    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [February 29, 2000]
    [Pages 342-345]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Reception for Congressional Candidate Elaine Bloom in Miami, Florida
    February 29, 2000

        Thank you. Well, I was looking out at the beautiful vista--first, I
    was looking down on you. Did you see me up there? And I was looking at
    this magnificent home and thinking how fortunate we are, all of us, to
    be in this country at this moment, to be free citizens, to be able to
    come here to support someone in whom we believe.
        I want to begin by thanking Phil and Pat
    Frost. They have been with me a long time,
    too, and I am honored to be here in their magnificent home. I want to
    thank all of you who helped to spearhead this immensely successful event
    for Elaine tonight. I want to say that I'm glad that her children,
    David and Anne, are here,
    and I'm sorry the judge couldn't come. But far
    be it for us to get him in trouble. We want him to stay on the bench and
    make good decisions. [Laughter]
        I want to say how grateful I am for the friendship and support I
    have enjoyed from Congressman Peter Deutsch
    and his wife, Lori, who is here. And I thank
    them so much for their service to the United States. And Representative
    Sally Heyman, we're glad you're here.
        And I want to say a special word of thanks to my longtime personal
    friend Bill Nelson. I

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    am thrilled that he is running for the Senate and thrilled he is doing
    so well.
        I want you to know why I'm here tonight, besides the fact that I've
    been dying to see Phil and Pat's house. I'm here for three reasons. One is, Elaine
    was there for me when only my mother thought I could be elected.
    [Laughter] And she reminded me tonight that when we first met, she said,
    ``Now, look, I'm going to ask you some questions, but I want you to know
    in advance I'm going to be for you anyway, so you don't have to tailor
    your answers. Just shoot me straight.'' And we've been shooting each
    other straight now for, well, more than 8 years.
        I'll never forget when the first significant victory I won was in
    the Florida Democratic Convention when they had this straw poll. And
    Elaine and some of my other supporters hauled Hillary and me from
    meeting to meeting to meeting. I thought New Hampshire was tough till I
    met these people in all these little caucuses, you know. I had to answer
    400 questions. When I got through with that caucus, I said, ``I hope we
    did well, but I'm so tired, I don't care whether we win or not
    anymore.'' [Laughter] It was an amazing experience. And we had a lot of
    opponents, a lot of good people running for President in 1992. And we
    got a majority of the Florida Democrats at that caucus, and I feel
    profoundly indebted to Elaine Bloom.
        The second reason I'm here is because she embodies the philosophy
    that we call the New Democratic philosophy, that is conservative in part
    but also liberal in part. I believed, when I ran for President, that
    there was something really wrong with the way things were going in
    Washington. I felt that it bore no reasonable relationship to the work I
    had done for a decade as Governor, the work that she was trying to do
    here in the legislature with people like Governor Chiles and Governor,
    now Senator Graham before him, the work of
    getting people from different walks of life together, defining goals,
    defining opportunities, defining problems, then figuring out what to do
    about them.
        Washington was a place where, maybe because people felt they were so
    far from their constituents and it was so hard to get that 15 seconds on
    the evening news at night, they seemed to me to be more interested in
    sort of lobbing rhetorical bombs at one another and putting each other
    in little boxes and repeating over and over and over again the fights of
    yesterday as America kept moving into tomorrow.
        I was absolutely convinced then that there was nothing wrong with
    this country that couldn't be fixed by what was right with it. And so,
    with Elaine's help, with the Frosts' help, with a lot of you in this
    room, I asked the American people to give me and then give me and Al
    Gore a chance to see if a unifying philosophy of opportunity for every
    American and responsibility from every American and a community
    including all the people of this country could lead us to new ideas and
    a new direction. And now it's worked out pretty well.
        And I am immensely gratified to have been a part of the progress
    this country has made. I'm proud of it, and I know I am not solely
    responsible for it. If it hadn't been for--[applause] Thank you. It
    wouldn't have been possible if this country weren't the greatest
    environment for entrepreneurs and businesspeople in the world. It
    wouldn't have been possible if the American people weren't committed to
    working harder and smarter, and as the economy grew they didn't ask for
    inflationary pay increases. They understood they were in a world
    economy, and they ought to be tied to the growth of their enterprises.
    It wouldn't have been possible without the support of the members of my
    party in Congress, who, without any help from the Republicans, voted to
    bring the deficit down in 1993, got interest rates down, and started
    this long job-creating boom. So I am very grateful.
        But the third reason I'm here is the most important of all, and that
    is that in 11 months or so I'll be just another citizen, but the work of
    America goes on. We've turned this country around. We're moving in the
    right direction. But if you really think about what you'd like America
    to be, there's a great deal yet to be done.
        Yes, we've turned deficits to surpluses. But I think we ought to
    take this country completely out of debt, for the first time since 1835,
    to keep interest rates down for a new generation.
        Yes, the schools are getting better and more of our kids are going
    to college. But I don't think we ought to stop until we've got the
    certainty that every child, without regard to race or income, can get a
    world-class education and every person can go on to college and stay
    there for 4 years and not have to drop out because of the cost.

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        I don't think we should stop until we find a way for every American
    to have affordable health care, until we find a way to--[applause] Thank
    you. And Florida--I don't think we should stop until we know that when
    the baby boom generation retires--and I'm the oldest of the baby
    boomers; that's everybody born between 1946 and 1964--when we all get
    into our retirement years, there will only be two people working for
    every one person drawing Social Security. And I don't believe we should
    stop until we have modernized Social Security and Medicare for the 21st
    century and secured it so that the baby boomers can retire without the
    gnawing worry that we will be an awesome burden to our children and our
    children's ability to raise our grandchildren.
        And I can tell you, the people my age, we think about this a lot.
    And I'm trying to get this Congress to lengthen the life of Social
    Security, to lengthen the life of Medicare, to add a prescription drug
    benefit, but we can't stop until that's done.
        I'm proud of the fact that we've done a lot to save the Everglades,
    but I don't think we should stop until we reverse the tide of global
    warming and prove we can grow the economy as we improve the environment.
        I'm proud of the fact that we've made progress for peace and freedom
    around the world, but there are still threats from biological and
    chemical and nuclear weapons. There are threats from terrorists. And
    there are still profound problems in every corner of the world that
    people have because of their racial, religious, ethnic, and tribal
    differences. And we shouldn't stop.
        And I can tell you that it profoundly matters who is in the
    Congress. It's a big deal whether Bill Nelson
    gets elected to the Senate or not, more than you can imagine. There's
    going to be somewhere between two and four Justices appointed to the
    Supreme Court. I hope that Vice President Gore will be making those appointments, but the ultimate
    backstop is the Senate.
        That's another reason I'm so interested in the Senate race from New
    York--one of many. [Laughter] And I want to thank--so many of you
    tonight said something nice about Hillary or said you were helping her, and I'm very grateful to
    you for that.
        It matters because we're going to have to decide whether to follow
    the path of fiscal responsibility or not. We have doubled spending on
    education and training in my term, while getting rid of the deficit. And
    we did it by giving you the smallest Government in 40 years, by
    eliminating hundreds of programs. Was that a conservative decision or a
    liberal decision? Well, it was conservative: We got rid of the deficit.
    It was liberal: We doubled spending on education and training. That's
    the kind of discipline and values and vision we need. It matters.
        And finally, I'd like to thank all the law enforcement people who
    are here for supporting Elaine Bloom. One of the reasons I wanted to be
    identified with her is that she knew you could be a Democrat and still
    believe we ought to drive the crime rate down and that you could be
    tough and smart about crime. That's very important to me.
        I don't know if you had a chance to watch the news tonight, but a 6-
    year-old child near Flint, Michigan, shot another 6-year-old
    child and killed her today. Now, I don't know
    all the facts yet. I thought I had them, and I didn't. The first version
    I had wasn't right, but anyway, somehow--what's a 6-year-old kid doing
    with a gun, anyway? And what can we do about it?
        I've supported putting 100,000 police on the street. I've supported
    more efforts in the drug war. I've supported putting 50,000 more police
    out there now in high-crime areas. But we've got to do more to keep guns
    out of the hands of criminals and away from children. We just do.
    There's a huge difference there. Is that conservative or liberal? The
    NRA crowd says that's liberal. I think that I'm trying to conserve life.
    I think it's conservative in the best sense, and I think it's the right
    thing to do.
        So I'm here because I feel obligated to a woman I love, not only
    because she supported me, because when she disagreed with me or was
    worried about it, she'd call and chew me out about it. And I like that.
    Too many people are afraid to tell Presidents what they think, and
    that's what gets Presidents in trouble. She was a true friend. She
    always told me exactly what she thought. I'm here because she shares my
    philosophy. But mostly I'm here because of you, and because when I'm
    just a citizen and I'm not President anymore, I want my country to do
    well.
        I said something today at lunch I'd just like for you to think
    about, and I'll say it much briefer tonight. The last time we had--we
    now

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    have the longest economic expansion in history. The last longest
    economic expansion in history was 1961 to 1969, the years in which I
    grew up, graduated from high school, went to college, and finished
    college. When I graduated from high school in '64, Lyndon Johnson was
    President, passing civil rights legislation. We thought the economy
    would boom forever. We thought the civil rights problems would be solved
    in law, not in the streets. We thought we would prevail in the cold war
    without any division in our country.
        When I graduated from college 4 years later, it was 2 days after
    Robert Kennedy was killed, 2 months after Martin Luther King was killed,
    9 weeks after Lyndon Johnson said he couldn't run for reelection. The
    streets of Washington had burned after Dr. King was killed, and this
    country was divided right down the middle on the Vietnam war. And we
    were divided in a Presidential election where President Nixon said he
    represented the Silent Majority, which meant those who disagreed were in
    the loud minority, people like me. And we've been having these ``us''
    and ``them'' elections ever since--``us'' and ``them'' politics.
        Now, the country has been turned around, but we have big challenges
    out there. And what I want to say to you is that, in 1964, if anybody
    had told us the wheels would run off by 1968, no one would have believed
    it.
        This is not just a time for celebration; this is a time for humility
    and for resolve. As a citizen--not as President, as an American--I have
    been waiting for 35 years for my country to be in a position to build
    the future of our dreams for our children. That work will have to be
    done by the people who will be here after the 2000 election. That's the
    most important reason I am here. I trust Elaine Bloom with my
    daughter's future, with my grandchildren's
    future, with the future of America.
        And I ask you all to be vigilant and disciplined and active in this
    election. Just because we're doing well doesn't mean you can relax. You
    should feel a heavier obligation. And whenever you are tempted to think
    it doesn't matter, you remember this story I told you tonight. I have
    waited 35 years. We've got a second chance, and we need to make the most
    of it.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 7:25 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to Phillip and Patricia Frost, reception hosts;
    Elaine Bloom's husband, Philip, a judge in Florida's Eleventh Circuit,
    and her children David and Anne; State Representative Sally Heyman; and
    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. Ms. Bloom was a candidate for Florida's 22d
    Congressional District.