[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
[December 11, 1999]
[Pages 2280-2283]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Reception for Representative Alcee L. Hastings in Fort Lauderdale, Florida
December 11, 1999

    The President. Thank you very much. Whoa! You will have to forgive 
me; you can hear that I have a cold, and so I can't talk very loud. So 
if you talk, I can't talk. If you like my speech very much, I can't 
talk, because I can't get over all the cheers. But let me say to all of 
you, first of all, I want to thank the Keiser family and the leadership 
of this college for welcoming us here. I want to thank the president of 
the student body, Dean Samuels, who met me and 
gave me a gift from the students.
    I believe in the audience we have, in addition to Representative 
Hastings, another candidate for Congress on our ticket in an adjacent 
district, State Representative Elaine Bloom. I 
think she's here, and there she is. I want you guys to help her.
    Let me say to all of you, I have had a wonderful day in Florida. I 
don't think I ever had a bad day in Florida. This is the first time I've 
ever been in Florida in my life that I've been sick, and I had a good 
day in spite of it, because, this morning, I went up to Orlando to the 
Democratic State Convention. Now, I attended the Democratic State 
Convention in Florida in 1981 and in 1983 and in 1987, when I was just a 
Governor and a friend of your Governor's, and they were good enough to 
invite me. And I always had a big time, and Hillary had two brothers living down here then, and I was 
always looking for a reason to come and always learning about what was 
going on in Florida, and thinking, this is the beginning of what will 
happen in America.
    So, anyway, 8 years ago this week--8 years ago--in December of 1991 
Hillary and I came down to the Florida Democratic Convention, which was 
holding the first election of the primary season, a straw poll. I was 
running fifth--fifth--in the country in the primaries at the time, but I 
got over 50 percent in the Florida Democratic straw poll. And it's been 
all uphill ever since, thanks to all of you, and I'm very grateful.
    Now, I'm glad to be here tonight with Alcee Hastings, and I'll tell 
you why and ask you to help Elaine Bloom. 
Because I know the President sometimes gets the blame when things go 
wrong, but the President also gets the credit when things go right. And 
you heard Alcee talking about all those good things. I want to run over 
them again in a minute for you, but the good things that have happened 
here to the American people would not have happened had I not had the 
support of the Democrats in Congress, particularly those that were 
really strong-willed and outspoken, that had influenced the others, and 
Alcee Hastings is such a leader in the United States Congress.
    And I want you to know that his influence extends beyond the Florida 
delegation, beyond the Congressional Black Caucus, because he is an 
intelligent man; because he cares about the rest of the world; because 
he believes that you can care about the education of our children and 
saving Medicare and Social Security for our seniors and protecting the 
Florida environment, and still care about decency and humanity all 
around the world and the end of not only racism at home but racial and 
ethnic and religious hatred all around the world. He is one of the most 
exceptional people in the House of Representatives, and I want you to 
help him.

[[Page 2281]]

    Now, I'm going to give a short speech so I don't lose my voice, but 
you're more likely to remember it. I've got 14 months left, and then 
you're going to have an election to chart America's course in a new 
millennium. Here's what I want to say to you about it.
    We just passed the first budget of the 21st century. We got 100,000 
teachers for smaller classes in the early grades. We got 50,000 more 
police to keep the crime rate coming down. We got 60,000 more housing 
vouchers to help poor people move from welfare to work. We've doubled 
the number of after-school programs to help kids stay in school and 
learning and out of trouble. We gave States for the first time help to 
help turn around or shut down schools that are failing our children, 
because all our schools can do better. We moved forward on the 
environment. We paid our dues to the U.N. We gave debt relief to the 
very poorest countries in the world. We are moving forward.
    Then, there's a lot of stuff we didn't do that I want to next year: 
the Patients' Bill of Rights, the minimum wage increase, the hate crimes 
legislation.
    We had a great year in foreign policy. You know, I'm Irish. We saw 
the completion of the Irish peace process this year, and I'm very happy 
about that. And just last week, I announced that--earlier this week, a 
couple of days ago--that next week Israel and Syria will resume their 
peace negotiations in Washington, DC, in a couple of days.
    So we're going to keep working to the last hour of the last day. But 
I want you to step back a minute, because what happens in these 
congressional elections, whether Bill Nelson gets elected United States 
Senator from Florida, whether Elaine Bloom gets 
elected United States Representative from Florida, whether we hold the 
White House--and I believe we will--but it all depends on--I wish I 
could be more whoop-dee-doo. I'm doing the best I can. It all depends on 
what the voters think the election is about.
    Now, I want you to remember this. We put in our economic program in 
1993, and the Vice President broke the tie 
in the Congress, and the Republicans said it would be a disaster. Now, 
we have 20 million jobs, the longest peacetime expansion in history, the 
lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 32 
years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the lowest African-American 
and Hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded, the lowest female 
unemployment rate in 40 years. Now, that's the first thing.
    The second thing I want to say is, we have the lowest crime rate in 
25 years; 90 percent of our kids immunized against serious childhood 
diseases for the first time in history; over 2 million more kids covered 
under the Children's Health Insurance Program. We've cleaned up 3 times 
as many toxic waste dumps as the predecessor administrations, both of 
them. And we now have the lowest output of waste that is terribly 
damaging to the environment that we've had in 20 years. Twenty years ago 
we had 50 million fewer people.
    We've had 150,000 young people serve this country in AmeriCorps, 7 
million young people take advantage of the HOPE scholarship to go on to 
community college and to other college education. We've had 10 million 
people get the benefit of the minimum wage, and over 20 million get the 
benefit of the family and medical leave law. This is a better, stronger, 
more together country than it was 7 years ago.
    But what I want to say--I'll stay the course. I want you to stay the 
course. And then what I want you to do--wait, wait--what I want you to 
do is go out here and find your fellow Floridians who may not be 
Democrats, who may not be voters, and not only do I want you to stay the 
course; I want you to teach the course.
    You know, we had an idea that we ought to have a country with 
opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and a community of all 
Americans. And almost everything that we fought for we were opposed by 
the leaders of the other party. And I've been willing to work with them. 
And when we've worked with them, I've always given them credit for what 
they've done. But I think we have proved that we're a stronger country 
when we go forward together across racial lines.
    So what are they trying to give you in Florida? Mr. 
Connerly wants to come here and try to abolish 
affirmative action when we've proved that going forward with affirmative 
action in the right way strengthens the economy and the society and 
makes us all better off. So I want you to think about that.
    So the first thing I want you to tell folks is it's not like we 
don't have evidence here. It's not like there's no evidence about which 
approach works. I'll never forget how the NRA went after Congressmen in 
States like Florida

[[Page 2282]]

after we passed the Brady bill and I signed it, because my predecessor 
vetoed it. And they told the awfulest stories about how people are going 
to lose their guns. Well, 470,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers did 
lose their handguns, but not a single Florida hunter missed a day of 
hunting season because of it. They did not tell the truth about that. 
This is a safer country because of it.
    Okay, so here's the issue. What's the election about? What's the 
election about? In my lifetime--in my lifetime--there has never been 
this much economic prosperity, social progress, national self-
confidence, with the absence of a domestic crisis or a foreign threat. 
It has never happened. So what's the election about? It's about what 
we're going to do with that.
    What do we propose to do with our prosperity? The Republicans gave 
us their answer in the last session of Congress when they passed a tax 
cut so large it would have prohibited us from saving Social Security and 
Medicare and prohibited us from ever paying down the national debt.
    But when I vetoed it, the American people supported me, and Alcee 
supported me, and the Democrats in Congress supported me because they 
said, ``No, no, no, that's not what we're going to do with our 
prosperity. What we're going to do with our prosperity is ask ourselves 
an honest question: What do we want America to look like in 10, 20, and 
30 years? How are we going to build the America of our dreams for our 
children? What are the big challenges out there?'' And let me just tell 
you what I think they are.
    Number one, you've got to deal with the aging of America. You've got 
to save Social Security and Medicare for the baby boom generation, add a 
prescription drug benefit, let people over 55 buy into Medicare if they 
don't have health insurance. We've got to do this. We have got to do 
this. I'm telling you, every baby boomer I know is plagued by the 
thought that our retirement will burden our children and their ability 
to raise our grandchildren. Now, we've got the money now, folks, to take 
the Social Security Trust Fund out beyond the life of the baby boom 
generation, and we ought to do it.
    Look at these young people. Look at the young people that are here, 
18 to 23 or 24, the young people in that age group. Do you really think 
when they get old enough to have their children and they start raising 
families that they should be burdened in what they can do for their 
children because they're having to take care of us, their parents, when 
there is no earthly excuse for it?
    All we have to do is take the savings that we get from paying down 
the debt with the Social Security surplus and put those interest savings 
into the Trust Fund, and it will take it out beyond the life of the baby 
boom generation--no controversy, no heat, no nothing. We ought to do it, 
and we ought to do it next year.
    The second thing we ought to do is to deal with the children of 
America. Ironically, we're growing at both ends, in our elderly and in 
our children. We've got the largest number of school children in our 
schools in our history. They are the most racially, ethnically, and 
religiously diverse school children in our history, and every one of 
them deserves a world-class education, and we ought to give it to them.
    The third thing we ought to do is take a different approach to 
crime. Now, you all clapped when I said we had the lowest crime rate in 
25 years; we've got the lowest murder rate in 31 years. Does anyone here 
think the crime rate is low enough?
    Audience members. No!
    The President. No. Now, when I became President, nobody thought we 
could get the crime rate down. They thought the crime rate went in one 
direction only--up. Okay, now we know it goes down. I propose that in 
the year 2000 we have a decent goal. We say we're going to keep working 
till America is the safest big country in the world.
    I believe there are lots of other things I could say--and I'm trying 
to save the Everglades, you know--and I just want to say this one thing 
about the environment. The young people here, if they're going to have 
the kind of America they deserve, are going to have to accept the fact 
that you can improve the environment and grow the economy at the same 
time. And as soon as we--look, since I became President, the air's 
cleaner; the water's cleaner. We've set aside more land than any 
administration except those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. We've 
cleaned up all these dumps. Let me tell you something. We better start 
thinking that we should be improving the environment as we grow the 
economy, not destroying the environment as we grow the economy.

[[Page 2283]]

    But the last thing I want to say is this. I'll just give you one 
other. You ought to go home tonight and ask yourself what you think the 
big challenges are. Go home and make your own list. But I'll tell you, 
if somebody said to me tonight, ``Well, Mr. President, you don't have 14 
more months; you've got to leave tomorrow. But I'm the genie, and I'll 
give you one wish. You can do anything for America you want, but only 
one.'' What I would choose is for us to be one America, across all the 
lines that divide us, for two reasons. First of all, we'll never be what 
we ought to be as long as we still have hate crimes where some guy in 
the Midwest that belongs to a church he says doesn't believe in God but 
believes in white supremacy, goes out and kills in rapid succession an 
African-American former college basketball coach, and then kills a 
Korean Christian walking out of his church; an angry guy out in Los 
Angeles shoots a bunch of Jewish kids going to a church school, a 
synagogue school, and then goes out and murders a Filipino postman, and 
the guy thought he had a two-fer: he had an Asian and somebody who 
worked for the Federal Government; James Byrd gets dragged to death in 
Texas; Matthew Shepard gets put on a rack.
    Yesterday, all over America, there were gripping pictures of these 
two young soldiers, one 21, one 18. The 21-year-old, a gay soldier who 
the 18-year-old beat to death with a baseball bat. And I thought to 
myself, looking at these two young boys--keep in mind, I look at them in 
a certain way not only because they're young enough to be my own sons, 
but because I have a lot of your sons under my command. Those young men, 
when they put on that uniform--both of them--when they put on that 
uniform, they basically took an oath that says, ``If Bill Clinton tells 
me to, I will go halfway around the world to fight and die.'' That's 
what it means. Let's not kid. That's what it means.
    So here are these two kids. They make the same pledge. They've got 
their whole lives before them. One of them is dead, and the other one's 
life is ruined. And frankly, I ached for both of them. And the young boy 
that murdered the other one because he was gay, he wasn't born feeling 
that way; somebody taught him to do that. So that's the last thing I 
want to tell you.
    You guys are smart. That's why I always say what government ought to 
do is create the conditions: get rid of the debt; give people the same 
incentives to invest in poor areas we give them to invest in poor areas 
in Latin America and Asia and Africa; give people empowerment, and they 
will do the job. But, first and foremost, we must be one America.
    That is also the way we can have the biggest influence in resolving 
the crisis in the Middle East, in Kosovo, in Bosnia, the tribal warfare 
in Africa, you name it. This old world is still burdened down with 
people that can't get along without hating somebody who is different 
from them. And we all know better. We all know better.
    So I tell you, if you go out there and you make the subject of the 
election the record of the last 7 years and what are we going to do with 
our prosperity--and the answer is, we're going to deal with the aging of 
America, the children of America, make America the safest big country in 
the world, put America out of debt for the first time since 1835, bring 
genuine economic opportunity to the poorest people in the country, and 
be one America--we will come home next time, too.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 6:50 p.m. in the auditorium at Keiser 
College. In his remarks, he referred to Ward Connerly, chairman, 
California civil rights initiative.