[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
[October 29, 1999]
[Pages 1922-1928]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Atlanta, Georgia
October 29, 1999

    Thank you so much. Well, first, Larry and 
Carol, thank you for opening your home. This is 
a beautiful tent. I was complimenting Larry on the tent, and he said, 
``Well, it covers the parking lot.'' [Laughter] And I said, ``Well, 
maybe you ought to just leave it up then.'' [Laughter] It's wonderful, 
and we could probably, most of us, be back tomorrow night if you'll have 
us here. [Laughter] This is really, really beautiful.
    And I want to compliment you, too, Doctor, 
on your short speech, where you said everything that needed to be said. 
And maybe we'll get a chance to vote for you someday; if you give 
speeches like that, you'll be elected to anything.
    I want to thank our DNC chair, Joe Andrew, for coming down with me tonight and for his leadership, 
and my good friend Andy Tobias and your State 
chair, David Worley. Thank you, David. I also 
want to acknowledge our finance director, Fran Katz, who is here. And her sister's family is here tonight. 
And I think this is Fran's last event. She has been magnificent for us, 
and thank you, Fran, for all the work you've done.
    I want to thank my longtime friend Senator Max Cleland and tell all of you that, in my opinion at least--I may 
be a little biased because we've been friends a long time, and I was the 
happiest person in America outside Georgia when he got elected in 1996. 
But he is doing a wonderful job for you, and you should be very proud of 
him.
    I want to thank Senator Charles Walker, 
the majority leader of the Senate, for being here; and Mike 
Thurmond, your labor commissioner; and 
all the other officials that are here: my longtime friend Michael 
Hightower, the Fulton County executive. 
Thank you all for coming.
    I will try to make a fairly brief speech tonight, but it occurred to 
me you have so many new people here tonight that don't normally come to 
these things, and two of them I see are from Arkansas. I don't know if 
the others have any excuse or not. [Laughter] But it occurred to me that 
if people were asking you why you were doing this, that tomorrow, people 
might ask the rest of you why you were here. And I would like to give 
you a few reasons, because they're why I'm here.
    And Joe Andrew's right. I guess I don't 
have to be here; I'm not running for anything. I kind of hate it; I wish 
I could. [Laughter] But that's the system we've got and every time I see 
a debate, I wish I were part of it. When the Republicans were debating 
in New Hampshire the other night, I wish I had been part of it, you 
know. [Laughter] I'm always convinced I could turn just one more, you 
know.

[[Page 1923]]

    I come here tonight because I believe in what we have done these 
last 7 years, because I believe the choices before the American people 
are stark but also marvelous, and because I believe that we are now in a 
position to do something that in my whole lifetime--in my whole 
lifetime, which now spans 53 years--we have never been able to do as a 
country before. We are, for the first time in my lifetime, economically 
and socially and politically strong enough and free enough of external 
and internal debilitating crises that we actually have a chance to write 
the future of our dreams for our children.
    And I'd like to tell you how I think that came to be and what I 
think the choices are. And tomorrow I hope you'll be able to tell people 
why you came.
    When I came to Georgia in 1991 and 1992, the United States was in a 
period of economic distress, social division--we had a big riot in Los 
Angeles, remember?--political drift, where the so-called vision thing 
was derided and government itself had been discredited. Even liberals 
thought government would mess up a two-car parade. And I came before the 
people of Georgia, and I said, ``Look I have some new ideas. It's time 
to put people back at the center of our politics. It's time to work for 
unity, not division. It's time to build a country with a goal of 
opportunity for every citizen and responsibility from every citizen and 
a community of all of our people, meeting our responsibilities at home 
but also our responsibilities to lead the world for peace and freedom 
and prosperity.''
    And Georgia was good to me. I remember when I ran in the Georgia 
primary, all the Washington experts said that ``Governor Clinton heads 
south to Georgia in deep trouble. If he doesn't get at least 40 percent 
in the Georgia primary, he's toast.'' It was by then I'd already been 
declared dead three times. Now it's happened so often, I'm going to open 
a tombstone business when I leave office. [Laughter] But anyway--and the 
people of Georgia in the primary gave me 57 percent of the vote in 1992 
and sent me on my way. And I'm very grateful for that.
    And then I remember, we had a rally in a football stadium outside 
Atlanta, in the weekend before the election of '92. You remember that, 
Max? And we filled it. And I think Buddy 
Darden was there. We filled the rally. And I 
remember Hank Aaron was there, and there 
were over 25,000 people there. And we won the State by 13,000 votes. So 
everyone who spoke at that rally can fairly claim to have made me 
President of the United States, since there were twice as many people 
there as we won the State by. But we made it, and the rest is history.
    I believe that a parallel process has been going on in Georgia, 
trying to create a new Democratic Party with Max 
and, first, Governor Miller and now Governor 
Barnes, with the election of Mike 
Thurmond and Thurbert Baker, Senator Walker, all 
the other people on your team, a new generation of leadership, 
reflecting the broad society of this great State.
    We've been working at this now, the Vice President and I and our 
team, for 7 years. And when I came in '92, we made an argument to the 
people. We said, ``Hey, give us a chance; the country's in trouble.'' 
And the American people gave us a chance. But there is no more argument, 
because the results are in. And from the day I became President to this 
day, this is the record: We have 19\1/2\ million new jobs and the 
longest peacetime economic expansion in history, which by February, if 
it continues, will be the longest expansion ever, including all that has 
occurred during our wars; we have the highest homeownership in history, 
the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years, the lowest inflation rate in 
30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest poverty rate 
in 20 years, the lowest teen pregnancy rate in 30 years, the lowest 
crime rate in 30 years, the first back-to-back budget surpluses in 42 
years; we've paid $140 billion, all for the national debt, the largest 
in history in the last 2 years; and we've done it with the smallest 
Federal Government in 37 years.
    Now, those are not arguments; those are the facts. And it was done 
by a Democratic Party with a modern philosophy rooted in old values that 
proved that we could manage the economy, balance the budget, reform 
welfare, be for high standards and more investment in education, be for 
the right kind of crime policies, and move this country forward. And it 
wasn't easy.
    We had our casualties. One of them is Buddy Darden, sitting right back there. He was one of the people who 
was brave enough to stand up and vote for my economic plan. When the 
Republicans said, falsely, that it would raise taxes on all Americans, 
it didn't. It raised taxes on most everybody in this room, including 
me--

[[Page 1924]]

[laughter]--but not all Americans. And we said, ``Look, everybody's been 
talking about this deficit, but nobody wants to do anything about it. If 
we don't cut the deficit in half in 4 years, we're never going to turn 
the economy around.'' And most everybody in this room has made more from 
the stock market and their investments and the healthy economy and low 
interest rates than the higher taxes of '93 cost. But Buddy Darden's 
just one of the people who was brave enough to lay down his job in 
Congress to build up a better future for our people and our country, and 
I will never forget it.
    So the first thing I want to say is, these are real numbers. And 
everywhere along the way, we had to fight in the face of bitter partisan 
opposition for our economic plan, for our crime plan, for the right kind 
of welfare reform that required able-bodied people to work, but also 
protected their children's food and medicine, and gave their parents 
more child care. And it's working. It's working. And you should be proud 
of that.
    So the first thing you can say is, ``Well, we gave those guys a 
chance 7 years ago, and it's worked out pretty well.'' Now, that ought 
to be the first part of your answer.
    And the second thing we have to ask ourselves is, now what? You 
know, all these polls say, well--and the press always, because they love 
to kind of stick the knife in and see if you squirm while they're 
sticking you--they're always saying, ``Well, but the polls say 70 
percent of the people want a change.'' And I always say, ``Well, if 
they'd polled me, I'd have been in the 70 percent.'' If someone said, 
``Vote for me; I'll do everything Bill Clinton did,'' I'd vote against 
that person. Why? Because the world is changing very fast. And because 
what I have tried to do, compared to where we were in 1991 and 1992, is 
get this country turned around. It's like turning around an ocean liner 
in the middle of the ocean; you can't do it overnight. And we are moving 
in the right direction. But there are a lot of big challenges out there.
    So the second thing I want you to think about is, what are we going 
to do now? My belief is, since this is the chance of a lifetime to build 
the future of our dreams, we ought to be taking on the big challenges 
and seizing on the big opportunities. And I'd like to tell you what they 
are. And then I'd like to compare our position with the contemporary 
Republican position.
    But first, let me just make a general observation here. Twenty-one 
years ago, when I ran for Governor for the first time--and I was 32 
years old, and I didn't know what I was doing, I don't think--I asked 
this kind of old sage in Arkansas, I said, ``You got any advice for 
me?'' I was about 30 points ahead in the polls. He said, ``Yes, Bill.'' 
He said, ``Let me tell you something. In this business, you're always 
most vulnerable when you think you're invulnerable.'' And if you think 
about that, that's a pretty good rule for life. You know, I'm convinced 
one of the reasons that we've had such intense partisan battles in the 
last year is that the majority party of Congress believe they have the 
luxury of doing it because the country's doing so well, so there can't 
be any really adverse consequences to not paying our United Nations dues 
and not ratifying the test ban treaty and not funding the Wye peace 
talks or anything else, fooling around with the environment. Because, 
after all, things are going well and everybody's in a good humor, and so 
this will be treated with a certain amount of frivolity.
    And if you think about it, countries are no different than 
businesses or families or individuals. How many times have you made a 
mistake in your life because you relaxed your concentration or you got 
diverted when things were going well, and you felt that nothing possibly 
could happen very bad? I see a lot of you nodding your heads. This is a 
common human challenge.
    So it is not self-evident that we will use this great moment of 
prosperity and success to do what we ought to do. But if you think about 
the children and the grandchildren that we all have or hope to have, and 
what we owe to them and how, at least in my 53 years, our country has 
never had this kind of a chance before, we'll have a hard time 
explaining why we didn't make the most of it if we don't.
    So here's what I think we ought to be doing to build that bridge to 
the new century for our kids. Number one, we have to deal with the aging 
of America. We're going to double the number of people over 65 in 30 
years. That means we have to save Social Security for the baby boom 
generation, which is a gift not only to the baby boom generation but to 
their children and grandchildren who won't have to support us if we save 
Social Security. It means we have to save Medicare, and we should reform 
it to make it more like the best private sector practices in medicine, 
but also we should

[[Page 1925]]

add a prescription drug benefit, because 75 percent of our seniors don't 
have affordable prescription drugs.
    It means that we should deal with the children of America. For the 
first time ever in the last 2 years, we have more kids in the public 
schools than we had in the baby boom generation. And they're a very 
different crowd. They are the most racially and ethnically, culturally 
and religiously diverse group of children we have ever had. It is true 
here in Atlanta, where you have more foreign companies headquartered 
than any other city in America. It is true just across the river from 
the Nation's Capital in Washington, in Fairfax County, which has the 
most diverse school district in America, children from 180 different 
national and ethnic groups in one school district. It's true in my home 
State of Arkansas, which in the 1980 census had the highest percentage 
of people living in Arkansas who were born there of any State in the 
country except West Virginia, now ranks second in the country in the 
percentage growth of Hispanics. This is a nationwide thing. We are 
changing the whole scope of what it means to be an American in our 
schools before our very eyes. And we must be committed to giving these 
kids, every one of them, a genuinely world-class education.
    We need higher standards; we need more accountability; we need to be 
committed to turn around failing schools or close them down. But we 
don't need to brand kids failures if the system is failing them. We need 
the after-school programs, the summer school programs, the modern 
schools, all of our classrooms hooked up to the Internet, smaller 
classes that we want to bring with 100,000 teachers there. There are a 
lot of things we can do. But we don't get there unless we make it our 
priority.
    We need to deal with the fact that not everybody in our country has 
participated in our recovery. I'll give you some surprising examples. In 
the State of South Dakota, the unemployment rate is 2.8 percent. On the 
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the unemployment rate is 
73 percent. In the Mississippi Delta, we still have in my part of the 
country the poorest part of America, on the average, in the lower 
Mississippi Delta valley. In Appalachia, there are still places where, 
because of their physical isolation, there is no new enterprise and 
opportunity. In many of our inner cities from coast to coast that is so.
    But I'll give you another surprising thing. If you look at New York 
State and you take out New York City and the suburban counties in New 
York, the rest of New York ranks 49th in job growth since I've been 
President--if it were a separate State. That includes Albany, Rochester, 
Buffalo, Syracuse, big towns that you know about.
    I have proposed to double the number of the empowerment zones that 
the Vice President has managed so well over 
the last 6 years--which put intense effort into bringing cities back and 
rural areas back--and to pass something I call the new markets 
initiative, which would simply give people like you the same financial 
incentives to invest in poor areas in America we now give you to invest 
in poor areas in Latin America, in the Caribbean, in Africa, in China. I 
think that you should have those incentives.
    I think we have to do more to build a balance between family and 
work in the 21st century, when almost all parents, fathers and mothers, 
will be working. We have to find a way to extend health care to all of 
our children. We have to find a way to extend child care to working 
families who need it. Only about 10 percent--in spite of the fact that 
we have increased dramatically in my administration, only about 10 
percent of the people who are eligible for child care assistance 
actually get it.
    We need to have a real equal pay law for equal work for women and 
men. We've still got problems there. We need to pass the Patients' Bill 
of Rights. We need to continue to invest in biomedical research. We need 
to make a commitment that everybody who works 40 hours a week should not 
live in poverty. It's time to raise the minimum wage again. I feel very 
strongly about that.
    But the main point I want to make is this: We need an administration 
with a focus on trying to balance family and work so that our goal is 
that people can succeed at home and at work. The most important job of 
any society is raising children. It dwarfs the importance of any other 
job.
    So if people who are at work, either because they want to be or they 
have to be, are worried sick all day that their kids are in trouble, 
they're not going to be very productive workers. On the other hand, if 
people, because they're worried about it, don't go to work at all when 
they

[[Page 1926]]

want to and could, and could make a contribution to our society, we 
won't be as strong a country. We have got to be more deliberate and 
disciplined in creating a framework of support for people to succeed at 
home and at work.
    I can mention a lot of other things. Just let me mention a couple 
more issues that are really important. We need a commitment to build 
21st century communities that are both safe and livable. I told you the 
crime rate's at a 30-year low, and it is. And I'm proud of it. Murder 
rate's at a 32-year low. Does anybody in this audience tonight believe 
that America is safe enough? Of course not.
    So I say we should set ourselves a real goal. If we're the freest 
big country in the world, why shouldn't we be the safest big country in 
the world? Why shouldn't we say, if it worked to put 100,000 police on 
the street, and it gave us a 30-year low in the crime rate, I promise 
you, if you put 50,000 more out there concentrated in the high crime 
areas, we can drive this crime rate down more.
    If the Brady bill kept 400,000 people with criminal or mental health 
backgrounds from buying handguns, and didn't deprive one single hunter 
of a day of deer season or one single sports shooter of one contest, 
then we ought to close the loophole in the Brady bill and apply it to 
the urban flea markets and the gun shows and get some more people out 
there.
    We also ought to recognize that having 21st century communities 
means we have to find a way to preserve the environment and grow the 
economy. We're going to have to do more to provide green space in urban 
areas. More people need to live in cities where you get to drive through 
woods, like we did to come here tonight. And we can do that. We can do 
that. We have a whole agenda before the American people.
    One of the things that I'm proudest of as President is that under 
our administration, we have protected more land than any administration 
in the entire history of America except those of Franklin and Theodore 
Roosevelts, and I'm proud of that. But we have to do more of that.
    So the aging of America, the children of America, the continuing 
poverty challenge of America, balancing family and work, building 21st 
century communities, ensuring the long-term prosperity of America--you 
hear all these people running for President and they're promising all 
these tax cuts and all these spending programs, you just remember one 
thing. We got to the dance that we're enjoying today because we got rid 
of that awful deficit, and we had the first back-to-back surpluses in 42 
years. And that has given us low interest rates and a booming 
environment for entrepreneurs to succeed in. We now have a chance. If we 
stay within the parameters of the budget I sent to this Congress, we can 
actually pay off the debt of America and be debt-free within 15 years 
for the first time since Andrew Jackson was President in 1835.
    Now, if we do that, if we do that, what does it mean? Does it mean 
there will never be another recession? Of course not. But it means no 
matter what, interest rates will be lower, that means more jobs, higher 
incomes, more new businesses, cheaper home mortgages, car loans, and 
college loan payments. Because we have paid the debt down $140 billion 
in the last 2 years, because the aggregate debt is over 1\1/2\--listen 
to this--trillion dollars less than the experts said it would be when I 
became President, that amounts to a tax cut and lower mortgage payments 
of $2,000 a year to the average family, $200 a year in car interest 
payments, $200 a year in college loan payments to the average family in 
America.
    We don't want to forget what got us here. The Democrats are the 
progressive party. We like to invest money in people. We like to help 
people, and we ought to. But we have to do it within a framework that 
says it is this economy that has been our best social program, those 
19\1/2\ million new jobs, every year a new record in new businesses 
started, creating an environment in which people like a lot of the great 
entrepreneurs here present have been able to be so successful.
    So I say we ought to set a big goal. Let's get ourselves out of debt 
over the next 15 years, and then we'll have more money than we know what 
to do with. And our children and grandchildren can look forward to a 
generation of prosperity.
    You mentioned the world earlier, and how concerned you were. I 
believe that America has special responsibilities that are, if anything, 
even greater now that the cold war's over. And it bothers me that the 
majority in Congress don't want to pay our U.N. dues; that they so 
blithely walked away from a Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty that 
our nuclear allies Britain

[[Page 1927]]

and France and 150 other countries had signed; that they wouldn't even 
let us offer the safeguards that answered the problems they said were 
there with the treaty; that it was just a political issue.
    It bothers me that they passed a foreign assistance package that not 
only had no money to meet America's commitments that I made pursuant to 
a 25-year bipartisan involvement in the Middle East peace process, 
nothing for the Wye peace accord, to finance it and do our part, when 
we're at a very critical juncture in the Middle East talks, and I'm 
about to go off to Oslo to meet with Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat; nothing 
to continue the denuclearization program started by Georgia's Senator 
Sam Nunn and Dick Lugar of Indiana, the Nunn-Lugar program, which has done more to 
make the world safe than anything else we've done lately, because it 
destroys nuclear weapons in Russia--no money for that--no money for 
America to join everybody from His Holiness the Pope to the European Union to Japan in providing debt relief to 
the poorest countries in the world in the year 2000, so they can begin 
to grow and buy our products--some of them really think that the only 
thing we've got to do is build a bigger bomb and a bigger wall and we'll 
be fine, because the cold war's over. I think that is nuts.
    You know, we went in and won a war in Kosovo so that people could go 
home and not be butchered because of their ethnic and religious 
background. But when we left, the European Union and our other Allies 
are bearing the lion's share of the costs and the burden in Kosovo now. 
We helped to end a terrible, brief, bitter conflict in East Timor, after 
the people there voted for independence, and stopped another ethnic 
slaughter. But when we left, our friends from Australia, New Zealand, 
Malaysia, and other places went in and did the lion's share of the work. 
They needed us to help them get in there, but they did it. We get 
something out of cooperating with other people in the world. And if we 
stop it and we don't want to pay our fair share, then someday we'll be 
confronted with crisis after crisis after crisis where we've either got 
to go alone or watch while nothing happens.
    Every President since Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman endorsed 
the idea of the United Nations, has understood that America would be 
more influential if we were a good neighbor and a good partner, and did 
a responsible job of paying our fair share. And I think it's important.
    And the last point I want to make is the most important of all. If I 
had to leave the Presidency tomorrow--as much as I have worked on all 
the things we just talked about: the economy, the family, the 
environment, the children, the seniors--and I could give America one 
gift, my one gift would be to give America the ability to be one 
America, to bridge all of the divides.
    It is so ironic that we're celebrating the explosion of technology, 
the explosion of biology, the solving of the mystery of the human 
genome. We look ahead to all these unbelievable things happening, and 
the biggest problem of the world is the oldest problem of human society. 
We're still scared of people who aren't like us. And when you strip it 
all away, that's what's going on in Northern Ireland; that's what's 
going on in the Middle East; that's what's going on in the Balkans; 
that's what's going on in the tribal wars in Africa; and that's what you 
see when Matthew Shepard gets killed in Wyoming, or James Byrd gets torn 
apart in Texas, or the little Jewish kids get shot at going to the 
community center, and the Filipino postalworker gets murdered in 
California, or the Korean Christian gets shot coming out of church in 
Indiana, right after the African-American basketball coach gets murdered 
walking on the street in Chicago.
    What happened to all these people? We still can't form a society 
where no one hates anybody else because they're different. And it all 
starts with fear, which leads to distance, which leads to looking down 
on people, which leads to eventually dehumanizing them, which then 
justifies violence against them.
    So if I could leave this country with one gift, it would be the gift 
of just being one America. Because people are smart in this country. We 
nearly always get it right when we've got enough time. That's why we're 
still around here after 200 years, you know, we eventually get it 
figured out. And the reason--so the second reason that I hope you will 
say, if people ask you why you're here, say, ``You know, they had some 
good ideas, and they've got a good record, the Democrats do,'' first 
thing; secondly, ``They want to take on the big challenges for the 21st 
century, and so do I, and I agree with them on what they are.''

[[Page 1928]]

    The third thing I want to point out, just briefly, is that the new 
Republican Party wanted a tax cut that's so big, it would have spent all 
the non-Social Security surplus and there would have been no money to do 
any of this I talked about. We wanted a tax cut, too, but one that would 
be consistent with paying off the debt and investing in the education of 
our children and dealing with the aging of America.
    The second thing I want to say is, it may be popular in the South, 
but I think it's wrong. I don't think it's so popular anymore. Even the 
new Republican Party is for whatever the NRA says they ought to do on 
these gun fights. Now, you know, I once had a lifetime membership in the 
NRA. I've even got my jacket here. I'm sure they revoked it somewhere 
now. [Laughter] But you listen--hadn't anybody missed a day of deer 
season on what I've done, nobody, and nobody's been knocked out of one 
sporting contest for what I've advocated. But there are people alive 
today because of these background checks. We did the right thing.
    So we differ. We're for the Patients' Bill of Rights, and they're 
against it. We believe our education program ought to include 100,000 
teachers, and we ought to build or modernize 6,000 schools. I was just 
in Philadelphia today where the average school building is 65 years old. 
In New York City, 40 percent of school buildings are over 70 years old, 
and they still are heated by coal. There are places in this country 
where we cannot hook up the rooms to the Internet because they cannot be 
wired. I was in Florida, in a little town, the other day; there were 12 
housetrailers out behind the elementary school in a little town where 
the kids were going to school. This is an important issue.
    In our budget, we not only don't spend the Social Security surplus, 
we extend the life of Social Security and Medicare. Their budget doesn't 
add a day to the life of Social Security and Medicare. They're opposed 
to our initiatives on the environment. You know what they've done in 
foreign policy; we've talked about it earlier. So we have profound 
differences.
    And I hope tomorrow you'll say, ``You know, whether I voted Democrat 
or Republican over the last 20 years, looking at the next 10, I agree 
with the Democrats. Those are three pretty good reasons to have been 
here. I like the record; I like the agenda; I agree with them on the 
differences.''
    But if you don't remember anything else, just remember this. We're 
all pretty lucky or we wouldn't be sitting under this tent tonight. The 
good Lord has been good to us. And most all of us would like for people 
to believe we were born in a log cabin we built ourselves, but the truth 
is we've all had a lot of luck and a lot of kindness and a lot of gifts. 
And with all the turmoil, the person in this room I believe has made the 
greatest sacrifices for our country is Max Cleland, and I think he would tell you even he feels lucky to be 
here and be with us.
    So if you don't remember anything else, just remember this. I'm not 
running for anything. I'm 53 years old; I've had the best life I could 
imagine. I will never be able to give this country enough to repay what 
has been given to me. But if I could give you anything, you would 
remember this--believe me, this is the only chance in my lifetime we 
have ever had to build the future of our dreams for our children, and we 
dare not pass it by.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:20 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Larry and Carol Cooper; Andy 
Tobias, treasurer, and Fran Katz, national finance director, Democratic 
National Committee; State Democratic Party Chair David Worley; former 
Representative Buddy Darden; former Senator Sam Nunn; State Senator 
Charles Walker; Fulton County Commissioner Michael Hightower; State 
Attorney General Thurbert E. Baker; baseball Hall of Famer Henry (Hank) 
Aaron; former Gov. Zell Miller and current Gov. Roy E. Barnes of 
Georgia; Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel; Chairman Yasser Arafat of 
the Palestinian Authority; and Pope John Paul II.