[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
[October 18, 1999]
[Pages 1815-1820]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a New Jersey Democratic Assembly Dinner in Elizabeth, New 
Jersey
October 18, 1999

    Thank you. Well, first of all, ladies and gentlemen, let me say I'm 
delighted to be here in Ray Lesniak's 
humble home. [Laughter] It's a beautiful place; we have a beautiful 
tent. It's a gorgeous New Jersey evening. When I got out of the airplane 
at the Newark airport and I looked up in the sky, it was just so 
beautiful, and I was so glad to be here.
    I thank Representative Menendez for 
being here and for his friendship and support and his representation of 
you in the Congress. I thank Mayor Bollwage for hosting us; and my good friend Mayor Sharpe 
James, who is the only big city mayor in 
America who's also in the State Assembly--in the State Senate--it's 
liable to start a trend--[laughter]--which if you're a Democrat would be 
a very good thing to do. [Laughter] So, Sharpe, I think at the next 
mayors' conference you ought to suggest to all of our other mayors they 
should run for the State Senate or the State Assembly. It would be a 
good thing.
    Chairman Giblin, thank you for your work. 
Senator Codey, Assemblywoman 
Weinberg, and to all the other members of 
the Assembly here, all the other mayors that are here. Mr. 
Corzine, thank you for being here and for 
offering yourself for public office.
    I got tickled, you know, I'm always learning about New Jersey, and I 
love it. What Ray didn't say was that we had the biggest improvement in 
our vote in the margin of victory from '92 to '96 in New Jersey of any 
State in the entire United States of America. And I am so very grateful 
for that.
    So here's what I learned about New Jersey politics tonight. 
Lesniak, the Pole--[laughter]--introduces 
Bob Janiszewski. Doria, the Italian, pronounces it properly and calls him 
Janiszewski. [Laughter] Now, that's because if you're not in the family 
you've got to be politically correct--[laughter]--but if you are, you 
want to say the guy's name in the way that can get the most votes. 
[Laughter] It was fascinating, I loved it.
    Let me say, I met--you know, Bob 
had me, in October of 1991, 8 years ago this month, to the Hudson County 
Democratic dinner. And I was hoarse; I could barely talk. I thought, you 
know, I saw this guy, and I didn't know whether he was going to bounce 
me out of the room or put his arm around me, and as

[[Page 1816]]

strong as he is, I might not survive either one. [Laughter] And I wanted 
so badly to make a good impression, I couldn't even talk. Maybe that's 
why most of the people there supported me. I don't know. [Laughter]
    But since then, the friendships that I have enjoyed here, the 
support that I have received from here, and the opportunity we've had to 
work together has meant more to me than I can say. And you've been so 
good to me, to the Vice President, to our family in the administration. 
I just can't thank you enough.
    You might ask--Joe said, well, I'm the only President that ever came 
here for the Assembly candidates. Now, if I were running for reelection 
you might understand that. What am I doing here tonight? Well, if Ray 
Lesniak asked me to empty my bank 
account--meager though it is--fly to Alaska to meet him tomorrow 
morning, I'd probably do it. I feel deeply indebted to him, and I'm glad 
his wonderful family is here tonight.
    But I came here tonight not only out of a sense of gratitude and 
indebtedness to people like Joe and so 
many others here who have helped me over the years but also because I 
think this is quite important. And I'd like to ask you just to take a 
few minutes with me and think about where our country has come from, 
where we are now, and where we're going, and how these Assembly races 
fit into it.
    You know, when I ran for President in 1992, it's almost impossible 
to remember what the country was like. We had high unemployment, 
stagnant growth, stagnant wages. We had increasing social division; 
crime was up; welfare was up; all the social problems were up. We had 
had serious incidents of civil disobedience out in Los Angeles. We had 
political gridlock in Washington. Our country was divided, and there was 
no unifying vision that would bring the people together, and it seemed 
to me that someone ought to run.
    And at the time, the incumbent President, Mr. Bush, was at over 70 
percent approval in the polls, in the aftermath of the Gulf war. But it 
seemed to me that somebody ought to run and say, ``Look, this country is 
going through a lot of changes, and we have a lot of challenges and a 
lot of opportunities. And we're not going to either meet the challenges 
or seize the opportunities unless we have a vision that will bring us 
together and move us forward.''
    And so I went around the country. I declared--to show you how much 
frontloaded this process has become, I didn't even declare for President 
until this month in 1991. This race has been going on ever since my 
daughter was in diapers, for--this year I think. [Laughter] And I said, 
``Look, I believe we need to bring this country together around a set of 
simple values and new ideas: opportunity for all, responsibility from 
all, and a community of all Americans. I believe we need to look to the 
future and understand that we can get rid of this deficit and still 
invest in education, that we can protect the environment and still grow 
the economy, that we can help labor and business, and that all these 
either/or choices that have been put on us from Washington for years and 
years and years will not get us where we want to go.''
    I also said I thought we needed a new set of partnerships in America 
between Government and business and labor and between the Federal 
Government and the State and local government. We needed to focus on 
empowering our citizens to make the most of their own lives and 
challenging them to serve in whatever way they could.
    All these things were just arguments in '92. And luckily for me and 
the Vice President, the country gave us a chance. They said, ``Okay, we 
heard your argument. We'll give you a chance.'' But it's not an argument 
now. There's evidence. The results are in, and after nearly 7 years in 
office, we have the longest peacetime expansion in history, 19\1/2\ 
million new jobs, the highest homeownership ever, the lowest 
unemployment rate in 29 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the 
lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the lowest crime rates in 26 years, 
the lowest murder rate in 32 years, the first back-to-back budget 
surpluses in 42 years, and we've reduced the size of the Federal 
Government; it's the smallest it has been in 37 years. It's not an 
argument anymore. We're going in the right direction.
    And along the way, we proved you didn't have to give up other 
things. The air is cleaner; the water is cleaner; the food is safer. 
We've set aside more land and protected it than any administration in 
the history of this country, except those of Franklin and Theodore 
Roosevelt. We've immunized 90 percent of our children

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against serious diseases for the very first time. A hundred and fifty 
thousand young Americans have now served in AmeriCorps. The HOPE 
scholarship and other financial aid have virtually opened the doors of 
college to all Americans who are willing to work for it. And 15 million 
Americans have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law.
    Now, the question before America in the elections of 1999 and 2000 
is what are we going to do now? Where are we going now? Are we going to 
say, ``Well, we're doing so well, we can indulge ourselves in petty 
politics and meanness and just power positioning of the moment?'' Or are 
we going to say, ``Hey, this is the chance of a lifetime. Once in a 
lifetime a country is in this kind of shape--a great country, leading 
the world--and we have to use this once in a lifetime chance to 
basically build the 21st century of our dreams for our children and our 
grandchildren and for a safer and more prosperous world?''
    In order to do that, we have to challenge the American people, and 
you have to challenge the people of New Jersey to think big and to be 
big. I know what I think the big challenges are. And when I tell you, 
you'll see why I'm here tonight.
    One, we have to take care of the aging of America. The number of 
people over 65 in this country will double in the next 30 years. I hope 
to live to be one of them. [Laughter] When that happens, there'll only 
be two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. So 
meeting the challenges of the aging of America requires us to do a 
number of things.
    Number one, to save Social Security and stretch out the life of the 
Trust Fund until it encompasses a life expectancy of all the baby 
boomers. That's worth fighting for.
    Number two, to save and reform Medicare and add a prescription drug 
benefit. To let people between the ages of 55 and 65 buy into Medicare, 
because people who lose their health insurance at that age almost never 
find another job with the same sort of health care guarantees. We ought 
to have a long-term care tax credit. That's a tax cut I wish my 
Republican friends would embrace, because so many families are having to 
take care of their parents or disabled relatives in long-term care.
    The second thing we've got to do is meet the challenge of our 
children. We have more children from more diverse backgrounds by far 
than at any time in our history, in State after State after State, not 
just in places like New Jersey and New York and California. My State, 
Arkansas, is one of the top two States in America in the percentage 
growth of Hispanic children in our schools. Our whole country is 
becoming more diverse. And yet we know that, while we have the best 
system of colleges and universities in the world, we do not give all of 
our children a world-class education.
    We need higher standards, and we need more support. If we're going 
to have no social promotion, which I favor, we also should have summer 
school and after-school programs for the kids who need it; 100,000 
teachers for smaller classes, which gives great results, and every 
classroom in this country should be hooked up to the Internet. And we 
ought to build or modernize thousands and thousands of schools. And if 
my initiative passed, we could help you get that done here in New 
Jersey.
    So, the aging of America and the children of America; the third big 
challenge we have is to help the families of America in an age where 
almost everybody with children is also working. I think we need to 
broaden the reach of the family leave law. I think we need to toughen 
the enforcement of equal pay for equal work. It is still not a reality. 
Women still don't get equal pay, and that is very, very important. I'm 
the only guy that I know made less money than his wife every year we 
were married until I became President. [Laughter] This is something I'm 
doing for the rest of you. [Laughter] I feel very strongly about it.
    We ought to pass the patients' protection bill. We ought to do more 
for child care for working families. We ought to raise the minimum wage. 
These things are important. We ought to expand health care coverage, 
especially to children of lower income working people.
    The fourth thing we've got to do, I believe, is to set as a national 
goal that we're going to make America the safest big country in the 
world. Yes, the crime rate is the lowest in 26 years. That's good. The 
murder rate is the lowest in 32 years. In spite of these horrible school 
shootings, children are less likely to be killed today than they were 7 
years ago. I'm proud of that. But does anybody seriously believe this 
country is as safe as it ought to be? And if it's not, why should we 
stop until America is the safest big country in the world?

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    Now, I have a proposal to put 50,000 more police on the street--the 
first 100,000 did a good job--and to put them in the highest crime areas 
of the country. The Democrats in Washington, we're trying to pass 
proposals for reasonable gun restriction, for child safety locks, for 
closing the gun show loophole, which has no background checks at gun 
shows and urban flea markets, and doing a number of other things. But we 
shouldn't stop. We shouldn't say we're satisfied with where it is, 
because we shouldn't be.
    The next thing we ought to do is to make this economy work for all 
Americans. You know as well as I do that right here in New Jersey there 
are people and places that have not been touched by this economic 
recovery. We've worked very hard on this. The Vice President has run our remarkably successful empowerment 
zone program. But we want to double the number of those empowerment 
zones, and we want to make sure that with our new markets initiative 
that people who have money to invest get the same financial incentives 
to invest in poor neighborhoods in America we give them to invest in 
poor neighborhoods in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, and throughout 
the world. Because people here who want to go to work ought to have a 
chance. If we don't do something now, when our economy is so prosperous 
and when our unemployment rate is so low to give people who don't have 
work the chance to have it, we will never get around to it. Now is the 
time to do that.
    Let me just say one other thing, maybe in some ways the biggest idea 
of all. People are asking me all the time if we've repealed the business 
cycle, because we now have the longest peacetime expansion in history. 
We haven't. But one of the things we know is that if we keep an open 
economy and we keep competing and this technological revolution 
continues and we educate more and more of our people, we'll do better. 
But you all know that one of the reasons we're doing better is because 
we took a $290 billion deficit and turned it in to $115 billion surplus, 
and that drove down interest rates, and it increased investment; it 
increased jobs; it increased incomes; it lowered home mortgage rates; it 
lowered college loan rates; it lowered car interest payment rates and 
credit card rates. It made us more prosperous.
    If my plan in Washington is adopted, to save Social Security and 
Medicare, it will enable us to pay down the debt over the next 15 years, 
so that 15 years from now this country could be out of debt for the very 
first time since--listen to this--Andrew Jackson was President in 1835. 
Now, why should the nominally more liberal party be for getting us out 
of debt? Because it's good for poor people who want jobs; it's good for 
middle class people who want affordable credit; it will give us a 
stronger, longer-running prosperity. And when we do get into trouble, it 
won't be nearly as bad as it otherwise would have been. And I hope every 
Democrat will stand up for that and stick up for that. That's why I 
vetoed that Republican tax bill, because we never would have gotten out 
of debt and we wouldn't have had any money left to invest in education 
and health care and the environment.
    I'll just mention two other things real briefly, because they don't 
bear on you quite so much. One is, I think the most important thing we 
can do is keep working to build one America, to keep working to reach 
across the lines that divide us. The more complicated, the more diverse 
we get, the more we ought to be lifting up and celebrating our 
differences and making a little fun of them, like I did tonight--
[laughter]--and enjoying it but also reaffirming our common humanity.
    When you see all these hate crimes we have--Matthew Shepard killed 
in Wyoming because he was gay; James Byrd dragged apart in Texas because 
he was black; a Filipino postalworker shot in California by a man who 
just got through shooting at Jewish children at a Jewish community 
school; an African-American basketball coach and a young Korean 
Christian killed walking out of his church in the Middle West by a man 
who belonged to a church that said he didn't believe in God, he 
believed--the church believed in white supremacy.
    When you see all this stuff it is just sort of the most egregious 
example in America of the problems that all of us have in looking at 
people who are different from us and feeling fear or misunderstanding. 
And when those things are not dealt with, they can lead quite easily to 
hatred, which can lead to dehumanization, which in the most egregious 
examples, can lead to killing. And it's not just America. It's all over 
the world. What am I working on in the Middle East or Ireland or to try 
to stop tribal wars in Africa or in Bosnia and Kosovo? All over the 
world, we are still, on the verge

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of this most modern of ages, we're bedeviled by fear of the other.
    We had a fascinating--Hillary has 
organized eight different Millennium Evenings at the White House, where 
we bring in brilliant people to come talk about various things and then 
put it out over the Internet, all over the country and all over the 
world. Last week we had two guys come in and talk. It was the most 
fascinating thing you ever saw. One of them 
helped to develop the architecture of the Internet. The other one was an expert in the human genome project. And they 
talked about how computers made it possible to unlock the mystery of the 
human genes and together would make it possible to do things like put 
little computer chips in any part of our body that's broken someday and 
have the chip emit electronic impulses which would, for example, take 
the place of damaged nerves. It was fascinating.
    But what the geneticist said is interesting. He said that all human 
beings, from a genetic point of view, are 99.9 percent the same, and 
that the genetic differences among groups of people--that is, within 
them are greater than the genetic differences of the group as a whole 
with any other group. So that among Poles, Italians, Latinos, and 
African-Americans, within each of those groups, the genetic differences 
are different than on average the genetic differences of one group are 
from another. We have got to get over this notion that we define our 
lives in terms of being better than somebody who is in some other group. 
And it's a huge issue.
    The last thing I want to say--you mentioned the test ban treaty. I 
have done everything I could from the first day I got here to try to 
lead the world to a point where we could take advantage of the good 
things going on and beat back the threats of tomorrow. What are the 
threats? The spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons; the 
growth of terrorism, organized crime, and drug running and the groups 
working more and more together. What are the opportunities? Expanding 
trade, expanding communications.
    One of my big struggles with the Congress is that they don't agree 
with a lot of this. But I just want you to know one thing about the test 
ban treaty. Everybody is for it when you hear about it. Then they can 
get a lot of people to say, ``Well, I don't know if I'm for it 
because,'' they say, ``why should America sign a nuclear test ban treaty 
when other people can cheat?''
    The answer is, the treaty makes it harder to cheat. Because if we 
get the treaty, we get over 300 supersophisticated sensors that we put 
out all over the world, in all the critical places, which catch people 
cheating. If we don't sign it, it's harder and harder to know whether 
people are testing or not; and even if they do, they're not violating 
any rules, because we walked away.
    Now, that's what I think. Deal with the aging of America. Deal with 
the children of America. Deal with the families of America. Make us the 
safest big country in the world. Get us out of debt and give poor people 
a chance to be a part of this economy. Make us one America, and keep 
leading the world. That's what I think.
    Now, look at the Republicans' position. On Social Security, they 
have an act to save Social Security or reform Medicare, and they say 
there won't be any prescription drug benefit this year. On education, 
they're against voluntary tests; they're against our no-social-promotion 
policy; they won't give us 100,000 teachers; and they sure won't give us 
any funds to help you to build or modernize your schools. On the family 
issues, they're against expanding family leave; they haven't supported 
equal pay; they're sure against the Patients' Bill of Rights, the 
leadership; and they haven't helped us expand child care. On the crime 
issue, they were against putting 100,000 police on the street, and 
they're against putting 50,000 more. And you know where they are on the 
gun issues. On the economy, the tax cut would have taken away the 
possibility of getting us out of debt. On one America, they're against 
the hate crimes bill, the employment nondiscrimination bill. And on 
world leadership, it's not just the comprehensive test ban; they won't 
pay our U.N. dues; they're against our doing our part to combat climate 
change; and they're against adequately funding our national security. I 
vetoed a bill today for foreign operations which doesn't have any money 
to meet our obligations to the Middle East peace process, any money to 
increase our efforts to diminish the nuclear threats that still exist in 
Russia, any money to help pay off the debts of the poor countries that 
the Pope and everybody else has begged the rich countries of the world 
to do in the year 2000.
    Now, what has all this got to do with the New Jersey Assembly? 
Plenty. Because if you

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look at these things--the children, the seniors, the families, whether 
the economy works, how the education system works, whether we've got 
safe streets, and whether we're coming together instead of drifting 
apart--a lot of that work is done at the State level. Joe has already 
talked about it but, you know, I'm proud to come here because you're 
trying to pass a meaningful patients' protection bill that not only has 
the right to sue but also has an ombudsman to look over how the managed 
care system works.
    Now, I have a right to say this because I have never condemned 
managed care, per se. But do you know when I proposed the Patients' Bill 
of Rights, 43 managed care companies came to me and said, ``Mr. 
President, we're interested in these principles. We think they ought to 
be the law. But you don't understand; you have got to pass a law, 
because if we try to do this on our own, we'll lose our shirt if our 
competitors undercut us. They'll take all the healthy people and not 
charge them anything and leave us with all the problems. There needs to 
be a law here.''
    I'm here because New Jersey's Democrats are trying to pass child-
proof gun legislation, which is very important. I'm here because you 
believe in progressive, not regressive, taxation--and I know about your 
fight there--and because of what you've done in education. Keep in mind, 
this only works if there is a partnership.
    Now, my Republican predecessors talked a lot about partnerships, but 
we have eliminated more regulations on the State--two-thirds of all the 
Department of Education regulations. We have turned over more programs 
to the State than my two predecessors combined. But if it's going to 
work, you have to have the right people in the State government.
    So I ask you, again, think about what you want the new century to 
look like for your kids and your grandkids. Think about the obligation 
we have with this chance of a lifetime. Do what you can to stick with us 
nationally but also at the State level. And if you do what you ought to 
do in these elections, you will send a loud message to America that we 
are moving in the right direction for tomorrow.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 7:30 p.m. in an outdoor tent at a private 
residence. In his remarks, he referred to State Senator Raymond J. 
Lesniak, dinner host; Mayor J. Christian Bollwage of Elizabeth; Mayor 
Sharpe James of Newark, NJ; Thomas Giblin, chairman, and Robert C. 
Janiszewski, Hudson County chairman, Democratic State Committee; State 
Senator Richard J. Codey; State Assembly members Loretta Weinberg and 
Joseph V. Doria, Jr., who introduced the President; Jon S. Corzine, 
former chief executive officer, Goldman Sachs; Vinton G. Cerf, senior 
vice president of Internet architecture and technology, MCI WorldCom; 
and Eric Lander, director, Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome 
Research.