[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
[October 3, 1999]
[Pages 1672-1678]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Beverly Hills
October 3, 1999

    The President. Thank you very much. Clarence, I'd like to spend the night and--[laughter]--and we 
could have quite a bunking party here. [Laughter] But you'll have to 
give me a raincheck.
    I want to thank Clarence and 
Jackie and their family for having us here, 
and all the other people who helped to sell tickets and make this event 
possible. I'd like to thank my good friend Maxine Waters for being here and for her passionate leadership for 
our party. Having Maxine for a friend, a supporter, and an occasional 
rebuker has been one of the more interesting experiences of my life. 
[Laughter] And I like it. I'd like to thank Governor Romer; I'd like to thank Beth Dozoretz, our national finance chair of the DNC, for being here. I 
want to thank all of you.
    You know, I was thinking, particularly here, all of you have to come 
to so many of these dinners, and you listen to so many people give 
speeches, and I'm trying to decide what can I do to make this memorable? 
I guess I could give the talk I normally give. I remember one time Tina 
Turner came to Little Rock to give a concert, when she was just sort of 
making her comeback. It was right after she'd come out with that 
``Private Dancer'' album. You all remember that? And she had that big 
macho saxophone player with chains and everything--it made me want to go 
pump iron and apply for a new job. [Laughter] But anyway, she sang all 
these new songs, and she was a big hit, and everybody loved her. And we 
got to the end of the concert, and the band started playing her first 
hit, ``Proud Mary,'' playing the introduction to ``Proud Mary.'' And she 
kind of moved up to the microphone, everybody cheered, and she moved 
back. She moved up and everybody cheered, and she said, ``You know, I've 
been singing this song for 25 years, but it gets better every time I do 
it.'' [Laughter] So maybe this will be a little better. [Laughter]
    But I would like to just ask you to take just a few minutes to be a 
little serious with me tonight about why you came. If somebody asked you 
tomorrow why you came, what are you going to say? If somebody asked you 
tomorrow why you contributed, what are you going to say?
    When I came to California as a candidate for President and then 
later the Vice President and I came together, this State was in trouble. 
It was in trouble economically; it was divided socially; there was a 
great sense of anxiety and frustration. Maxine 
took me into her home, and we walked down the streets and the 
neighborhoods that she represented, and people were worried about the 
future. And I had this idea that--this general idea that there was 
something

[[Page 1673]]

wrong with American politics in the early nineties because it was 
basically all focused on repeating the same old arguments we'd been 
having in America for years and having the same old fights with the same 
old language and seeing who could divide the pie up. And it was all 
about the politics of division. And when you got through slicing the 
citizens up, you just hoped that your share of the pie was bigger than 
the other person's share of the pie.
    It didn't seem to me to be working very well. I mean, after all, we 
had high unemployment; we had social tension; we had no driving vision; 
we had quadrupled the debt of the country in 12 years. We had a lot of 
problems. So I said, ``Give me a chance to lead the country on a 
philosophy that there should be a community of all Americans, and that 
we should look for unifying ways to do our business together. We should 
look for an economic policy that gets rid of the deficit and continues 
to invest in the education of our children. We should look for an 
economic policy that helps business and labor. We should be able to grow 
the economy and make the environment cleaner, not dirtier. We should be 
able to respect all of our differences and treat everybody with respect 
and still be more united by our common humanity.'' It sounded kind of 
Pollyanna, I'm sure, to some people, but I believe it.
    So I was making an argument to the American people, and thankfully 
the American people said, ``Okay, we'll give these guys a chance.'' And 
they did. But they didn't know. They couldn't know. It was my argument.
    In 1996 people thought there was some evidence that it was working, 
and so they renewed my contract. If anybody comes to me and talks to me 
about running for President, I say it's the world's biggest job 
interview. [Laughter] You get an employment contract if you win. And 
then you move to a place where everybody who talks to you tries to make 
you to forget who you really work for and what you're supposed to be 
doing.
    So here we are now, almost 7 years into this grand experiment. It is 
not an argument anymore. One reason you should be here is, the politics 
of community and progress together work. This country has had, in the 
last 7 years, the longest peacetime expansion in history; we now have 
the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years, the lowest welfare rates in 32 
years, the lowest crime rates in 26 years, the lowest poverty rates in 
20 years, the first back-to-back budget surpluses in 42 years, and the 
highest homeownership in history. This is not an argument; there is 
evidence. What we have done has worked for America. And I'm glad that we 
have been a part of that. But that's not enough.
    We've got the country working again. What I think we have to do now 
is to look at the great, long-term challenges of the country. Once in a 
lifetime do people get a chance to do what we have a chance to do now, 
to look around and say, if we wanted to paint a picture of tomorrow for 
our children and our grandchildren, if we wanted to celebrate the new 
millennium not just with the brilliant show that Quincy is putting together for me on The Mall but with a 
really different way of living in America, where we were working for 
ourselves and for our neighbors and where things were really working in 
ways that we could all be proud of, what would we do?
    When I got here, we couldn't ask these questions. We had to get the 
country working again, you know? We had--as somebody said--what's that 
old saying? If you're up to your ears in alligators, it's hard to talk 
to somebody about draining the swamp. [Laughter] Well, now we can drain 
the swamp. Now we can look ahead. We can imagine what would we really 
like America to be like in the new millennium and what would we have to 
do to get there.
    I want us to think about big ideas. Let me just say, some of them 
are things that I can make some real headway on in the time I'm in 
office, and some of them are things that will have to be dealt with when 
I'm not President anymore. But the main reason I hope that you will 
say--tomorrow if somebody said, ``Well, why did you go there last 
night?'' I hope you'll be able to say, ``Well, I bought their argument, 
but it works; but more importantly, I share their vision for tomorrow, 
and I want to be part of it. Because elections are always about 
tomorrow.''
    I'll just tell you one other little story, then I'll go back. When I 
was a Governor of what President Bush used to call a small southern 
State, every year I would go out to the State Fair, and I would have 
Governor's day. Sounds kind of august. Really what I did was go into 
this big tin shed and find myself a little booth, and I'd sit there and 
any citizen who wanted to come up who was at the fair and talk to me and 
say anything would do it.

[[Page 1674]]

    And so in 1989, in October, this month, 10 years ago, I'm having 
Governor's day at the fair. And there's another election coming up in 
1990, at which time I will have been Governor for 10 years and four 
terms, because we went from 2- to 4-year terms. So this guy comes up to 
me, about 70 years old in overalls, and he looks at me and he says, 
``Bill, are you going to run again?'' Except he said, ``again.'' 
[Laughter] And I said, ``Well, I don't know. If I do, will you vote for 
me?'' He said, ``Yeah, I guess I will; I always have.'' And I said, 
``Well, aren't you sick of me after all these years?'' He said, ``No, 
I'm not, but nearly everybody else I know is.'' [Laughter] And this guy 
might have won me the election in 1990.
    So I had this conversation. So I got sort of hurt and huffy, and I 
said, ``Well, don't you think I've done a good job?'' He said, ``Yeah, 
but''--this is exactly what he said--he said, ``Yeah, I do. But,'' he 
said, ``you did get a paycheck every 2 weeks, didn't you?'' [Laughter] 
He said, ``That's what we hired you to do.'' He said, ``If you want to 
win this next election, you'll have to tell them what you're going to do 
next time.'' He said, ``The fact you did a good job doesn't mean much.'' 
He said, ``We paid--we gave you a salary, gave you a nice house to live 
in, you know.''
    And that's very important. But the reason that the achievements of 
our administration and our party and our Members of Congress like 
Maxine matter is that they are some evidence 
that if we're going to change, we need to keep changing, building on 
what we've done that's right, rather than changing by taking a U-turn 
and going back to what got us in trouble in the first place. Neither she 
nor I should get some sort of gold star. The question is, is it evidence 
of whether we're moving in the right direction as a country?
    Now, here are some of the things that I think we ought to be doing 
if we want America to look like it should. Number one, we've got to deal 
with the aging of America. When the baby boomers retire, the number of 
people over 65 will double. There will be two people working for every 
one person drawing Social Security. I am the oldest of the baby boomers. 
Tony told me tonight--Tony Robbins--that he 
was the youngest. I wish I could switch positions. [Laughter]
    But I can tell you that my people, the people I grew up with, middle 
class people, people without a lot of money, they are plagued by the 
notion that the retirement of the baby boom generation will impose an 
intolerable burden on our children and our grandchildren. And we have a 
chance now to take care of Social Security and Medicare, so we take care 
of the elderly, but the income of their children is free to raise their 
grandchildren. It's a big deal.
    The second thing we ought to do is to recognize that we have an 
extra-special responsibility to children and families because we've got 
more kids in school today than ever before, from more diverse 
backgrounds. The school district across the river from me in Washington, 
DC, in Alexandria, Virginia, has people from 180 different national and 
ethnic groups, speaking 100 different languages--one school district--
even slightly more diverse than the Los Angeles county schools, 
unbelievably enough.
    Now, this is a godsend in a global economy with a global society if 
we can figure out how to take our conviction that all these children can 
learn and turning it into an educational environment in which all of 
them do learn. We ought to have after-school and summer school programs 
for the kids who need it. We ought to end social promotion but not blame 
the kids for the failure of the system, so you've got to give them the 
support they need. There ought to be universal access to the Internet. 
We ought to have more teachers for smaller classes and modern schools. 
These things are all terribly important. And you should know that 
there's a big difference in the parties on these two things: what to do 
for the seniors, what to do for the children.
    The third thing we ought to do is to do something about poor people 
who haven't been part of our prosperity. It really bothers me that we've 
got the greatest economy in the history of America, the lowest poverty 
rate in 20 years, the lowest African-American poverty rate ever 
measured--we've only been measuring it about just under 30 years--but if 
you go to any inner city, if you go to the Mississippi Delta, if you go 
to Appalachia, if you go to the Indian reservation--unemployment on the 
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota is 73 percent--you will 
see that there are people who have not participated in our prosperity. 
And we cannot do it by just Government programs alone, because we still 
have to--I'll say more about that in a minute, but we've got to find a 
way to bring enterprise to these people.

[[Page 1675]]

    And I'll just give you two examples, two ideas I have. Number one, 
if you want to invest in the Caribbean and Latin America, in Africa, in 
poor countries in Asia, we will give you significant loan guarantees and 
tax credits to do so. I think we ought to give people the same tax 
incentives to invest in poor areas in America we give them to invest in 
poor areas around the world. Let me be very clear: I don't want to take 
away those other things. I want Americans to help other people work 
their way out of poverty. I'm trying to pass an Africa trade bill right 
now that will bring us closer to Africa. I'm trying to pass a Caribbean 
Basin initiative right now that will bring us closer to the Caribbean 
and do more to help those people, but I want to help people here at 
home.
    The other thing--think about this. I was in northern California the 
night before last with a bunch of people that worked for eBay. Did you 
ever buy anything off eBay? Do you know eBay? Do you know there are now 
over 20,000 people who make a living not working for eBay, the company, 
but trading on eBay the Internet site? Many of them used to be on 
welfare. They actually make a living trading on eBay.
    Now, think what we could do for the economy of America, for poor 
people, if we could, within the next couple of years, make access to the 
Internet as universal as access to the telephone is--access to the 
Internet as universal as access to the telephone. Giving investors in 
America the same incentives to invest in poor areas they have to invest 
around the world, we can do something to bring enterprise and 
opportunity to people who aren't part of our prosperity. And I think we 
ought to do it. It's the right thing to do.
    One last economic thing, a big idea that I think I've sold most of 
my fellow Democrats on, that no one ever thought the more liberal party 
in America would advocate: if we follow the budget outline that I gave 
the Congress, we can actually afford a modest tax cut and still get this 
country out of debt in 15 years for the first time since 1835 when 
Andrew Jackson was President.
    Now, everybody in this room who is over 40 years old who studied 
economics was taught that the country ought to be in debt a little bit; 
a little debt was a healthy thing. Why do I think we ought to get out of 
debt? Because everybody in this room that is in the global economy in 
any way, shape, or form--whether it's in entertainment, investment, or 
anything else--you know that there is a worldwide market for money. 
Every time a country gets in trouble, they find out they can't keep 
their money in if people want to put it somewhere else.
    If we got this country out of debt, what would it mean? It would 
mean lower interest rates forever. It would mean lower interest rates if 
Berry wants to start a new business in his 
second childhood. [Laughter] It means more jobs. It means higher 
incomes. It means you can send your kids to college cheaper. It means 
you can buy a home cheaper. It means that our friends around the world 
who are poorer than we are can borrow money that we used to take away 
from them. This is a big deal. We can give our children a generation of 
prosperity if we make America debt-free.
    Let me just give you a couple other ideas. We've got the lowest 
crime rate in 26 years. Does anybody seriously think that it's low 
enough? Don't you think America is still a pretty dangerous place? Don't 
you think we're still losing too many of our kids? Don't we still have 
too many people in prison?
    Okay, now, we can talk all day about this, but I just want to say 
one thing. I think America should adopt as a goal, say, okay, for a long 
time we didn't think we could get crime down. Now we know we can drive 
crime down, 7 years in a row; big deal. It is a big deal. And it's the 
lowest it has been in 27 years. There are some places where the murder 
rate is half what it was 5 years ago. This is huge. But no one believes 
this country is safe enough.
    Why don't we adopt a big goal and say we're going to make America 
the safest big country in the world? If we're the most prosperous 
country in the world, if we're the freest country in the world, why 
shouldn't we be the safest country in the world? Well, I'll tell you one 
thing. We're going to have to do more to keep kids out of trouble and 
help them and support them. We're going to have to do more to keep guns 
out of the wrong hands. It's crazy.
    You know, every time I have a fight with the NRA, they say guns 
don't kill people, people do. They say this is about evil. So I said the 
other day, I said, ``Okay, it's about evil. I agree with that.'' I mean, 
this guy shoots this Filipino postalworker out here and shoots at these 
little Jewish kids. Yes, that's evil. But do you believe America is more 
evil than any other country

[[Page 1676]]

in the world because we have a higher murder rate? I don't.
    Or what about this; listen to this. The number of children killed 
accidentally by handguns in America--accidentally--is 9 times greater 
than the number of children killed accidentally by guns in the next 25 
biggest industrial economies combined.
    Now, do you believe we're more stupid than any other country?
    Audience member. Yes. [Laughter]
    The President. So are we, like, 9 times more stupid than--you see 
where I'm going with this? Look, I grew up--I was shooting cans off 
fenceposts with .22's when I was 12 years old. I governed a State where 
we shut factories and schools down on the opening day of deer season 
because there wouldn't be anybody there anyway. [Laughter]
    But this is madness, to let people go to gun shows and buy guns with 
criminal records and go out and shoot people when you can stop it. And 
don't let anybody tell you we can't do something with reasonable 
restraints; 400,000 people have not been able to get guns because they 
have criminal backgrounds since the Brady bill passed. And don't you kid 
yourself for a minute; that's one of the reasons we've got the lowest 
crime rate in 26 years. Let's make America the safest big country in the 
world.
    And I want to say just two other things, one thing that people 
normally--maybe you wouldn't see raised in a group like this. But I 
think environmental issues are too little discussed outside 
environmental groups. You know, the economy has gotten better in the 
last 7 years; the air is cleaner; the water is cleaner; the food is 
safer; we set aside more land than any administration in history, except 
those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. But we're still in the grip of 
a big idea that's not right anymore.
    Most of you now believe--I think you do--that global warming is 
real. I hope you do. Nine of the 11 hottest years in the last 500 years 
have been in the last 12 years. If this thing happens--I just was down 
in New Zealand near the South Pole, the polar ice cap melting, big 
chunks of it coming off. If the planet heats too much, the polar ice 
caps melt, the water level rises, island nations can be flooded. 
Sections of Louisiana and Florida can be flooded. The whole center of 
agriculture, the people who produce our food that we live by, will be 
moved to the north, changing and disrupting societies. This is a big 
deal.
    You have malaria now today in places in Africa where it has never 
been before at altitudes it has never been before because the mosquitoes 
are going higher because it's hotter up there. This is a serious thing. 
Now, what's that got to do with all of you? It's a big deal.
    For a long time, it was true that you could not build a rich country 
unless you put more greenhouse gases into the air by burning coal and 
oil. It was true. But it isn't true anymore, and most people still think 
it is.
    So the Indians and the Chinese, they think they can't get rich, and 
when I tell them they don't have to do this, they think, ``old Bill 
Clinton's trying to hold us down on the farm.'' In America, in Congress, 
there are people who think that I have some dark plan to wreck the 
American economy. Well, if I wanted to wreck the American economy, I've 
done a poor job of it.
    But I'm telling you, we now can conserve our way to greater wealth. 
We will be a wealthier country if we are environmentally responsible. We 
will be a wealthier planet if we protect the Earth. And the young people 
in this room, you mark my words. Someday you'll remember I said this; 10 
years from now, if you go to one of these events, I'll bet you 
environmental issues take up 30 percent of the discussion, maybe more.
    So why don't we turn it around now while we can? Why don't we say 
we'll make America the first country in the world to give up an idea 
that's not true anymore and embrace the future?
    The last thing I want to say is this. The thing I most worry about 
of all is that we're on the verge of a new millennium with these 
unbelievable technologies and these unbelievable scientific discoveries; 
a lot of the young women in this room tonight will have babies in the 
future, will have your children after the human genome project is 
completed and we have decoded all the mysteries of the human gene. So 
literally, this might start in 5 years. You have a baby, and then you 
come home from the hospital, and you have a road map of you child's 
future. And it's a little scary because it says, well, your child may be 
more likely to develop heart disease at an earlier age, but it will also 
say, but if you do these five things for the first

[[Page 1677]]

10 years of his or her life, you'll add another 20 years to their life.
    The average 65-year-old person today has a life expectancy of 82. 
The children--Quincy said thank you. [Laughter] You think about this. 
Think about young mothers bringing home their children thinking their 
kids are going to be 90 or 100 years old, and they'll be alert and 
active and healthy and strong. It will be great.
    So you've got all this, and we're all hooked in on the Internet, and 
all this stuff is happening. And whoop-dee-doo, and it's wonderful. And 
there are more rich people than ever before. But what is the biggest 
problem in the world today? What do I spend my time worrying about? That 
there are still people who insist upon killing each other and preventing 
the children of their areas from having a decent future because of their 
racial, their ethnic, their religious, their tribal differences.
    And what's the biggest problem we're dealing with in America today? 
From the bombing in Oklahoma City to stretching poor, young Matthew 
Shepard out on a rack and killing him a year ago in Wyoming this week to 
dragging James Byrd until he came apart, literally, in Texas to what 
happened out here at the Jewish school and with the Filipino 
postalworker to what happened in Illinois and Indiana with that young 
man who was a member of a church that said they didn't believe in God 
but they did believe in white supremacy, so he went--he murdered a 
former basketball coach at Northwestern and murdered a young Korean 
coming out of church--the guy was coming out of a church and he got shot 
in the back and killed--what do all these people have in common?
    They are on the verge of a new millennium that is the most modern of 
times, absolutely in the grip of the most primitive and ancient of 
hatreds, the fear, the hatred, and the dehumanization of people who are 
different from them.
    And that's the last thing I want to say to you. All these other 
things I've said to you are important, but they're by and large mental 
problems. This is a spiritual problem. But it should be part of the 
political platform of any group of citizens that really seeks to make 
the future America's greatest days. You have to ask yourself if you 
really believe that what we share in common is more important than what 
divides us.
    And if you just think about it, I mean, here, we're--I'm trying to 
get this thing done in Northern Ireland, where my people grew up--in my 
family there were both Catholics and Protestants, and they lived on the 
line between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and this has 
been going on for a few hundred years now. It's not like we're 
unacquainted with the issues. And they've been fighting for 30 years, 
and now they've all agreed what to do and everybody's agreed that they 
all have to do what they're supposed to do and everybody's agreed they 
all have to do what they're supposed to do by a certain date. And a lot 
of people are prepared to let it all go back to smithereens again 
because they want to have an argument about who goes first, like you 
used to have when you were 6 or 7 years old on the playground.
    I'm just telling you, just think about it. Look, we all wake up 
every day with, like, little scales inside of hope and fear and light 
and darkness. We all do. Everybody has bad days. But it is unbelievable 
that we're almost in a new millennium and the world is in a grip of this 
level of primitive hatred and destruction. My party believes that we are 
one America. My party believes that I did the right thing in trying to 
stop the slaughter of the Muslims in Bosnia and the Albanians in Kosovo.
    I believe that when my child is my age, she will live in a golden 
age if, but only if, we have married all this modern science and 
technology to a higher level of humanity. Thank you very much.

[At this point, dinner host Clarence Avant, 
chairman, Motown Record Co., made brief remarks and presented a gift to 
the President.]

    The President. Thank you. Let me say, you know, one of the things 
that all this money you give to the Democratic Party does is to finance 
a lot of the election activities in 2000, and my wife may be part of those election activities. And she 
has--the reason I can't spend the night with Clarence and participating in this bunking party is that she 
has to go on a trip tomorrow. And I am going to get home before she 
leaves, because I want to see her before she leaves for a week, so I 
can't stay. But I thank you for this, and I thank you for your 
friendship and support. I wouldn't take anything for the last 7 years, 
warts and all. And a lot of you made it possible for me to serve and for 
us to do what we've done. Just don't quit.

[[Page 1678]]

    Believe me, these are big issues, and I hope I gave you some things 
to think about tonight that'll make you want to keep on fighting all the 
way through next year. Thanks.

Note: The President spoke at 9:15 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to Mr. Avant's wife, Jacqueline; former Gov. Roy 
Romer of Colorado, former general chair, Democratic National Committee; 
musician Quincy Jones, a coordinator of the planned millennium 
celebration on The Mall; motivational speaker Anthony Robbins; and Berry 
Gordy III, founder, Motown Records Industries.