    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [November 9, 1999]
    [Pages 2033-2039]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Hispanic Leadership Forum
    Dinner
    November 9, 1999

        Thank you very much. After that introduction, I am thinking many
    things. [Laughter] I'm thinking, I wonder how long it will be before
    Miguel will run for office. [Laughter] I'm
    thinking, it is much better to have such a friend than an opponent.
    [Laughter] Thank you. Thank you for being my friend in ways that are
    personal as well as political. You may, however, have caused me quite a
    problem tonight, not over Vieques but over saying I have a Hispanic
    soul. Not very long ago the great African-American Nobel Prize winning
    author Toni Morrison said I was the first
    black President. [Laughter] And if I am the first black President and
    the first President to have a Hispanic soul, I'm afraid they'll never
    let me go home to Ireland. [Laughter] It might be worth it. [Laughter]
        Loretta Sanchez, thank you very much for
    your leadership and standing up here tonight and performing in your
    usual, laid back, repressed fashion. [Laughter] What a joy it is to have
    somebody like you in Congress who's not ashamed to have a good time
    being in public life. We ought to all enjoy it and be honored.
        You know, when I see people trudging around here all the time,
    complaining about how hard public life is and all the burdens, I say,
    ``You know, they're not giving these jobs away. Nobody made you come up
    here.'' [Laughter] People come to me all the time and say, ``Hasn't this
    been just awful for you?'' I say, no. [Laughter] It's actually been
    quite wonderful. You know, a few turns in the road one way or the other
    and I could be home doing deeds, wills, and divorces. [Laughter] I am
    grateful to be here, and I like it, every day of it. And
    Loretta likes it, and she's grateful to be
    here, and I appreciate that.
        I want to thank the administration members who are here: Secretary
    Slater, who represented me at home today in
    Arkansas at the funeral of Daisy Bates, a great hero of the civil rights
    movement; Administrator Alvarez; Maria
    Echaveste; my former Secretary of
    Transportation and Energy, Federico Pena, who
    did a superb job in both places, it's nice to see you. I would also like
    to thank another former member of my administration who is here tonight,
    who is now working for Vice President Gore,
    Janet Murguia. Her brother was just confirmed as the first Hispanic Federal judge
    from Kansas, so we've got one of them on the payroll, anyway.
        I want to thank all the people at my table and other places who had
    so much to do with the success of this evening, Joe and Alfie and Roger
    and Leo and all the others. Nelson, thank you very much for your
    leadership. Thank you, Joe Andrew and the
    others who are here from

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    the DNC. Lottie Shackelford, Lydia
    Camarillo, thank you for your willingness to
    go run our convention. Make sure we all have a good time out there, will
    you? [Laughter]
        And let me say one serious word before I go forward. There's one
    person I really wish were here tonight, who died a couple of days ago,
    the great mayor of Sacramento, California, Mayor Joe Serna. Mickey
    Ibarra would be here, but he's out there
    representing me at that service today. So I ask you all to remember
    Isabel Serna and the family in your prayers.
    They've been through a lot. He was a magnificent mayor and a great
    Democrat and a great friend of mine. He was one of those people who
    enjoyed public service, had a good time doing it, and was proud down to
    the last day--his health would no longer permit him to serve--and I ask
    you to remember.
        I also would like to thank two people who aren't here tonight: one,
    Secretary Richardson, who is still in the
    administration; and the other whom I wish were here, Henry
    Cisneros, who has served us so ably and is
    such a great man. I thank him.
        Now, as all of you know, we're trying to finish this year's budget,
    and we're trying to do a few other things before the Congress goes home.
    And I'd like to mention just a few of them because I think they relate
    particularly to the concerns of the Hispanic community. I want you to
    know what's still out there. We're fighting to get a reaffirmation of
    the commitment that Congress made last year, right before the election,
    that the majority, the Republican majority has voted to go back on. But
    I am determined that we will reinstate it, and that is to put 100,000
    teachers out there in the early grades so we can lower class size and
    give our children a better education.
        We are fighting to give our hardest pressed communities that still
    have a high crime rate 50,000 police officers on the street. We are
    fighting to raise the minimum wage, which I think is very, very
    important, especially for lower income workers, many of whom are
    Hispanic. You know, we lifted over 1\1/2\ million Hispanics out of
    poverty by doubling the earned-income tax credit in 1993 and then by
    raising the minimum wage. And it's time to raise it again. And I hope we
    can prevail, and I hope you will help us.
        We're trying to pass hate crimes legislation. We're trying to pass
    legislation that will enable disabled people to go into the work force
    and not lose their Medicaid health insurance. We're trying to pass the
    Caribbean Basin initiative and the African trade bill, which would open
    our markets to the Caribbean nations and African nations and open their
    markets more to us and put our Caribbean neighbors on a more equal
    footing with our Mexican neighbors in our trading relations.
        All of those things can still be done before the Congress goes home.
    And insofar as any of you have influence with anyone, I hope you will
    get out there and help us with our agenda, because all these things
    reflect the deepest values of the Democratic Party and our commitment to
    the future.
        I just want to make a couple of other points. I don't want to keep
    you late, and most of you have heard me give a lot of speeches. I had a
    very emotional day today. I was thinking about many things. I'm about to
    leave to go to Europe. Hillary and
    Chelsea just left to go to the Middle East
    to continue the work that I was doing last week in our hope that we can,
    over the next 100 days, actually get a framework for a final peace
    agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Then I'm going to
    Turkey and to Greece, two great friends of America, in the hope I can
    help them resolve some of their difficulties over Cyprus and other
    issues before I leave office. And then I'm going on to Bulgaria, a great
    ally of ours, to try to keep pushing to make peace in the Balkans, where
    we have had to take up arms in Bosnia and Kosovo to stop ethnic
    cleansing and slaughter.
        And today I had this incredible experience, which would have been
    wonderful for any President but was especially wonderful for me. I
    hosted in the White House about 30 members of the United States
    Congress, Republicans and Democrats, and a couple of hundred other
    people to give the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award Congress
    can award, to the nine students who integrated Little Rock Central High
    School 42 years ago.
        For those of you who are old enough to remember that or young enough
    to have studied it, you may know also that, in addition to the courage
    of the young children and the power of the Supreme Court's decisions and
    the court orders, the power of the Presidency was necessary for the
    integration of Little Rock Central High School when President Eisenhower
    sent

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    in the 101st Airborne Division and later federalized the Arkansas
    National Guard to stop the obstruction.
        Today I signed a bill naming the Old Executive Office Building after
    President Eisenhower because he worked there many years in the military.
    That building, until the Great Depression, housed all the offices of the
    executive branch, including all the offices of what was then called the
    War Department, except for the Treasury Building and the Office of the
    President. So Dwight Eisenhower actually worked in that building as long
    as he worked in the White House as President.
        And his son, General John Eisenhower,
    who is also a noted historian, and John's wife and their daughter were
    there, so I asked them to come. So Dwight Eisenhower's son and
    granddaughter were actually present as we recognized these nine
    students. And because Arkansas is my home, I have lived with the reality
    of these people all my life, since I was 11 years old.
        And I said today that these nine students, in their simple desire to
    get a better education became, as children, our teachers. When I lived
    at home, literally 99 percent of all children in my State went to
    segregated schools. And we may have had an opinion one way or the other,
    but everybody more or less accepted it was the way it was.
        But when they did what they did, then all of a sudden, they came
    crashing in our lives and everyone had to decide: Where do you stand;
    what do you believe; how will we live? Thirty years later, I hosted them
    in the Governor's Mansion for the 30th anniversary of Little Rock
    Central High. I brought them all in, and I showed them all the rooms
    where the then-Governor planned the obstruction to keep them out the
    school. They got a big kick out of that.
        And 40 years later, 2 years ago, I went home to Little Rock, to the
    steps of Little Rock Central High School--which in the 1920's was voted
    the most beautiful school building in America, and it's still a
    magnificent structure--and I held the doors open for them, with our
    Governor, as they walked freely through the front door, something they
    had not been able to do 40 years ago. And then 2 years later, they came
    to the White House, with all their myriad family, kinfolks, and friends,
    for a celebration that truly represented America at its best.
        This has been a great day, a great day to be President and a great
    day to be an American. And to end it with you--you and all those you
    represent have been so good to me and to Hillary and to the Vice
    President and Mrs. Gore--is a great privilege.
        I just want to leave you with a couple of thoughts. Number one, many
    of you helped me in 1992 because you knew we didn't want to keep on
    going the way we were going, because we had economic problems and social
    discord and political drift, and Government was discredited. So you knew
    what you were against, and you were willing to try something else. But I
    was just an argument for most of you. Most of you never met me before I
    started running for President, and you decided to give me a chance.
        So the first thing I want to say to you is it is not an argument
    anymore. Together, we made a good decision, and we've changed America
    for the better. Seven years later, when you go home tomorrow and you go
    back across the country and people ask you why you were there, you can
    say, ``Well, we gave him a chance, and we tried it their way.'' And as
    has already been said, we not only have had the most diverse
    administration with the most diverse appointments, including the
    judicial appointments--more of whom I'm trying to get up for a vote by
    the way--in history, but we have the longest peacetime expansion in
    history, 19.8 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment rate in 30
    years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest crime rates in
    30 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the lowest female
    unemployment rate in 46 years, the first back-to-back budget surpluses
    in 42 years, with the smallest Federal Government in 37 years. It is not
    an argument anymore. It's working. It's the right direction for America.
        So the second thing I want to say to you is, we've got to decide
    now, what are we going to do with this. Because even if I pass
    everything I'm trying to pass, if we get a good minimum wage bill and
    the 100,000 teachers and the 50,000 police and we get the
    antienvironmental riders off the bills and we pass the Caribbean Basin/
    Africa trade initiative, we do all the things I mentioned to you, there
    still will be a lot for America to do.
        And of all Americans, Hispanics ought to be able to think about
    this, our country, as we would our family. I remember one of the nicest

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    nights we ever shared at the White House, Federico and I, was when we previewed that wonderful movie
    ``Mi Familia'' at the White House.
        In my lifetime, which is stretching on and on as the days go by, in
    my lifetime, this is the first chance America has had to have, on the
    one hand, the prosperity and confidence that we have and, on the other,
    to be unburdened by serious, wrenching foreign threats to our security
    or domestic crises. In the 1960's we had, for a brief period more or
    less, the best economy we'd ever had, with low unemployment, low
    inflation. But we had, first, the civil rights crisis to deal with and
    then the war in Vietnam.
        Now what do you do, as a person, as a family, as a business, if
    things are better than they have ever been, but you can look ahead to
    the future and clearly see challenges and opportunities that will not be
    met or seized if you don't do certain things you're not doing now? What
    do you do? That is the great question before our people.
        I can tell you--you know, I don't know about you, but I'll just use
    my own life; from the time I was a little boy, one of the--well, when I
    first ran for office, let me start with that. I asked an old sage in
    Arkansas politics, I said--I was running really well in this race for
    Governor. I said, ``What do you think I ought to really remember?'' He
    said, ``Bill, just remember this: In politics, you're always most
    vulnerable when you think you're invulnerable.''
        How many times can you remember in your own life, when you broke
    your concentration, when you got divided, when you made a stupid mistake
    because you thought things were rocking along so well, nothing bad could
    happen? How many times has that happened to a family or to a business,
    where you just think things are going to roll on forever? It's never
    that way. Human nature is not that way. Human circumstances don't work
    that way. I'm telling you, this is a precious jewel we have been given,
    a gift we have been given as a country, to look ahead and say, ``Okay,
    what are the big challenges? What are the big opportunities?'' You ought
    to make your own lists. And ask yourself, in your lifetime, has there
    ever been an opportunity like this for America?
        What are the challenges? I'll just give you a few. The number of
    people over 65 is going to double in 30 years. There will be two people
    working for every one person drawing Social Security. Medicare is
    supposed to run out of money in 15 years. Seventy-five percent of our
    seniors can't afford prescription drugs but need them to stay alive and
    maintain their quality of life. How are we going to deal with the aging
    of America?
        We have the largest number of children in our schools in history,
    the first time more people than the baby boom, and by far more diverse.
    Loretta was talking about that Republican newsletter from northwest
    Arkansas. That's really true. Northwest Arkansas is one of the fastest
    growing areas of America, has been for 20 years, and one of the most
    racially and religiously homogeneous areas in the country. And all of a
    sudden, boom, they have this big infusion of Hispanics. The Catholic
    Church there now has a Spanish mass every Sunday and has had for the
    last several years. And that's nothing if you're from Orange County, but
    if you're from northwest Arkansas, that's a huge deal. [Laughter]
        We also have a big influx of people in western Arkansas from
    Southeast Asia. But last year, our State ranked first or second--I'm not
    sure which, but I'm sure it's one of the two--in the percentage growth
    of Hispanic population. Joe Andrew didn't
    mention this, I don't think, but in addition to all the mayors we've
    celebrated, we've had a truly historic, breathtaking election in the
    State of Mississippi, where we won the governorship in a State where
    they didn't think a Democrat could be elected for love or money.
        And part of it was the overwhelming African-American turnout. But
    there are also more Hispanics moving to Mississippi. All over the South,
    their voices are being heard. And we only won the election by about
    6,000 votes, so everybody can take credit for the victory. [Laughter]
        So we have to think about this. What are we going to do for all
    these children? They need a world-class education. If we do it right,
    the diversity of America will be a blessing in a global society. What
    are we going to do about the fact that this fabulous recovery has left
    people and places behind? Unemployment on the Pine Ridge Indian
    Reservation is 73 percent. Upstate New York, outside of the suburbs in
    New York City, if it were a separate State, would rank 49th in job
    growth since I've been President. Hawaii, burdened by the collapse of
    the Asian economy, is the only State with no

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    economic growth--the inner cities, the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia.
        How are we going to bring prosperity to people and places left
    behind? Do we have the will to guarantee economic growth for a
    generation of Americans by taking America out of debt? I gave a budget
    to the Congress that will get us out of debt over the next 15 years, for
    the first time since 1835. And the progressive party, the Democrats,
    ought to be for that. It sounds like a conservative thing--it is--but
    it's the progressive thing to do in a global economy. Because if the
    government is not borrowing money, you can borrow it for less, and our
    trading partners can get more for less, and then they can be better
    partners with us, and they can lift their people out of poverty.
        How are we going to grow the economy and meet our environmental
    responsibility? We've proved you could do it. Are we going to keep doing
    it? We've got the lowest crime rate in 30 years. Does anybody seriously
    think America is as safe as it ought to be? If you do, let me just give
    you one statistic. The accidental death rate of children from gun shots
    in the United States is 9 times the rate of the next 25 biggest
    industrial economies combined.
        I think we now know we can bring the crime rate down. Why don't we
    set a realistic goal? I mean realistic in terms of our dreams. Why don't
    we say we won't quit until America is the safest big country in the
    world? And if we want that, how are we going to do it?
        Last night, I appeared in the first-ever townhall meeting on the
    Internet, which was interesting for me, since one of the reasons I asked
    the Vice President to join the ticket is
    because I was so technologically challenged. [Laughter] It was quite a
    thrill for me to do that.
        But there is a digital divide, and it can have huge consequences. I
    was in northern California the other night, meeting with people who work
    for eBay. Do you all ever use eBay? Buy anything on eBay? You want to
    hear something interesting? Over 20,000 Americans now make a living on
    eBay, not working for eBay, trading on eBay, many of them former welfare
    recipients. Think of what we could do in America to close the economic
    divide if we could close the digital divide, if usage and access to
    computers and connections to the Internet were as dense as telephone
    ownership and usage. Think of it. Now, these are the kind of things we
    ought to be thinking about.
        What are the security threats of the 21st century? Well, I think one
    of them is we can start running away from each other because we've all
    of a sudden gotten afraid of trade. We need to keep expanding trade but
    work harder to put a human face on it, to take into account legitimate
    environmental issues and labor issues, but not to run away from the fact
    that with 4 percent of the world's people and 22 percent of the world's
    income if we want to continue to grow, we've got to sell something to
    the other 96 percent. And if we want to sell something to them,
    particularly since we're richer, we have to be willing to buy things.
    But this is a good thing.
        What else? The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,
    nuclear, chemical, and biological, and the possibility that they can be
    made in smaller quantities, like everything else is smaller. We've got
    cell phones so small now my big old fingers won't even hit the numbers
    right. The miniaturization of all things technical will apply to
    weapons, as well, make no mistake about it. This is a serious challenge,
    the growth of terrorism around the world, the prospect that the
    terrorists, the drug runners, the organized criminals will all start
    working together, and the rampant threat of racial, ethnic, and
    religious wars--big challenges.
        Which brings me to the last one. And it's what I've spent so much
    time on around the world and what I celebrated today with honoring the
    Little Rock Nine: Can we truly make our motto, E Pluribus Unum, real as
    we grow ever more diverse?
        It requires, I would argue, three things. One is we have to respect,
    not just tolerate--not just tolerate--but respect and celebrate our
    differences. You know, I don't have the same attitude as the people that
    put out that memo Loretta talked about. I think it's a lot more
    interesting in America as we grow more diverse.
        I'll never forget the first Cinco de Mayo celebration I went to in
    San Francisco. I thought, ``Where has this been all my life?''
    [Laughter] You know? I mean, what have we been doing here?
        You know, I used to--when I was Governor of my home State, I used to
    go to a place called Little Italy to eat spaghetti in a town called
    Slovak, to meet with the farmers that came there in the 1848 revolution.
    And now we're just repeating our history in technicolor, times four. And
    I think it's fascinating.

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        But let's stop all this tolerance stuff. Tolerance is not good
    enough. We need respect and celebration of our differences, number one.
        Number two, we need to recognize that, as we have from the
    beginning, we have genuine differences of opinion, which ought to be
    forthrightly and publicly argued. In that sense, and if that's all we're
    doing, partisanship is not necessarily a bad thing. When people say
    partisanship with a little negative edge, what they really mean is these
    people in Washington are fighting their partisan battles trying to
    increase their power without concern for the public interest. They think
    there's some game going on that's not real. But we will always have
    honest differences.
        I know why I'm a Democrat in the year 1999. And I have friends in
    the Republican Party who know why they're Republicans. And we honestly
    see the world in different ways. We ought to create a safe and
    constructive way for people to feel free to think and argue.
        But the third thing we have to do is to recognize that the
    differences we celebrate and the differences we fight over, neither one
    of them are nearly as important as our common humanity. And that is what
    the world keeps forgetting, at its peril.
        Don't you think it's interesting that, at a time when we talk about
    the Internet--this and finding a cure for cancer, and last year we
    actually were able to transplant nerves into the spine of laboratory
    animals that had had their spines severed, and for the first time ever
    they have movement in their lower limbs. Two years ago we identified the
    two genes that are the biggest predictors of breast cancer for women.
    Within a couple of years, when mothers take their babies home from the
    hospital, we'll be able to give them a genetic map which will say, here
    are the things your child has a greater than normal propensity for, but
    if you do the following things, you can minimize them. A lot of people I
    know, experts in the field, actually believe within a very few years
    babies will be born with a life expectancy of nearly a century--within a
    very few years. Already today, if you live to be 65, your life
    expectancy is over 82 years.
        Isn't it interesting, at this time, with all this marvelous stuff
    happening, not to mention all the techno-joys we can have, that the
    biggest problems we have in the world are rooted in the oldest failing
    of human society? We are afraid of people who are different from us. And
    when you're afraid of somebody who's different from you, it's easy to
    formalize that fear in dislike or hatred, and it's a short step to
    dehumanizing them, after which it's a short step to taking violent
    action against them and to thinking it really doesn't matter.
        I'll never forget being in the airport at Kigali, Rwanda, talking to
    a woman who thought she had been killed, because she was cut up in one
    of the machete rampages in the Rwandan genocide, and she woke up to find
    her husband and her six children all slashed to death around her. She's
    the only surviving one, knowing that they had been betrayed by her
    neighbor, a person they lived with, lived next to her, in total peace
    for years, and boom, like that, they started the fight between the Hutus
    and Tutsis, and people turned on a dime, betrayed their neighbors-for-
    life, and let people be slaughtered.
        Now, there are lots of other stories that are heroic on the other
    side. But what happens to people? Why does that happen?
        Why are the Catholics and the Protestants still fighting in Northern
    Ireland when the Irish Republic has got the fastest growing economy in
    Europe, and their common heritage is rich and fascinating and
    interesting, and they could be having arguments in bars or in Parliament
    and making money, instead, and educating their children?
        What is it that's keeping the Israelis and the Palestinians from
    taking these last few steps, the Syrians from joining in? Why are there
    other terrorist and rejectionist groups that are prepared to go out and
    kill innocent civilians to keep the Israelis and the Palestinians and
    the Syrians from making their final peace agreement?
        If you look at America, you look at the success of people from the
    Indian subcontinent in America--from India, from Pakistan, from
    Bangladesh--the phenomenal success, if you look at the fact that India
    will be bigger than China in 20 years, that they both have big
    scientific bases of expertise, why are they fighting over the line of
    control in Kashmir? Why can't they work that out? Why is that such a big
    problem that they keep spending money preparing to go to war with one
    another instead of educating their children and alleviating the abject
    poverty that is holding them down and keeping them from their full
    potential? I mean, I could go on and on and on. But you get the point.

    [[Page 2039]]

        Why did I have to go into Europe and bring the power of the American
    military to bear in Bosnia and Kosovo to keep people from slaughtering
    mostly Muslims, although others were involved too. What is the deal
    here? Same reason, in a more--thank God--mundane but still very cruel
    way people were spitting on and kicking and cursing those nine kids when
    they tried to go to Little Rock Central High School 42 years ago.
        One of the great human weaknesses is that when people get organized,
    they think that, in order for their tribe to matter, the other tribe has
    to matter less. In order for their lifestyle to be validated, somebody
    else's has to be invalidated, that every difference of opinion turns out
    to be a difference justifying the dehumanization of your opponent. This
    is a very dangerous thing, made more dangerous, not less, by the
    collision of societies and the close contact and the openness of
    borders.
        So we need you for another reason. We need you in the Democratic
    Party. We need you as Americans. We need you to remind us of what the
    concept of family means to you. What are the obligations of people who
    are in your family? What do we owe to one another? If you're like me,
    once you get about 50, your family members, there are some you don't
    even like very much. But you are bound together. You are bound together.
        I want you to think about that, so when you go out across the
    country, you go back home and people say, ``Why are you here? What are
    you doing? Why are you a Democrat? Why are you helping who you're
    helping in 2000?'' Say, ``Well, number one, I tried him in '92 and it
    worked. We're in a lot better shape than we were then, and we're in a
    lot better shape than we've been in a long time. Number two, I'm doing
    it because I want to take on the big challenges of the future. And I'm
    really determined that we're not going to blow this responsibility to
    our children and grandchildren. And number three, because the Democrats
    represent the best hope for creating a family in America and a family in
    the world that doesn't minimize our differences; it celebrates them. It
    doesn't minimize our arguments; it respects them. But it recognizes that
    underneath it all is our common humanity. And without that, nothing else
    matters much. With it, there's nothing we can't do.''
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 9:20 p.m. in the Crystal Ballroom at the
    St. Regis Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Miguel Lausell, chair,
    Hispanic Leadership Council; Representative Loretta Sanchez, general
    cochair, Lottie Shackelford, vice chair, and Nelson Diaz, Hispanic
    caucus leader, Democratic National Committee; dinner vice chairs Alfonso
    Fanjul, Roger Rivera, and Leo Perez; Jo Velazquez, president, Strategics
    Group International, LC; Lydia Camarillo, chief executive officer,
    Democratic National Convention Committee; Carlos Murguia, Judge, U.S.
    District Court for the District of Kansas; former Secretary of Housing
    and Urban Development Henry G. Cisneros; and Joanne Eisenhower, wife of
    Gen. John Eisenhower, and their daughter, Susan. The President also
    referred to Public Law 106-92, approved November 9, which renamed the
    Old Executive Office Building to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive
    Office Building.