    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [April 15, 2000]
    [Pages 725-728]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Beverly Hills,
    California
    April 15, 2000

        The President.  Thank you very much. Well, first of all, let me say
    that this is an easier speech for me to give than the one the Vice
    President just gave, because I'm not
    running for anything. [Laughter] So I was thinking, well, what should I
    say? And I asked Al, I said, ``Is there anything special you want me to
    say?'' He said, ``Nothing special; just get up there and say,
    `Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Gore.' '' [Laughter]
        I actually--and I will proceed to tell you why I actually think
    that's not an unrealistic litany there. Let me also say that the----
        The Vice President.  Note the amendment
    that I came back to you.
        The President.  He said, ``Oh yeah, put Clinton in there
    somewhere.'' [Laughter] Actually, you know, I've gotten so gray, I tried
    to get Jay Leno to come in and give the speech
    tonight, but he turned me down. [Laughter]
        I wanted to say to you that--I really, our friends over here in the
    media, they do a good job of covering this Presidential campaign. But
    they are obsessively interested to find even the slightest difference of
    opinion between the Vice President and me.
    And I discovered another one just tonight, when he was up here bragging
    on ``American Beauty.'' Now, I loved ``American Beauty.'' I love Kevin
    Spacey. I actually liked ``Howard the Duck.''
    [Laughter] And I just, you know, in the spirit of full disclosure, I
    thought I ought to make it. [Laughter]
        I want to thank David and Steven and Jeffrey and
    Marilyn, Andy, and
    all the DreamWorks folks and all of you who are here tonight. I talked
    to Hillary right before I came in
    here, and she said to tell you all hello. And many of you have helped
    her, and I thank you, those of you who have done that, for doing so.
        I want to thank you for helping me and Al and Tipper before, and in
    this election. And I want to be brief, because I know you want to hear
    Sarah sing, and I do, too. But there are a
    couple of things that I can say that I think are meaningful.
        It seems impossible to me that it's just 2 weeks away from--or 6
    weeks away, excuse me--from 8 years ago, from June 2d, 1992, when I won
    the primary in California and knew I would be the Democratic nominee.
    And then it's 12 weeks away from the time when Al and Tipper and Hillary
    and I were in New York, 8 years ago, and we started this long odyssey
    together, got on a bus and started one of our bus tours.
        Today I got up at 5:15 and went into the Sequoia National Forest to
    make the Grand Sequoia National Monument, to protect the remaining 34
    groves of sequoia trees for all time to come. Now, that sort of thing I
    got to do today because Al's running, and I
    have more time to do those things. [Laughter] But it's the sort of thing
    we have done. We have now set aside more land under national monuments,
    the Clinton/Gore administration has, than anyone. I just loved it. So I
    want to say, first of all, thank you for giving us the opportunity to
    serve, to make a difference. Because if it hadn't been for our friends
    in California, and particularly for a lot of people in this room, I am
    not sure we could have done it.
        I thank you for the support you are giving to the Vice
    President and Tipper tonight and for our party. I'm very grateful for all
    the leaders, present and past, of the national Democratic Party who are
    here. And I just want you to think about three or four things real
    briefly.
        First of all, when Al and Tipper and Hillary and I moved to
    Washington to the White House, to the Vice President's residence, we
    really did have a different idea about the way the country ought to
    work. We had a vision

    [[Page 726]]

    of an America in which every responsible citizen had opportunity without
    regard to their income or background, in which every law-abiding citizen
    was part of one American community in a 21st century world growing
    closer together, not further apart, where America was the central force
    for peace and freedom and prosperity. That's what we believed we had to
    do.
        And to get there, we thought we needed a unifying and forward-
    looking set of initiatives. Now, Al talked about that. The record speaks
    for itself. What I want to say to you is--notwithstanding the fact that
    I'm not running and, therefore, more prone to look backward than
    forward--that is, after all, what you hired us to do. When you hire a
    President and a Vice President, you hire them to win for America.
        And America is always about tomorrow. And I want you to know that
    even though I am not on the ballot, in many ways the election of 2000 is
    more important than the elections of 1992 and 1996. Why do I say that?
    Because we have worked so hard to turn this country around and get it
    going in the right direction. And we are now at a point where as a
    people we could literally make the future of our dreams for our
    children--the stuff that the Vice President was talking about.
        We could finally prove forever we could grow the economy and make
    the environment better. We could have universal preschool, universal
    access to college, and 21st century schools in between. We could really
    help people to balance work and family in ways that are not possible
    today. We could do more than we could possibly imagine today to make
    globalization and high technology work for ordinary people, not just the
    people that are paying to be here tonight but the people that served our
    meal as well.
        And it all turns on this election. And the truth is, this election
    ought not to be close. And the only reason it is, is that elections are
    about more than records, qualifications, and issues, and because people
    sometimes lose their concentration when times are good.
        I like the way things are going in this country now, but I'm telling
    you, things could be a lot better. Things could be a lot better, but
    only if we build on the platform that we're standing on right now.
    That's the first thing I ought to say. In the 2000 election, if you like
    the fact that the country's been turned around, you have to believe that
    the 2000 election is just as important, if not more important, than the
    two that preceded it.
        The second thing I want to say is--the Vice President can't say all the things he ought to say about himself.
    But in the entire history of the United States, no one who has ever
    served in that position has had remotely as much positive impact on
    America, as Vice President, as Al Gore has. Not even close.
        And I was thinking about--he talked about all the hard decisions. I
    can still remember every conversation we ever had at our weekly lunch
    where he would say, ``You know, I don't know how you're going to make
    these decisions, but I'm quite sure that decisionmaking involves some
    sort of mental and emotional muscle. It's just like working out. And the
    more hard decisions you make, the easier they'll get. So you've just got
    to jump off the board, decide what's right, and do it.''
        And when we made the decision to take on the budget deficit and we
    knew we could risk political destruction for it--because everybody in
    the other party opposed us--he was right
    there early. We made the decision to take on the gun lobby in a
    systematic way for the first time in history, to take on the tobacco
    lobby, to take on the unpopular issues of Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. He
    was there, always there, always early.
        Yesterday the Russian Duma ratified START II, the nuclear arms
    reduction treaty, which will now enable us both to dramatically reduce
    our nuclear arsenals, in no small measure because he has managed a major
    part of our relations with Russia for 8 years now. And we just recently
    saw the announcement coming out of Detroit that we're going to have cars
    before you know it making 70 or 80 miles a gallon, running on dual-fuel
    cells. He has managed our partnership for
    new generation vehicles for almost 7 years now.
        We have the smallest Federal Government in 40 years because he ran our reinventing Government program. I'm going
    to have this conference on the digital divide, starting in East Palo
    Alto, Monday. When we became President and Vice President, only about 3
    percent of our classrooms were connected to the Internet. Today, over
    two-thirds are, thanks to the fact that he has led our effort to connect
    the schools and to give rates that the schools could afford, even the
    poorer schools.

    [[Page 727]]

        So we are friends, and I am biased. But what I just gave you are not
    my opinions but facts. So, number one, it's an important election.
    Number two, I'm worried because people sometimes lose their
    concentration when times are good. Number three, he is the most qualified person in my lifetime to seek this
    job, I believe.
        And the final thing I want to tell you is this: There are big
    differences. You know what they are. But if someone were to ask me to go
    back over the last 8 years and to look ahead to the next 8 years and
    say, ``Well, what is the most important thing of all?'' I would say, the
    most important thing of all is for us to keep striving to be one
    America. That's why I have worked so hard to try to help end the racial
    and religious and ethnic and tribal wars of the world, that the United
    States has tried to be a force for peace all over the world. That is why
    we have worked so hard for the hate crimes bill, the ``Employment Non-
    Discrimination Act,'' an end to racism, equal pay for women, all those
    things--because the American people are really smart. And if they can be
    free of the demons that bedevil people all over the world, we are going
    to do just fine.
        I was in Atlanta the other night to celebrate John Lewis--
    Congressman John Lewis' 60th birthday. We were
    reliving the 35th anniversary of the march at Selma. And I was talking
    about John and how the most important thing that he did was not just to
    win the passage of the civil rights laws but to lead a movement to
    forgive everybody that had oppressed him, and in so doing, to liberate
    us.
        You know, we are all--all of us are guilty from time to time of
    defining our importance in life with some negative reference to somebody
    else--``I had a bad day, but at least I'm not them. On my worst day, I
    would never do that and be like them.'' Not a person hasn't done that.
    But at least we've never made a political program of it in our party,
    and I'm proud of that. And I'm proud of being a Democrat.
        So you've got the best qualified person. You heard him go through the issues, and you agree with him on the
    issues. We've got great people running for the House and Senate, one of
    whom I have a particular interest in.
    [Laughter] But you have to believe in the larger issue. You've got the
    chance to build the future of your dreams for your children and your
    grandchildren, because of the conditions that exist in this country
    today. Therefore, this election is as important, maybe more important
    than the two that came before it.
        And I'll leave you with this story. Al talked about it a little in
    his remarks. When we celebrated, in February, the longest economic
    expansion in American history, we got the economic team in. Everybody is
    patting themselves on the back, you know, and we were all feeling like
    we were smarter than we probably are. And I said, ``Well, when was the
    last longest economic expansion in history?'' You know when it was?
    Nineteen sixty-one to 1969, when we were young people.
        I graduated from high school in 1964. President Kennedy had been
    killed. The country united behind Lyndon Johnson. Inflation was low;
    unemployment was low; growth was high; productivity was booming.
    Optimism was rampant. Lyndon Johnson was clearly going to be reelected.
    And even though there was a serious civil rights challenge, we--
    basically, most people I knew felt it would be solved in the Congress
    and the courts with peaceful demonstrations. Even though we were sort of
    involved in Vietnam, no one I knew at that time thought it would tear
    the country to shreds. And everybody was just pretty casual about where
    we were, and we just took our prosperity for granted, and we thought we
    could get rid of poverty and everything else without a great deal of
    effort and concentration.
        Four years later I graduated from college in Washington, DC, 2 days
    after Robert Kennedy was murdered, 2 months after Martin Luther King was
    murdered, 9 weeks after Lyndon Johnson said he couldn't run for
    President again because the country was ripped right down the middle
    over Vietnam. We had riots in the streets, and within just a few months
    after the 1968 election, the longest economic expansion in history was
    history.
        I say that not to be a downer, because I am probably the most
    optimistic person, congenitally, maybe even naively, and more optimistic
    than I was the day I became President. But I say that to remind you. We
    dare not break our concentration or relax our commitment just because
    times are good.
        And forget about being President, I say this to you as a citizen: I
    have waited for 35 years for my country once again to be in the position
    it was in when I was young, to build the future of our dreams for our
    children.

    [[Page 728]]

        That's what this election is about. That's why he should be President. You will never get a chance in your
    lifetime to vote for someone as well-qualified again. I certainly wasn't
    when I ran. You will never get a chance in your lifetime to ratify a
    direction and to accelerate the pace of change that is clearly working.
        If you really think about it, you are not ever going to have any
    clearer choices. But when you think it doesn't matter, when you get
    tired, when you wish somebody wouldn't call you again between now and
    November, you remember the story I told you about the last longest
    economic expansion in American history, and take a deep breath and bear
    down, because the best is still ahead of us.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

     Note:  The President spoke at approximately 10:15 p.m. on the terrace
    at Historic Greystone Mansion. In his remarks, he referred to ``Tonight
    Show'' host Jay Leno; actor Kevin Spacey; founders Steven Spielberg,
    Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, and Chief of Corporate Affairs
    Andy Spahn, DreamWorks SKG Studios; Mr. Katzenberg's wife, Marilyn; and
    musician Sarah McLachlan. The transcript released by the Office of the
    Press Secretary also included the remarks of Vice President Gore.