    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [June 22, 2000]
    [Pages 1212-1215]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Federal Victory Fund Reception in Phoenix, Arizona
    June 22, 2000

        Thank you very much. I appreciate the standing ovation. [Laughter]
    Let me say I'm delighted to be back in Arizona again. If you only knew
    how many times I complained that I wasn't coming out here enough, you'd
    really be impressed. [Laughter] I love coming here.
        I want to say, in his absence, that Bruce Babbitt has done a magnificent job as Secretary of the
    Interior, and I'm very proud of him. We had some rocky issues in the
    first couple of years, and we still do some things that our friends in
    the Republican Party don't agree with. But we decided together--and
    we've been friends for many years because we served as Governors
    together--that all these emerging issues in the West, the challenges of
    reconciling all this growth with the environmental challenges, basically
    were ignored by the other party when they were in power, and they
    normally did well in the elections because the Federal Government wasn't
    getting in anybody's hair. And then when the Democrats got in, they
    tended to try to deal with them, but in a way that alienated so many
    people, we found further behind. So we decided that we would not ignore
    them, but we'd try to do it in a way that would make connections with
    people at the grassroots

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    level. And I think, by and large, the strategy has worked, and I'm very
    grateful.
        We set aside, among other things, more land--in national monuments,
    in the 43 million roadless acres of the national forests, otherwise--
    than any administration in the history of this country except those of
    Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. And I'm very proud of that. And you
    should be proud of him.
        I want to thank the gentleman to my left--to your left, my right--Ed
    Rendell, the former mayor of Philadelphia
    who has been a great chair of our Democratic Party and who was leading
    us to victory this year. And I really thank him for doing that. I
    decided he ought to be chair of the party when Al Gore and I won
    Philadelphia with about 80 percent of the vote and a bigger margin than
    President Kennedy did when it was a much larger city. So I figured if he
    could work that kind of mathematical magic in Philadelphia, there's no
    telling what he could do with the country as a whole. [Laughter]
        I want to thank Steve for his long
    friendship and Janet for her outstanding
    leadership. I also want to thank her publicly--I've never had a chance
    to do this before--for her sterling service as United States attorney
    here in my first term, before she became the attorney general.
        I want to acknowledge the event cochairs here, John
    Shacknai, Bob and Carolyn
    Wolf, Delbert and
    Jewell Lewis, and Fred DuVal, who is much missed in the White House, but I thank him
    for what he did. And let's give them all a big hand. [Applause]
        Now, I also want to say a heartfelt thanks to one present and one
    former Member of Congress, Ed Pastor and former
    Senator Dennis DeConcini. I think I'm going
    to see them sometime today. I don't know if they're in this room, but
    they really did a lot to help ensure the success that this country has
    enjoyed in the last 7\1/2\ years.
        I will be brief, but I want to say some things as succinctly as I
    can. First, I am more grateful than you know that in 1996 we won the
    electoral votes of Arizona, for the first time since Harry Truman in
    1948.
        Second, I am profoundly grateful for the success our country has
    enjoyed in these last 7\1/2\ years, that Steve
    and Janet outlined. I've worked real hard
    to try to turn this country around and move it in the right direction.
    And I think we were helped by the fact that I had been a Governor for
    nearly a dozen years, that I had dealt with most of the problems that
    the country was facing in 1992, and that we actually had specific, clear
    ideas about what we wanted to do and we laid them before the American
    people in great detail.
        And that brings me to the present moment. Everybody knew what the
    problem was in 1992. The wheel was about to run off. The economy was in
    bad shape. The society was deteriorating by most indicators, and we knew
    what we had to do. We also knew that Washington was just paralyzed by
    this sort of partisan fight when basically people would say, ``You got
    an idea. I've got an idea. Let's fight. Otherwise, neither one of us
    will get on the evening news.'' And so there was a real penalty put on
    thinking. If you thought you had new ideas and you tried to work things
    out, there was really no reward. And most of us out in the country,
    whether we lived in Arizona or Arkansas or someplace else, thought that
    it didn't make much sense. So we set about trying to turn the country
    around, and the results have been good.
        But now we're in a new election season. And people ask me all the
    time, ``Well, who's going to win? Do you think the Vice President is
    going to win?'' I say yes. ``Do you think Hillary is going to win?'' I
    say yes. And I do, on both counts. ``Do you think the Democrats will win
    back to Congress?'' Of course, I say yes. But here's the real truth: Who
    will win this election depends upon, more than anything else, what the
    people of America think the election is about. The question you ask may
    determine the answer you get.
        So that's what I want to say to all of you, because when I leave,
    somebody might ask you why you were here today and what you intend to
    do. And there's a lot of work for you to do between now and November,
    and you have to decide what you think the election is about. The
    election in 1992 was about what we were going to do to turn our country
    around. In 1996 it was about whether we would continue and build on that
    direction and build our bridge to this new century. This election is
    about, in my view, what do we intend to do with our prosperity.
        And I would argue to you that what a country does at a magic moment
    like this is just as stern a test of its judgment and its character as
    what a country does when it's in trouble. Anybody in this audience
    today, who is over

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    30 years of age at least, can cite at least one time in your life when
    you made a mistake, a personal or a professional mistake, not because
    things were so tough but because things were so good you thought there
    was no penalty for the failure to concentrate and think about the long
    run.
        Now, for me, what we ought to do with our prosperity is take
    advantage of it, because nothing lasts forever--nothing bad, nothing
    good, nothing lasts forever. So take advantage of this moment to build
    the future of our dreams for our children, to deal with the big
    challenges: to deal with the aging of America, to deal with the plain
    environmental challenges that are out there because of the way we have
    grown as a nation and as a world, to deal with the challenge of giving
    all of our children a world-class education.
        And while I'm at it, I'd like to compliment the legislators. It
    seems to me like there's a bipartisan majority in Arizona for really
    doing something significant about the schools, and I hope it will get
    through the legislature. And I want to thank the Republicans who are
    supporting--[applause].
        What are we going to do to help all these families who now have jobs
    balance work and family? Our country is behind other countries in that.
    You'd be amazed how many parents I talk to, whether they're working for
    minimum wage or whether they're making six-figure incomes, who worry
    every single day about how they're going to meet their responsibilities
    at work and meet their most important responsibilities of raising their
    children.
        There are all these really big, interesting challenges. The reason
    that I want the Vice President to win,
    apart from my personal loyalty to him and the role that he's played--and
    he has been, by far, the most significant Vice President in the history
    of the country. No other Vice President--I'm a pretty good student of
    American history, and this is not just election-year hype--no other Vice
    President has ever had anything close to the positive impact on the
    affairs of America and the lives of the American people as Vice
    President than Al Gore has had. Not Harry Truman; not Theodore
    Roosevelt; not anybody as Vice President.
        So when people say, ``Why do you think he should be elected?'' I say, first of all, because he'll
    keep the prosperity going; secondly, because he really wants to extend
    it to the people and places that have been left behind and aren't fully
    part of this; and thirdly, because he understands the future, and he can
    take us there.
        We worked very hard to build America's high-tech future because we
    fought for a technology act, the Telecommunications Act of '96, that was
    pro-competition and pro-education, with the E-rate that gives discounts
    so that all of our schools and public libraries can hook up to the
    Internet. We've got a very different world today. He understands a big issue that all of you will face sooner
    or later--probably sooner rather than later--which is, how are we going
    to preserve people's privacy rights when all of our financial records
    and all of our health care records are on somebody's computer somewhere?
    That's just one example.
        You need to elect a President now who will keep the prosperity
    going, who will extend it to people and places left behind, and who
    understands the future and can lead us there.
        Now, I want you to know three things about this election. One, it is
    really big. It is just as important as the elections of '92 and '96,
    because we may never have another chance in our lifetime to have a
    moment where there is so much economic prosperity, social progress, and
    relative absence of domestic crisis or foreign threat. So it's
    important.
        Two, there are real differences between the parties, from the
    Presidential candidates to the Senate candidates to the House
    candidates--real differences--and that's good. It means we can have an
    exciting and fundamentally positive election. We've had too many
    elections in the last 20 years where both candidates tried to convince
    the voters that their opponents were just a notch above a car thief. And
    you don't have to do that. You can assume in this election that
    everybody is honorable, that everybody is going to try to do what they
    say they're going to do, and there are differences. So, one, it's
    important; two, there are differences.
        The third thing you need to know is, only the Democrats want you to
    know what the differences are. [Laughter] For example, there is no
    question that it will be very appealing for the Republicans, beginning
    with the nominee for President, to say,
    ``Hey, vote for us, and we'll give you a tax cut worth over a trillion
    dollars over the next 10 years. And we can easily afford it because
    we're going to have such a big surplus, because it's projected.''

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        And we say--the Vice President said last week--``No, no, no. First
    of all, let's start by saving 20 percent of the projected surplus by
    taking the taxes you pay for Medicare and putting it in a lockbox so it
    can't be spent on anything besides Medicare. We'll pay the debt down
    until we need it, and we'll have a hedge in case this surplus doesn't
    materialize. And, yes, let's have a tax cut, but let's focus it on the
    people who really need it and on their need to educate their children,
    to pay for child care, to pay for long-term care, to accumulate wealth
    and save for their own retirement.''
        But let's not spend it all, because if you pass a tax cut now based
    on an assumed surplus--it's self-serving for me; I ought to say, ``Of
    course we're going to have a multi-trillion dollar surplus over the next
    10 years, and I produced it, ha-ha.'' But the truth is, you don't know
    any more than I do whether we're going to have all that money over the
    next 10 years. And I think--people ask me all the time, ``What great
    economic innovation did you bring to Washington?'' And I give a one-word
    answer: arithmetic. [Laughter] We brought arithmetic back. We said,
    ``Look, if we don't have it, we shouldn't spend it. We've got to get rid
    of the deficit. We've got to pay the debt down.''
        Now, the Democrats should be for, yes, investing in education; yes,
    giving working people tax breaks; yes, investing in the environment and
    scientific research. We should be for all that. But we should also be
    for continuing to pay down the debt. Why? Because it will keep interest
    rates lower. It will stave off inflation. It will keep the stock market
    growing. It will keep the economy stronger. We need to do it.
        You don't know any more than I do whether all this money that we now
    project is going to be there over the next 10 years. And if we give it
    away all on the front end in a tax cut, you know as well as I do, if it
    doesn't materialize, we'll be right back into the bad old days of
    deficits. Big issue. So you can't pretend that there are no consequences
    here. And if you want this thing to keep going, prudence, arithmetic,
    relying on human experience is really important.
        I'll just give you a couple of other examples. We're for the minimum
    wage, and they're not. We're for a real Patients' Bill of Rights; a few
    of them are, but most of them aren't. We believe you can grow the
    economy and improve the environment in the information age. It is no
    longer necessary for a country to stay rich or grow rich by putting more
    greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Most of them don't believe that,
    but I do. And I believe the evidence is clear.
        Vice President Gore said the other day, ``Vote for me, and I will
    build on and strengthen President Clinton's declaration of over 40
    million roadless acres in our national forests.'' In the primary--
    something that the Republicans hope you'll develop amnesia about--
    [laughter]--in the primary, his opponent said, ``Vote for me, and I'll
    get rid of that order protecting those 43 million roadless acres.''
    There's a real difference.
        So there are real differences. And what I want--what I would like to
    ask you to do is go out to the people who aren't here, people you talk
    to every day, people that might not be Democrats--independents,
    Republicans--people with money, middle class people that spend
    everything they earn paying their bills every 2 weeks, people that work
    in this hotel and have to struggle to pay their bills--and talk to them
    about it, and say, ``Look, this is a gift, folks. We can have an old-
    fashioned American election. We don't have to be swayed by 30-second ads
    saying that this person's bad or that person's bad. Let's assume
    everybody's honorable and that they'll do what they say they're going to
    do.'' And get the differences out there, and ask people to think about
    what they think this is about.
        I have done everything I could to leave our country in good shape.
    And I just want us to take advantage of this moment to build a future we
    dream of for the kids that are in this audience. And if we do that, then
    the outcome will be clear, here and throughout America.
        Thank you very much.

     Note:  The President spoke at 12:30 p.m. in Salon 2/3 at the Ritz
    Carlton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to reception cohost Steve
    Owens; Janet Napolitano, Arizona attorney general, who introduced the
    President; and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas.