    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [June 10, 2000]
    [Pages 1125-1128]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a New Leadership Network Reception in Minneapolis
    June 10, 2000

        Thank you. Wow! [Laughter] I started off today at 5 o'clock this
    morning in Washington--that's 4 o'clock your time--and I came out to
    Carleton to give the commencement address. And I came here, and I went
    to another event. It's just getting rowdier as I go on. You guys are
    doing great.
        I would like to thank my friend and partner Mayor Rendell from Philadelphia, the chairman of our party, for
    coming out here with us. And I want to thank
    Mike; you and Mary and all the people have done
    a great job with this party--all the sponsors. This is just fabulous.
    And I'm delighted to be here.
        And I want to thank the Fine Line Music Cafe folks and all the
    people who provided the music. And I want to thank Senator Paul
    Wellstone and Sheila and their kids and grandkids--the whole Wellstone
    family is here today; and Representative Martin Sabo, whose daughter is also a candidate
    here today. Your State auditor, Judi Dutcher, I
    want to thank her for being here.
        Look, this is a good way to spend Saturday afternoon. [Laughter] And
    I realize I, in a way, don't need to give a speech because I'm sort of
    preaching to the saved here. [Laughter] But I would like to say a couple
    of things anyway, if it's all the same to you. I mean, since I'm the
    only one in my administration or in my house who is not running for
    anything this year--[laughter]--I'm afraid I'll get out of practice if I
    don't get to kind of work out a little. So you all just relax; I want to
    give you a little bit.
        First of all, I want to thank the State of Minnesota for voting for
    Bill Clinton and Al Gore twice and giving--[applause]. Secondly, I want
    to thank you for fielding competitive candidates for the House and the
    Senate to help us win back the majority in the United States Congress
    which we--we could do.

    [[Page 1126]]

        You know, I think Minnesota is a place where people know ideas
    matter. I was here on my education tour not very long ago, and I went to
    St. Paul to the first charter school in the history of the country. And
    you know, since then, since we got in, there was one when I became
    President, and there are now over 1,700 because we have worked so hard
    to get the point out across the country and get the word out that our
    public schools can succeed and they can educate our kids. Even the kids
    from the most difficult circumstances can learn if we had the right kind
    of educational opportunities for them. And that to me sort of symbolizes
    what Minnesota is all about, high ideals--high ideals, high standards,
    practical approaches to problems involving everybody.
        And I just want to say to all of you that I think the election we're
    about to have is every bit as important as the two we just had. Now, in
    1992 the country was in trouble, and everybody knew it. The economy was
    in bad shape. The society was growing more divided. The political
    rhetoric in Washington was paralyzed and seemed irrelevant to the way
    most of us live.
        And we've tried to turn that around. We've tried to create a society
    in which there was opportunity for every responsible person and in which
    we were coming together in a more closely knit community, in which we
    were looking outward to the rest of the world and trying to be a force
    for peace and freedom and prosperity and decency. And we tried to
    avoid--[applause]--thank you. What I wanted to say is--and there's been
    a lot of success. We've got the strongest economy in history, and we've
    got a society that's coming together. Crime rate's down; poverty is
    down; the welfare rolls have been cut in half. We have the highest rate
    of minority business ownership in history and the lowest minority
    unemployment in history in America. We have a lot of things that are
    moving in the right direction.
        So, you say, ``Well, how can the 2000 elections possibly be as
    important as the '92 election was when we were in the tank, or the '96
    election was when people were trying to decide whether to ratify the
    direction we were taking?'' I'll tell you why: because once in a
    lifetime do you find a situation like this in America where the economy
    is strong, where the society is coming together, where we've got a lot
    of self-confidence. We're not paralyzed by a crisis at home. We don't
    feel immediately threatened by a crisis overseas, even though there are
    dangers out there. This has never happened before in my lifetime, and
    I'm older than nearly everybody in this room. [Laughter]
        Now, and I can tell you this--how a country deals with its good
    moments is just as stern a test of its character as how it deals with
    its crises. So what do you think we ought to do?
        I'll tell you what I think we ought to do. I think we ought to bring
    jobs to all the people and places that have been left behind. I think we
    ought to get rid of child poverty. I think we ought to give every
    working family the time and the tools they need to take care of their
    kids, as well as work.
        I think we ought to deal with the fact that when the baby boomers
    retire, it's going to impose new burdens on our society. We ought to
    figure out how to save Social Security and Medicare, provide
    prescription drug benefits to seniors that need it. I think this.
        I think we ought to prove that we can have excellence in every
    school building in America. I think we ought to open the doors of
    college to every American. That's what I talked about at Carleton today.
    I think we ought to roll back the tide of climate change and prove we
    can create jobs and clean up the environment at the same time.
        I think we ought to prove we can create a global economy where
    there's more trade and there's higher labor standards and environmental
    standards and we put a more human face on it. I think we ought to keep
    working to get rid of all the hatred that still exists in this country,
    based on race or sexual orientation or religion or ethnic background.
        And I think we ought to maintain our involvement with the rest of
    the world for peace and freedom. This is the one-year anniversary,
    today, of our formal victory in the conflict in Kosovo, where we stood
    up against ethnic and religious cleansing and let a million people go
    home.
        But this is way more than military; it's mostly not military. I was
    ridiculed the other day by one of the leaders of the other party because
    we said that AIDS was an international security crisis for the United
    States. Seventy percent of those cases are in sub-Saharan Africa.
        Now, you tell me--we've got a lot of allies there for freedom and
    democracy, and you have people actually hiring two people for every job
    opening because they assume one of them will die in a few months. We
    have armies where

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    the infection rate is 30 to 40 percent, where a country can collapse on
    us, people that we believe in, that we're trying to help. So I'm proud
    of the fact that I think we ought to be investing some of your money to
    find vaccines for AIDS, for TB, for malaria, for people overseas that
    need these things. I think that's right.
        So here's the deal. I'm not running, but I know a little something
    about this election. [Laughter] It's just as important as the other two
    were. If somebody asks you why you're here and why you're doing this,
    you tell them that. It's a big election. It's a big test of a country,
    how you deal with all these good times. And we've finally got the
    chance, a chance that we have not had maybe in my lifetime, to deal with
    the big problems out there facing America, to deal with the big
    opportunities out there. And there's a huge difference between what our
    party believes and what our nominee for
    President believes, and what they believe.
        You know, whether it is a big issue like maintaining our present
    economic policy or going for a tax cut so big that we'll go back to
    deficits, or a more discrete issue like raising the minimum wage by a
    dollar over the next few years or not doing it, there's a huge
    difference. And I'm telling you, everything from the appointment of
    Justices to the Supreme Court to our economic and environmental and
    health care and educational policies, there is a profound difference.
        And it's not like it was in 1992. In 1992, we made an argument, and
    you gave us a chance. Now, you've got running for President in the
    Democratic Party the most experienced, effective Vice President in history, who cast the tie-breaking vote on the
    economic plan in '93 that got us to where we are today; who cast the
    tie-breaking vote the other day to close the gun show loophole and
    require child trigger locks; who has run our empowerment program which
    has brought thousands of jobs to some of the poorest communities in
    America; who has managed a big part of our relations with Russia, with
    South Africa, with Egypt, with other countries; who ran our reinventing
    Government program and helped to reduce the size of Government, without
    putting anybody in the streets, to its smallest size in 40 years so we
    could double education funding while we were cutting the deficit.
        Now, there has never been anybody that had that kind of impact in
    that job, who understands the future better. Along the way, he continued with his wife
    to hold every single year a family conference in Nashville, Tennessee,
    that dealt with things like family leave, health care for poor children,
    mental health parity in health insurance policies. The kinds of things
    that families come to grips with all the time, Al and Tipper Gore have
    been working on for 8 years on their own, in a way that has changed the
    future of America and what we've been able to do.
        Now, here's the thing about elections. Somebody besides those of us
    in this room today get to vote. [Laughter] And most people who get to
    vote don't ever come to an event like this. And most people who get to
    vote may never hear me make this case for Vice President Gore or for our candidates for the Senate and the
    House or for the fact that we have honest differences.
        Then you get these elections where everybody is trying to convince
    you that anybody that's not in their party, there's something wrong with
    them; there's something bad. That's not true. We just have honest
    differences. Most people do what they say they're going to do when they
    get elected. And I'm just telling you, there are huge differences in
    economics, in health care policy, in environmental policy, in the
    constitution of the courts. I could go through every issue.
        And it's not like '92, when we had an argument. You have evidence.
    We have tested what we believe against what they believe, in ways large
    and small. None of them support our economic policy. They said it was
    going to drive the country in a ditch. We now know it drove the country
    to 22 million jobs and the longest economic expansion.
        Most of them were against our crime policy, the Brady bill and
    putting 100,000 police on the streets. They said it wouldn't do any
    good. They said that all the criminals bought guns at gun shows. Now
    that we're trying to do a background check at gun shows, they say they
    don't buy them there. But back then they said they did. [Laughter] So we
    tested it, and 500,000 guns later, not in the hands of felons,
    fugitives, and stalkers; 100,000 more police on the street; more after-
    school programs for our kids--we've got the lowest crime rate in over 30
    years. This is the right thing to do.
        So go out there and tell people you're supporting the Vice
    President and the Democratic

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    Party, number one, because they believe in opportunity for everybody and
    a community of all Americans, they've got good ideas, and they work;
    number two, because he had a pivotal role in it; and number three,
    because looking to the future, you agree with us. Whether it's the
    Patients' Bill of Rights or getting working families access to health
    care or raising the minimum wage or reversing global warming or just
    continuing to grow the economy in a responsible way and reaching out to
    all kinds of Americans to make them part of our family, you agree with
    us.
        And you tell those people that haven't made up their mind, ``Look,
    there is not an argument now. You've got 8 years of evidence. Go with
    the evidence. Go with the future. Stick with us, and America will be in
    a good place.''
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 3:44 p.m. at the Fine Line Music Cafe. In
    his remarks, he referred to Edward G. Rendell, general chair, Democratic
    National Committee; Mike Erlandson, chair, and Mary McEvoy, associate
    chair, Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party; Senator Wellstone's
    wife, Sheila; and Julie Sabo, candidate for Minnesota State Senate.