    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [February 29, 2000]
    [Pages 336-340]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in West Palm Beach,
    Florida
    February 29, 2000

        Thank you very much. First of all, Bren,
    thank you for your wonderful remarks and for opening your home to us
    today, giving those of us who suffered through an unusually long, cold
    Washington winter a chance to gaze out on the Atlantic under different
    circumstances, and for always being there for us.
        I also want to thank you for what you have
    done for the most important U.S. Senate candidate in the country to me.
    Hillary had a wonderful time here,
    and I thank you and the rest of you who helped her. I thank you for
    that.
        I'd like to join with Joe Andrew in
    expressing my appreciation to all the other officers of the Democratic
    Party and the Florida officials that are here. Congressman Peter
    Deutsch and Lori flew
    down with me today. We had a good time, and I was glad to be able to
    ferry them back home, for a few hours anyway.
        I'd like to thank Danny Abraham, Cynthia
    Friedman, the Carters, all the others who have
    done this fine work today, and I'd like to put in a special plug for my
    longtime friend Representative Elaine Bloom,
    who is running for Congress here. She was for me in December of 1991,
    when only my mother thought I could be elected President. [Laughter] And
    I am for her in 2000. I'm going to do what I can to help. But I thank
    you for running for Congress. Thank you.
        Let me just say a few words today about this millennial election and
    about why we're where we are. Eight years ago, when I ran for President,
    I did so because I thought Washington had become a place that was almost
    turned in on itself, obsessed with itself, and stuck in the thinking and
    the debate of a time that was long gone. It was obvious then that we
    were moving into a global economy, into a global society, that the whole
    way we work, the way we earn a living, the way we relate to each other
    and the rest of the world was undergoing a profound change. And yet, in
    Washington, we just kept repeating over and over and over again the same
    debates. Each party took the same sides, staked out the same opposite
    position. Paralysis occurred, and the results were not particularly
    satisfying to the American people.
        And so I decided that I would ask the American people to give me a
    chance to try a different approach: to try to have a politics that would
    unite and not divide; to try to have a budget policy that would restore
    basic arithmetic to the American budget and to stop pretending that we
    could ever get rid of high interest rates and low investment and slow
    growth until we got rid of the Government deficit; to put the American
    people first in profound ways, so that it would no longer be about
    Washington but about how people lived out here.
        And we've been working at it pretty steady now for 7 years and a
    month, and the results have been good. We have the longest expansion in
    history and the lowest unemployment rate and welfare rolls in 30 years,
    the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, lowest crime rates in 25 years.
    Adoptions are up. Ninety percent of our kids are immunized for the first
    time. The college-going rate's increased a lot. We've got 150,000 young
    Americans who are doing community service through the AmeriCorps
    program, 1,000 colleges with their kids out, going into grade schools
    every week to teach people to read. The country is coming together and
    moving forward. And that is the good news.
        But I think the most interesting thing about this election is, in my
    judgment, that the winner will be determined by what the election is
    about--in the President's race, in the Congress races, in the Governors'
    races. And you have to help decide what the election is about. And
    there's more latitude now because things seem to be going well, so we're
    under the illusion that there is more latitude to decide what the
    election is about.

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        I always tell people the Presidential election is the world's
    greatest job interview, except that the job interview, unlike most jobs,
    this job interview has two components. First of all, people have got to
    be able to look at you and size up, ``Can I imagine this person having
    this job?'' And then they have to decide what the job is about. And they
    are two different things. If you don't pass the first test, you don't
    get to take the second one.
        Now, I think all four of the candidates that are left passed the
    first test. The American people can look at them and imagine them being
    President. But the winner will be determined by, what is the job about?
    What is the election about; what is the charter; what do you want; what
    are we to do with this enormous amount of prosperity, this historic
    moment where we can make peace?
        Very often, democracies mishandle good times, because people are
    under the illusion that it's just sort of on automatic and it goes on
    forever. And when I gave the State of the Union Address, I asked the
    American people to work with me this year and the Congress to try to
    overcome the partisan divides and to take a long look ahead at the big
    challenges facing America. I asked them to pay the debt off, get America
    out of debt for the first time since 1835. I asked them to deal with the
    aging of America. We're going to double the number of people over 65 in
    the next 30 years.
        I released a Medicare report today that said the fastest growing
    group of seniors are people over 85. They will spend almost a quarter of
    their lives on Medicare. And since 70 percent of our seniors don't have
    access to affordable quality medicine, I'd like to see them get it under
    the Medicare program. But we also have to change the program so it will
    last longer.
        We have to lengthen the life of Social Security. I persuaded this
    Congress to save the Social Security surplus--that is the surplus that
    we get because you pay more in Social Security taxes than we pay out
    now--but I haven't persuaded them to do anything with it. So the good
    news is we're paying down the debt. But the bad news is we haven't saved
    Social Security yet. Because if they would just take the interest
    savings we get from a lower debt and put it into the Social Security
    Trust Fund, we could run it out to 2050, which would take it beyond the
    life expectancy of all but the most fortunate baby boomers. We have to
    deal with this.
        We've got to face the fact that we have the largest and most diverse
    student population in our history, and we no longer have an excuse for
    not making our schools excellent. We now know how to do it. We were
    talking the other night with the Governors, who just left town, in
    Washington. And there were a couple of people, one in my Cabinet, the
    Secretary of Education, and one retiring
    Governor, the Governor of North Carolina,
    who has the best school improvement record in America, and we were
    laughing about what it was like when we started as young men together 22
    years ago as Governors. Everybody wanted to make the schools better, but
    we didn't really know how. Now we know. We have mountains and mountains
    and mountains of evidence of what works. And the National Government
    should play a role in that. There's nothing more important than giving
    all our kids a good education. Is that going to be a part of this
    election, or not?
        We've got the crime rate down 7 years in a row. It's the lowest it's
    been in 25 years. But nobody seriously believes this country is as safe
    as it ought to be. We can make America the safest big country in the
    world. Columbine happened a year ago, and I'm still waiting for Congress
    to close the gun show loophole, to stop the importation of these large
    capacity ammunition clips, and to require child safety locks on guns.
        Today in Michigan in a school, a 6-year-old boy, with a gun that his
    brother gave him, shot a 6-year-old girl. And
    she died. The child was 6 years old. How did that child get that gun?
    Why could the child fire the gun? If we had the technology today to put
    in these child safety locks, why don't we do it? I don't know what the
    facts were in this case, and I don't want to prejudge it or condemn
    anyone. But I know this: I know that the accidental gun death rate of
    children--the accidental gun death rate of children in America is 9
    times higher than that in the other 25 biggest countries combined--
    combined. So we know what to do. We just don't have any excuses. Is that
    going to be a subject of this election, or not?
        You have to decide that. And the same is true with health care. The
    same is true with the environment and whether we can grow the
    environment and improve the economy. The same is true with our
    obligations around the

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    world. How do we define America's responsibility to fight biological and
    chemical and nuclear warfare, to fight terrorism, to advance the cause
    of peace, to fight against the racial and ethnic and tribal turmoil
    around the world, to advance the cause of peace through expanding trade?
        I strongly believe--and our party's divided about it, I know--but I
    strongly believe we ought to let China in the World Trade Organization.
    Everything I've learned as President and everything I've learned in 53
    years of living is that you get a lot more from people if you give them
    a chance to work with you than you do if you tell them you don't want to
    fool with them any more.
        And we've got a big stake in how China turns out. I don't know how
    they will and neither does anybody else, but I know this: If we put them
    in this trade organization, they'll have to open their markets to us
    just like our markets are open to them. So it's a no-brainer
    economically. But politically, it's important, because they will have an
    incentive to make good choices in the future about their role in the
    world. If we keep them out, they'll still keep selling stuff here,
    they'll relate more closely to others, and they'll have no incentives to
    be responsible partners in the world.
        If we do this, 20 years from now we'll wonder why we ever debated
    it. If we don't do it, 20 years from now we'll be still kicking
    ourselves. That's what I believe. So I'm going to fight for it.
        But these things ought to be the subject of this election, because
    you know the world will grow smaller, not larger. We have the lowest
    unemployment rate in 30 years, much lower than anybody thought we could
    have without exploding inflation. But there are still people and places
    that have been left behind. Should they be the subjects of this
    election?
        There are rural areas, Indian reservations, and inner-city
    neighborhoods where there are still people willing to work; where there
    is no free enterprise, no investment; where we could, by changing our
    tax laws and giving people like you the same incentives to invest in
    poor areas in America you have today to invest in poor areas in Latin
    America, in Africa, in Asia--I'm for that, by the way. I'm trying to get
    America to invest more money overseas, but we ought to have the same
    incentives to invest in poor areas in America.
        Does this matter to you? I think it should. By the way, it's not
    only morally right; it's a good way to keep the economy growing without
    inflation. There are Indian reservations in this country where the
    unemployment rate is still 70 percent. If you cut it to 20 percent, just
    to 20 percent, all those people would become consumers as well as
    workers. It's noninflationary growth.
        I'll just mention one other issue. You have to decide. I have found
    it incredibly ironic that in this most modern of ages, where I meet all
    these young people that have made fortunes in their twenties off dot-com
    companies--you know, I'm too old to make a living in this flourishing
    sector of our economy. And it is growing like crazy, you know. I just
    was at the Business Roundtable, and all these heads of these Fortune 500
    companies were trying to figure out why the Dow was going down while the
    NASDAQ was going up. And we're doing all these incredible things.
        I went in a little African village, and I saw a hookup from an
    American cable company and what they were putting in there so these kids
    could get modern maps to learn geography. I went into a favela in Rio
    with Pele, the great soccer player, and saw what an
    American company was doing there, through technology, to try to get
    these poor children in Rio a chance to have a different life. I have
    seen all these efforts to bridge the digital divide in America, all this
    neat stuff and a lot of more mundane things. I have a cousin in Arkansas
    who plays chess once a week with a guy in Australia. I mean, you know,
    it's the modern world out there.
        I know in a couple of months, I'll have an announcement that will be
    one of the great honors in my life. I'll be part of--we will announce
    that the human genome has been fully sequenced, and we can now set about
    the business of analyzing the very blueprint of life and why we turn out
    the way we do and how we deal with various things. We may be able to
    block broken genes with gene therapies to stop people from ever
    developing diabetes, to stop people from ever developing Alzheimer's, to
    stop people from ever developing breast cancer, all of these things.
    It's just going to be unbelievable.
        Now, don't you think it's interesting, with all this stuff going on,
    that the biggest problem we face as a society is still the oldest one?

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    We're still scared of people who are different from us. And it's easy,
    once you are frightened or uncertain, to turn that into distrust, to
    turn that into dehumanization, to turn that into violence, and then to
    have no conscience about it because they didn't matter anyway.
        I mean, it's interesting--you look around the world, and you see
    tribal wars in Africa where hundreds of thousands of people die in a few
    days. You see continuing religious and ethnic tensions in the Middle
    East, and religious tensions continue in Northern Ireland, where I
    thought we had the door closed, and it got knocked open again. And
    what--this is outrageous--what happened in the Balkans, the problems
    they're having in Russia in Chechnya. You just look around the world, on
    any given continent.
        And in America you say, ``Well, look at us. We're the most
    successful, diverse democracy in history.'' That's true, but we had a
    shooting at a Los Angeles Jewish center, where Jewish kids were shot at
    because they were Jewish. A Filipino postal worker was killed because he
    was both Asian and a Federal employee, and the guy that killed him
    thought that was a double shot. Matthew Shepard was killed because he
    was gay. The guy in the Middle West killed the former African-American
    basketball coach at Northwestern, killed a Korean Christian walking out
    of church, and three or four other people, and he said he belonged to a
    church that didn't believe in God but did believe in white supremacy.
    And I could go on. You know all these issues.
        What I want to say to you is that times are good, but we should be
    humble about this. We should be grateful, and we should be humble,
    because we have, number one, not repealed all the laws of human nature,
    which means there is still the darkness of the heart to deal with, and
    number two, good times are either made the most of or squandered.
        And I just want to leave you with this. A lot of you here are
    younger than me, but a lot of you are about my age, maybe a little
    older. When we celebrated earlier this month the longest economic
    expansion, peace or war, in our history, I was very interested in that,
    because I love economics and I study it every month. I read all the
    numbers and everything and try to keep up with what's going on. So I
    went back and studied the last longest economic expansion in our
    history. Do you know when it was? Nineteen sixty-one to 1969, the years
    of my childhood and youth, when I should have been doing dot-com
    companies. [Laughter]
        But let me tell you about them. In 1964, the height of the
    expansion, I graduated from high school. My President had been killed a
    few months before, and the country was heartbroken. But contrary to a
    lot of the Monday morning quarterbacks that look back, it was not the
    beginning of American cynicism. That's not true. We united behind
    President Johnson. He got off to a great start. He was leading us toward
    passing civil rights legislation, legislation to help the poor. And in
    1964, when I finished high school, there was this enormous sense of
    optimism and confidence in the country that, A, the economic good times
    would go on forever; B, we would resolve in a lawful way, through our
    Congress, our civil rights challenges; and C, we would certainly
    prevail, without controversy in our country, in the cold war against
    communism. Those things would happen. Everybody thought so.
        Two years later, we had riots in our streets. The country was
    already divided over Vietnam. Four years after I graduated from high
    school, I was graduating from college 2 days after Robert Kennedy was
    killed, 2 months after Martin Luther King was killed, 9 weeks after
    Lyndon Johnson said he wouldn't run for election. And the country was
    totally divided. And there were more riots in the streets, and the
    National Capital was the scene of a riot in which block after block
    burned to the ground.
        A few months afterward, we had a Presidential election, the first
    Presidential election in modern times fought on the grounds of ``us''
    versus ``them,'' where President Nixon, a man of immense talent, I might
    add, was elected on a theme of the Silent Majority. Now, some of you
    remember that. Now, if there's a Silent Majority, there must, by
    definition, be a loud minority, right? I was one of them; I know.
    [Laughter] So it was ``us'' and ``them.'' A few months after that, the
    economic expansion was over. And we've been having ``us'' and ``them''
    politics ever since. And for 7 years, I have worked to end that, I think
    with greater success out here in the country than in the Capital, but
    nonetheless, it's been an honor to try.
        I'm telling you this as a citizen now, why I'm glad you're here. You
    have to help us define what this election is about. And that's what
    we're going to use your contribution for. But

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    those of you who are older, like me, you remember what it was like in
    the mid-sixties. As a citizen, I have waited for 35 years for my country
    to be in a position to build the future of our dreams for our children.
    That's what this is about. It's not just about choosing a person. We
    have to define the job and the direction. Then the choice will take care
    of itself. You know what I think. But just remember how quickly these
    things can get away and what a heavy responsibility we have to make the
    most of a truly magic moment.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:10 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to Bren Simon, Danny Abraham, Cynthia Friedman, and
    John and Nancy Carter, luncheon cohosts; Joseph J. Andrew, national
    chair, Democratic National Committee; Lori Deutsch, wife of
    Representative Peter Deutsch; Gov. James B. Hunt, Jr., of North
    Carolina; 6-year-old Kayla Rolland, who died after she was shot by 6-
    year-old classmate Dedrick Owens at Theo J. Buell Elementary School in
    Mount Morris Township, MI; and former professional soccer player Pele,
    Minister of Extraordinary Sports of Brazil.