[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
[August 2, 1999]
[Pages 1369-1371]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner
August 2, 1999

    Thank you very much. I will be brief, but let me begin by thanking 
John Kerry for having us in his beautiful, 
beautiful home. He and Teresa have been very 
good for our country and very good for our party, and I am delighted to 
be here. And I want to thank all of you for coming.
    Let me ask you to think about what I hope we'll be discussing in the 
following way. When I became President, I was trying to make sure that 
America would begin to function again at an acceptable level of 
performance so that the American people, who are basically out there 
getting up every day, working hard, doing a good job, would find some 
way to be better rewarded, and so that we could maximize these sweeping 
changes going through the world in how we work and how we live and how 
we relate to one another, both within this country and beyond our 
borders.
    And so we set about trying to do that, and the results, I think, 
have been quite satisfactory in a lot of ways. And I'm grateful for 
that. If I could just make one point about it, the President does not do 
these things alone. John Kerry's leadership in 
the areas that he mentioned has been nothing short of brilliant. And 
without the support of the people in Congress who are our allies, none 
of it could have happened. So I'm grateful for that.
    Now, I have a year and a half left on my term, and yet, I'm thinking 
more about the long term than I did even when I got here, for the simple 
reason that we are now in a position to think about the long term and 
about how we can do more than just make the country work but how we can 
secure a framework for opportunity for America, for a greater social 
justice, for a greater good at home and around the world than ever 
before. That's why I think

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it's important that we not blow this surplus we waited 30 years to 
produce until we have fundamentally secured the challenge of the aging 
of America by doing something about Social Security and Medicare. It's 
why I think it's important that we not, while the economy is rocking 
along very well, pass a tax cut that would undermine our ability to meet 
our commitments in education, the environment, biomedical research, and 
other areas. I think that's very important.
    But I also think we need to be thinking about those fundamental 
things in society that have not fully incorporated what most of you have 
done very well doing, which is riding the wave of the information 
revolution. We have, thanks to the Vice President, done our best to have good policies, whether it was in 
the Telecommunications Act or a lot of other specific issues, some of 
which Senator Kerry mentioned, or just doing no harm. And we've been 
able to, far more than ever before, maximize the use of information 
technology and Government, which is why we now have the smallest 
Government we've had since 1963. But if you really think about it, we 
should not be satisfied with where we are. And I'll just give you a few 
examples.
    In education, we finally have test scores turned around, not only in 
mathematics and science but also in reading, which is really quite an 
important achievement, since so many of our children do not have English 
as their first language. But no one seriously believes we have the best 
system of elementary and secondary education in the world. And we have 
all this diversity in our country. How can we use technology to lift the 
level of all education?
    I'll give you another example. We have now, as you all probably have 
seen, I think we have reached the benefit, the limit of the benefits 
that traditional management can bring in moderating inflation and health 
care costs. When I became President, health care was rising at 3 times 
the rate of inflation and people were dropping coverage dramatically. 
Now, unfortunately, that's continued to happen. But one of the reasons 
that there's this intense debate in Washington over the Patients' Bill 
of Rights is that so many people, including a lot of health care 
professionals, believe that we have reached the limit which you can get 
management-related--traditional, management-related savings out of 
health care without eroding the quality of care.
    What can we do to maximize the impact of all the things that we do 
to make the health care system work better and extend coverage to more 
people? I'll give you a third example. Someone told me in Silicon Valley 
one day that people in high tech businesses work 3 to 9 times faster 
than people in normal businesses do, and Government worked 3 to 9 times 
slower, and therefore, the marriage was impossible, which I thought is 
an interesting observation and painfully accurate from time to time.
    What can we do, what still is out there that we should be doing that 
makes Government more responsive, more accessible to people? And then 
the two that I'm particularly interested in: How can we use technology 
to bring economic opportunity to people in places that are not part of 
this recovery in the United States; and how can we use-it--or can we use 
it to help people bridge a whole generation of economic development 
around the world?
    Ron Dozoretz and I have talked a lot 
about what could be done, for example, for the Indian reservations. We 
were in Appalachia; we were in the Mississippi Delta--a lot of the 
places that are still poor are not in inner-city neighborhoods; a lot of 
places are literally, physically--[inaudible]--from mainstream American 
economic life. And I'm convinced that if we can't figure out ways to 
bring opportunity to these places now, we will never get around to it 
because of the high performance of our economy generally and because 
it's really an opportunity for investors to go into places where there's 
a lot of labor, a lot of willing labor, and the cost of doing business 
is modest.
    It seems to me that while what we've done with the empowerment 
zones, under the leadership of the Vice President, and what I propose that the Congress adopt, which is 
essentially to give the same set of financial incentives to people who 
invest in poor areas in America we give them to invest in the Caribbean 
or Latin America or Africa or Asia, is a good start. But I think there 
has got to be, at least for those people that are physically isolated, 
some thought to how technology can be used to trigger the infusion of 
economic opportunity and, therefore, the inclusion of those people into 
the mainstream of American economic life.
    And finally, politics, which has already been mentioned by Senator 
Kerry--it seems to me

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that there is, on the one hand, this sort of exponential increase in the 
cost of running campaigns, because we try to--because of the cost of 
communication. Let's not kid--and if you look at the cost of the 
campaigns as compared with the size of the Federal budget, for example, 
it doesn't look like such a big, carrying cost. But it's an enormous 
burden for people who have to go out and raise the money and spend the 
money. And basically we're communicating with each other in traditional 
ways. Most of the costs of the campaign today comes from television and 
mail, and in some places a lot of money is spent on radio and 
occasionally, depending on what the communications are, on newspaper 
advertising. But most of it's TV and mail.
    Increasingly, we see these breathtaking stories of people just 
opening a webpage for a given cause and all of a sudden having 200,000, 
300,000, 400,000 people within a matter of weeks signing on and going 
forward. Is there some way to use the Internet to further democratize 
politics, to energize more people to participate, to energize more 
people to contribute at modest levels, and to lower the relative cost of 
reaching voters or increase the relative impact of voter reach?
    Because if you think about it--like when we run TV ads, there's a 
reason that an ad on the Super Bowl costs so much money. And that is 
that more people are watching it than now watch the evening news on the 
networks combined because they have so many other options. As the 
television audiences become more dispersed, I think you will see more 
sophisticated use of mail to identify, at least, people you think you 
can reach. And that's good, but is there some way we can use this both 
to broaden the base of contributors at modest levels but also to 
increase the relative effectiveness or decrease the relative costs of 
reaching people, so that people feel like they're participating in the 
democracy and so that more people have a chance to participate in ways 
that will make all of us feel better about the way we conduct our 
democracy as we go toward the next century?
    So these are things that I think about a lot. And I think, you know, 
meeting the challenge of the aging of America is a big deal. I think 
meeting the challenge of education is a big deal.
    I'll give you one more example. America's got the lowest crime rate 
in 26 years. I think that's a very good thing. And it's easy to lose 
that when we have these gripping, horrible incidents like we had in 
Atlanta or the horrible thing in Littleton, Colorado. But why shouldn't 
we be the safest big country in the world? I mean, if we have the most 
powerful technology base in the world, we can figure out how to solve 
any other problem. Why can't we think of a way to organize ourselves 
that would make us the safest big country? Why shouldn't that be? Why 
shouldn't we have a big goal that is--and bring to bear all these 
things.
    Nothing is--I agree with John; I think 
that 50, 60, 70 years from now, when people look back and write the 
history of this era, they will conclude that this was a bigger deal than 
the industrial revolution, that this sort of had the combined impact of 
the industrial revolution and the printing press, which produced the 
Gutenberg Bible, and that it was just breathtaking. Now, what we who are 
living through this ought to do--in addition to those of you who are 
good enough to profit from it and contribute to our economy and make our 
society stronger and hire people and do all the good things you're 
doing--we ought to say, if this is profoundly changing the way we work 
and the way we live and the way we relate to each other, by definition 
it ought to be able to be effective in helping us meet society's biggest 
challenges, including those I outlined tonight.
    So I'm very interested in it. I thank you for your presence here. 
And I am all ears.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 7:35 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Senator John F. Kerry and his wife, 
Teresa Heinz; and Ronald I. Dozoretz, founder, FHC Health Systems.