the big
    tent of our prosperity until we have not only the best higher education
    system in the world but the best elementary and secondary education
    system in the world.
        And you've got to give this lady
    and her colleagues in Minnesota an enormous amount of credit for what
    they have done now for more than a decade to make us think about this.
    But if I could say to all of you at the grassroots level, if you can
    figure out a way to make economic change faster, to bring opportunity to
    where it doesn't exist, and to bring more uniformity of excellence in
    public education, if we could do those things, if that could be a huge
    part of the DLC's crusade for the next decade, I wouldn't be a bit
    worried about America's future.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 3 p.m. in the Baltimore Convention Center.
    In his remarks, he referred to Al From, president, Democratic Leadership
    Council; Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante of California, who introduced the
    President; Gov. Parris N. Glendening and Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy
    Townsend of Maryland; Gov. Roy Barnes of Georgia; Gov. Mel Carnahan of
    Missouri; Gov. Thomas R. Carper of Delaware; Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa;
    Mayor Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore; Maryland State Senate President Thomas
    V. (Mike) Miller, Jr., and House Speaker Casper R. Taylor, Jr.; civil
    rights leader Jesse Jackson; Mayor Debra Powell of East St. Louis, IL;
    Mayor Kirk Watson of Austin, TX; Mayor Donald T. Cunningham, Jr., of
    Bethlehem, PA; Minnesota State Senator Ember Reichgott Junge; Georgia
    State Labor Commissioner Michael L. Thurmond; and Hiram Eastland,
    founding member, Mississippi Democratic Leadership Council.