[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
[September 18, 1999]
[Pages 1556-1559]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Dinner
September 18, 1999

    Ladies and gentlemen, the main thing I want to say tonight is, thank 
you. Thank you to the Congressional Black Caucus for your leadership and 
your partnership, for your genuine friendship. Thank you to Jim 
Clyburn; to my friend of 27 years Eddie 
Bernice Johnson; to Eva 
Clayton; to the dean of the delegation, John 
Conyers; to your retiring member and a 
great champion of education and human welfare, Bill Clay; to Corrine Brown and Elijah 
Cummings and Sheila Jackson Lee and all the other members of the CBC, I thank you 
for your kindness, your friendship, your support to me, to Hillary, to 
Al and Tipper Gore, to what we have done together. I thank Senator Carol 
Moseley-Braun for her continuing 
willingness to serve.
    I welcome and congratulate the award winners, my friends Julius 
Chambers and Alvin Brown and Tom Joyner. Can you imagine 
Tom Joyner and his son thanking Al and me for 
being on his radio program? [Laughter] You know, even the people that 
don't like us don't think we're stupid. [Laughter] And I want to thank 
and congratulate Rear Admiral Evelyn Fields, 
who has done such a great job. She started as a cartographer and went on 
to chart a new course of opportunity not only for African-American women 
but for all women. And thank you for honoring them.
    I also would like to welcome the President of Haiti here, President 
Rene Preval. We're delighted to have him here, 
and we thank him for his friendship.
    There are so many people here who have been associated with our 
administration, and they were all asked to stand. You know them well. I 
want to just mention two, if I might. One is my chief speechwriter, 
Terry Edmonds, because he's the first 
African-American to ever hold that job, and the reason I'm introducing 
him is, since Al and Eddie Bernice and Jim talked, I can't give half the 
speech that he wrote for me, so the least I can do is acknowledge that 
he did it. Thank you my friend. You're doing great.
    The other person I want to thank for his extraordinary leadership as 
our special representative to the continent of Africa is Reverend Jesse 
Jackson, and I want to thank him very much for 
that and particularly his role in ending the disastrous conflict in 
Sierra Leone.
    I want to congratulate some of the current judicial nominees, more 
than half of whom are women and minorities, including Judge James 
Wynn, who would be the first African-
American to serve on the fourth circuit; Judge Ann Williams, the first African-American on the seventh circuit; and 
this week I nominated Kathleen McCree Lewis to serve on the sixth circuit. I congratulate them.
    There are just two more people I want to thank. I want to thank my 
wife for her love, her friendship, 
and for her leadership for our children and our future; for the way she 
has represented us around the world and for having the courage to stay 
in public service. After all we've been through, she would be the best 
United States Senator you could ever elect to anything.
    I also want to thank all the members of the administration here, the 
Cabinet members; some are African-American, some are not. But one of the 
most interesting things that anyone ever said to me is--the Presidential 
scholar, that the Vice President and I knew, came from Harvard one night 
to a dinner at the White House, and we were pretty low. It was after we 
had been waxed in the '94 congressional elections; and this man said, 
``I have been studying administrations for a long time, and you should 
know that I believe that yours will be reelected; and one reason is, you 
have the most loyal Cabinet since Thomas Jefferson's second 
administration.'' So to all who are here--Secretary Slater, Madame Attorney General, 
Secretary Herman, any other members of the 
Cabinet who are here,

[[Page 1557]]

our Veterans Affairs Secretary, all the 
others--I want to thank them.
    And finally, and most of all, I'd like to thank the Vice 
President, without whom none of the good 
things we have accomplished together would have been possible. He has 
been, by far, the most influential, active, passionate, intense, 
effective Vice President of the United States in the history of our 
Republic, and I am very grateful to him.
    Now, you know, this has been an exciting year for African-Americans. 
A lot of things have happened. I mean, Serena Williams became the first black woman since Althea Gibson to 
win the U.S. Open; Ken Chenault was named the 
first black CEO of American Express; and this is very important--I want 
you all to listen to this--the magnificent African-American writer Toni 
Morrison agreed with an extreme rightwing 
journalist that I am the first black President of the United States. 
[Laughter]
    Chris Tucker came to see me today--
[laughter]--and I was in stitches. He's here somewhere tonight. Where 
are you? Stand up there. [Applause] So Chris Tucker is in there; he 
looks at me with a straight face and says he's coming in to case the 
Oval Office because he's about to make a movie in which he will star as 
the first black President. I didn't have the heart to tell him I had 
already taken the position. [Laughter]
    I want to make a couple of points. Most of what needs to be said has 
been said. One of the most interesting books of the Bible is the Book of 
James. It challenges us to be ``doers of the word, and not hearers 
only.'' This truly is a caucus of doers. And I'm grateful for all the 
things that have happened that everyone else has mentioned. But none of 
it would have been possible without you.
    Now we come again to what has become a fairly usual moment in the 
last 2 years--the end of another budget year in which we must all make 
an accounting of ourselves to the American people for what we have done 
and what we are about to do and what we are going to do with the money 
they give us from the sweat of their brow.
    Now, our Republican friends have sent me a tax bill, and it is quite 
large. The middle class and working class and lower income relief in it 
is, oh, about the size of our bill, but their bill is more than 3 times 
the size of ours. And people in upper income groups who are doing pretty 
well in the stock market get all the rest of the relief.
    But the main thing is that the bill makes choices. We all make 
choices in life, often when we pretend not to and often when we deny 
that we are, but we do. And so even when things don't seem to be 
happening, sometimes decisions of the most momentous consequences are 
being made. The Vice President courageously 
presented himself for public office, for the highest office in the land. 
Many of the rest of you will be running this year; perhaps the First 
Lady will be among you.
    But while we are doing these things, which we know are big, 
decisions will be made in this Congress which will affect what they can 
do if the American people are good enough to send them into office.
    Why do I want to veto this bill? Not because I enjoy these 
interminable partisan fights; I frankly find them revolting most of the 
time. It's not really what the framers had in mind. They wanted us to 
debate our differences in advance and then figure out what we could 
agree on and go on and do it. But there are choices here.
    Do you know the number of people over 65 is going to double in the 
next 30 years? I hope to be one of them. [Laughter] When that happens, 
there will be two people working for every one person drawing Social 
Security and Medicare. We ought to use this surplus to deal with the 
challenge of the aging of America and take care of Social Security and 
Medicare and give a prescription drug benefit.
    Do you know we've got more kids in our schools than ever before? You 
heard the Vice President talk about what our agenda is and what he wants 
to do. Well, you can't do it if you give away the store first. We ought 
to invest in our kids. We have the most diverse, largest group of 
children ever in our schools, and they are carrying our future in their 
little minds every day when they show up. And we need to give them all a 
world-class education.
    And if we do this right, believe it or not, we'll be paying down the 
debt. We could actually make America debt-free for the first time since 
Andrew Jackson was President in 1835. Now, here's why progressives ought 
to be for this: Because if we do that, we'll drive down interest rates, 
and we'll be able to get more people to go invest money in places that 
haven't yet felt our prosperity. We'll keep interest rates

[[Page 1558]]

down for homes, for college loans, for car loans, for credit cards. 
We'll guarantee that we'll have a generation of prosperity. We will pass 
something on to our children. This is a choice.
    What I want to say to you is, I want us to get as much of this done 
as we can so that we leave for our successors in office the chance to do 
something meaningful. Nothing, in some ways, is more important than 
trying to make sure every American has a chance to participate in our 
prosperity. I was so proud of Alvin Brown 
tonight when I was listening to his speech on the film, getting ready to 
give him his award; so grateful that the Vice President gave him a chance to lead our empowerment zone and 
enterprise community programs; so glad that we are continuing to try to 
involve businesses. The Vice President is determined to bridge the so-
called digital divide and put computers in every classroom in America, 
not just those who can afford it on their own, and make sure they can 
afford to use them. Thank you, Chairman Kennard, for what you've done on that.
    It's very important that we fund the next round of empowerment 
zones, that we fund the new markets initiative, that we give Americans 
the same incentives to invest in poor neighborhoods here we give them to 
invest in poor places overseas. I want to continue with all these 
incentives. I wish we did more for the Caribbean, for Central America, 
for South America, and for Africa. I just want to do the same thing for 
the poor neighborhoods of Appalachia, of the Mississippi Delta, of the 
Indian reservations, of the cities that have been left behind.
    All the things that have been mentioned, I just want to say, me too. 
To the fair and accurate census, me too; to making sure that our 
children have safe and good places to learn, me too; to meeting the 
challenge of quality health care and passing an enforceable Patients' 
Bill of Rights and doing more in the battle against AIDS, here at home 
and around the world, and restoring trust between the community and 
police, passing the hate crimes legislation, and passing the other 
things that we talked about.
    I want to say a few words, seriously, about a topic that the Vice 
President touched on, and I really appreciated it. And I don't want to 
trivialize this. I think the killing of innocent people, en masse, in 
America has been the most painful thing that he and I and our families 
have had to endure in discharging our responsibilities to the American 
people--the bombing at Oklahoma City; the terrible school violence at 
Littleton, Colorado; and before that, across the country, Arkansas and 
Mississippi, all the way to Oregon, and all the other places that were 
affected; this awful spate of race-related killings, and then, 
apparently, people just with their anger out of control, from Illinois 
and Indiana out to Los Angeles, over to Georgia, and back to Fort Worth, 
Texas.
    None of us should seek to make any capital out of this, but all of 
us should seek to make sense out of it. That's why we started this big 
grassroots campaign against youth violence that I hope all of you will 
be involved in. Two or three people came up to me tonight and said you 
were doing things back in your home communities, and I'm grateful.
    But the Vice President brought up this subject about whether it was 
evil rather than guns, since that is the debate as it has been posed in 
the paper and by some others, to explain the terrible thing that 
happened in the church in Texas, and many of these other things. And he 
said, essentially, both.
    I just want to ask you to think about this, because you think about 
how many times in your life you're in a--[inaudible]--and you would like 
to avoid taking responsibility for something that you could actually do 
something about, in your personal life, in your work life, as citizens. 
You can always find some other cause for the problem that you can still 
do something about.
    You know, our country has the highest murder rate in the world. And 
here, I'll tell you another thing you probably didn't know. The number 
of children who die accidentally from gun deaths in the United States is 
9 times higher than the number who die in the next 20 biggest economies 
combined. Now, if you believe this is about the human heart, you must 
believe two things: If the murder rate is higher here and the accidental 
death rate is exponentially higher, you must believe that we are both 
more evil and more stupid than other countries. Don't laugh. I know it's 
kind of funny, but don't laugh.
    The point I'm trying to make is, the NRA and that crowd have got to 
stop using arguments like this as an excuse to avoid our shared 
responsibilities. It may be true that if we had passed every bill that I 
have advocated, and every bill that the Vice President says he'd pass

[[Page 1559]]

if he were President, that some of these killings would have occurred. 
But it is undoubtedly true that many would not. And that is what we have 
to think about.
    And when we go into this political season, where everybody will turn 
up the rhetoric, you ought to have your antennae working real good, and 
ask yourself, are these people looking for a way to assume 
responsibility, or to duck it? And when I say that, I mean no disrespect 
to anyone.
    Of course, it is because something horrible had happened to that 
man's heart that he walked into that church in Texas and killed those 
people, of course it is. And the same things that happened to the 
children in Los Angeles and the Filipino postalworker, and the same 
thing that happened to all those people in Illinois and Indiana, of 
course it is. But we cannot use that as an excuse not to ask ourselves, 
what's the difference between our setup here and everybody else's setup? 
And is it worth the price we're paying, or is there something we can do 
collectively to make America a safer place and make it clear that more 
of our children are going to grow up safe and sound and healthy? That's 
what we ought to be doing. Make this election year about assuming 
responsibility, not ducking it, for America's future. You can do it, and 
we need you to do it.
    Finally, let me just say for the record and for the press here, most 
of the things the Congressional Black Caucus has really worked for in 
the nearly 7 years I've been privileged to be President have not 
benefited African-Americans exclusively, sometimes not even primarily. 
Most of the things that you have fought for were designed to give all 
Americans a chance to live up to the fullest of their God-given 
capacity, designed to give all Americans a chance to live on safe 
streets, designed to give all Americans a chance to come together.
    And in that sense, it may be that, in the end, the efforts we have 
made--now manifested in our office for One America in the White House, 
that Ben Johnson leads--to bring 
this country together as we move forward may be the most important of 
all. You know, no one can foresee the future. I have loved doing this 
job, and I'm going to do it to the best of my ability every day that I 
have left on my term. I am going to do it to the best of my ability. I 
am going to be a good citizen for the rest of my life and tell people 
exactly what I think.
    But no one can see the future, and no one has all the answers. But I 
know this, and you do, too. If every American really believed that we 
were one nation under God, if every person really believed that we are 
all created equal, if every person really believed that we have an 
obligation to try to draw closer together and to be better neighbors 
with others throughout the world, then all the rest of our problems 
would more easily melt away.
    And so I ask you, as we go through the last difficult and 
exhilarating challenges of this year, as you head into the political 
season next year, keep in your mind--especially those of you in this 
Congressional Black Caucus--the enormous potential you have to reach the 
heart and soul of America, to remind them that we must be one.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at approximately 10 p.m. in the ballroom at 
the Washington Convention Center. In his remarks, he referred to 
Representatives James Clyburn, chair, Eddie Bernice Johnson, first vice 
chair, and Eva M. Clayton, John Conyers, Jr., William (Bill) Clay, 
Corrine Brown, Elijah E. Cummings, and Shelia Jackson Lee, members, 
Congressional Black Caucus; Tom Joyner's son Oscar; and actor Chris 
Tucker. The transcript was released by the Office of the Press Secretary 
on September 20.