[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

[[Page 1209]]

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.