[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[June 22, 2000]
[Pages 1227-1233]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in San Diego
June 22, 2000
Let me say, first of all, Mike,
you gave a wonderful talk, and you gave a wonderful toast. And I like it
either way. [Laughter] And I want to thank you and Carol and all of you for the work you did to make this a
success tonight. I'd like to thank California's first lady, Sharon
Davis, for being here. I'd like to thank
Representative Bob Filner and his wife,
Jane, who are here. Thank you for being here.
Former Representative and chief of staff to the Governor, Lynn
Schenk, thank you for being here.
And I also would like to thank the leaders of the Barona and Viejas
Tribes for their support and for the example they're setting. We had a
great talk around the table tonight about the differences among the
tribes in terms of economic circumstances and potential in Indian
country throughout America. One of the great honors of my Presidency has
been the opportunity I've had to spend more time with more people from
the Native American tribes and the tribal governments than any President
probably in history. I even invited all the tribal leaders to meet me at
the White House; for the first time since James Monroe was President in
the 1820's, that happened. It was quite wonderful. So it's been a great
thing.
I would like to thank Bertrand, the owner
of Mr. A's Restaurant, for a wonderful dinner tonight. Was this great,
or what? [Applause]
[[Page 1228]]
When I used to do these back home--and we didn't eat like this--
[laughter]--I feel pretty great about it.
I'd like to thank Mayor Rendell, who
I did--he was looking forward to a fairly peaceful retirement of a year
or so, and then he was going to ascend to the governorship of
Pennsylvania, which I still hope he will do. So I told him I had this
little part-time job I was interested in him doing. And he has part-
timed himself all across America, exhausting himself, trying to make
sure that we preserve the progress in this country and preserve the
prosperity. And I'm very, very grateful to him. He's been a great leader
for our party. And all these young people that work on these events, I'm
grateful to them.
I'll tell you a story. I don't know about a joke, but I'll tell you
a story. You gave the Irish blessing so--my people are from a place
called Fermanagh. They were Irish Protestants living on the border.
Fermanagh is a little village literally on the border of Northern
Ireland and Ireland, in the west. And my mother was a Cassidy. So we
found the Protestant Cassidys; we traced them all the way back to a
farmhouse built in the 1750's. And I went to Ireland in '95; they
actually gave me a watercolor of the farmhouse, which is the only--the
oldest known residence of relatives of mine--at least, any relative
that's willing to admit it still. [Laughter]
And you know I've had this remarkable love affair with Ireland,
because I got the United States involved in the peace process, and it's
worked out in a remarkable way. I went to Dublin in '95; we had 100,000
people in the street; it was really one of the great days of my life. I
turned on the Christmas lights in Belfast, and there were 50,000 people
there. It's just been unbelievable.
What happens, especially when you're not running anymore, you tend
to get a little free with what you say. [Laughter] Sometimes you
actually commit the sin of saying exactly what you think. [Laughter] I
can say this because we've had a happy ending now. [Laughter] You may
remember, for a while we got the institutions of self-government up to
Northern Ireland, and everybody is working along together, and then all
of a sudden it all gets taken down because they can't agree on the
decommissioning issue. And it was maddening--and all these people had
been working for years, many of them a lot longer than I had thought--
that after we had actually ended the Irish civil war and we had got it
all done, it was all going to pieces again.
And I said--not thinking about stereotyping the Irish, of which I
am one--I said, this reminds me--I said these two sides in Northern
Ireland remind me of two guys that are kind of drunks, and they decide
they're going to quit drinking. And they walk out of the bar together,
arm in arm, and right as they get to the swinging door they say no, and
they turn around and go back.
So I was blasted all over Ireland. ``Clinton let us down. He's
stereotyping the Irish.'' And I was really worried about it until about
3 days later I got in the mail a copy of a letter to the editor from the
Irish Times saying, ``I see all this criticism of President Clinton for
comparing us, and all those things he said.'' And he said, ``It is
terrible what he said; I've been a drunk all my adult life, and I resent
being compared to those people.'' [Laughter] So sometimes when you're
uptight, you've just got to tell a joke and laugh it off and go on.
But anyway, I'm delighted to be here and I'm delighted that--I sort
of thought there would come a time this year when I'd show up at one of
these dinners and no one would be there. [Laughter] And so I'm very
grateful to you. I'm grateful to the people of California, and I'm very
grateful to the people of San Diego. I've had a special relationship
with this community from the beginning. I love it here. My family and I
have had a wonderful set of experiences here. We had a wonderful
vacation here one year around--a springtime vacation. And I'm
particularly glad that I came here tonight and somebody showed up.
[Laughter]
I got a call last week from a very distinguished citizen of the
world who said, ``Well, Mr. President, for a lame duck, you're still
quacking rather loudly.'' [Laughter] So that's what I'm trying to do.
I would like to just say a couple of things to follow up on what
Mayor Rendell said. I thank you for coming here, and we'll do our best
to invest the funds you have given us wisely. But we need your help in
telling people why you feel this way. People ask me all the time, they
come up to me and they say, ``Who do you think is going to get
elected?'' And I always say, ``I think the Vice President is going to
win.'' I do. I said it a year and a half ago when he was 18 points
behind in the polls. Then they kind of say, ``Do you think
Hillary
[[Page 1229]]
is going to win?'' I say, ``Of course''--I mean, what do you expect me
to say? But I actually believe it.
But let me say what I think the real issue is in all these Senate
and the House and the President's race. And I do think we're going to
win. But the issue is, what do the voters think the election is about?
This is one of those deals--we've got a lot of trial lawyers in this
room. Sometimes the answers people give depends upon the way the
question is asked or what you think the real question is. And this
election really--the outcome of this election is going to be determined,
by and large, by what people think this election is about.
And I think if we can demonstrate, number one, that we've been
working here for 8 years with a core set of ideas designed to give
opportunity to every responsible citizen and to create a community in
which any American can be a part; and that we've tried to be a force for
peace and freedom and prosperity and decency around the world; and that
what we need to do is to build on that, not undo it--if we can make that
point, then the second point we need to make is that we have to decide,
we need to make a conscious decision about what to do with our
prosperity. I mean, sometimes I feel like a broken record, but I will
say this over and over and over again. Anybody who is over 30 years old
can remember at least one time in his or her life when you have made a
whopping mistake not because you were faced with adverse circumstances
but because things were rocking along so well you thought there was no
penalty to the failure to concentrate. Anybody who is over 30 years old
can remember at least one time in your personal life or in your work
life when a mistake has been made because it seemed that there were no
consequences to the failure to concentrate because everything was
rolling along.
And if you really listen to the two sides, the other side really
seems to be saying, ``Look, we need to just take this thing while it's
coming because nobody can mess up this economy if they try.'' And I
don't believe that. I think we need to make a conscious decision as a
people that we have an obligation, a solemn obligation to our children's
generation, to use this magic moment to deal with the big issues out
there, the big challenges, the big opportunities of this century.
Now, if you get that far, then you have to say, what are those
challenges; what do you think they ought to do; and are there any real
differences between the parties? And I have to tell you that I think
it's obvious what we ought to be doing. We need to figure out how to
keep this prosperity going and spread its benefits to people and places
who have been left behind.
We need to figure out how to make people who have jobs better able
to balance their responsibilities at work and their responsibilities at
home--something America still has not done enough on. Child care,
preschool, after-school, health care for the families that are working
out there that don't have it yet--all of those things.
We need to figure out how to continue to grow the economy and do
even better at preserving and improving the environment, and especially
dealing with the problem of climate change.
We've proved that we can get the crime rate down. We ought to commit
ourselves to making this the safest big country in the world. We can do
that in 5 years if we made up our mind to do it.
We ought to commit ourselves to paying America's debt off. We're not
running deficits anymore; we're running surpluses. I think it ought to
be a national policy goal to pay off the public debt. That's what I
believe.
Now, I have to tell you, that's a very controversial position among
Democrats, because we also want to spend more money to educate people,
to provide health care to poor people. But here's why I'm for that. If
we keep paying the debt down, we'll keep interest rates down. It'll be
easier for people to borrow money. It will be easier to invest. There
will be more jobs. There will be higher incomes. And we'll keep the
expansion going along. And the best social program any government can
provide is a good private sector job. You've got to have a growing
economy first. We wouldn't be here having this conversation. This
election wouldn't even be about all this stuff. We're sitting here
arguing about how to spend the surplus, and is it one or two trillion
dollars over the next 10 years?
If I had told you in '92, if I had to come to California and I
said, ``I want you to vote for me, and I'll get rid of this deficit''--
we'd been running a deficit for 30 years, and we
[[Page 1230]]
quadrupled the national debt in the last 12 years--``now vote for me,
and I'll get rid of it. And before I'm gone we'll have three different
surpluses, and we'll know that we can pay off our debt in the first
decade of the 21st century.'' Do you know what you would have said? You
would have said, ``He seems like such a nice man, but he's slightly
daft, and we better send him home.'' [Laughter]
But it happened. People ask me all the time, what magical new idea
did we bring to Washington in the economic area? And I always say, in
one word, arithmetic. That is, we stopped playing games with the
numbers. We stopped promising people something we couldn't deliver. We
said, if we're going to spend the money, we've got to have the money.
And we made hard choices. I got rid of hundreds of programs so that we
could double our investment in education while we were cutting the
deficit. And those things had to be done.
Now, what's all this got to do with where we are? So here we are
now. If you believe these big challenges ought to be faced, then you
have to say, well, are there consequences to the decision of who gets to
be President? Are there consequences to the decision who gets elected to
the Senate, who gets elected to the Congress? And I would argue that
there are big differences between these candidates. And if you'll listen
very closely to the debate, the Democrats are a lot more interested in
you knowing what the differences are than the Republicans are, because
they know if you really understand the differences, two-thirds of the
people agree with us.
For example, should we say, okay, now we have the surplus at $2
trillion over 10 years, estimated, projected, over the next 10 years. So
their policy is to spend over half of it on a tax cut, $1.3 trillion,
and then to partially privatize Social Security, which--and guarantee
the benefits of everybody still in the system, which will cost about
another $800 billion. So there's $2 billion there. And then to pay for
``star wars'' and school vouchers and some other promises, so that we'll
be back into deficits sooner or later in the next decade if we get the
whole $2 trillion.
Our policy, as reflected in the Vice President's position, is we
may not get the $2 trillion. That great line from ``Jerry McGuire''--
``Show me the money!'' The problem with all this tax cut stuff--it
sounds great, and most of you would be better off in the short run with
their policy. But I emphasize ``in the short run'' because if we have a
big tax cut with 4 percent unemployment, it will be perceived as
inflationary; interest rates will go up more than they've already gone
up; it will slow the economy; it will cut the profitability of your
investments; and therefore, the projected surplus will not materialize,
and we'll be right back in the deficit suit.
So we're put in a position of telling you things you may not want
to hear, like the Vice President said the other day, why don't we just
start by saying we're going to save 20 percent of this projected
surplus, because $400 billion of this projected surplus are taxes you're
paying for Medicare. So let's just wall it off, use it to pay down the
debt until we need it, and then Medicare will last a lot longer.
Why don't we have a tax cut, but less than--and a sizable one, but
still less than half the one they propose, so we can focus on wealth
creation for people that can't do it otherwise, help them establish
their own savings account, child care, sending kids to college, long-
term care when you've got an elderly or disabled relative who is sick,
and then save some money to invest in our future--in education, in
science and technology, in new environmental technologies, in health
care, and the things that will change our future?
Now, there's a huge difference. What do you propose to do with the
surplus? What do you propose to do with this moment of prosperity? It
will affect economic policy; it will affect social policy. What are the
other differences?
Well, we think we ought to bend over backwards and let everybody
participate. We think the people that served this food tonight, if
they're working hard and obeying the law, have just as much right as we
do to benefit from this new economy. That's what we think. And so we
think we ought to raise the minimum wage; they don't. We think we also
ought to have a tax cut for working people that have modest wages with
children at home.
We think that we ought to pass the Patients' Bill of Rights, and
they don't. We think we ought to have a Medicare-based, broad-based
prescription program for seniors so that people can get medicine that
can't afford it today, and they don't. If we were creating Medicare
today,
[[Page 1231]]
we'd never create Medicare without a drug program today. It was a
doctor-and-hospital program in 1965 because that's what medicine was.
Now anybody that lives to be 65 years old has got a life expectancy of
82. And if they take care of themselves and they have access to good
health care, they could live longer.
In a few days, we'll have an announcement that the human genome
project is essentially completed, its basic mapping. You will then see
in the next couple of years this breathtaking explosion of discoveries
about the pattern and genes that make you more likely to get certain
kinds of cancer or Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or become overweight or
have a heart attack or whatever. You'll see all this stuff. And you will
begin to see kind of individualized plans develop for little babies when
the mothers bring them home from the hospital that will change the whole
landscape of health care. And it wouldn't surprise me a bit to see
children being born within the next 10 years, in our country and other
developed countries, that are being born with a life expectancy of 90
years. That is going to change everything.
So if you're going to live that long, it seems to me that the
society's obligation is for people not only to live as long but to live
as well as possible. One thing the Congress did on the bipartisan
fashion--and I applaud everybody who did, including the Republicans, and
take the earnings limit off Social Security. We need to do that. You
can't have--if a huge percentage of your population is over 65 and a
bunch of them are healthy as can be and they want to work, you don't
want to have an economic incentive for them not to work when you're
going to have a ratio of people on Social Security to not--of only two
to one.
So we have to think of all these things. Now, why am I for Al
Gore for President? Not just on all these
issues. I could go through--let me just talk about crime a minute. I
want to talk about crime. I want to talk about welfare.
We got a bipartisan welfare reform bill through, but I had to veto
two bills. Why? Because I agreed with the Republicans that people who
were able-bodied on welfare who could work should work, but what I did
not agree with is that we should abandon the national guarantee of
health care and nutrition to their children. So we finally got a bill.
And I said, ``We've got work requirements in here. This is not going to
be a disincentive. But we've got to take care of these children.'' So I
vetoed two bills, and we finally got one we agreed on. I signed it, and
they were saying, ``Well, maybe it was too weak.'' All I know is, since
I became President, we've got the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years, and
they're less than half the size they were in '93.
On the crime bill, the first time I ever did an event with Ed
Rendell when he was mayor was on an
antidrug, anticrime, antigang event. Ed and I were so dumb, we didn't
know crime was a Republican issue; we thought it was an American issue.
[Laughter] All this idea that it's a Republican issue is like that's
what's the matter with Washington; it's all about words and stuff
instead of what are you really producing.
So we had a crime program: Put more cops in the streets, do more
things to keep kids off the street and out of trouble, and take steps to
get guns out of the hands of criminals and kids. It wasn't rocket
science. Yes, the improving economy helped the crime rate. Yes, the
aging population in some places helped the crime rate. Yes, the sort of
waning of the crack epidemic helped the crime rate. But put more police
on the streets, giving the kids something positive to do, and doing more
to take guns out of the hands of criminals and children also had
something to do with it.
Now, I realize that it was a political risk. We lost a dozen
members of our caucus in the '94 election because they had the guts to
vote for the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban, because the NRA
convinced people we were going to come and take their guns away. A dozen
gave up their careers so that your kids could be safer. And these people
are still talking about--now they say if Governor Bush wins, they'll have an office in the White House. And
figuratively, they will, because they've made their commitments, and
they'll have to honor them.
But look here, not a single hunter has missed a day in the deer
woods because of the Brady bill or the assault weapons ban. [Laughter]
And when we banned those cop-killer bullets, they still haven't found
the first deer wearing a Kevlar vest. [Laughter] I mean, there are no
problems here. What is the deal here? I mean, what is this about? I
mean, I can say it. One of the reasons that they dislike me so intensely
is that I grew up in one of the all-time hunting cultures of the world.
[[Page 1232]]
But this is crazy. You can't have a society where you take no
sensible steps to keep criminals and little children from having access
to guns. So the Brady bill has kept a half million felons, fugitives,
and stalkers from getting guns. We've got a 35-year low on gun crime.
So what do we want to do? Well, we want to close the gun show
loophole. That means if somebody goes to a gun show, we think we ought
to do a background check. We want child trigger locks on the guns. We
want not to import large capacity ammunition clips which can be used by
people in America to get around the assault weapons ban.
Now, there is still not anybody going to miss a day in the deer
woods. All this rhetoric about gun control is crazy. You know, in
America, we have a constitutional right to travel, too. The Supreme
Court says there is a constitutional right to travel. But if you leave
here and you get in your car and you go home, you'll have seatbelts;
you'll have a speed limit; if you've got a little baby, you'd have a
child restraint law. And you don't ever hear anybody griping about car
control, do you? ``Car control, it's a threat to the constitutional
rights of travel.'' Car control is if I come get your car and put it in
my garage. [Laughter] Otherwise, it's highway safety.
So there is a big difference between our two parties in this. And I
think it's a huge issue. I'm glad we've got a lower crime rate, but this
country is nowhere near as safe as it needs to be. And I don't think we
ought to quit until we're the safest big country in the world. Just like
I don't think we ought to quit paying down the debt until we're out of
debt. And these are big ideas. You get the drift here. And we're
different on these issues.
So the last thing I want to say is, I hope this election will be an
honest, open debate where we posit the fact that the candidates for
President and Senate and Congress are basically honorable people who
intend to keep their commitments and talk about their differences and
have an honest debate. I think if we do that, I think Al Gore will be elected President. I think that all these
great candidates we've got in California--we've got a chance to pick up
several House seats here. I think we'll win all of the ones we've got a
chance to win because they're good candidates and because the voters
will agree with us, because we've got a record that proves that in the
areas where we're different we've gotten results, and because we've got
new ideas.
And I just want to say one word about the Vice President. I think I probably know him better than anybody
outside his family now. There are three reasons that I'd be for him if
he weren't my Vice President and I didn't feel obligated in a profound
and wonderful sense. One is, I agree with the economic policy he's
articulated. I don't think we ought to risk giving away the whole
projected surplus on tax cuts and long-term spending commitments. I
think it's a risky strategy, and it's not worth it. And you wouldn't run
your family business that way, and you wouldn't run your business that
way. And we shouldn't run our Government that way. We worked a long time
to turn this thing around, and we don't want to just squander it again.
Number two, I think he'll work harder
to extend the benefits of this prosperity to people in places that
aren't part of it now, and to help average families balance work and
child rearing, open the doors of college to everybody.
Number three, I think he understands
the future. This is a big deal. Al Gore was talking about global warming
before most people even knew the two words went together. I'm talking
years and years and years ago he was talking about it. Now, even the
major oil companies admit that it's real. The first time we ever had
lunch together, he showed me this chart he's got about greenhouse gas
emissions into the atmosphere and how much they've gone up. And in the 8
years we've been here in the White House, 7 of them were 7 of the 10
hottest years recorded since 1400.
Al Gore was talking about the Internet
before other people in Congress. He's been falsely accused of claiming
he created it. That's not true. That's like another one of those bum
raps. Once somebody says something in the press, they just keep on
playing it. It doesn't matter if it's not true anymore; it sort of
acquires it.
What he said was that he introduced
legislation which helped to create it, and it did create it as a
phenomenon that went beyond a small private government research project.
Do you know how many sites there were on the World Wide Web when I
became President? Fifty. How many are there now, everyone? Fifty
million. Fifty, and now 50 million. He understood that.
[[Page 1233]]
He understands that there is all these
fabulous possibilities to close the digital divide and to do things that
we haven't even imagined, but we also are going to have to work hard to
protect our old-fashioned values. For example, if all of our health
records and all of our financial records are on somebody's computer
somewhere, I think that you ought to have some privacy protections. And
there are some things I don't think other people ought to be able to get
unless you say okay. And somebody that understands all the competing
considerations--it would be a good thing to have a President that
understood that.
So I think his economic policy is
right. I think he'll do more to try to help everybody benefit from the
things that are going on. And I think he really understands the future.
And I think that's what you want.
So what I'd like to ask you to do is to go out and tell people who
want to know why you came here tonight--not to hear me tell Irish
jokes--that, well, California is a better place than it was 8 years ago,
they had some ideas, and they turned out to be pretty good; that you
agree with Gore's economic policy, and you
think we ought to spread the benefits to more people and build one
American community; and you want somebody who understands the future and
can lead us there.
And on the critical issues, there really are differences between
the parties, and it's important that they be clarified and uplifted. But
if the people believe that this election is about whether we can build
the future of our dreams for our children, we'll be just fine.
Thank you.
Note: The President spoke at 8:37 p.m. in Dining Room B at Mr. A's
Restaurant. In his remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Michael T. and
Carol Thorsness; Edward G. Rendell, general chair, Democratic National
Committee, and former mayor of Philadelphia, PA; Bertrand Hug, owner,
Mr. A's Restaurant; and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas.