[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

[[Page 1214]]

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.''

[[Page 1215]]

    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.