    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [May 8, 2000]
    [Pages 864-868]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Reception for Representative Baron P. Hill in Bethesda, Maryland
    May 8, 2000

        Thank you. Well, I want to thank, first of all, Joe and Anne, for having us in their
    beautiful home on this beautiful spring night. And I want to thank
    Baron's colleagues Charlie Stenholm from
    Texas and Steny Hoyer from Maryland for
    coming. They represent, I think, the future of the Democratic Party and
    where we have to go, and they've proved that you can get elected in
    places where sometimes we don't get elected. I also want to thank your
    predecessor, Lee Hamilton, for being here.
    He's one of the greatest House Members in my lifetime, and I thank him
    for what he is doing. And I want to thank, in his absence, Senator
    Bayh.
        Evan met me at the door, and he said
    Susan was out of town, and he had two choices: He
    could stay and hear me give this speech, or he could go home and tuck
    his kids in bed. And I said, ``You've heard the speech''--[laughter]--
    ``and you'll never regret a minute you stay with your children.'' My
    daughter is about to be a senior in college,
    and I can still remember all the nights I tucked her in bed, and she can
    remember anything she ever did that I missed. [Laughter] Even though she
    can count them on one hand and have fingers left over, at 20 years old
    she can still remember. So he went home, as he should have. And since
    he's not here, I won't be embarrassing him when I tell you that I hope
    and expect some day I'll be voting for Evan Bayh
    for President of the United States.
        I want to say just a few things, and I won't keep you long. I want
    to get out and say hello to the people I haven't seen yet. The country
    is in good shape, and I'm grateful for that. And I'm grateful for the
    time I've had to serve and the opportunities we've had. And certainly
    not in my lifetime, and maybe never in the history of America, have we
    had at the same time such a strong economy with benefits more evenly
    distributed. We have inequality coming down in the last 2 years for the
    first time in over 20 years, the lowest African-American and Hispanic
    unemployment rates ever recorded, the lowest female unemployment rate in
    40 years, the lowest single-parent poverty rate in 46 years.
        The crime rate, we just said yesterday, has come down now 8 years in
    a row. We've got the lowest crime rate in over a quarter century, the
    lowest murder rate in 30 years. We have

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    almost--the welfare rolls are about half the size they were when I took
    office. Things are moving in the right direction. Ninety percent of our
    children immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first
    time.
        I thank you for the applause you gave when Baron talked about the
    economy and our role in it. But what I would like to say is--people come
    up to me all the time and they say, ``Well, thank you, and I wish you
    could run again.'' Half the country is probably elated that I can't, but
    it's nice when the people that say it, say it.
        But here's what I want to say to you. A President is important. It's
    important to be able to articulate what you believe. It's important to
    be able to touch people where they live. It's important for people to
    think that the person in the Oval Office cares about them. It's
    important that you fight hard for the things you believe in.
        But if you don't believe in the right things, you still won't get
    good results. That's why I'm here tonight. I like Baron Hill. I've liked
    him from the first time I met him. I admire him. But I think that the
    direction that we took--first our party and then our country, beginning
    in the '92 election--is profoundly important. And the major question
    before the American people this year is, what are we going to do with
    our good fortune? Yes, the surplus, but generally, what are we going to
    do with our good fortune?
        And normally, the question asked in a campaign determines who wins.
    That is, what people think the election is about very often determines
    the outcome of the election. And I believe with all my heart the answer
    to that question is not that we should indulge ourselves but that we
    should take on the big challenges and the big opportunities that are
    still out there. Because most of what I've had to do the last 7 years
    and some odd months is to try to turn the ship of state around and get
    us going in the right direction and, to use the metaphor I used in the
    '96 campaign, build our bridge to the 21st century.
        Now the country has a chance that we've never had before to
    literally build the future of our dreams for our children. We almost had
    it in the 1960's, and it came apart over the combined impacts of the
    civil rights struggle and the Vietnam war and the divisions that ensued
    in the country and the collapse of the economic recovery of that decade.
        So if the question is, what are we going to do with the good times,
    and the answer is, take on the big challenges and the big opportunities,
    then the issue is, how? And I would argue that what we need to do is to
    continue to change based on what we call the New Democratic philosophy.
    We believe that you can be pro-business and pro-labor. We believe you
    can be pro-growth and pro-environment. We believe you can be pro-work
    and pro-family. We believe you can be pro-trade and pro-labor and human
    rights.
        And I don't want to give a long speech about that, but I would like
    to cite two examples because they reflect Baron Hill's career, brief as
    it is, already distinguished in Congress. One is this trade issue. I
    believe that any fair reading of the record would say that I'm the most
    pro-labor President, at least since Lyndon Johnson. I believe that is
    fair. But my belief in trade is rooted in two things.
        Number one, we've got 4 percent of the world's people and 22 percent
    of the world's income, and I don't think you have to be a rocket
    scientist to figure out if you want to keep over 20 percent of the
    world's income, you've got to sell something to the other 96 percent of
    the people. And you have responsibilities to them. You want them to do
    better, so you have to let them sell stuff to you.
        Secondly, I think it's good for us in other ways. Imports--nobody
    ever talks about that, but because we've had open markets, we've been
    able to grow without inflation. When I was elected President, after the
    election we had a big economic parley down in Little Rock, and I had a
    private meeting in the Governor's Mansion, and I had Democratic
    economists--that is, they were more progressive; they wanted to believe
    we could have low unemployment without inflation. So I said, ``How low
    can unemployment get on a sustained basis without inflation?'' And the
    consensus was ``Six percent, maybe 5.8; you get below that, you're going
    to have inflation.'' It was 3.9 last month, with core inflation at 2.4
    percent.
        Now, if you want growth without inflation, you have to keep your
    markets open so there is some pressure on keeping the prices down. In a
    larger sense, because we're the most prosperous country in the world
    now, when we trade with others, it helps us to build friends and

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    allies and promote democracy and stability and keep our kids from ever
    having to go to war again.
        And that's really what this China issue is all about. A lot of you
    are here because you know that it's a laydown, economically, in the
    short run, because we don't have to give China any more access to our
    markets, and they give us lots of access to theirs. We can put up car
    dealerships there for the first time. We can sell American cars without
    having to let them manufacture them in China or transfer technology. We
    have all kinds of agricultural access we never had before.
        But in a larger sense, what this is really about to me, having
    focused on the economy like a laser beam, is national security. Because
    China is the biggest country in the world, and in somewhere between 30
    and 50 years, it'll have the biggest economy, unless India outstrips it,
    which is conceivable. And when that happens, are we going to have a
    working relationship with them, or is it going to be a new cold war?
        Meanwhile, we want them to grow more open. I don't like the human
    rights abuses that exist there. But if we say no to them, we'll have no
    influence on their policies, because they think we're trying to stiff
    them. They'll get in the World Trade Organization anyway, but the
    Europeans will get all the trade benefits we negotiated and I fought for
    a year for. And I think the chances that there will be trouble between
    China and Taiwan will go up exponentially if the United States says no.
    I've already had to send carrier groups to the Taiwan Straits once, and
    I don't want to do it again. I will if I have to, but I don't want to do
    it again.
        If somebody were to ask--people are always asking me, ``Now, what
    have you learned as President. What can you tell somebody else?'' The
    one thing I learned about foreign policy is it's a lot more like real
    life than I thought it was. I mean, if you hear people talk about it,
    they always use these complicated words and all that. It's a lot more
    like real life. Nine times out of 10 you can get more with an
    outstretched hand than you can with a clenched fist, just like in real
    life. You never want to let your guard down, but you want to give people
    a chance to do the right thing, just like real life.
        And this is a big issue. And he took a brave position, and I want to
    be here to support him for it. And a decade from now, if we prevail,
    we'll wonder why we had the debate. And if we don't, we'll still be
    paying the price.
        One of the terrible things about public life is that sometimes you
    have to make tough decisions. I got so tickled; I read an article
    yesterday saying that I had real good approval ratings, and if it hadn't
    been for the bad approval ratings I had in '93 and '94, I'd have the
    highest average approval ratings of any President since they've been
    taking polls. And I thought, well--I showed it to Hillary, and she said, ``Sure, in '93 and '94 we made
    all the hard decisions that gave us the good approval ratings later.''
    [Laughter]
        You know, even in good economic times, life doesn't give you 100
    percent easy decisions. So he's taking a tough decision. It's the right
    decision for America, and I respect it.
        The second thing I want to mention is education, because education
    will be a big subject of debate, as it should be, in this election. And
    education has now become like God, motherhood, and apple pie; everybody
    is for it. But we had a strategy, and Baron Hill has come in to support
    a very important part of that. Our strategy was: Set high standards,
    have accountability, identify schools that are failing, require them to
    turn around or shut down, stop social promotion, but don't blame the
    kids for the failure of the system, give them the help they need to
    succeed. And he's been especially active in promoting small, effective
    schools. I just want to tell you just two points about this and why it's
    so important.
        The Republicans, from Governor Bush on
    down, they're going to say they're for education. And they're going to
    say a lot of good things. And he'll be able to cite some things that
    happened in Texas. But here's the problem with their proposal. Their tax
    cut is so big, and their defense increases are even bigger than the ones
    I proposed, and if you put those two things with their voucher proposal,
    there won't be any money left to do what they say they're going to do in
    education. And somehow we've got to get that out to the American people.
        The other point I want to make to you is this. When I became
    President, one of the things that frustrated me was a lot of people just
    didn't think things could get better. I mean, if I had run for President
    and I said, ``Now, you vote for me, and sometime in my second term,
    instead of having a $300 billion deficit we'll be paying down the
    debt,'' the voters

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    would have said in '92, ``He seems like such a nice young man, but he's
    slightly deranged. We better send him home.'' [Laughter] When I leave
    office, we will have paid off $355 billion of the national debt.
        So if I said to you, ``Crime will go down every year in my
    administration,'' you would have said the same thing. If I said, ``I'll
    cut the welfare rolls in half, or we will together,'' you would have
    said the same thing. What's the point of this? We now know it can get
    better.
        What I want you to understand is that public education can get
    better. I've been working on this over 20 years now. And Hillary and I
    put through this big education reform program in 1983, and we thought we
    knew what we were doing. But I can tell you that we now know more than
    we have ever known. And I just want to cite three things that are
    important to our philosophy, in the education tour I took last week.
        I went to St. Paul, Minnesota, to the Nation's first charter school.
    It's a public school with public funds set up outside the normal
    bureaucratic rules of a school system so that it can serve a specific
    population or have a special mission. The first charter school in the
    country, in St. Paul, was the only one that existed when I started
    running for President, promoting charter schools, and nobody in America
    knew what I was talking about.
        But I went to that school. There are over 100 kids in this high
    school. They all showed up. They were all kids that had not done well in
    other schools. A lot of them had had terrible, terrible problems in
    their personal lives, the kind of things that most of us would find it
    difficult to overcome. They're in school. There's no dropout rate.
    There's no violence in the school. There are no weapons in the school.
    The kids are learning. An extraordinary percentage of them are going on
    to college. It is working. And there are now 1,700 of those schools in
    America today. There are long waiting lists. Some of them have failed.
    But unlike other schools that have failed, they can be just shut down;
    you just revoke the charter.
        And I'll give you just two other examples. I went to Columbus, Ohio.
    And Columbus has gotten 55 of our teachers under our 100,000 teachers
    program to lower class size in the early grades. They took class size
    from 24 to 15 in the first three grades. And I went to this very poor
    neighborhood, to this elementary school where in one year--one year--
    they went from 10 percent of their kids reading at or above grade level
    to 45 percent, from 10 percent of their kids doing math at or above
    grade level to 33 percent, from 10 percent of their kids doing science
    at or above grade level to 30 percent--in one year.
        I went to Owensboro, Kentucky, where in 1996 Kentucky was one of the
    first States to implement the requirement we got the Congress to pass
    that anybody got Federal aid, the States, had to identify their failing
    schools. They identified 170. Within 2 years, 91 percent of them weren't
    failing anymore.
        Now today, in this Owensboro school, in 3 years, here's what they
    did. They went from 12 percent of their kids reading at or above grade
    level to 57 percent, 5 percent doing math at or above grade level to 70
    percent, 0 percent doing science at or above grade level to 64 percent.
    They're the 18th best grade school in the State of Kentucky, and two-
    thirds of the kids are eligible for free or reduced lunch.
        Of the 20 grade schools in that State that scored highest on the
    test, 10 of them--10 of them--have kids where at least half of them are
    eligible for free or reduced lunch. Race and income and location are not
    destiny if you have good schools. That's what we believe. That's the
    second reason I'm here--because I think if our crowd stays in control of
    the education policy of this country, we will have further excellence.
        And Al Gore has laid out an education
    plan that will enable us to hire more teachers--and there are going to
    be 700,000 retiring in the next few years, with the biggest student
    population we ever had--and have higher standards, and put every kid who
    needs it in preschool, and every child who needs it will have access to
    an after-school program and a summer school program.
        That is worth fighting an election on. That is the whole history of
    the country. And what Americans must believe is, just like we got the
    deficit gone and we're paying down the debt, just like we have got the
    crime rate down, just like we have got the welfare rolls down, all of
    our schools can become excellent schools and all of our kids can learn.
    That's the second reason I'm here, and that's worth fighting this
    election on. That's what our party ought to be standing for.

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        So if somebody asks you why you came, say, because the election
    ought to be fought out over, what are we going to do with the good
    times? The answer is, we're going to take on the big challenges. And the
    way to do it is to keep changing, based on the philosophy that has
    brought us to this point. And no person in the House of Representatives,
    in my judgment, better embodies that than Baron Hill.
        Thank you very much.

     Note:  The President spoke at approximately 9:35 p.m. at a private
    residence. In his remarks, he referred to reception hosts Joseph J.
    Andrew, national chair, Democratic National Committee, and his wife,
    Anne; Senator Evan Bayh's wife, Susan; former Representative Lee H.
    Hamilton; and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas.