    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [March 13, 2000]
    [Pages 451-455]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Chicago, Illinois
    March 13, 2000

        Thank you very much. And thank you all for being here. I'm sure the
    fire marshal is nervous. [Laughter] You're all packed in here, and I'm
    very glad to see you.

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        I want to thank--Jan, thank you for
    that wonderful, wonderful introduction and for your commitment to
    handgun safety and to keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and
    children. Thank you, Senator Durbin. Thank
    you, Congressman Blagojevich. Thank you,
    Mayor Rendell and Janice Griffin and Joe Cari.
        I want to thank--I asked Phil and Karen
    Stefani to come up here because we're in their
    wonderful place. This is the 20th anniversary of the opening of their
    restaurant. So let's give them a big hand, the Stefanis. Thank you very
    much. [Applause] They have been wonderful friends to me and to Hillary,
    and I'm very grateful to them, and I thank them again.
        I will be brief, but I want to, first of all, thank you so much for
    being here and for your contributions. I want to thank the people of
    Illinois for being so wonderful to me and to Hillary and the Vice
    President and Tipper, for voting for me overwhelmingly in the '92
    primary and giving us your electoral votes in '92 and '96. I thank you
    for that.
        You know, I had a lot of advantages, running for President, in
    Illinois. I had Hillary. [Laughter] I
    had wonderful friends here in Chicago. I had David Wilhelm as my campaign chairman. I had served as the chairman
    of the Lower Mississippi Delta Commission, which included all the
    counties in southern Illinois, and I'd spent a lot of time there. I was
    from Arkansas, and there's an enormous number of African-Americans in
    Chicago from Arkansas, and that was a big help--something which stunned
    my opponents in '92 when they found out only too late. [Laughter] So
    I've had a lot of advantages here. And Illinois has been so good to me.
    Chicago has been so good to me. And I have now Bill Daley, who is making a wonderful Secretary of Commerce
    and doing you proud every day.
        But I want to talk to you tonight about where we go from here and
    why you came here. I'm grateful that I've had the chance to serve as
    President, and I'm grateful for those of you who said tonight going
    through the line you wish I could serve a little more. This is the first
    election in decades I haven't been a candidate. Most days I'm okay with
    it. [Laughter]
        So I come tonight to say to you, as your President, as a fellow
    citizen, as somebody who is profoundly grateful for how good you've been
    to me, we have worked a long time to turn this country around, to get
    the economy growing, to get the poverty rate down, to get the welfare
    rolls down and the crime rate down, to get people coming together and
    moving forward, to make America a respected force for peace and freedom
    around the world--several of you talked about my upcoming trip to India
    and Pakistan tonight.
        And this election gives us a chance to build the future of our
    dreams for our children. It is very important. We have a chance, now,
    because the unemployment rate's at a 30-year low, because we've got
    back-to-back surpluses for the first time in 42 years, to give all our
    children the education they deserve; to provide health insurance for low
    income working children and their parents; to provide the kind of tax
    relief that would enable every family to be able to tell their children
    when they're young, ``If you stay in school and do your lessons, no
    matter how poor we are, you can still go on to college''; to prove that
    we can grow the economy and improve the environment at the same time; to
    meet the big challenges out there.
        We can get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835.
    We can save Social Security before the baby boomers retire. I'm the
    oldest of the baby boomers, and I can tell you that everybody in my
    generation, the people who I grew up with at home, most of whom have
    very modest incomes, they're very worried that when we all retire and
    there are only two people working for every one person on Social
    Security, that we'll impose a burden on our children and their ability
    to raise our grandchildren. We can get rid of that burden right now. We
    can take Social Security out beyond the lifespan of the baby boom
    generation.
        We can lengthen Medicare. We can add a prescription drug benefit,
    which should have been there all along, so that our seniors who can't
    afford their medicine will be able to afford it. We can do these things.
        And we can make America a safer place. You know, it's amazing to me
    that I get in these tussles with the NRA. They've been after me for a
    decade now. [Laughter] You know, I once got a lifetime membership to the
    NRA--I think it's been revoked now--[laughter]--because I worked with
    them when they were trying to educate children to go hunting without
    hurting themselves, when they were trying to help me solve a lot of
    other problems. But now their main mission in life seems to be to stop
    any kind of collective action that will help us to

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    keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children.
        You know, we do this in all kinds of other ways. Most of us are safe
    drivers, but we still don't object to getting a driver's license or
    having to wear our seatbelts. Most of us are not terrorists, but we
    don't object to going through those metal detectors at airports. In
    fact, we kind of like them now because we think they keep us alive--but
    at some inconvenience, especially if you've got something that jangles
    in your pants and you keep--you know, your money clip keeps setting it
    off and you go through four or five--but we do it, right, because it
    makes us a safer country.
        Now, their position is that guns are the only thing that we should
    impose no inconvenience on the law-abiding majority to protect us from
    the law-breaking minority or the dangerous people.
        They said when we passed the Brady bill, we'd just interfere with
    hunters' rights and wouldn't get any criminals. There hasn't been a
    hunter missed a day in the deer woods, but we kept 500,000 felons,
    fugitives, and stalkers from getting handguns, and a lot of people are
    alive in this country because of that. And the same with the assault
    weapons ban.
        I really regret that the NRA leader--I
    guess he was frustrated, and sometimes when you don't have a defense for
    your position, the best thing to do is just attack your opponent, and
    that's what he did. But you know, it's pretty hard for me to take
    somebody saying I really want a certain level of killing in America so I
    can beat up on the NRA. You can say that on television, but I sat with
    the mother and the stepfather of that beautiful little 6-year-old girl that was killed in Michigan, and I didn't like that. I
    went and met with the families that lost their children at Columbine,
    out in Springfield, Oregon, and Jonesboro, Arkansas; I didn't like that.
    I've met with a lot of people who died from violence or whose loved ones
    died from violence. I'm just trying to keep more people alive. And I'm
    not interested in fighting with anybody, but I'm interested in fighting
    for this young man's future with his ``No Guns'' sign here.
        And I was thinking today, coming into Chicago, one of the most
    meaningful days I ever had here was out in one of your neighborhoods,
    near a rehab unit where we had, I don't know, a half dozen, maybe a
    dozen people who were wounded severely by gun violence. And that day
    there was a Chicago police officer who had done 2 tours in Vietnam and
    survived them without a scratch and had 11 bullets in his body because
    he'd been assaulted doing his job as a law enforcement officer.
        And the police and the gun safety groups gave me a beautiful plaque,
    a very heavy plaque with a model of Abraham Lincoln that was the same
    used for the penny. And it's still in my office in the White House. If
    you came there, you could see it today. And I keep it to remember all
    those young people I saw in wheelchairs, paralyzed for life, who
    shouldn't have been there.
        And I say that because there are big stakes here. And there are big
    differences between what the House and Senate Democrats would do and
    what their Republican counterparts would do. There are big differences
    between what Vice President Gore and
    Governor Bush would do. And I don't feel the
    need to attack them the way they attack us. I think they actually
    believe what they say. I just think they're wrong.
        And I think that--you know, if we gave the kind of tax cut that the
    Republicans have embraced, starting with their nominee, we couldn't save
    Social Security; we couldn't save Medicare; we couldn't invest in
    education; and we'd start running deficits again. And I think you like
    it when we pay down the debt and these interest rates are low, and you
    can buy cars and homes and keep borrowing money and keep this economy
    going. And we still have the money to invest in schools and education
    and trying to help people work their way out of poverty.
        There are real differences on these gun safety issues. I don't think
    that anybody ought to sell a handgun without a child safety lock on it.
    I don't think that we ought to import these big ammunition clips that
    allow you to convert weapons into assault weapons when we've banned them
    here at home. And I don't think that we ought to require background
    checks if you go buy a handgun in a gun store, and then if you show up
    at a gun show or an urban flea market, you can get out of the background
    checks. And I think Americans ought to be willing to undergo a certain
    amount of inconvenience, if they're law-abiding people buying a gun at a
    gun show or an urban flea market, to wait a day or so until this
    background check is done. And if it has to be 3 days because the records

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    aren't there, it's over the weekend, I think that's okay, too. And I
    don't think people ought to be bellyaching about that. If it saves the
    life of one child, it is worth it--it is worth it.

        So what I want you to do is to tell people these things. If they ask
    you, why did you go last night, tell them that ``I went because this
    country is in better shape than it was 7 years ago. They had good ideas,
    and they turned out to be right. I went because, more important, because
    they've got a better plan for the future.''

        And the last thing I want to say is this. A week ago yesterday I had
    one of the great days in my life. I got to go to Selma, Alabama, for the
    35th anniversary of the voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus
    Bridge. And I was thinking--I see all these young people here--I was
    thinking, when I was a young man in college, people were still being
    killed for the right to vote. Whites and blacks marching together in the
    South lost their lives so that everybody could vote--in my adult
    lifetime. And I thought about what a long way we have come since 1965.

        In 1964, when I finished high school, we were sad because President
    Kennedy had been killed, but the country united behind Lyndon Johnson.
    We thought we would have an economy that would go on forever. We thought
    we would solve the civil rights problems through the Congress. We
    thought we would win the cold war without dividing the country. We
    thought things would be just hunky-dory.

        Within a year, people were getting killed at Selma. Within 2 years,
    we had riots in the street. Within 4 years, Martin Luther King and Bobby
    Kennedy were dead, and Lyndon Johnson couldn't run for reelection, and
    the country was split right down the middle over the war. And within a
    few months, we had elected a President on a campaign of ``us'' against
    ``them'' called the Silent Majority. Do you remember that? If you
    weren't in the Silent Majority you were, by definition, in the loud
    minority. That's what I was in. [Laughter] And we've been ``us-ing'' and
    ``them-ing'' ourselves to death for 30-something years now. [Laughter]

        And by the way, that's when we had the longest economic expansion in
    history until this one. And soon after that election, expansion
    disappeared. And I say that because it is important that you not let the
    American people, the people of Illinois, the people of Chicago be casual
    about this election. Because 35 years ago, when we had the same sort of
    economy by those terms in those years, we thought it would just go on
    forever, and we thought everything was going to be hunky-dory, and the
    wheels ran off.

        And I have waited as an American citizen for 35 years to give our
    people the chance to build one America and to build the future of our
    dreams. That's what I've been working for these whole 7 years. I knew we
    could never get it all done in my term of service, but I knew if we
    could turn America around, if we could point America in the right
    direction, if we could keep going and unleash the energies of all of our
    people, we could actually build one country and deal with these big
    challenges.

        Now, that's what this election is about. It is very important. You
    cannot assume any good thing that is happening today is on automatic.
    Martin Luther King said, ``Progress does not roll along on the wheels of
    inevitability. It is brought by people who are willing to work hard, to
    be coworkers with God.''

        You have to work. You have to work. You've got a Presidential
    nominee you can be proud of. You've got a Senator, you've got Members of
    Congress you can be proud of. This is worth fighting for. When people
    ask you tomorrow why you were here--don't even wait for them to ask--
    tell them why you came. [Laughter] Tell them the country's better off
    than it was 7 years ago. Tell them we've got better ideas for the
    future. Tell them you have got the chance of a lifetime to build the
    future of our dreams for our children, and you are determined to do it,
    and you know that the best way to do it is to support the Democrats in
    November.

        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:10 p.m. at Stefani's Restaurant at a
    dinner for the Women's Leadership Forum and the Saxophone Club. In his
    remarks, he referred to Representative Janice D. Schakowsky; Edward G.
    Rendell, general chair, and Joseph A. Cari, Jr., finance chair,
    Democratic National Committee; Janice Griffin, national chair, Women's
    Leadership Forum; dinner hosts Phil and Karen Stefani; Wayne LaPierre,
    executive vice president, National Rifle Association, who appeared March
    12 on ABC's ``This Week''; Veronica and Michael McQueen, mother

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    and stepfather of 6-year-old Kayla Rolland, who died after she was shot
    by 6-year-old classmate Dedrick Owens in Mount Morris Township, MI; and
    Gov. George W. Bush of Texas.