[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
[November 9, 1999]
[Pages 2033-2039]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Hispanic Leadership Forum 
Dinner
November 9, 1999

    Thank you very much. After that introduction, I am thinking many 
things. [Laughter] I'm thinking, I wonder how long it will be before 
Miguel will run for office. [Laughter] I'm 
thinking, it is much better to have such a friend than an opponent. 
[Laughter] Thank you. Thank you for being my friend in ways that are 
personal as well as political. You may, however, have caused me quite a 
problem tonight, not over Vieques but over saying I have a Hispanic 
soul. Not very long ago the great African-American Nobel Prize winning 
author Toni Morrison said I was the first 
black President. [Laughter] And if I am the first black President and 
the first President to have a Hispanic soul, I'm afraid they'll never 
let me go home to Ireland. [Laughter] It might be worth it. [Laughter]
    Loretta Sanchez, thank you very much for 
your leadership and standing up here tonight and performing in your 
usual, laid back, repressed fashion. [Laughter] What a joy it is to have 
somebody like you in Congress who's not ashamed to have a good time 
being in public life. We ought to all enjoy it and be honored.
    You know, when I see people trudging around here all the time, 
complaining about how hard public life is and all the burdens, I say, 
``You know, they're not giving these jobs away. Nobody made you come up 
here.'' [Laughter] People come to me all the time and say, ``Hasn't this 
been just awful for you?'' I say, no. [Laughter] It's actually been 
quite wonderful. You know, a few turns in the road one way or the other 
and I could be home doing deeds, wills, and divorces. [Laughter] I am 
grateful to be here, and I like it, every day of it. And 
Loretta likes it, and she's grateful to be 
here, and I appreciate that.
    I want to thank the administration members who are here: Secretary 
Slater, who represented me at home today in 
Arkansas at the funeral of Daisy Bates, a great hero of the civil rights 
movement; Administrator Alvarez; Maria 
Echaveste; my former Secretary of 
Transportation and Energy, Federico Pena, who 
did a superb job in both places, it's nice to see you. I would also like 
to thank another former member of my administration who is here tonight, 
who is now working for Vice President Gore, 
Janet Murguia. Her brother was just confirmed as the first Hispanic Federal judge 
from Kansas, so we've got one of them on the payroll, anyway.
    I want to thank all the people at my table and other places who had 
so much to do with the success of this evening, Joe and Alfie and Roger 
and Leo and all the others. Nelson, thank you very much for your 
leadership. Thank you, Joe Andrew and the 
others who are here from

[[Page 2034]]

the DNC. Lottie Shackelford, Lydia 
Camarillo, thank you for your willingness to 
go run our convention. Make sure we all have a good time out there, will 
you? [Laughter]
    And let me say one serious word before I go forward. There's one 
person I really wish were here tonight, who died a couple of days ago, 
the great mayor of Sacramento, California, Mayor Joe Serna. Mickey 
Ibarra would be here, but he's out there 
representing me at that service today. So I ask you all to remember 
Isabel Serna and the family in your prayers. 
They've been through a lot. He was a magnificent mayor and a great 
Democrat and a great friend of mine. He was one of those people who 
enjoyed public service, had a good time doing it, and was proud down to 
the last day--his health would no longer permit him to serve--and I ask 
you to remember.
    I also would like to thank two people who aren't here tonight: one, 
Secretary Richardson, who is still in the 
administration; and the other whom I wish were here, Henry 
Cisneros, who has served us so ably and is 
such a great man. I thank him.
    Now, as all of you know, we're trying to finish this year's budget, 
and we're trying to do a few other things before the Congress goes home. 
And I'd like to mention just a few of them because I think they relate 
particularly to the concerns of the Hispanic community. I want you to 
know what's still out there. We're fighting to get a reaffirmation of 
the commitment that Congress made last year, right before the election, 
that the majority, the Republican majority has voted to go back on. But 
I am determined that we will reinstate it, and that is to put 100,000 
teachers out there in the early grades so we can lower class size and 
give our children a better education.
    We are fighting to give our hardest pressed communities that still 
have a high crime rate 50,000 police officers on the street. We are 
fighting to raise the minimum wage, which I think is very, very 
important, especially for lower income workers, many of whom are 
Hispanic. You know, we lifted over 1\1/2\ million Hispanics out of 
poverty by doubling the earned-income tax credit in 1993 and then by 
raising the minimum wage. And it's time to raise it again. And I hope we 
can prevail, and I hope you will help us.
    We're trying to pass hate crimes legislation. We're trying to pass 
legislation that will enable disabled people to go into the work force 
and not lose their Medicaid health insurance. We're trying to pass the 
Caribbean Basin initiative and the African trade bill, which would open 
our markets to the Caribbean nations and African nations and open their 
markets more to us and put our Caribbean neighbors on a more equal 
footing with our Mexican neighbors in our trading relations.
    All of those things can still be done before the Congress goes home. 
And insofar as any of you have influence with anyone, I hope you will 
get out there and help us with our agenda, because all these things 
reflect the deepest values of the Democratic Party and our commitment to 
the future.
    I just want to make a couple of other points. I don't want to keep 
you late, and most of you have heard me give a lot of speeches. I had a 
very emotional day today. I was thinking about many things. I'm about to 
leave to go to Europe. Hillary and 
Chelsea just left to go to the Middle East 
to continue the work that I was doing last week in our hope that we can, 
over the next 100 days, actually get a framework for a final peace 
agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Then I'm going to 
Turkey and to Greece, two great friends of America, in the hope I can 
help them resolve some of their difficulties over Cyprus and other 
issues before I leave office. And then I'm going on to Bulgaria, a great 
ally of ours, to try to keep pushing to make peace in the Balkans, where 
we have had to take up arms in Bosnia and Kosovo to stop ethnic 
cleansing and slaughter.
    And today I had this incredible experience, which would have been 
wonderful for any President but was especially wonderful for me. I 
hosted in the White House about 30 members of the United States 
Congress, Republicans and Democrats, and a couple of hundred other 
people to give the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award Congress 
can award, to the nine students who integrated Little Rock Central High 
School 42 years ago.
    For those of you who are old enough to remember that or young enough 
to have studied it, you may know also that, in addition to the courage 
of the young children and the power of the Supreme Court's decisions and 
the court orders, the power of the Presidency was necessary for the 
integration of Little Rock Central High School when President Eisenhower 
sent

[[Page 2035]]

in the 101st Airborne Division and later federalized the Arkansas 
National Guard to stop the obstruction.
    Today I signed a bill naming the Old Executive Office Building after 
President Eisenhower because he worked there many years in the military. 
That building, until the Great Depression, housed all the offices of the 
executive branch, including all the offices of what was then called the 
War Department, except for the Treasury Building and the Office of the 
President. So Dwight Eisenhower actually worked in that building as long 
as he worked in the White House as President.
    And his son, General John Eisenhower, 
who is also a noted historian, and John's wife and their daughter were 
there, so I asked them to come. So Dwight Eisenhower's son and 
granddaughter were actually present as we recognized these nine 
students. And because Arkansas is my home, I have lived with the reality 
of these people all my life, since I was 11 years old.
    And I said today that these nine students, in their simple desire to 
get a better education became, as children, our teachers. When I lived 
at home, literally 99 percent of all children in my State went to 
segregated schools. And we may have had an opinion one way or the other, 
but everybody more or less accepted it was the way it was.
    But when they did what they did, then all of a sudden, they came 
crashing in our lives and everyone had to decide: Where do you stand; 
what do you believe; how will we live? Thirty years later, I hosted them 
in the Governor's Mansion for the 30th anniversary of Little Rock 
Central High. I brought them all in, and I showed them all the rooms 
where the then-Governor planned the obstruction to keep them out the 
school. They got a big kick out of that.
    And 40 years later, 2 years ago, I went home to Little Rock, to the 
steps of Little Rock Central High School--which in the 1920's was voted 
the most beautiful school building in America, and it's still a 
magnificent structure--and I held the doors open for them, with our 
Governor, as they walked freely through the front door, something they 
had not been able to do 40 years ago. And then 2 years later, they came 
to the White House, with all their myriad family, kinfolks, and friends, 
for a celebration that truly represented America at its best.
    This has been a great day, a great day to be President and a great 
day to be an American. And to end it with you--you and all those you 
represent have been so good to me and to Hillary and to the Vice 
President and Mrs. Gore--is a great privilege.
    I just want to leave you with a couple of thoughts. Number one, many 
of you helped me in 1992 because you knew we didn't want to keep on 
going the way we were going, because we had economic problems and social 
discord and political drift, and Government was discredited. So you knew 
what you were against, and you were willing to try something else. But I 
was just an argument for most of you. Most of you never met me before I 
started running for President, and you decided to give me a chance.
    So the first thing I want to say to you is it is not an argument 
anymore. Together, we made a good decision, and we've changed America 
for the better. Seven years later, when you go home tomorrow and you go 
back across the country and people ask you why you were there, you can 
say, ``Well, we gave him a chance, and we tried it their way.'' And as 
has already been said, we not only have had the most diverse 
administration with the most diverse appointments, including the 
judicial appointments--more of whom I'm trying to get up for a vote by 
the way--in history, but we have the longest peacetime expansion in 
history, 19.8 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment rate in 30 
years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest crime rates in 
30 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the lowest female 
unemployment rate in 46 years, the first back-to-back budget surpluses 
in 42 years, with the smallest Federal Government in 37 years. It is not 
an argument anymore. It's working. It's the right direction for America.
    So the second thing I want to say to you is, we've got to decide 
now, what are we going to do with this. Because even if I pass 
everything I'm trying to pass, if we get a good minimum wage bill and 
the 100,000 teachers and the 50,000 police and we get the 
antienvironmental riders off the bills and we pass the Caribbean Basin/
Africa trade initiative, we do all the things I mentioned to you, there 
still will be a lot for America to do.
    And of all Americans, Hispanics ought to be able to think about 
this, our country, as we would our family. I remember one of the nicest

[[Page 2036]]

nights we ever shared at the White House, Federico and I, was when we previewed that wonderful movie 
``Mi Familia'' at the White House.
    In my lifetime, which is stretching on and on as the days go by, in 
my lifetime, this is the first chance America has had to have, on the 
one hand, the prosperity and confidence that we have and, on the other, 
to be unburdened by serious, wrenching foreign threats to our security 
or domestic crises. In the 1960's we had, for a brief period more or 
less, the best economy we'd ever had, with low unemployment, low 
inflation. But we had, first, the civil rights crisis to deal with and 
then the war in Vietnam.
    Now what do you do, as a person, as a family, as a business, if 
things are better than they have ever been, but you can look ahead to 
the future and clearly see challenges and opportunities that will not be 
met or seized if you don't do certain things you're not doing now? What 
do you do? That is the great question before our people.
    I can tell you--you know, I don't know about you, but I'll just use 
my own life; from the time I was a little boy, one of the--well, when I 
first ran for office, let me start with that. I asked an old sage in 
Arkansas politics, I said--I was running really well in this race for 
Governor. I said, ``What do you think I ought to really remember?'' He 
said, ``Bill, just remember this: In politics, you're always most 
vulnerable when you think you're invulnerable.''
    How many times can you remember in your own life, when you broke 
your concentration, when you got divided, when you made a stupid mistake 
because you thought things were rocking along so well, nothing bad could 
happen? How many times has that happened to a family or to a business, 
where you just think things are going to roll on forever? It's never 
that way. Human nature is not that way. Human circumstances don't work 
that way. I'm telling you, this is a precious jewel we have been given, 
a gift we have been given as a country, to look ahead and say, ``Okay, 
what are the big challenges? What are the big opportunities?'' You ought 
to make your own lists. And ask yourself, in your lifetime, has there 
ever been an opportunity like this for America?
    What are the challenges? I'll just give you a few. The number of 
people over 65 is going to double in 30 years. There will be two people 
working for every one person drawing Social Security. Medicare is 
supposed to run out of money in 15 years. Seventy-five percent of our 
seniors can't afford prescription drugs but need them to stay alive and 
maintain their quality of life. How are we going to deal with the aging 
of America?
    We have the largest number of children in our schools in history, 
the first time more people than the baby boom, and by far more diverse. 
Loretta was talking about that Republican newsletter from northwest 
Arkansas. That's really true. Northwest Arkansas is one of the fastest 
growing areas of America, has been for 20 years, and one of the most 
racially and religiously homogeneous areas in the country. And all of a 
sudden, boom, they have this big infusion of Hispanics. The Catholic 
Church there now has a Spanish mass every Sunday and has had for the 
last several years. And that's nothing if you're from Orange County, but 
if you're from northwest Arkansas, that's a huge deal. [Laughter]
    We also have a big influx of people in western Arkansas from 
Southeast Asia. But last year, our State ranked first or second--I'm not 
sure which, but I'm sure it's one of the two--in the percentage growth 
of Hispanic population. Joe Andrew didn't 
mention this, I don't think, but in addition to all the mayors we've 
celebrated, we've had a truly historic, breathtaking election in the 
State of Mississippi, where we won the governorship in a State where 
they didn't think a Democrat could be elected for love or money.
    And part of it was the overwhelming African-American turnout. But 
there are also more Hispanics moving to Mississippi. All over the South, 
their voices are being heard. And we only won the election by about 
6,000 votes, so everybody can take credit for the victory. [Laughter]
    So we have to think about this. What are we going to do for all 
these children? They need a world-class education. If we do it right, 
the diversity of America will be a blessing in a global society. What 
are we going to do about the fact that this fabulous recovery has left 
people and places behind? Unemployment on the Pine Ridge Indian 
Reservation is 73 percent. Upstate New York, outside of the suburbs in 
New York City, if it were a separate State, would rank 49th in job 
growth since I've been President. Hawaii, burdened by the collapse of 
the Asian economy, is the only State with no

[[Page 2037]]

economic growth--the inner cities, the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia.
    How are we going to bring prosperity to people and places left 
behind? Do we have the will to guarantee economic growth for a 
generation of Americans by taking America out of debt? I gave a budget 
to the Congress that will get us out of debt over the next 15 years, for 
the first time since 1835. And the progressive party, the Democrats, 
ought to be for that. It sounds like a conservative thing--it is--but 
it's the progressive thing to do in a global economy. Because if the 
government is not borrowing money, you can borrow it for less, and our 
trading partners can get more for less, and then they can be better 
partners with us, and they can lift their people out of poverty.
    How are we going to grow the economy and meet our environmental 
responsibility? We've proved you could do it. Are we going to keep doing 
it? We've got the lowest crime rate in 30 years. Does anybody seriously 
think America is as safe as it ought to be? If you do, let me just give 
you one statistic. The accidental death rate of children from gun shots 
in the United States is 9 times the rate of the next 25 biggest 
industrial economies combined.
    I think we now know we can bring the crime rate down. Why don't we 
set a realistic goal? I mean realistic in terms of our dreams. Why don't 
we say we won't quit until America is the safest big country in the 
world? And if we want that, how are we going to do it?
    Last night, I appeared in the first-ever townhall meeting on the 
Internet, which was interesting for me, since one of the reasons I asked 
the Vice President to join the ticket is 
because I was so technologically challenged. [Laughter] It was quite a 
thrill for me to do that.
    But there is a digital divide, and it can have huge consequences. I 
was in northern California the other night, meeting with people who work 
for eBay. Do you all ever use eBay? Buy anything on eBay? You want to 
hear something interesting? Over 20,000 Americans now make a living on 
eBay, not working for eBay, trading on eBay, many of them former welfare 
recipients. Think of what we could do in America to close the economic 
divide if we could close the digital divide, if usage and access to 
computers and connections to the Internet were as dense as telephone 
ownership and usage. Think of it. Now, these are the kind of things we 
ought to be thinking about.
    What are the security threats of the 21st century? Well, I think one 
of them is we can start running away from each other because we've all 
of a sudden gotten afraid of trade. We need to keep expanding trade but 
work harder to put a human face on it, to take into account legitimate 
environmental issues and labor issues, but not to run away from the fact 
that with 4 percent of the world's people and 22 percent of the world's 
income if we want to continue to grow, we've got to sell something to 
the other 96 percent. And if we want to sell something to them, 
particularly since we're richer, we have to be willing to buy things. 
But this is a good thing.
    What else? The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, 
nuclear, chemical, and biological, and the possibility that they can be 
made in smaller quantities, like everything else is smaller. We've got 
cell phones so small now my big old fingers won't even hit the numbers 
right. The miniaturization of all things technical will apply to 
weapons, as well, make no mistake about it. This is a serious challenge, 
the growth of terrorism around the world, the prospect that the 
terrorists, the drug runners, the organized criminals will all start 
working together, and the rampant threat of racial, ethnic, and 
religious wars--big challenges.
    Which brings me to the last one. And it's what I've spent so much 
time on around the world and what I celebrated today with honoring the 
Little Rock Nine: Can we truly make our motto, E Pluribus Unum, real as 
we grow ever more diverse?
    It requires, I would argue, three things. One is we have to respect, 
not just tolerate--not just tolerate--but respect and celebrate our 
differences. You know, I don't have the same attitude as the people that 
put out that memo Loretta talked about. I think it's a lot more 
interesting in America as we grow more diverse.
    I'll never forget the first Cinco de Mayo celebration I went to in 
San Francisco. I thought, ``Where has this been all my life?'' 
[Laughter] You know? I mean, what have we been doing here?
    You know, I used to--when I was Governor of my home State, I used to 
go to a place called Little Italy to eat spaghetti in a town called 
Slovak, to meet with the farmers that came there in the 1848 revolution. 
And now we're just repeating our history in technicolor, times four. And 
I think it's fascinating.

[[Page 2038]]

    But let's stop all this tolerance stuff. Tolerance is not good 
enough. We need respect and celebration of our differences, number one.
    Number two, we need to recognize that, as we have from the 
beginning, we have genuine differences of opinion, which ought to be 
forthrightly and publicly argued. In that sense, and if that's all we're 
doing, partisanship is not necessarily a bad thing. When people say 
partisanship with a little negative edge, what they really mean is these 
people in Washington are fighting their partisan battles trying to 
increase their power without concern for the public interest. They think 
there's some game going on that's not real. But we will always have 
honest differences.
    I know why I'm a Democrat in the year 1999. And I have friends in 
the Republican Party who know why they're Republicans. And we honestly 
see the world in different ways. We ought to create a safe and 
constructive way for people to feel free to think and argue.
    But the third thing we have to do is to recognize that the 
differences we celebrate and the differences we fight over, neither one 
of them are nearly as important as our common humanity. And that is what 
the world keeps forgetting, at its peril.
    Don't you think it's interesting that, at a time when we talk about 
the Internet--this and finding a cure for cancer, and last year we 
actually were able to transplant nerves into the spine of laboratory 
animals that had had their spines severed, and for the first time ever 
they have movement in their lower limbs. Two years ago we identified the 
two genes that are the biggest predictors of breast cancer for women. 
Within a couple of years, when mothers take their babies home from the 
hospital, we'll be able to give them a genetic map which will say, here 
are the things your child has a greater than normal propensity for, but 
if you do the following things, you can minimize them. A lot of people I 
know, experts in the field, actually believe within a very few years 
babies will be born with a life expectancy of nearly a century--within a 
very few years. Already today, if you live to be 65, your life 
expectancy is over 82 years.
    Isn't it interesting, at this time, with all this marvelous stuff 
happening, not to mention all the techno-joys we can have, that the 
biggest problems we have in the world are rooted in the oldest failing 
of human society? We are afraid of people who are different from us. And 
when you're afraid of somebody who's different from you, it's easy to 
formalize that fear in dislike or hatred, and it's a short step to 
dehumanizing them, after which it's a short step to taking violent 
action against them and to thinking it really doesn't matter.
    I'll never forget being in the airport at Kigali, Rwanda, talking to 
a woman who thought she had been killed, because she was cut up in one 
of the machete rampages in the Rwandan genocide, and she woke up to find 
her husband and her six children all slashed to death around her. She's 
the only surviving one, knowing that they had been betrayed by her 
neighbor, a person they lived with, lived next to her, in total peace 
for years, and boom, like that, they started the fight between the Hutus 
and Tutsis, and people turned on a dime, betrayed their neighbors-for-
life, and let people be slaughtered.
    Now, there are lots of other stories that are heroic on the other 
side. But what happens to people? Why does that happen?
    Why are the Catholics and the Protestants still fighting in Northern 
Ireland when the Irish Republic has got the fastest growing economy in 
Europe, and their common heritage is rich and fascinating and 
interesting, and they could be having arguments in bars or in Parliament 
and making money, instead, and educating their children?
    What is it that's keeping the Israelis and the Palestinians from 
taking these last few steps, the Syrians from joining in? Why are there 
other terrorist and rejectionist groups that are prepared to go out and 
kill innocent civilians to keep the Israelis and the Palestinians and 
the Syrians from making their final peace agreement?
    If you look at America, you look at the success of people from the 
Indian subcontinent in America--from India, from Pakistan, from 
Bangladesh--the phenomenal success, if you look at the fact that India 
will be bigger than China in 20 years, that they both have big 
scientific bases of expertise, why are they fighting over the line of 
control in Kashmir? Why can't they work that out? Why is that such a big 
problem that they keep spending money preparing to go to war with one 
another instead of educating their children and alleviating the abject 
poverty that is holding them down and keeping them from their full 
potential? I mean, I could go on and on and on. But you get the point.

[[Page 2039]]

    Why did I have to go into Europe and bring the power of the American 
military to bear in Bosnia and Kosovo to keep people from slaughtering 
mostly Muslims, although others were involved too. What is the deal 
here? Same reason, in a more--thank God--mundane but still very cruel 
way people were spitting on and kicking and cursing those nine kids when 
they tried to go to Little Rock Central High School 42 years ago.
    One of the great human weaknesses is that when people get organized, 
they think that, in order for their tribe to matter, the other tribe has 
to matter less. In order for their lifestyle to be validated, somebody 
else's has to be invalidated, that every difference of opinion turns out 
to be a difference justifying the dehumanization of your opponent. This 
is a very dangerous thing, made more dangerous, not less, by the 
collision of societies and the close contact and the openness of 
borders.
    So we need you for another reason. We need you in the Democratic 
Party. We need you as Americans. We need you to remind us of what the 
concept of family means to you. What are the obligations of people who 
are in your family? What do we owe to one another? If you're like me, 
once you get about 50, your family members, there are some you don't 
even like very much. But you are bound together. You are bound together.
    I want you to think about that, so when you go out across the 
country, you go back home and people say, ``Why are you here? What are 
you doing? Why are you a Democrat? Why are you helping who you're 
helping in 2000?'' Say, ``Well, number one, I tried him in '92 and it 
worked. We're in a lot better shape than we were then, and we're in a 
lot better shape than we've been in a long time. Number two, I'm doing 
it because I want to take on the big challenges of the future. And I'm 
really determined that we're not going to blow this responsibility to 
our children and grandchildren. And number three, because the Democrats 
represent the best hope for creating a family in America and a family in 
the world that doesn't minimize our differences; it celebrates them. It 
doesn't minimize our arguments; it respects them. But it recognizes that 
underneath it all is our common humanity. And without that, nothing else 
matters much. With it, there's nothing we can't do.''
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:20 p.m. in the Crystal Ballroom at the 
St. Regis Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Miguel Lausell, chair, 
Hispanic Leadership Council; Representative Loretta Sanchez, general 
cochair, Lottie Shackelford, vice chair, and Nelson Diaz, Hispanic 
caucus leader, Democratic National Committee; dinner vice chairs Alfonso 
Fanjul, Roger Rivera, and Leo Perez; Jo Velazquez, president, Strategics 
Group International, LC; Lydia Camarillo, chief executive officer, 
Democratic National Convention Committee; Carlos Murguia, Judge, U.S. 
District Court for the District of Kansas; former Secretary of Housing 
and Urban Development Henry G. Cisneros; and Joanne Eisenhower, wife of 
Gen. John Eisenhower, and their daughter, Susan. The President also 
referred to Public Law 106-92, approved November 9, which renamed the 
Old Executive Office Building to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive 
Office Building.