    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [May 17, 2000]
    [Pages 957-962]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Greenwich,
    Connecticut
    May 17, 2000

        Scott, we ought to take this act on the
    road. [Laughter] I may do another video with you in it. [Laughter]
        I want to say, first of all, I loved that introduction. [Laughter]
    And it meant more to me than you know. I hope most people do think I'm
    their kind of guy--but especially young people like him.
        And I want to thank the Richmans for opening their beautiful,
    beautiful home to us. And I thank all the cochairs of this event,
    Ronni, Braith,
    Peter, Bob, and the others
    who worked on it. Thank you very much.
        I thank Mayor Rendell for taking on
    this little part-time job of heading the Democratic Committee.
    [Laughter] And my old law school classmate Dick Blumenthal, I thank him for being here; and Mayor Malloy, Senator McDermott, and
    Barbara Kennelly, who now works in our
    administration at the Social Security Administration. You might want to
    talk to her about Social Security reform--[laughter]--give her all your
    ideas. And I thank Ed Marcus and the other
    folks who have come who've been active in Connecticut Democratic
    politics for a long time.
        I would like to just make a few brief points. I know the hour is
    late, and I got to visit with a lot of you coming through.
        Number one, whenever I'm anywhere now, I try not to miss a chance to
    say thank you. The people of Connecticut have been very good to me and
    to Al Gore, Hillary and Tipper. They gave us their electoral votes--you
    did twice, by a good margin the first time and a bigger one the second
    time. And I'm very, very grateful for that.
        The second thing I would like to say is, believe it or not, even
    though things are going well, it's my opinion that the 2000 election is
    at least as important as the elections of 1992 and 1996, because in 2000
    people will make a very great decision, which is what to do about our
    good fortune and whether to ratify the policies that got us to this
    point and build on them in the future. It's a huge decision.
        And if you listen to the debate, it's obvious that our friends in
    the other party, from the top down, hope that the American people don't
    think that's what they're supposed to do in this election. So they want
    to blur all these decisions, you know, and turn it into sort of a feel-
    good deal. And I mean, things are going along so well, who could mess it
    up, right? [Laughter] So just kind of, let's just, you know, a little
    bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of the other thing.
        So I'm glad you're here, and I thank you for your money, and we'll
    try to spend it well. But you're not done, because you've got to be good
    citizens between now and November, because I'm telling you, this
    election is just as important as the last two were.
        I spent so much of the last 7\1/2\ years trying to turn the ship of
    state around, trying to build our bridge to the new century, trying to
    make sure things were going in the right direction. Well, now they are.
    And when I leave office, we will have paid off about $355 billion of the
    national debt. And it was projected, when I took office, that this year
    the deficit would be about $400 billion a year.
        If I told you in 1992, ``Vote for me, and before I get out of here,
    I'll give you at least 3 years of surpluses and pay off over $350
    billion of the debt, and I'll double investment in education and
    training at the same time,'' you would have said, ``He seems like such a
    nice man, but he's slightly''--[laughter]--``deranged, and we'd better
    send him home.''
        So I'm grateful for what's going right. But it's just the beginning.
    And I go back to what I said in the State of the Union Address. It

    [[Page 958]]

    is a stern test of a free people, not just how they behave when they're
    under the gun in depression and war but how they behave when all things
    seem possible and things are going very well. And the easiest thing to
    do is to let down and be distracted and be diverted and take the easy
    way out. This is the chance of a lifetime to build the future of our
    dreams for our children. But to do it, we have to make a lot of big
    decisions.
        I think we have to decide to keep paying down the debt; to make
    extraordinary efforts to bring the benefits of the new economy to people
    and places that have been left behind, through incentives to invest in
    those places; to give every child a world-class education and access to
    college, and to those who need it, preschool and after-school programs;
    to give working families access to affordable health care; to do more to
    help people balance work and family; to prove that you can grow the
    economy and improve the environment, not undermine it--and you can, by
    the way, in the new information age; to prove that we can be the safest
    big country in the world; to prove that we can build a country that
    brings us together instead of divides us at election time.
        Now, I think this is important. This is big. I've worked real hard
    so you guys could do this when I was gone.
        I'm not running for anything. Most days I'm okay about that.
    [Laughter] I had a great time at Hillary's nomination last night. She was great. And thank you,
    those of you that are helping her; I'm very grateful.
        But you've got to think about this. That's what this election is
    about. Whether people think that's what it's about, enough, is another
    thing altogether. But I'm telling you, that's what this election is
    about. And 50 years from now, when people look back and write about this
    time, this is how this election year will be judged: What did we do with
    our prosperity? What did we do with a declining crime rate, welfare
    rolls cut in half, other social problems getting better? What did we do
    with this enormous period of good fortune, with the absence of domestic
    crisis or foreign threat to our security? What in the wide world did we
    do with it, with all these big challenges and opportunities sitting
    there right before our eyes?
        It's not like we have to look around the corner--as the Irish say
    some people can do, can see around corners. You don't have to see around
    corners. You know what the big challenges and opportunities facing this
    country are. That's the whole deal. That's the first thing I want to
    say.
        The second thing I want to tell you is, I think that Vice President
    Gore is uniquely qualified to lead this
    country at this moment, because he understands the future and knows how
    to get us there. And I've listened very carefully to all the things that
    have been said, pro and con, in the last several weeks. And one of the
    most amazing things I have ever heard is people saying, ``Well, you
    know, this guy won't take a tough position.'' He broke the tie in the
    budget. It passed by one vote. The Republicans, every one of them was
    against it--100 percent of them. They said we were going to bankrupt the
    country and we were going to wreck the economy. Now they say, ``Oh, so
    what if we were wrong? So what if we quadrupled the debt? Please put us
    in control again.'' We won by a vote.
        He broke the tie on gun control. We won by one vote in the Senate.
    We voted to close the gun show loophole; we voted to have a ban on large
    capacity ammunition clips being imported into this country; we voted to
    require child trigger locks in the Senate, by one vote.
        He supported me when I gave financial aid to Mexico. You know what
    the poll was on that? Eighty-one to fifteen, don't do it. He supported
    me when we went into Bosnia. He supported me when we went into Kosovo.
    He supported me when we went into Haiti. He supported me when no
    administration had ever consistently taken on either the gun lobby or
    the tobacco lobby before.
        So that's the first thing you need to know. Every tough decision I
    had to make that was unpopular in the short run but was right for the
    long run, he was there early in the do-it camp.
        The second thing I want to say is, I'm a little bit of an amateur
    historian of this country. I know a little bit about other Presidencies
    and the institution of the Vice President. And you should know this. I
    work at night in a private office on President Grant's Cabinet table.
    Now, when Grant was President, when Lincoln was President, there were
    only seven Cabinet Departments. And they actually had a form of Cabinet
    government: the Cabinet met two or three times a week. And there are
    eight drawers around this table. It tickles me; they could all

    [[Page 959]]

    keep their important papers in one little old drawer. Everybody had a
    key to a little drawer. [Laughter] And you know, there wasn't even a
    place for the Vice President, not even a place.
        Even after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated--and before that William
    Henry Harrison died of a bad cold, because he spoke for 3 hours and a
    half at his inaugural without a coat--people didn't even think about it.
    We were just lucky that Theodore Roosevelt turned out to be a great
    President, after William McKinley was assassinated. And though I love
    him very much, President Roosevelt, we were just lucky that Harry Truman
    turned out to be a very great President indeed, because he did not even
    know about the existence of the atomic bomb when he became the President
    of the United States in the springtime of 1945.
        Now, after that happened, people began to take this job a little
    more seriously. Before that, people--guys that were running for
    President just picked somebody for Vice President they thought would
    balance the ticket, geographically or politically or agewise or some
    otherwise.
        And if you think about it, it was a crazy waste of potential, right?
    How would you like to be able to hire somebody, give them a good job, a
    nice staff, and tell them what to do, and if they had a lot of talent,
    give them a lot of power, and they'd make you look good? I think these
    other guys didn't know what they were missing. But I'm just telling you,
    it didn't happen.
        Now, President Eisenhower gave Richard Nixon a little more
    responsibility. Then President Kennedy gave Lyndon Johnson still more
    responsibility. He had been the Senate majority leader; he was a man of
    great experience and knowledge. And Hubert Humphrey had more or less the
    same role that Lyndon Johnson did.
        Then, to be fair, the first big breakthrough came with Jimmy Carter,
    who made Walter Mondale a genuine partner in the Vice Presidency. They
    had lunch every week. Walter Mondale could come to any meeting. Vice
    President Mondale had been in the Senate and worked in Washington.
    Governor Carter, then, before he was President, had never done that. And
    they had a fabulous partnership. And to give credit where credit is due,
    President Reagan followed that model when George Bush, President Bush,
    became Vice President. And he had about as much of a role in the Reagan/
    Bush years--often they were doing things I didn't agree with, but the
    point is, it was a responsible decision. Ronald Reagan made a
    responsible decision to let George Bush be a part of that.
        So in the whole history of the country, you've got everybody else--
    Johnson and Nixon, Mondale and Bush, okay? And then here's Gore. This is
    a matter of historic fact. There has never been a Vice President who has
    had so much positive impact on the American people as Vice President.
        For one thing, as he points out, whenever he votes in the Senate, we win. [Laughter] But far beyond
    that, let me just tell you a few things. He ran our reinventing
    Government program. We have the smallest Federal Government in 40 years,
    and I'll give you 100 bucks if you can name five programs that were
    eliminated. We eliminated hundreds of them. You haven't missed them,
    have you? Why? Because we doubled our investment in education; we
    continued to increase our investment in science and technology and
    medical research.
        He ran our empowerment zone program,
    that has brought thousands upon thousands of jobs to people and places
    that were left behind, by creating special tax-incentive zones with
    special public investments to create more economic opportunity.
        He was our principal adviser in
    telecommunications and technology. And we had a lot to do with the
    Telecommunications Act of 1996. Since then, there have been hundreds of
    thousands of jobs created in the high-tech industry. I went to a dinner
    the other night in New York City with 40 executives of companies that
    did not exist in 1996, before the telecom bill was signed.
        And he fought for the E-rate, which is
    now giving $2.2 billion in discounts to school districts, the poorest
    school districts in this country, to make sure that all of our schools
    can be hooked up to the Internet. In '94, when we started, we had 16
    percent of the classrooms and 3 percent--I mean, 16 percent of the
    schools and 3 percent of the classrooms with an Internet connection.
    Today, we have 95 percent of the schools and 75 percent of the
    classrooms because of the E-rate that Al Gore fought for.
        He has managed a lot of our
    environmental policies--and being criticized by the Republicans for
    doing that. If we had not demonstrated that you can have cleaner air,
    cleaner water, safer food, and set aside more land than

    [[Page 960]]

    anybody but the Roosevelts and still grow the economy, I don't know what
    it would take to convince people that you can have a strong economy and
    a good environment. And he deserves a lot of credit for that.
        He managed big chunks of our
    relationship with Russia, our relationship with Egypt, our relationship
    with South Africa, a lot of the initiatives we took in arms control.
        There has never, ever, ever, in the history of the United States,
    been a person who, as Vice President, had remotely the range of
    responsibility or positive impact that he
    has had. There has, therefore, never been a person who was Vice
    President who, because of that service, was remotely as well-qualified
    to be President as he is. Now, you need to know that.
        And you also need to know that, in my opinion, he really does understand the future. And he knows how to
    lead us there. Ninety-five percent of the scientists say the climate's
    warming, and the big oil companies accept it, just about. And a lot of
    the big companies that emit a lot of greenhouse gases are saying,
    ``We've got to do something about climate change, otherwise it's going
    to wreck the whole environment of the world and flood island countries
    and destroy economies.'' In 1992 Al Gore was showing me his little
    chart--[laughter]--saying the same thing that everybody else now takes
    as the conventional wisdom.
        If you want to make the most of prosperity in a time of rapid
    change, you'd better hire somebody who understands the future and knows
    how to get us there.
        Now, I want to make one last point. There will be consequences to
    these decisions. I think you would all admit there were a few
    consequences to the decision the American people had to give the
    Congress, to the Republicans in 1994. There will be consequences.
        The public will either choose to continue paying down the debt and
    to stay with the economic policy that has given us 21 million new jobs
    and the longest economic expansion in history or to revert to a policy
    that risks running deficits and drastically underinvesting in education,
    science and technology, and other things. That's going to happen.
    Whether people are aware of it, when the decision is made or not is up
    to you, but it will happen.
        There will be a decision, which will either lead to continued
    improvements in the environment or people who believe that the Federal
    Government's got no business doing half of what we've done. And they'll
    try to undo some of what we've done. A couple of you told me how great
    you thought that 40 million roadless acres was, that we set aside in the
    national forests. The Audubon Society says it's one of the most
    significant things done in the 20th century. It will be history if the
    other side wins the White House and the Congress, because they've
    characterized it as a vast land grab. I don't know how you can grab what
    already belongs to you--these are Federal lands--but they have.
        There will be vast consequences in whether we continue to make
    America the safest big country in the world. You saw where the gentleman
    from the NRA said the other day that if we lost the White House and they
    won, the NRA would have an office in the White House. Now, since he's
    said that, they probably won't do it. That would probably be too
    embarrassing. But they will have a veto over policy.
        You will--you know, I've got to say something about this gun control
    business. Progressives lose on labels and win on facts. So don't you let
    anybody talk to you about gun control and all that. You know, they act
    like--you know, you practically hear vampire music in the background
    when the other guys talk about this. They talk about the second
    amendment and its right to keep and bear arms. And I just want to--next
    time somebody talks to you about that, say, ``Listen. The Supreme Court
    has also given us the right to travel. But when we have seatbelt laws,
    child safety laws, speed limit laws, and you have to get a driver's
    license to drive your car, nobody talks about car control.'' As if it's
    some--now, if I come get your car and put it in my garage, that's car
    control. [Laughter] Otherwise, it's highway safety.
        This is a huge deal. We can make this country the safest big country
    in the world and not keep a hunter out of the deer woods or keep anybody
    from sport shooting. But we have to do sensible, preventive things to
    keep guns out of the hands of criminals and kids. If it's important to
    you, you better manifest that in your election. You better make sure
    that everybody you know understands that, because there are huge
    consequences. There are huge consequences.
        If you believe that the Supreme Court ought to protect individual
    liberties, including a woman's right to choose, you need to know that
    that's at stake in this election. It will stay if

    [[Page 961]]

    the Democrats win. It will go if the Republicans do. That's what I
    believe with all my heart. Within 24 months, it's goodbye; it's gone.
    And I'm old enough to remember what it was like before.
        So for all the happy talk, you need to understand that number one,
    we owe it to the American people to say, ``Set your sights high. Aim for
    the future. Build the future of our dreams for our children.'' Number
    two, we've got a candidate who's the best
    qualified person I can imagine and by far the best Vice President in the
    history of the country. And number three, there are huge differences in
    economic policy, crime policy, social policy, environmental policy that
    will shape America's future. And I haven't even mentioned national
    security.
        We're for a Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, like most
    everybody else in the world. They're not for it. They want to get rid of
    the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. They think all this arms control is
    an idle--you know, ``Why worry about that? We've got more bombs than
    anybody else, and the Russians can't afford to build any more right now,
    so just go on.'' So, I'm just telling you folks, this is a big deal.
        The voters have not yet begun to focus on this. They will begin to
    think more and more about it. They will draw their own conclusions. But
    my experience over many years, now, has been that the person who wins
    the election may be determined by what the people think the election is
    about.
        What is the subject of the election? If the people of this country
    believe it's whether we should be building the future of our dreams for
    these kids and the millions like them and the millions that are still
    living in poverty, without regard to race, religion, sexual orientation,
    or anything else--if that's what they think, we win.
        If they think, ``This is a stroll in the park; this economy's on
    automatic; nobody could mess it up if they tried. And people say all
    kinds of things in an election to make promises to these radical
    interest groups, but maybe they won't happen, and so let's just kind of
    feel our way through this,'' who knows what's going to happen?
        Clarity, facts, specifics, issues, evidence--those things are our
    friends. You've got to start asking everybody you know, what do you
    think this election is about?
        So maybe this is too severe a thing for me to say to you after a
    nice dinner and a funny introduction--and I won twice in Connecticut.
    And I don't want you to think I'm an ingrate. But I went to all this
    trouble, and I worked, and I loved every day of it, and I'm not done.
    I'm going to get a lot of stuff done before I have to leave.
        But I want you to understand, this is a millennial election in more
    than calendar years. This is a profoundly important decision about where
    we're going as a people. And you can't let anybody think that it's just
    some ordinary event or that there are no consequences.
        I'll close with this. When we celebrated the longest economic
    expansion in American history last February, I asked my advisers, I
    said, ``Well, when was the last longest economic expansion in history?''
    You know when it was? Nineteen sixty-one to nineteen sixty-nine.
        Scott's 17 years old. When I graduated
    from high school, I was 17 years old, in the springtime of 1964, in the
    full bloom of the last longest economic expansion in history. You know
    what I thought? I thought the sucker would go on forever. [Laughter]
        Ah, we knew we had civil rights challenges. I thought they'd be
    settled in the courts and in Congress, not in the streets. I knew we had
    a few people in Vietnam. I never dreamed that we would have trouble
    prevailing and that the agony of it would someday tear our country apart
    and tear my generation apart. We just thought everything was fine.
        Four years later, when I was a senior in college and I was fixing to
    graduate from college--passes like this--it was 2 days after Robert
    Kennedy was killed, 2 months after Martin Luther King was killed, 9
    weeks after my President, Lyndon Johnson, could not even run for
    reelection because this country was torn half in two over Vietnam. And
    just a couple of months after that, the last longest economic expansion
    in American history was itself history.
        Now, those of us who are old enough to have memories have
    responsibilities. And I'm here to tell you I've been waiting for 35
    years for another chance to do right by our future. And now we have no
    domestic civil rights struggle that puts millions in the street. Instead
    we have a million moms that just want our kids to be safe. We have no
    Vietnam war to divide us

    [[Page 962]]

    and distract us. And if we make the wrong decisions, we have only
    ourselves to blame. I'm telling you, this can be the best time in human
    history.
        But this election decision for the Presidency and for Congress will
    determine what the shape of this country is for decades to come. That's
    why, if somebody tomorrow asks you why you came here, tell them that's
    why you came here. And tell them some of the things I've told you
    tonight. And whatever happens between now and November, don't you get
    tired. I've been waiting 35 years for this, and I'm not going to see us
    blow it.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

     Note:  The President spoke at 10:12 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Rich and Ellen Richman and their
    son Scott, who introduced the President; Ronni Ginott, State chair,
    Women's Leadership Forum; dinner cochairs Braith and Peter Kelly and Bob
    Rose; Edward G. Rendell, general chair, Democratic National Committee;
    Mayor Dannel P. Malloy of Stamford, CT; State Senator Brian McDermott;
    and Connecticut State Democratic Party Chair Edward L. Marcus.