[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
[October 1, 1999]
[Pages 1657-1659]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 1657]]


Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Palo Alto
October 1, 1999

    Thank you very much. I am delighted to be here in this beautiful 
home and this beautiful tent. I think I should tell you Eric and Wendy and their daughters 
have opened their home to us; they have also opened their swimming pool 
to us. We're on top of the swimming pool; I say that not to make you 
nervous--[laughter]--because we all know that this is a community where 
technology reigns supreme. There will be no failure of the technology 
here.
    You might be interested to know that the White House press room, 
where you sometimes see me answering questions at briefings, that's also 
on a swimming pool. The President used to have a swimming pool there. 
And when President Nixon got in, he thought that he should do something 
for the press and give them closer access to the White House, so he 
covered up the swimming pool and gave it to the press, which resulted in 
his getting a lot of really good press as a result of that great and 
generous gesture. [Laughter] I said that because I always like to see 
the reporters laugh, and they're over there. [Laughter]
    I am delighted to be here. I thank Joe Andrew and Beth Dozoretz and 
Governor and Mrs. Romer and 
all the people from the Democrat Party for being here. I'm glad 
Congresswoman Anna Eshoo got home. I don't 
know when she got back, but they have been voting like crazy for a long 
time. I want to thank John and Ann Doerr and Sandy Robertson and 
Scott Cook for their help on this event tonight, 
as well.
    Let me say, what we're going to do tonight is what I prefer to do, 
which is after we have dinner, we're just going to have a little 
conversation. And so I won't speak very long. I want to thank 
Eric for what he said. I have tried to be a 
good President, to support the growth and opportunities of this 
community, although it is not true that I'm not technologically 
challenged; I am. But I understand a lot of things I can't do. Most of 
you do, too. So I try to understand well enough to be a good President, 
and I've had an enormous amount of help from the Vice President, from others, and from many people here.
    I think that a lot of people in this community who have been working 
with us since 1991 would genuinely be surprised at how very much 
influence and input you have had in the decisions that we've tried to 
make for America over the last 7 years. And you've also had very 
articulate voices speaking up for you, including Anna Eshoo, Zoe Lofgren, Ellen 
Tauscher, and others, and I thank them 
all.
    The other thing that I would like to say is that I am very grateful 
for the opportunity I've had to serve as President, to have a chance to 
help to give you the chance, and people like you all over America the 
chance to do all the marvelous things which have occurred in the last 
6\1/2\ years. I especially feel that way about the technology community 
which represents--the high tech community represents about--directly; 
not indirectly, but directly--about 8 percent of our economy, but 30 
percent of our growth since 1993. And it's something that you can be 
very proud of.
    So what I tried to do for this community--I also was very mindful--
was something we were doing for all of America, that it would benefit 
all of America, that it would lift our country and broaden the horizons 
and possibilities of the future for our children.
    The last point I would like to make is this, and I hope we can talk 
more about it inside. The central issue for the American people as 
citizens, as we head into a new election season, and the first one in a 
long, long time I haven't been a direct part of, is not whether we will 
vote for change, but what kind of change we want to embrace.
    You know here, as well as any group of people in America, that 
avoiding change is not an option; if we all do nothing, we're going to 
change because the way we work and live and relate to each other and the 
rest of the world is changing at a breathtaking pace. So the question 
is, what deliberate decisions will we make about the nature of change 
that we hope to shape and we hope to grasp?
    The argument I've been trying to make to the American people, I 
think with some success, to the Democrats in Congress with some success 
and to the Republicans in Congress with more

[[Page 1658]]

limited success, is that we ought to identify the largest challenges 
facing our country that we now are in a position to grasp because of our 
current prosperity and the projected financial lines that we see in the 
future.
    The biggest ones I believe are, number one, the demographic 
challenge caused by the retirement of the baby boomers. We have to 
lengthen the life of the Social Security Trust Fund, as well as to make 
it easier for people to have more private savings so that when people my 
age and younger retire, the baby boomers, we don't bankrupt our kids and 
undermine their ability to raise our grandkids. Number two--and that 
requires not only Social Security but some changes in Medicare as well.
    Number two, we have to deal with the education of the most diverse 
and the largest group of schoolchildren in our history. Eric told you 
that he was at the education summit that the Governors had, the second 
one over the last 4 years. It was the 10th anniversary of the first 
education summit we had at the University of Virginia when I represented 
the Democratic Governors and President Bush was in office, and we set 
goals.
    And then we argued that there ought to be standards to achieve those 
goals, and now, when I became President, only 16 States, led by Governor 
Romer, who was the leader of the Governors on 
education, had really enforceable standards; now, 50 do--in 4 years. 
That's good. Only 11 States had real accountability for schools and 
teachers and students. Now we still only have 16. So the next big thing 
we've got to do is get more charter schools out there, more options, and 
then assist them where you end social promotion, but give kids the 
support they need. And you have to turn around failing schools or shut 
them down, but there are options like charter schools if the schools 
aren't working. That's the next big frontier there, but that's very 
important.
    The third big challenge I think we face is the global environmental 
challenge. Many of you in this room work on technologies which 
demonstrate to you every day that modern developments have broken the 
link between economic growth and putting more greenhouse gases into the 
atmosphere. But a lot of people don't believe that.
    A House subcommittee last year made us spend something like $400,000 
trying to defend our position on global warming, which was not taxes, 
not regulation; it was markets and tax incentives to basically 
accelerate the development and the widespread use of available 
technologies that would grow the economy while improving the 
environment. And they think it's some dark conspiracy to take us back to 
the stone age economy. And we see this all over the world, and it will 
be a terrible problem for our children unless we do something about it.
    There's a new book out by Paul Hawken and 
Amory and Hunter Lovins, and it's called ``Natural Capitalism,'' that I 
commend to all of you. No one could read it and come away with any 
conclusion other than we could actually accelerate the growth of this 
economy if we got very serious about energy conservation and the 
development of alternative energy sources. We would accelerate, not slow 
down, the growth of the economy. So it's a huge issue, I think.
    The fourth thing that I would like to say is I think that we have 
got to find a way to sustain--to keep pushing the limits of the business 
cycle. When I became President, I was told by my own economists that if 
we got the unemployment rate below 6 percent for 6 months or more, we'd 
have inflation. And it's been below 4\1/2\ percent for 2 years, and we 
don't have much. I don't think we've repealed all the laws of economics 
here. I don't even think you can do that. But what we have done is to 
plug into the global economy and emerging technologies in a way that 
make it possible to fundamentally change the parameters of business 
cycles and the heaves of supply and demand. In order to do that, what I 
think we have to do among other things, in Government, is to keep paying 
down the debt.
    And I've given the Congress a proposal that, if they would adopt it, 
would deal with these other challenges I've mentioned, provide for a 
modest tax cut and still enable us to get America out of debt by 2015 
for the first time since 1835. And I think it would be very good 
economics, because with interest rates set by global markets to have in 
America a situation where the Government wasn't competing with you for 
money, and we were going to have lower interest rates for a generation, 
in my judgment would lead to higher standards of living, more business 
growth, more jobs, and a more stable future.
    So I think this idea of paying down the debt, which sounds like a 
very old idea in the context of the global economy, is actually a new 
one.

[[Page 1659]]

There are a few of you here in this room that are almost as old as I am, 
and anybody who is--certainly anybody who is 40 or over who went to 
college and took any number of economics courses, was taught by people 
that we ought to have a healthy amount of debt; every country needed a 
certain amount of debt because you were always borrowing to invest in 
the future.
    Then, in the 12 years before I took office, we borrowed just to put 
food on the table as a government, which was a disaster. We may need to 
do that again someday. But right now, in this global economy, we'd be 
better off getting out of debt.
    The last point I want to make is this is something you should all 
ponder--no it's not, it's the next to the last point I want to make is--
[laughter]--not everybody has participated in this economic growth. Yes, 
we've got the lowest poverty rate in 20 years, the lowest African-
American poverty rate ever recorded, the lowest Hispanic poverty rate in 
20 years, and I'm proud of all that. But there is a huge number of 
working people and their children in poverty and skirting on the edges. 
They have not participated in this recovery, and we just have to face 
that. Even though unemployment is the lowest it's been in 29 years. And 
a lot of them are physically isolated in inner cities and the Delta of 
the Mississippi River and Appalachia and Indian reservations. Technology 
can have a lot to do with how we overcome that. But we have got to find 
a way to bring enterprise to poor people, because the distribution of 
intelligence in this country is fairly even. We have to figure out a way 
to make the distribution of usable opportunity even enough to get a core 
of enterprise in these poor areas here and around the world.
    This really is the last point. One of the most ironic experiences I 
have had as President is that I have been privileged to work with you 
and others to build a truly modern economy for America, an economy for 
the 21st century. But so much of my personal leadership in foreign and 
domestic policy has been required to deal with the emotional and 
practical and national security demands caused by the eruption of 
primitive hatreds, from Bosnia to the Middle East to Northern Ireland to 
African tribal warfare to the Oklahoma City bombing to this whole spate 
of the ethnic and racial and religious and antigay violence we've had in 
America in the last 2 years.
    It's quite interesting, isn't it? I mean, here you are out here; all 
you think about is the new millennium. You just gave me a book about the 
these hard questions to ask about the next thousand years. Isn't it 
ironic that the thing that's holding us back most in fulfilling our 
shared potential is our inability to form a community around our common 
humanity because of our vulnerability to mankind's most ancient fears: 
the fear of the other? And so I think we need to deal with that.
    I'm very proud that I believe my party is on the right side of all 
those issues, and I thank you for being here to help us tonight.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:35 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Eric and Wendy Schmidt; Joseph J. 
Andrew, national chair, Beth Dozoretz, national finance chair, and 
former Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado, former general chair, Democratic 
National Committee; Mr. Romer's wife, Bea; attorney John Doerr and his 
wife, Ann; Sandford Robertson, founder and chair, Banc Robertson 
Stephens; and Scott Cook, founder and director, Intuit, Inc.