[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
[December 11, 1999]
[Pages 2273-2279]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks to the Florida State Democratic Convention in Orlando, Florida
December 11, 1999
Thank you very much. Thank you. Now, folks, you all sit down now.
Can you sit down? I'm a little hoarse, so I can't shout you down, and
you won't be able to hear unless you sit down and relax here.
First of all, I want to thank my good friend Charlie
Whitehead for inviting me here and for
being willing to take the reins of this party again. I came here in
1981, 1983, 1987, 1991; only Arkansas have I visited the Democratic
Convention more than I have in the State of Florida, and I thank you
very much.
I want to thank Representatives Hastings, Brown, Meeks; former Congressman Smith; the wonderful Lieutenant
Governor of Maryland and I think
the finest Lieutenant Governor in the United States, Kathleen Kennedy
Townsend, who spoke to you earlier today. And I want to say how proud I
am that a person who has been a friend of mine a long time is going to
be your next United States Senator, Bill Nelson.
And Grace Nelson, thank you very much for your
interest.
I also asked if Rhea Chiles was still here.
It was almost exactly a year ago that Lawton Chiles passed away, and
like his family and his friends and his beloved Floridians, I want you
to know I still miss him. He was my friend. He was my mentor. He was my
ally. His legacy is alive and well in the good things he did in Florida
and the good things that we're doing in the United States. And I'm
honored to be here.
Now, let me tell you, I know you probably noticed we're about to get
into an election season here--[laughter]--and you may have noticed that
I can't run for anything this year. [Laughter] So I want to tell you how
come I came down here.
First of all, it was almost 8 years ago exactly when the Democratic
Convention of Florida in December of 1991 put my campaign on the map.
And I came to say thank you. With your help, when I was running fifth in
the polls nationally, we won a decisive victory over a majority in the
straw poll here in 1991. It was the first evidence that Democrats were
ready to take America in a new direction. And I got to thinking about
that last night and this morning. You were very wonderful to me, but I
also want you to know you were a hard sell. [Laughter]
I don't know how many times I've talked to Jeff Eller and Craig Smith, who were among
those who worked this convention for me, and Hillary and I remember how
dog-tired we were when we got back to our hotel room after the speech,
and then we had to go and visit all these caucuses. We must have gone to
a dozen caucuses. And we were asked the most detailed questions over the
most wide array of issues, and I just hope you're putting this crowd
this year through this. That's all I want to say. [Laughter] It was
unbelievable.
But I must say, you know, I had been coming here--I remember when
then-Governor, now Senator Bob Graham invited me
in '81 and '83 and '87--I loved this convention, and I loved that
experience in '91. I love your energy, your intensity, your commitment,
your caring about the issues and the future of this State and this
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Nation. And if you can keep this energy--don't forget, we won in '92,
and in '96 we won again, and in '96 we carried Florida for the first
time in 20 years--you can win again here, and you can do it.
Every time I try to take a walk down memory lane, some of the
political press says, ``Oh, well, he's thinking about his term being
over.'' Well, I'm not, either. I've got 14 months left, and I'm going to
give it to them every day until I go. But since this is an election
year, I think it's worth taking a little walk down memory lane.
In the 12 years before Al Gore and I took office, irresponsible
policies in Washington piled up deficit after deficit. We quadrupled the
national debt in 12 years. We had high interest rates, high
unemployment, stagnant wages, growing inequality. By 1991, when I
entered the race for President, we had economic distress, social
decline, political division, and government was entirely discredited.
And don't let anybody forget it.
Now, what a difference 7 years of working for opportunity,
responsibility, and community with all Americans make. We are ending the
century on a high note. And you can take great pride in it because you
had a not insignificant amount to do with it.
Just last week we crossed a truly remarkable threshold: 20 million
new jobs since January 1993. And more and more, they're good-paying jobs
on which you can support a family, buy a home, take a vacation, save for
college and retirement.
So I just want to take a minute here, and I'm going to give you a
capsule of the last 7 years. I want you to know it; I want you to take
pride in it, because you were a part of it; and I want you to share it
with your fellow citizens. The Republicans can have all the rhetoric
they want. Let people choose between their rhetoric and our record.
Number one, economically, we have the longest peacetime expansion in
our history. In February it will be the longest economic expansion in
the history of our country, including that in World War II. We have a
30-year low in unemployment, a 32-year low in welfare, a 20-year low in
poverty rates. We have the highest homeownership ever, the largest
surplus ever, the first back-to-back budget surpluses in 42 years, with
the smallest Federal Government in 37 years.
There's more. We have the lowest Hispanic and African-American
unemployment rates ever recorded, the lowest Hispanic poverty rates in
25 years, the lowest African-American poverty rates ever recorded, the
highest rate of small business starts in history, the highest rate of
minority business ownership in history, the lowest female poverty--
unemployment rate in 40 years, the lowest single parent household
poverty in 46 years. We're going forward together.
Now, I might say--I was going to save this for later in my speech,
but I think we ought to insert it here--and we've done it with the most
diverse administration in history, the most diverse appointments to the
judgeships, to the Cabinet, to the administration. And I think that the
record, not me, the record America has established in the last 7 years
proves that Mr. Connerly is wrong in wanting
to end affirmative action.
Look, it's interesting, you know, affirmative action actually began
under a Republican administration, back when both parties were really
committed to civil rights. And like any system that went on for years
unexamined, there were some problems with it and it needed to be fixed.
And we worked very, very hard on a ``mend it, don't end it'' policy that
I'm proud of. But you cannot look at the record the American people have
established in the last 7 years--where we made an effort to include
everybody, and we made an effort to make sure our economic policies
benefit everybody, our political policies benefited everybody, our
social policies benefited everybody--and make a serious case that we'd
be better off if we were growing more divided by walking away from one
of the tools that has helped to bring us together as a nation. Don't
give up on affirmative action, and go out there and defend it.
Wait a minute. We're not done with the record yet. You all just
relax. [Laughter] I want you to remember this. I'll send a copy of this
to Mr. Whitehead, and he can send it
out. We have--listen to this--we have the lowest crime rate in 25 years;
470,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers have not been able to get a
handgun because of the Brady bill. All the things the NRA--let me tell
you--but the NRA was wrong. There's not a hunter in Florida that's
missed a day of the hunting season because of the Brady bill, but there
are a lot of little kids in the inner city alive because of the Brady
bill today. It was the right thing to do.
Wait a minute. Over 20 million people have taken advantage of the
family and medical leave
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law, a bill which was vetoed by my predecessor. And it hasn't hurt the
economy. Over 10 million people benefited from the minimum wage
increase. It hasn't hurt the economy. Over 7 million people right now
have claimed their HOPE scholarship tax cut to pay for community college
or the first 2 years of college so that we can open the doors of college
to everyone in the United States of America.
Over 2 million more kids have been insured since the Balanced Budget
Act passed in 1997 under the Child Health Insurance Partnership between
States and the Federal Government--2 million more kids. Over 90 percent
of our children are immunized against serious childhood diseases for the
first time in the history of the United States. Over 150,000 young
people have served their communities in Florida and throughout the
country in AmeriCorps, our national community service program. It took
the Peace Corps 25 years to get the number of volunteers we've achieved
in 5 years in AmeriCorps.
Now, these are just some of the facts. Let's talk about the
environment. The air is cleaner. The water's cleaner. The food is safer.
We have the lowest production of waste materials in our country in 20
years, and 20 years ago we had 50 million fewer people. We've cleaned up
3 times as many toxic waste dumps as the Republicans did in the 12 years
before we took office--3 times as many. And we have protected more land,
from the Florida Everglades to the California redwoods to the 40 million
roadless acres in the national forests, more land than any
administration in the history of this country except those of Franklin
and Theodore Roosevelt.
Along the way, we made a contribution to peace and humanity and
democracy in Northern Ireland, in the Middle East, in Bosnia, in Kosovo,
in Haiti. We expanded trade with Latin America. We're trying to do so
with the Caribbean. We're trying to be a good neighbor to our friends in
the Caribbean and to our friends in Africa.
We have reached out to reduce the nuclear threat, from Russia to
North Korea; to establish a decent relationship with China, which is
important to our future. And the world is a safer, stronger place than
it was 7 years ago.
Now, I say this to you to say not how great we were, but that we had
good ideas, focused on giving the American people the conditions and the
tools to make the most of their own lives; focused on creating
opportunity for every responsibility citizen; focusing on creating a
community of all people in this country who are willing to work hard and
be good citizens. And the American people did it. And I am very
grateful. Hillary is very grateful.
We are all very grateful.
But I want to say to you, I could not have done it, not any of it,
without the Democrats in the Congress. And we need more of them, not
fewer of them. Send Bill Nelson up there.
And I want you to know that it would not have happened without the
Vice President. Again, I want you to listen
to this, and you can see, I'm a little hoarse, so I can't--this is from
the heart. Now, these are facts. From his vote to break the tie on the
'93 budget--which is what gave us the ability to balance the budget, got
interest rates down, got the economy going--to his vote to break the tie
on the Senate's consideration of commonsense gun legislation to close
the loophole in the Brady bill so we could also cover the gun shows--
something you voted to do in Florida--from leading our efforts to
connect every classroom to the Internet--let me tell you what we've
done: 5 years ago, when Al Gore and I started working on this and I
asked him to take it on, only 4 percent of the classrooms in the country
were connected, and they were in 14 percent of the schools--5 years ago;
today, over 50 percent of the classrooms are connected to the Internet
in over 80 percent of the schools; I think he's done a good job in
helping this to happen--from running our empowerment zone program to
bring economic opportunity to poor areas to supporting our policies and
developing so many of our policies to strengthen the American family to
leading our reinventing Government effort--which has given us, I will
say again, the smallest Federal Government in 27 years with a higher
level of support for the American people--to supporting every tough
decision I have had to make as President, from guns and tobacco to
Bosnia and Kosovo, I can tell you that in the history of the country, he
is the most effective and influential Vice President who has ever served.
He's got a lot of good ideas for the
future, too, and now I want to talk about that. I just signed the first
budget of the 21st century. Charlie said we had a do-nothing Congress.
Well, that's not quite true. They tried to do
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something; they tried to pass a tax cut so big that it would have kept
us from ever paying down the debt and fixing Social Security and
contributing to our children's education. And I vetoed that, and the
Democrats stayed with me. That was a major achievement of the last
Congress.
And then, when they got ready to go home, that's when the President
and the Democrats acquired a little influence in the debate. So when we
came out of the budget, even this year, we had a continuing commitment
to 100,000 teachers, to 50,000 more police, to 60,000 housing vouchers
to help poor people move from welfare to work. We doubled the funds for
after-school programs. We got the first money the Federal Government has
ever appropriated for States to turn around or shut down failing
schools, so that we can help all our kids get a good education and still
support the public schools and public school reform.
We had major advances on the environment, and we beat back major
assaults on the environment. And we've paid our United Nations dues and
agreed to help alleviate the debt of the poorest countries in the world.
And we fixed some of the too-severe cuts in the Medicare law from the
1997 balanced budget, restoring funding to hospitals, to nursing homes,
to other medical providers, needed to help the 29 million elderly and
disabled Medicare beneficiaries.
We also passed a landmark bill I am immensely proud of, which allows
people with disabilities to keep their Medicaid if they move into the
work force so people can go to work, because they can't get private
insurance.
Now, there's a lot of things we didn't do, and I'm going to be
working to get it done. We didn't pass the Patients' Bill of Rights, and
we should. It's wrong; everybody should be guaranteed quality care. We
didn't raise the minimum wage again, and we should. We didn't close the
gun show loophole and require child trigger locks, and we should. We
didn't pass the hate crimes legislation or the employment
nondiscrimination act, and I believe we should. We didn't pass my new
markets initiative, which would give Americans the same tax incentives
and loan guarantees to invest in poor areas in America they get to
invest in poor areas in Latin America or Asia or Africa, and I think
they should.
I hope that they will agree to let China join the WTO and give them
normal trading status. Why? Because you already know we've got a big
trade deficit with China. This bill, this agreement I made gives more
options for American farmers, American manufacturers, American
investors. All they get out of it--and it's not insignificant--they get
to be in the World Trade Organization, where we'll all have to live by
the same rules. But we get dramatically greater access to their markets.
It means big, big jobs and incomes for farmers and workers in America.
And I hope it will pass.
Most importantly, I hope we will find a way next year to protect
Social Security and Medicare in the face of the baby boomers'
retirement. Now, I want to talk a little more about that. And this is
what I want to tell you about the election. We've got a great record.
We--you and me, all of us--we've got good ideas. We ought to be winning
every poll by 20, 25 points in every race. Why aren't we? Well, they
always have more money than we do. And they've been talking to a certain
sector of our electorate for so long and telling them how terrible we
are, some people probably believe it and forget to think before they
vote. [Laughter]
But you can change that. So I just want to leave you with this. This
I want to be my gift to you. I will do everything I can for the next 14
months, but you have to be good citizens in this election season. And
the future of America is riding now on how the Congress' races and the
Governors' races and the President's races and these other things come
out.
Let me begin with a story. Over Thanksgiving, I got my whole family,
my extended family, I gathered them up and took them to Camp David. Then
after we stuffed ourselves on Thanksgiving, we had some more of our
friends come up, and they had some little kids, too, to play with my two
little nephews. And on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, this beautiful
little 6-year-old girl looked up at me, and she said, ``Now, Mr.
President, how old are you anyway?'' [Laughter] So I said, ``Well, I'm
53.'' And she said, ``That's a lot. That's a lot.'' [Laughter] So I
said, ``Yes, it is a lot.''
And let me tell you, from the perspective of those years, in my
lifetime, in my whole lifetime there has never been a time when America
had this much prosperity, this much social progress, this much national
confidence, with the absence of a crisis at home or a threat abroad.
[[Page 2277]]
Now, what does that mean? [Applause] Wait, wait, wait, wait. We're
done with the record. [Laughter] I want you to think about this. What
that means is that for the first time in my lifetime, on the edge of
this new millennium, we actually have a chance to shape the future of
our dreams for our children in a way no previous group of Americans in
our whole lifetime has had. And that imposes on us a terrific
responsibility. You know, anybody can concentrate when their backs are
against the wall. The great British essayist Samuel Johnson said,
``Nothing so concentrates the mind as the prospect of one's own
destruction.'' Your back's against the wall; you can focus.
When things are rocking along, hunky-dory, it's easy to get
distracted. I was so proud of the American people for sticking with me
when I vetoed that tax cut. I said, you know, you can understand it if
people said, ``Hey, man, we've been working hard out here. The eighties
were tough; the nineties were tough. Cut us some slack, here.'' But they
said, ``Uh-uh, no; we don't want to go back to those old bad days. We'll
stay on the path we're on.'' That was good.
So I ask you--here's what will determine whether we win this
election or not, from the White House to the Senate to all the other
elections. What will determine whether we win is, what is it about? And
if it is about our common responsibility as a people to meet the big
challenges of the 21st century, because we ought to and because we can
now, for the first time in our lifetimes, then we will win.
What are they? We've got to deal with the aging of America. The
number of people over 65 will double in 30 years. I hope to be one of
them. [Laughter] It is unconscionable that the baby boom generation will
walk away again from the opportunity to take Social Security out beyond
the life expectancy of the baby boomers and to push the life of Medicare
out there and to add a prescription drug benefit for the people who
cannot afford their medicine today.
Second, you look around Florida; we've got the largest and most
diverse student population in our history. We cannot walk away from our
obligation to give all of these children a world-class education. We
ought to pass my initiative to help people build or repair thousands of
schools. We ought to keep on going until we connect them all to the
Internet. We ought to give every child access to an after-school
program. We ought to make sure the teachers are certified and well-
trained and well-compensated. We owe that to these kids. Nothing is more
important.
Third, we ought to do more to help people balance work and family:
more child care; insure all the kids with health insurance; equal pay
for equal work for women. We ought to do that.
Fourth, we ought to make sure that we can grow the economy and still
improve the environment. The world is in a grip, still, of a very bad
idea that's wrong. All over the world, including in Washington, DC,
people believe you can't get rich unless you put more coal and oil into
furnaces or machines and burn them and pollute the atmosphere. It's not
true anymore. It's not true anymore.
The farmers in Florida, I predict to you, within 15 years, will be
saving all their waste products for biomass fuel. You'll be able to use
a gallon of gasoline to make 8 or 10 gallons of biomass fuel with no
greenhouse gas emissions. When that happens, the whole future of that
will change. You can buy windows right now that let in 5 times as much
light and keep out 5 times as much heat and cold.
We have undertaken to green the White House, and we have saved the
equivalent of almost 700 cars on the highway by energy conservation at
the White House. And it's working just fine. We're all warm in the
winter and cool in the summer. It's a big deal. It will be a bigger deal
to the future; you mark my words. If you don't want the Everglades to
flood because of global warming, we'd better deal now with this. And we
can do it.
Let me just mention one or two other things. We've got the crime
rate down to a 25-year low, good; murder rate down to a 31-year low,
good. Does anybody think America is as safe as it ought to be? No, of
course not. Now, when I took office, most people didn't believe you
could drive the crime rate down. We all thought the crime rate just went
in one direction, up. So now we know it can be brought down.
So I say to you, the reason I fight hard for this, these commonsense
gun measures and the 50,000 more police in the high-crime areas and more
programs to keep kids out of trouble in the first place is I don't think
it's good enough to say we've had crime go down 7 years. I think the
Democrats ought to say, okay, now
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we know we can do it; we have a new goal. We want America to be the
safest big country in the entire world, and we're going to keep working
until we do it.
Now, I want to say something about the economy. I think it is
terribly important that we keep our party front and center on keeping
this economy going. How are we going to keep it going? Number one is,
don't forget what brought us to the dance. We need to keep paying down
this debt. You know that we can be out of debt in 15 years if you stay
on my budget path. For the first time since 1835 America will be debt-
free. And we ought to do it.
Second, we've got to keep working within our party, within our
country--with labor, environmentalists, and businesspeople--until we
finally get it right on trade because, I am telling you, the world is
better off today because there is 50 years of increasing trade. We are
only 4 percent of the world's people; we've got 22 percent of the
world's income. It just stands to reason that you can't hold that unless
you sell something to the other 96 percent.
Furthermore, let me say something about imports. They are unpopular
in general and popular in particular. We don't like imports in general,
but we all have them: we wear them; we drive them, you know. [Laughter]
What do they do for you? They keep inflation down with competition.
That's why we've got the longest peacetime expansion in our history,
because inflation didn't destroy it. So we've got to keep working until
we get this right.
The third thing we've got to do--and this is something I feel so
strongly about--if we can't bring economic opportunity to the poor areas
of America that have not participated in this recovery now, we will
never get around to doing it, never--to Appalachia, to the Mississippi
Delta, to the poor rural areas of America, to the inner cities, to the
Native American reservations. We've got to do it.
And with economic opportunity we also have to keep our focus on
doing everything we can at home and around the world to get people
together, to get people over these conflicts they have over race and
ethnicity and religion and sexual orientation. It's crazy.
Let me just ask you to think about this. Don't you think it's
interesting that whenever you read something about the new millennium,
they talk about the wonders of the human computer, the wonders of the
human genome? Hillary had some people
at the White House the other night, one of the guys that founded the Internet and one of the principal
scientists working on the human gene. And the
Internet guy actually sent the first E-mail 18 years ago, because he had
a profoundly deaf wife, and he wanted to talk to
her at work, and she couldn't take hearing aids. And he said, ``The
intersection of the study of the gene and the study of computers means
we can do things that we never could do before.'' And he had his wife
stand up, and she started speaking, and because she has a minor little
computer chip stuck way down in her ear, she can hear for the first time
in 50 years.
Now, last year we transplanted nerves from the legs to the spine of
a laboratory animal for the first time and got movement in the lower
legs. Some people think we'll be able to take a picture of spinal cord
injuries and just design a computer chip to go in and replace the
electronic impulses that the spine used to provide. This is the kind of
stuff we're talking about.
In a couple of years, young mothers will come home from the hospital
with their babies, and they'll have a little genetic map. And it will be
a little scary. It will say, you know, your daughter has one of these
genes that are predictors for breast cancer. That's the bad news. The
good news is you know it now, and here are 10 things you can do that
will cut her risk by 80 percent. A lot of my friends who are experts in
the field really believe that, sometime early in the next century,
American newborns will have a life expectancy of nearly 100 years.
Now, a lot of my other friends in the space program think we'll find
out what's in the black holes in the universe. A lot of other people
believe we'll continue to fight against war because we'll be more
connected to the Internet around the world.
Let me ask you something. Don't you think it's interesting that in
this most modern of times, the biggest problem in the world today is the
oldest problem of human society: We don't trust people who are different
from us. We fear them. It's easy to go from fear to dislike, from
dislike to hatred, from hatred to dehumanization, and then to violence.
There was a picture yesterday morning in one of the big newspapers
of a young gay soldier that was beaten to death with a baseball bat and,
right next to him, the young soldier that
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beat him to death--one 21, one 18. I was looking at these two kids
thinking, you know, they're young enough that they could be my children.
And both these young men put on the uniform of our country, and I could
have sent them someplace to die. They both swore to go wherever I told
them to go and do whatever I told them to do. And I was aching for the
young man who had died and for the young man whose life is now
destroyed, who wasn't born hating that way; somebody had to teach him to
do that.
And so I say to you, you want to know what makes us different? The
best politics in 2000 is doing right by the big challenges of the
country. If people believe the election is about who's got the best
record and who's got the best vision for the big challenges, lifting us
up and pulling us together, listen, our crowd's going to do fine.
If we talk about the aging of America and Social Security and
Medicare, if we talk about the education of our children, if we talk
about growing our economy and helping our agricultural and manufacturing
sectors while improving the environment, if we talk about balancing work
and family, if we talk about bringing economic opportunity to poor
people and getting this country out of debt for the first time since
1835, and if we talk about the most important thing of all, which is
manifested in the hate crimes in America and in the continuing conflicts
from the Balkans to the Middle East, and thank God, in the peace
agreement in Northern Ireland, and we hope there will be one between
Israel and Syria soon, because they're coming to meet next week--people
have to find a way not just to tolerate but to celebrate their
differences, and to be secure in doing it because they believe, down to
the core of their being, that what we have in common is even more
important. We've got to let a lot of this stuff go. Our party can take
the lead in doing that.
So go out there and talk to people about what's happened in this
country in the last 7 years. Even more important, go out there and say,
``Do you really believe in our lifetime we've ever been in this kind of
shape before? And if you don't, what are we going to do with it?'' Go up
to total strangers on the street and say, ``You're a citizen; what do
you think we ought to do with this time? I think we ought to make the
most of it.'' And ask them about the aging of America. Ask them about
the children of America. Ask them about their parents struggling to
balance work and family. Ask them about the economy and the environment.
Ask them about bringing economic opportunity to poor places. And ask
them about building one America. You make this election season about
that, and we'll have another celebration next year.
Thank you, and God bless you.
Note: The President spoke at 10:10 a.m. in the Empire Room at the
Wyndham Palace Resort. In his remarks, he referred to Charles A.
Whitehead, chairman, Florida State Democratic Party; Senatorial
candidate Bill Nelson and his wife, Grace; Rhea Chiles, widow of former
Gov. Lawton Chiles of Florida; Jeffrey L. Eller, former Deputy Assistant
to the President and Director of Media Affairs; Craig T. Smith, former
Assistant to the President and Director of Political Affairs; Ward
Connerly, chairman, California civil rights initiative; Vinton G. Cerf,
senior vice president of Internet architecture and technology, MCI
WorldCom, and his wife, Sigrid; and Eric Lander, director, Whitehead
Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research.