    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [May 7, 2000]
    [Pages 858-861]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Reception for Hillary Clinton in Little Rock, Arkansas
    May 7, 2000

        Thank you very much. Vic, thank you for being
    here. Marion, thank you for being here. Vic
    Snyder was one of the bravest people in the Arkansas State Senate when I
    was Governor. When he ran for Congress, I told Hillary, I said, ``I'm
    afraid he can't get elected. He's got too much guts. He'll say what he
    thinks about everything.'' But he got elected, and he got reelected. And
    I thank--when Marion Berry ran for Congress after doing a stint in our
    administration in the Agriculture Department, Dale and David and I really felt
    that he was entitled to be in Congress, almost as a conciliation prize
    for having hosted us at the coon supper in Gillette all those years.
    Anybody who could get us to eat coon for 10 or 15 years in a row should
    be given a seat in Congress, just as a matter of course. But I thank
    them so much.
        The other night, when I was home a couple of weeks ago--or maybe it
    was last week--to dedicate the law school here to Bill Bowen and to do the event in honor of our friend Daisy
    Bates, Dale and David and I went to dinner alone, just the three of us. And we
    needed adult supervision. [Laughter] If there were a tape of the
    conversation we had--we relived everything we had ever done together,
    and amplified it all in an unconscionable way. I don't know when I've
    had as much fun. And Barbara, you should have
    been there to give us a little civilizing influence, but we had a good
    time.
        Today mostly is a day for us that is full of sentiment and
    gratitude. I want to thank you for all you've done for us over the
    years. I want to thank you for things large and small when I was
    Governor and for backing us in the two times I ran for President.
    Yesterday I did have a chance to travel the backroads of Logan and
    Franklin and Madison and Washington and Benton Counties and to relive my
    first race for Congress in 1974. We went to Stephanie Streett's wedding in the beautiful chapel in Subiaco. I
    thought about all my old

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    friends, including a lot of them, unfortunately, who aren't around
    anymore.
        And Hillary and I both agreed that if we hadn't had to start our
    careers in public life in a place where you actually had to go see
    people and listen to them, instead of someplace where you just spent all
    your time raising funds to run television ads, our lives would have been
    very different, and I never would have had a chance to be the President.
        I also was reminded of the first time I brought Hillary to Arkansas,
    and I picked her up at the airport here in Little Rock, and instead of
    going to Hot Springs, I drove her up to River Valley, and then we drove
    down Highway 7, a fairly indirect way, but I wanted to give her a sense
    of what I hoped she was getting into.
        I'm looking forward to building this library and policy center, and
    we're going to have big apartment on top of the library. We're
    finalizing the plans now. I'm trying to keep this library to a
    reasonable price, somewhere around $125 million. But I want it to be a
    world-class building, a place that is beautiful and distinctive for our
    State, that will capture the imagination of the people, and that will in
    some way, some small way, try to repay the people of Arkansas for all
    they have done for me. And we're going to have a nice apartment there,
    and I'll be there a lot. Even Senator Hillary will be there some, too,
    when I can work it out.
        I want to say a few things that are more comfortable for me to say,
    I think, than Hillary, before I bring her on. When Senator
    Moynihan announced that he would not
    run for the Senate again and the New York Democrats were trying to
    decide, you know, what they were going to do, they didn't just want to
    give the Senate seat back to the Republican Party and to Mayor
    Giuliani, and they knew he would be a
    very formidable candidate, that it was a seat that had been occupied by
    Robert Kennedy and then by Pat Moynihan. And all these House Members
    started calling Hillary. Then they started calling me to lobby Hillary.
        And we talked, and I had always hoped she would have a chance to run
    for office and to serve because I thought she would be so good. But we
    decided she needed to go up there and just visit people, just the way we
    did so long ago in all those communities I went through yesterday. Every
    town of any size, I had been in every store in town more than once that
    we went through. And so she did and came back and said, ``You know, the
    stuff I've worked on all my life is really what they need: someone who
    cares about the education of our children, how families balance work and
    child-rearing; somebody who knows something about health care; somebody
    who knows something about bringing economic opportunity to
    underdeveloped areas.'' If New York State, upstate--that's exclusive of
    the suburbs and the city--were a separate State, it would be 49th in job
    growth in my tenure as President, something that I have tried to help
    on. And much of what needs to be done there is what we've tried to do in
    the Delta and other rural areas of our State.
        And she had so many people who wanted her to run and wanted her to
    do it that she really decided that she ought to try. And then I just
    practically beat her up, time and time again, working on this
    announcement speech. She said, ``I've given a zillion speeches. Why do
    you keep doing this?'' I said, because an election is a job interview,
    and if you get the job, it helps to have decided in advance what you
    intend to do when you get there.
        And one of the reasons I think that the people here were good enough
    to elect me Governor five times is I always tried to be the candidate of
    change. I always tried to lay out what I wanted to do, and I always
    tried to be doing what I said I would do in the election. And one of the
    things I'm proudest of, a little known fact, is that in 1995, a
    Presidential scholar who at that time I had never met said that by '95 I
    had already kept a higher percentage of my campaign promises than the
    previous five Presidents. And I'm proud of that.
        So she worked on that. And I thought she gave a terrific speech that
    day, with a wonderful program. And she showed that movie, which has a
    lot of Arkansas in it, as you saw.
        Now, I want to make one general statement before I bring Hillary up
    here. This is a huge election. This election is just as important as
    what happened in '92, when this country was in terrible trouble. A lot
    of people have forgotten how bad it was in '92. And that's not good.
    It's just as important as it was in '96, when the American people
    decided to give me another chance to try to finish what I'd set out to
    do.
        But we have worked so--I've tried hard to take good care of this,
    and Hillary has been involved in so many of the things we have done

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    together these last 8 years. But so much of the time we spent--Dale and
    David were saying they were glad they were part of it--all we did was
    make unpopular decisions in '93 and '94, because we had to do hard
    things to get this country turned around again. Hillary made fun of me
    today. She said there was some article talking about that I had real
    good job ratings, and if they could just take out the first 2 years,
    they'd be perfectly astronomical. Well, in the first 2 years, I had to
    do all the hard stuff that made it better the last 6.
        And so we got the country turned around. And the unemployment rate
    last month was 3.9 percent, for the first time in over 30 years, and
    that's good. The welfare rolls have been cut in half; 90 percent of our
    kids immunized for the first time, something I know is very important to
    Dale and Betty Bumpers. Today the statistics were to be released, or have
    already been released, showing that crime has come down every year, down
    another 7 percent across the board. Only about three dozen cities in the
    United States last year, in the whole country, had an increase in the
    crime rate.
        So things are going in the right direction. But the big test for a
    country is, what do you do when things are going well? What do we
    propose to do with our prosperity, with the fact that our social
    problems are lessened, with the fact that we've got the lowest African-
    American and Hispanic unemployment rate ever recorded? What are we going
    to do with this?
        And in all fairness, one of the reasons that our adversaries in the
    other party, beginning with the Presidential nominee, are sort of trying
    to blur all these issues and say, ``We care about all those things that
    Bill Clinton and Al Gore worked on for 8 years,'' is that they hope that
    people will forget what it was like in '92. But there are huge decisions
    before you.
        And as sentimental as I feel today, elections are always about
    tomorrow. And what I wanted to do with all my heart is literally build a
    bridge for this country to the 21st century, so that when I left office,
    America would be in a position to build a future of our dreams for our
    children. To me, that's what this whole thing was about. And I was
    furious and disappointed in 1991, when I saw our country just paralyzed
    in Washington, nobody getting anything done, everybody fighting,
    partisan politics the order of the day--which, unfortunately, there's
    still too much of there.
        And so we set about doing things. But it's important for all of you
    to focus--if you believe that the results were good, it's not just
    because you knew me and you saw I gave a good speech and I was a pretty
    good guy. What we did was--those were the right things to do. You can be
    as eloquent as you want, and if you advocate the wrong thing, you'll get
    the wrong result.
        That's what--this election for the Senate is a big issue. It really
    matters who is in the Senate. The Republican Senators from Texas just
    announced a couple of days ago that they weren't even going to even
    permit a hearing on an Hispanic judge who was
    from El Paso, who graduated cum laude from Harvard and Harvard Law
    School and was endorsed by every single organization with an informed
    opinion. Why? Because he wasn't ideologically far enough to the right.
        This is a big election, and I can tell you who's in the Senate makes
    a huge difference, for good or ill. And you're going to have to decide,
    including in Arkansas, whether you want to build on the progress for the
    last 8 years or reverse the policies. Do you like this economic policy?
    If you do, you better stick with it and build on it. Do you believe that
    it's a good thing that the educational attainment is going up, the
    college-going rate is going up, more people than ever before can afford
    to send their kids to college? If you do, you've got to build on it, and
    the same thing with the environment and the same thing with health care
    and with national security. The other party is honestly opposed to the
    Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And if they do what they say they're
    going to do, there's a real chance we could have a new arms race again
    in the world, which is the last thing in the wide world we need. We've
    got enough problems out there with the terrorists and the drugrunners
    and the organized criminals, without setting off another arms race.
        So, you know, I'd like to come home and just make this a perfectly
    happy thing, but I'm telling you, this is a big decision that the people
    will take. And this election of 2000 is every bit as important, even
    though I'm not on the ticket. And a lot of you did a lot for me. You
    went to New Hampshire. You did all the things in the wide world. What
    was going on in '92 and '96, that was important. But the 2000 election
    will determine whether we really like the

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    direction of the country and we want to continue to change built on
    that, or whether we say, ``Well, we feel so good now, what they say
    sounds good; I think we'll go back to their economic policy and their
    education policy and their health care policy and their environmental
    policy and their foreign policy.'' This is a huge, huge decision.
        And that's why I thought it was a good thing for Hillary to run.
    Because I've been doing this a long time. I don't think any State ever
    had two Senators working together that were remotely as good as Dale
    Bumpers and David Pryor. They were the best team I ever saw. I served with 150
    Governors, and I've seen another 100 run through the White House since
    I've been there. You know, I realize I am prejudiced in this, but I know
    a lot about public service and public service efforts. And I have spent
    the last almost 30 years, now, having conversations with my wife about
    every conceivable issue.
        I watched her when she started the Arkansas Advocates for Children
    and Families. I watched her when she ran this education standards
    program here, when a lot of our kids couldn't even get science and math
    courses in their schools. I watched her labor to try to get rid of all
    the ridiculous Federal barriers to people adopting children, and to try
    to get us to adopt policies up there that would enable working families
    to afford health insurance and deal with a whole lot of other issues.
        And in my whole life, I have never known anybody that had a better
    grasp of the issues, a better ability to organize, a better ability to
    get people who thought they would never get along to work together, and
    could get up every day and just keep going, than Hillary--never, not a
    person.
        So, I think the Senate would be a much better place if she were
    there. I think she would do a superb job for the people of New York. I
    think she would be great for America. I think you know that, and you
    will never know how grateful we are that you're here today. And I hope
    you'll make her feel welcome.
        Come on up, Hillary.
        Thank you.

     Note:  The President spoke at 2:50 p.m. in Hall A at the New Statehouse
    Convention Center. In his remarks, he referred to Representatives Vic
    Snyder and Marion Berry; former Senator Dale Bumpers and his wife,
    Betty; former Senator David H. Pryor and his wife, Barbara; William H.
    Bowen, former dean, University of Arkansas at Little Rock School of Law;
    Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York City; Enrique Moreno, nominee for
    U.S. Court of Appeals Judge for the Fifth Circuit. The transcript
    released by the Office of the Press Secretary also included the remarks
    of the First Lady.