[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[February 8, 2000]
[Pages 205-208]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner
February 8, 2000
Thank you so much. I am delighted to be back in this wonderful,
wonderful old house that contains a lot of good ghosts. I want to thank
Jim and Joe for
hosting this event. I thank all of you for coming. Joe, I want to thank
you for having my mother out to the track. My mother was convinced that
heaven was a racetrack--[laughter]--where she would not have to run.
[Laughter] And I am delighted to be here with you today.
I want to thank all my friends from Maryland for being here,
particularly Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Senator Miller, Speaker Taylor,
party chair Wayne Rogers, and all the others
who are here. Maryland has been very good to me, to Hillary, and Al and
Tipper Gore. It's been one of our best States in both '92 and '96, and
also, thanks to truly outstanding leadership, a genuine laboratory for
virtually every reform I have advocated for 7 years.
You know, one of the things that you have to constantly reconcile
when you're President is, how do you apportion the President's time? And
if I just--after a while, if I keep making announcements in the Rose
Garden or in the Oval Office or in the White House, there's no picture
there, or it's the same picture. So you want to go out, but you don't
want to go too far, because otherwise you spend all day going to and
from someplace, and you miss a day's work. Well, it was my great good
fortune that I happened to be President at a time when Maryland was so
superbly led that every good thing in America that was going on anywhere
was also going on in Maryland. And I thank all of you for that.
I want to thank Ed Rendell and Joe
Andrew and my longtime friend Andy
Tobias for their willingness to come in and lead
our party and try to get us through a very challenging election year,
when we expect to be outspent but not outworked. And we know if we have
enough money to get our message out, it won't matter if they have a
little more. And I want to thank all of you for making them look a
little more successful tonight. We're very grateful to you for that.
And I want to thank Donna Shalala for
being here. She is the longest serving and, I believe, by far the most
effective Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Today we dealt with one of Donna's issues. I went out to the American
Academy of Sciences and signed the first Presidential Executive order of
the 21st century, banning genetic discrimination in employment and
insurance of Federal employees, and endorsing legislation introduced by
Senator Daschle in the Senate and
Congresswoman Louise Slaughter
from New York in the House to ban genetic discrimination in employment
and insurance practices for all employees.
I sort of would like to take that as a little metaphor. That's a
future issue, and it's thrilling to me. Why do we even have to worry
about that? Because in just a little bit, we'll have an entire map of
the sequencing of the human genome. We already know that broken genes
and what they look like--that are high predictors of breast cancer. The
good news about that is, pretty soon we'll have diagnostic techniques
that will either be able to head off the cancer ever developing, with
gene therapies that block the destructive development, or diagnose the
cancer when it's just a few cells and not after
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it has, as it did to my mother and so many others, gone too far.
So we're thinking about this incredible tomorrow. Reminiscent of, I
might say, my '92 campaign song, the old Fleetwood Mac song ``Don't Stop
Thinking About Tomorrow,'' we actually have the luxury of thinking about
these things. And it seems well within reach.
I just today, I ran into the chairman of General Motors at a nonpolitical event--I don't want to get him
roped into our business--anyway, but I complimented him on the Detroit
auto show and on the work that our administration has done under the
leadership of the Vice President with the
auto companies and the auto workers over the last 7 years in what we
call the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles. We now have
automobiles shown at the Detroit auto show--not small two-seaters; big,
roomy four-seaters--that will get 70 to 80 or more miles a gallon, with
fuel injection technology that also obviously dramatically reduces
harmful emissions, including greenhouse gas emissions.
And we were talking about that, and I was explaining to him the work
we're doing with scientists associated with the Department of
Agriculture to increase the efficiency of creating ethanol or other
fuels from biomass, not just corn but rice hulls, weeds, hay, anything.
Right now, the real problem with that is that the conversion ratio is
inefficient. And I don't want to get down into the weeds here, but I
think you should understand it. [Laughter] In other words, the reason
that it's a political issue--if you saw Iowa and you saw our candidates,
the Vice President and Senator
Bradley, arguing about who loved ethanol more--
[laughter]--the reason that's a political issue is that ethanol really
is an environmental net plus, but costs more. And it's not a huge net
plus yet; that is, it takes about 7 gallons of gasoline to produce 8
gallons of ethanol.
The scientists there are working on the same sort of chemical
discovery that led to the conversion of crude oil and gasoline. When
that happens, they estimate that we'll be able to make 8 gallons of
ethanol with one gallon of gasoline. And when you put that with a 70-
mile-a-gallon car, you're getting 500 miles to the gallon of gasoline,
and the whole future of the planet is changed. The whole future of our
ability to deal with climate change and global warming is changed.
Everything will change.
So we're dealing with all these real exciting things. And I think
that's very good. But what I want to say to you, which has already been
said by previous speakers, starting with Mayor Rendell, is the framework within which we will really, seriously
pursue these great opportunities will be set by how the American people
vote or, if they stay home, how they don't vote in the 2000 elections:
Who will be President; who will be in the Senate; who will be in the
House; who will be the Governor; what will be the shape of our decision?
And it is a hugely important election.
I have spent the last 7 years trying to turn this country around,
away from the difficult circumstances we face and the sort of defeatism
and political gridlock and negative attitudes about Government that
existed at that time. And we are on a roll. But what I want to say to
you is, one of the most dangerous times for a great people can be when
we're on a roll. Anybody in this room tonight who is over 30 years old
can recall at least one time in your life when you got in trouble
because you thought things were going so well that it didn't matter
whether you concentrated or whether you worked, whether you took on a
big challenge you had been meaning to take on. You could just sort of
indulge yourself in the moment. There were really no consequences;
everything's rocking along fine.
And what I want to say to you is, even though I'm immensely proud of
the record that the Vice President and Hillary and Tipper and I, Donna
Shalala, our whole administration has been a part of establishing, the
whole purpose of it was to bring us to this moment so we could really
deal with the big challenges of America in the new century. And a time
like this maybe comes along once in a lifetime. And if people make the
wrong decisions, or events intervene before they grab hold of their
potential, everything can change.
So it really matters whether you have someone who is committed to
maintaining our prosperity and bringing economic opportunity to poor
people, poor places that haven't had it.
It really matters that--whether we elect people who understand that
there are enormous pressures on working parents today to fulfill their
responsibilities to their children and their responsibilities at work.
And of all the advanced countries in the world, of all the things we do
well, we do that less well than nearly any other
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place. We need to do more to help people succeed at home and at work.
It really matters whether, now that we've gotten the crime rate down
for 7 years in a row, we have someone as President and in the Congress
who believes we can make America the safest big country in the world and
is willing to keep working to keep guns out of the hands of criminals
and away from children.
It matters whether we have someone who believes we can grow the
economy and improve the environment. It matters whether we have someone
who is committed to keeping America on the forefront of science and
technology and to do it in a way that preserves our values by protecting
our privacy. These things matter.
And if I might say, two things that we have done which were really
different--quite apart from the fact that we had a specific economic
policy, a specific crime policy, a specific welfare policy--they were
different from previous administrations: We said, ``We don't believe
Government is the enemy anymore; we tried that for 12 years and it got
us in one big ditch. But we don't believe Government is the solution to
all our problems. We favor a Government of empowerment and enterprise
that establishes the conditions and gives people the tools to solve
their own problems.'' In other words, we had a positive and unifying
notion of what our Government could be.
The second thing was that we said, ``We don't want to demonize our
opponents anymore, and we don't want them demonizing us.'' We are--we
think the biggest problem in the world is that people are still unable
to get along with those who are different from them. And they turn their
differences into demonization, principally in racial, in religious,
tribal ways, religious ways in the United States, in terms of hate
crimes and all those ways and also against people because they're gay,
and in this town, because people are of different political parties or
have different philosophies. Differences of opinion are good;
demonization is bad. Our administration knew the difference, and it has
made a difference all over the world.
So now, we come to this moment in this house, so I want to tell you
a story. It was my great good fortune to be friends with Averell
Harriman and with Pamela Harriman. When she died at 77 in Paris by a
swimming pool, she was our Ambassador to France, where she had gone as a
young woman after World War II. When he was almost 90, I was spending
the night with him one night in the residence next door. And he actually
got up--Hillary was there, too--and he got up at 11:45 p.m.--he had
already gone to bed--because we were up talking, and he was jealous that
we were still up talking. He was 89 years old. So we got him into a
conversation about what it was like representing President Roosevelt
with Churchill and Stalin. And then, about that time, they also had
hired a professor at Georgetown to work with Governor Harriman who had
taught me international affairs when I was a student there. So this
house has a lot of history to me.
I'd like you to think about this. You've talked about the first time
I was around here was when I was in college, the last time we had an
economic expansion this robust--that is, the one we just lapped--we just
lapped the economic expansion from 1961 to 1969. When I graduated from
high school in 1964, President Kennedy had been killed. But the country
really had--contrary to all these people who now look back and say
that's the beginning of America's long drift into cynicism--that's not
true. The American people were heartbroken, but they united as I have
never seen them, and they tried to rise above it. And they tried to
support President Johnson, and they got--there was a whole new energy
behind the civil rights movement and all the things we believe in.
So when I finished high school in '64, we had 3 percent
unemployment, big growth, no inflation. Everybody thought we were going
to be able to legally resolve our civil rights challenges through the
Congress; we'd all do it in a peaceful, positive way. Vietnam was a
distant place that we thought would be managed some way or another, and
we knew we were standing up against communism. It was the right thing to
do.
Four years later, when I graduated from Georgetown, in my last
semester, Martin Luther King was killed; Senator Kennedy was killed;
President Johnson announced he wouldn't run for reelection; Washington
burned; and a politically divisive message called the Silent Majority,
but really--the first time, getting into America--``America is divided
between `us' and `them,''' carried the day.
I want you to know something. I'm not running for anything, but as
an American, I have waited more than 30 years for my country once again
to be in the position that we lost because
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of the tragedies that happened in 1968, because of the riots in the
streets, because of the breakdown of the economy, because we squandered
our moment. And every one of you that's anywhere near my age who was
moved to believe that we could make a difference by the heroes we lost
30 years ago, you must believe that this election--not '92, not '96--
this election is the moment when America is back where we were when we
lost our way.
Most people don't get a second chance in life as a people. And most
of us who are still here are here only because we did get a few second
chances. America cannot let this go. That's why you ought to be here and
be here for our crowd all the way to November. And if somebody asks you
why you're doing it, you tell them what I just told you: This is the
chance of a lifetime, and we better make the most of it.
Thank you, and God bless you.
Note: The President spoke at 8:29 p.m. at a private residence. In his
remarks, he referred to James D'Orta and Joseph A. DeFrancis, dinner
hosts; Maryland House of Delegates Speaker Casper R. Taylor, Jr.; Wayne
L. Rogers, chairman, Maryland Democratic Party; and Edward G. Rendell,
general chair, Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, and Andrew Tobias,
treasurer, Democratic National Committee. A tape was not available for
verification of the content of these remarks.