    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [February 9, 2000]
    [Pages 210-213]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 210]]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in McAllen, Texas
    February 9, 2000

        Thank you very much. I want to say, first of all, how very grateful
    I am to Jesus and Elvia
    for having us in their beautiful home; to Alonzo Cantu; and of course, to my good friend Congressman
    Hinojosa.
        I thought it was interesting that he quoted that line from
    ``Casablanca''--[laughter]--my second favorite movie of all time. I like
    you very much, but I must say I've never thought of you in the same
    breath as Ingrid Bergman before. [Laughter] I'll have to think about
    that one.
        Let me say to all of you, I--Ben talked about how I have been here
    now, I guess, three times since I've been President. It isn't a hard
    sell. If it were up to me, I'd come once a month. If you've been
    following the weather between Washington and New York, where I'm
    spending most of my time now, you know that it's a little better down
    here. I saw the first golf course without snow on it I've seen in 3
    weeks, today coming in from the airport.
        I will be brief because I want to get around and visit with all of
    you and then speak about what you wish to speak about, but I would like
    to make a couple of general points. First of all, I came to the valley
    and to McAllen on the last night of my campaign in 1992; some of you
    were there. We had a marvelous 24-hour affair. We stopped in nine
    different communities, and I really wanted to come here. And I said then
    I wanted the American people to give me a chance to put the people of
    this country first again over the politics of Washington, which was, I
    thought, entirely too divisive and too mired in the past. And we brought
    a new philosophy to try to bring the people together, to try to change
    the way Government works, to empower people to solve their own problems,
    to try to bring opportunity to every responsible citizen, and to make a
    genuine attempt to build a community of all Americans. And our country
    is growing increasingly diverse with every passing day. In just a
    decade, for example, there will be no majority race in the entire State
    of California, our biggest State.
        So all these things are important. We talked about how we sent
    people from the Government down here to try to help. I think that's
    important. I think if we're going to have one America, we can't pretend
    that we're building one if we only go to the largest places or to the
    wealthiest places or to the places with the most influence or even to
    the places where I won the electoral votes. We have to try to bring
    everybody into the family of America and go forward.
        In 1992, when I stopped here, we had high unemployment. Today, we
    have the longest economic expansion in history and the lowest
    unemployment rate in 30 years and the lowest Hispanic- and African-
    American unemployment rates ever recorded.
        We had a great deal of social division in terms of race and income
    and other ways, and a lot of social problems. Today, we have the lowest
    welfare rolls in 30 years, almost 7 million fewer people on welfare, 2
    million-plus children lifted out of poverty, the lowest crime rates in
    30 years, the lowest poverty rates in over 20 years. The college-going
    rate is up by about 10 percent. And we've put empowerment zones all
    across America, including one in south Texas, to try to give people a
    better chance to be a part of this new enterprise economy.
        So the country, in general, is in the best shape perhaps it's ever
    been. And the great question in this election season, which I think I
    can comment on because for the first time in over two decades I'm not on
    a ballot anywhere, is after we have done all this work to turn our
    country around, to get it moving in the right direction, what are we
    going to do with this opportunity?
        And all of you can remember times in your own life--at least all of
    you that are over 30--when you made a mistake because you thought things
    were going so well there were no consequences to breaking your
    concentration, to not thinking ahead, to putting off the tough decisions
    that you knew were out there. That's the great challenge to America
    today: How are we going to make the most of what is truly a magic moment
    in our Nation's history?
        And as I argued a little more than a week ago in the State of the
    Union Address, I think the only thing to do is to keep pushing ahead, to
    bear down, to keep changing along the lines

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    that have brought us this far, to ask ourselves what are the big
    challenges still out there, and do our best to meet them. And I just
    want to emphasize, if I might very briefly, six of those that I think
    have particular impact on the people of the Rio Grande Valley.
        First of all, the number of people over 65 will double in the next
    30 years, and we have to be prepared for that. That means we have to
    save Social Security; we have to strengthen Medicare; and we ought to
    add a prescription drug benefit that our seniors can buy at a price they
    can afford, because over 60 percent of the seniors in America today
    cannot afford the prescription drugs they need to lengthen and improve
    the quality of their lives.
        Secondly, we have to realize that only in one respect has our social
    fabric been more strained since 1993: There are more people without
    health insurance today than there were in 1993. I remember when all the
    interest groups were arrayed against me and the First Lady when we tried
    to provide health care coverage for all. They told all those Congressmen
    that if they voted for my health care plan, the number of uninsured
    people would go up. Well, every Congressman who voted for it can say
    ``That's right. I voted for Clinton's plan. It didn't pass, and the
    number of uninsured people went up.''
        So I'm trying to do something about that. In 1997 we passed the
    Children's Health Insurance Program. And we got it off the ground, and
    it was a little slow starting. But last year we doubled the number of
    people in CHIP, and there are now 2 million children who have health
    insurance. But there are 3 million more who are eligible, and what I
    want you to understand--a lot of them are in the Rio Grande Valley--and
    the thing I want to emphasize is, we appropriated the money. The money
    is there, and we have to get these children enrolled.
        And I also asked the Congress this year to cover the parents of
    these children, almost all of them working people but on very limited
    incomes. Cover them. If we covered the parents and children that are
    income-eligible for the health insurance program for children, we could
    literally cover 25 percent of all the uninsured people in the United
    States, and they're the 25 percent that need the coverage the worst. So
    I ask you to help me pass that.
        In addition to that--and I'll bet there are a lot of these people in
    the valley, as well--the fastest growing group of people without health
    insurance are people between the ages of 55 and 65 who take early
    retirement or change jobs, and their new job doesn't have health
    insurance for people their age, or they take early retirement, and they
    don't have any health insurance until they're old enough to get on
    Medicare.
        I have proposed to let them buy into Medicare and to give them a tax
    credit to make it affordable. This will not in any way weaken Medicare.
    If anything, it will strengthen Medicare, because we're not taking money
    out of the Medicare Trust Fund. But if you think about the hundreds and
    hundreds of thousands of people out there today who are, because they're
    in an age group that I'm rapidly approaching, are not exactly attractive
    for insurance but are, on average, healthier than people over 65, we
    need to provide some way for them to get health care and for the health
    care providers to be reimbursed if they give them health care. And the
    simplest, easiest thing is to let them buy into the Medicare program.
        Let me say a word about education. In the country as a whole, test
    scores are up; high school graduation rates are up; college-going rates
    are up. That's the good news. The bad news is there is still a
    differential in the high school dropout rate that is breathtaking
    between Hispanic-Americans and the rest of America. And the dropout rate
    from college, once people go, is very high.
        So I have proposed a budget that puts a billion dollars more into
    Head Start, the biggest increase in a generation; that would provide
    after-school programs and summer school programs in every troubled
    school in America where there's a high dropout rate, and we know that
    makes a big difference. And we passed in '97 the HOPE scholarship, which
    gives a $1,500 tax credit for people for the first 2 years of college,
    and further tax relief for later years, which has effectively opened the
    doors of college to all Americans, at least to community college.
        I have asked the Congress to add to that a tax deduction for up to
    $10,000 of college tuition and to make it at the 28 percent rate, even
    for people in the 15 percent income tax bracket. That would effectively
    open the doors of 4 years of college to every person in this country. It
    could change the future of the Rio Grande Valley. And I hope you will
    help me pass that in this coming session.

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        I also have made proposals that would enable us to have the funds to
    help prepare 5,000 schools every year and to do major repairs or build
    6,000 more schools. We have a lot of kids that are in overcrowded
    classrooms, a lot of kids that are in classrooms so broken down they
    can't even be wired for the Internet. So I hope you will support the
    education agenda.
        In the area of families, I believe that one of the biggest
    unresolved problems we have today, or just daily challenges, is the
    challenge that families face when they have to work, particularly when
    both parents work or when there's a single-parent household and they
    have children, school-aged children, or even preschool children. So I
    recommended an expansion in the child care tax credit. I recommended
    making it refundable for low income people who sometimes spend as much
    as 25 percent of their income on child care. I recommended a $3,000 tax
    credit--that's $3,000 off your tax bill--to pay for the long-term care
    costs of people who are caring for elderly or disabled relatives. I
    think that is a very important thing, and I hope the Congress will
    finally agree to go on and raise the minimum wage.
        The last point I want to make on families and health care is what I
    made today--we have finally gotten a conference to begin tomorrow on the
    Patients' Bill of Rights, which I think is very important, to guarantee
    people the right to see a specialist, the right not to lose their health
    care coverage or to be required to change doctors in the middle of a
    treatment, a pregnancy or a cancer treatment, for example. And I think
    it's important that we pass that.
        The last economic point I want to make is that we now have an
    opportunity that we didn't have in '92, and that is to focus even more
    sharply on the people and the communities who are still mired in poverty
    and a high unemployment rate, the people who have not fully participated
    in this economic recovery.
        Now, the empowerment zone program, which is very well-known in south
    Texas because of the leadership of the Vice
    President--we've had our big national empowerment zone conference down
    here in the valley not very long ago last year. But I think it's time to
    both increase the number of these zones and increase the financial
    incentives to invest in them. I know you want to get high-tech business
    in here.
        You know, if there is some extra risk or some extra cost by going
    further away, we ought to help to defray that, because we will never
    have a better opportunity--ever--to prove what I believe: that we can
    bring free enterprise to people and places that have been left behind
    and that this is a way not only to help the people in those categories,
    the high unemployment areas in south Texas, this is a way to keep the
    American economic expansion going with no inflation because we'll be
    adding new businesses, new workers, new taxpayers, and new consumers all
    at the same time.
        I'm also, as I'm sure you've noticed from the emphasis I've given it
    for the last year or so, trying to get Congress to pass sweeping
    legislation that would cover every area of high unemployment in the
    country, to give people the same incentives to invest to bring new
    businesses to these areas we now give people to invest to bring new
    businesses to South America or Asia or Africa. I'm not against helping
    poor countries overseas. I just think we ought to have the same
    incentives to invest in poor areas here at home in America. I hope
    you'll help me pass that new markets legislation.
        One big part of that that I'm going to emphasize in a couple of
    months is closing the so-called digital divide, which would really be
    helped if you were able to recruit some high-tech companies down here
    and train people to work in them. Because one thing we know is that when
    people have access to computers, not just children in the schools but
    their parents at home or in a community center--and I've proposed
    establishing 1,000 of them across America to give all adults access to
    the Internet--we know that innovative people find new ways to improve
    their lot in life.
        For example, probably some of you here have bought or sold something
    on the website eBay, which is a great trading center. There are now over
    20,000 Americans, many of whom were once on welfare, who are now
    actually making a living--it's their full-time job--trading on eBay. No
    one would have ever thought of this as a possible opportunity for poor
    people, as a way to create small businesses.
        I've established all these community development financial
    institutions around the country since I've been President. We're making
    a lot of microcredit loans. Think about that. Think about being able to
    loan somebody enough money just to buy a computer with good capacity.
    They could be fully connected to the Internet, and they figure out how
    to make their own

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    living. There are all kinds of options out there, and we ought to leave
    no stone unturned in trying to get at the heart of this poverty problem
    and empower every person who has not yet been a part of this prosperity
    to do well.
        Now, here's the last point I want to make. If you were to ask me to
    put in a sentence what has been behind the change I tried to bring to
    America the last 7 years, what is behind the philosophy that governs
    everything I do, it is my belief that everyone counts and everyone ought
    to have a chance, and we all do better when we help each other, that we
    really have to build one America, and that the Government isn't the
    source or the solution to all the problems but is an absolutely
    imperative partner. We have to create conditions and empower people to
    make the most of their own lives.
        And in that connection, I have to tell you that one of the things
    that continues to bother me in my efforts to build one America is the
    problem that I continue to have in the United States Senate in getting
    judges confirmed--you want to talk to me about judges--particularly
    judges who come from diverse backgrounds. And there's always a political
    element in the appointment of judges, and sometimes when the President
    is of one party and the Senate is of another party, they don't confirm
    as many of the President's appointees. But there has never been an
    example like what we've seen of the deliberate slow walk and refusal to
    have hearings, refusal to vote up or down on judges.
        I appointed an El Paso lawyer named Enrique Moreno to serve on the Fifth Circuit. He graduated from
    Harvard and Harvard Law School. He'd come a long way from El Paso. The
    American Bar Association said he was well-qualified to be a judge. I had
    the highest percentage of judges recommended well-qualified by the ABA
    of any President since they've been doing the ratings, even though I've
    appointed more Hispanic, more African-Americans, more female, and a more
    diverse judiciary in history. And everybody concedes they're less
    political than my two predecessors. They just show up for work, by and
    large, and do their job. And I cannot even get a hearing because your
    Senators won't support it.
        I have appointed--I nominated a judge named Julio Fuentes for the Third Circuit and Richard Paez in California. They're supposed to give me a vote on him
    in March, but that's another thing I wish you would communicate,
    particularly if you're not a lawyer. You could have more influence in a
    way if you're not a lawyer. Tell your Senators that when the President
    appoints a person who worked himself all the way through Harvard Law
    School out of El Paso, and the ABA says he's well-qualified, and Texas
    needs the judge, give the man a hearing, and give him a vote. And if
    they're not for him, have the courage to vote against him. Don't keep
    killing these things.
        I keep telling people in Washington, ``We can do our business. We
    can show up for work. We can make progress, and we can still have
    elections. There will still be things we honestly disagree about. But we
    owe it to the American people, without regard to our party or our
    philosophy, to believe that everybody counts, everybody ought to have a
    chance, and we'll all do better when we help each other.''
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:05 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to Jesus and Elvia Saenz, luncheon hosts; and
    Alonzo Cantu, member, board of directors, Congressional Hispanic Caucus
    Institute.