[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[February 8, 2000]
[Pages 203-205]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]


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Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Reception
February 8, 2000

    Thank you very much. Thank you, John. 
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here tonight and for your 
support for our party. I wanted to just say a few words, and then we'll 
visit a little.
    I did put out the budget yesterday. And I've had a great week. We 
had the State of the Union, and then I went to Switzerland, to Davos, to 
the international economic forum, to talk about what I believe our 
policy ought to be on trade in the 21st century. And before I issued my 
budget, I got to hear my wife make a 
great speech on Sunday when she announced for the Senate in New York. I 
was very proud of her. I thought she did a wonderful job.
    Today I took action on another item I discussed in the State of the 
Union over at the American academy of sciences. I signed the first 
Executive order of the 21st century, protecting the genetic privacy of 
all Federal employees and asking Congress to do that for all employees 
throughout the country. I think that is a very important issue. We're 
going to have all this huge explosion of knowledge when we finish the 
mapping of the human genome. And we want people to participate to the 
maximum possible degree in all benefits that will flow out of that.
    And if we expect that, then we're going to have to make sure that 
they don't lose the right to a job, lose the right to get insurance, 
lose the right to be considered for promotion because their genetic map 
shows that they might have some propensity to some problem. We want 
people to participate in every conceivable way in learning about it so 
that we can develop blocking gene therapies for all the problems people 
have.
    So this is a very, very exciting time for our country. For me, it's 
actually rather interesting. For the first time in probably 24 years to 
see an election season come and go when I'm not on anybody's ballot 
anywhere--[laughter]--it's rather interesting. I'm having a good time. 
[Laughter] I feel like the cat that ate the canary some days.
    But one of the things I would like to say to all of you that I hope 
you will keep in mind throughout this year--as you support us, as you 
talk to your friends, as you make arguments for our candidates, from the 
White House to the Senate and the House and the governorships--is that 
the Democratic Party now has had 7 years of testing our dominant 
philosophy. And I think it's pretty clear, number one, that it works, 
and number two, that it's shared by a majority of the American people.
    Seven years ago when we began, we just had a roadmap for the future. 
We said, ``Look, we believe that there is a reason the country is 
suffering from economic stagnation and social division and political 
gridlock and that Government's been discredited, that we were operating 
under a philosophy that said Government was the problem, that pitted 
people against one another, and that was very good about talking about 
problems like the deficit but not very good about doing anything about 
it.''
    And we came to this town--our whole administration did, beginning 
with the Vice President and me--with a philosophy that said we were 
going to unify this country, that we were going to try to create 
opportunity for everybody, challenge everyone to be responsible, and 
bring everybody together in one community. And we were actually going to 
try to bring Washington together. I must say, we've had more success in 
the country than we have in Washington. [Laughter] But still, it's been 
an exhilarating effort here, and still a challenge every day.
    So now we've had 7 years of these results. And I just want to say 
what I said in the State of the Union Address. I think it is imperative 
that we not squander this moment under the illusion that because things 
are going well for this country there are no consequences to what we 
say, what we do, and what we advocate. We live in a very dynamic world. 
Things are changing very rapidly. We have never had this kind of 
opportunity to shape the future.
    A few of you in this room are as old as I am. I was telling somebody 
the other day that when we passed the milestone to having the longest 
economic expansion in history, the last one that was this long--the next 
to longest one now--was the one that occurred in the decade of the 
sixties. And you probably all remember that it played out under the 
inflationary

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pressures of what was then known as guns and butter, the Vietnam war and 
our obligations at home.
    When I graduated from high school in 1964, even though the country 
was still hurting over President Kennedy's assassination, we had 
actually come together and lifted ourselves up out of that. And there 
was this sense that there was nothing we couldn't do. Within 2 years, we 
had riots in the streets. The country was deeply divided over the war in 
Vietnam; we had over a half a million people there. Within a couple more 
years, the economy was in terrible shape. And the politics of division, 
basically, began to rule our national campaigns.
    As an American citizen, I have waited now about 35 years for my 
country once again to be in a position to basically be a nation of 
builders and dreamers, where we could shape the future. That's why in 
the State of the Union Address I said we've got to, number one, remember 
what brought us to the dance here. We've got to stay with an economic 
policy that has given us the ability to deal with these things. And I 
know I'm being criticized somewhat, from the right and the left, for 
paying the debt down. But we've got to keep this economy going. To do 
that, we've got to keep interest rates down and confidence sky high. And 
if you want businesses and individuals to be able to borrow more, then 
the Government should borrow less. And it will generally tend to be more 
efficient borrowing.
    Number two, we've got to invest in education; we've got to expand 
health care; we've got to help families balance their roles at home and 
at work; and we've got to continue to stay in the forefront of science 
and technology and meeting the new security challenges of the 21st 
century, especially the challenges of terrorism and biological and 
chemical weapons. We have to do these things.
    But it is within our grasp to shape a future that would have been 
undreamed of just a few years ago. I believe that the Democratic Party 
is the right party to lead this country. Even though it's flattering to 
see the Republicans sort of edging more and more toward our economic 
policy--I think that's a good thing. I think it would be a great thing 
for our country if we had a bipartisan economic policy. It's an 
important part of our national security in the 21st century.
    But we still have radically different approaches to things like 
sensible efforts to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and away 
from children to matters like making educational opportunity real and 
available to all, matters like our obligation to make available the 
access to health care. We've provided--because of the provision that 
Hillary and I and others fought so hard for in the 1997 Balanced Budget 
Act, we got 2 million more children in poor working families with health 
insurance today than we had just 2 years ago--2 million more. I made a 
proposal--and we got funding already, you've already paid for this, you 
don't have to--we have funding already for 3 million more. But I think 
now if we bring those children's parents into the program, we could take 
care of 25 percent of the uninsured people in America, and they're the 
25 neediest percent.
    The second fastest--big group are people between the ages of 55 and 
65 who leave the work force, lose their health care, aren't old enough 
for Medicare. And you'd be amazed how many people that I grew up with in 
Arkansas--we're all moving into this age group--who are affected by 
this. You're talking about a very large number of people. I think we 
ought to just buy them into Medicare--pay the cost, whatever the real 
cost is, give them a modest tax credit so it's more affordable.
    These are big issues. We've got to keep people coming together, 
meeting these basic needs if we want to keep people focused on the 
future. People stop focusing on the future when they have to worry about 
how they're going to keep body and soul together or when they feel 
threatened.
    So we have to keep the momentum up. And believe me, no matter what 
we do--and as I said, I would be elated if we wound up with a bipartisan 
consensus on our economic policy this year--there are going to be 
profound differences in our responsibilities to each other to build a 
strong society. And I cannot tell you how strongly I believe that a big 
part of our economic success has come because we were also doubling our 
investment in education and training and making it clear to ordinary 
people, through increases in the minimum wage, the Family and Medical 
Leave Act, things like this, that we cared about what happened to them 
and we thought they ought to be a part of America's future.

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    So you stay with us. Stay with us as we try to pass the Patients' 
Bill of Rights and the other things we've got on the plate now. And tell 
people the story, that we had a set of ideas, we had a core philosophy, 
and it has worked. And we do need to keep changing America, but we don't 
need to forget what brought us to this point; we need to build on it. 
With your help, we will.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 7:10 p.m. in the John Hay Room at the Hay 
Adams Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to John Merrigan, chair, 
Democratic Business Council.