[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[February 24, 2000]
[Pages 314-317]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
[[Page 314]]
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in New York City
February 24, 2000
Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Doug. I want to thank you and Traie for hosting us, and all the rest of you, thank you so
much for coming tonight. I thank my good friend Mayor Rendell for agreeing to become the chair of the Democratic
Party, a little part-time job that he can do on the side. [Laughter]
Thank you, Carl McCall, for being here. And
thank you, Carolyn Maloney, for being
here and for always being there for me and for our country in
Washington.
I would, just following up on what Doug said, I want to say to all
of you who have made such immense contributions to the economic
prosperity and to the quality of life our country has enjoyed over the
last few years--I want to express my gratitude to you. For me, it's been
a great privilege to serve. As I've told all the young people who work
for us, even the bad days are good days if you have a chance to do
something good for our country, and a lot of the static should be looked
at as part of the cost of doing business in the modern environment in
which we all labor. But it's been a wonderful thing to see our country
grow and prosper and deal with a lot of our non-economic challenges over
the last few years.
And I would just like to ask you briefly to think about how you
would answer the question tomorrow if someone asked you why you came
here tonight and spent all that money to hear Bill Clinton give a
speech, since you could have heard a much longer one at the State of the
Union for free on television. [Laughter] And you need to have an answer
for that, for yourselves and because this is a long year. There will be
a big election, and there will be many ups and downs and twists and
turns in the road, not only the Presidential elections but in the
congressional elections, the Senate elections, and others, one of which
I have a particular interest in here. [Laughter]
The central question before our country today is, what are we going
to make of these unprecedented good times--of the longest peacetime
expansion, the longest expansion in our history, including wartime, now,
the longest economic expansion ever; of a 20-year low in poverty and a
30-year low in welfare rolls and a 40-year low in female unemployment,
and a 40-year low now, Doug, in the size of
the Federal Government. What are we going to do now?
It seems apparent to me that one of the ways we got to where we are
is that the Government has followed policies that created the conditions
and gave people the tools and removed the impediments so that the
incredible creative enterprise of America could flourish. And we did it
by understanding that we live in a very, very dynamic time, fueled
principally by globalization and the explosion of technology,
particularly information technology, but also in the biomedical area, in
material science, and a whole array of other areas. That seems to me to
make the argument that what we need is to change, to keep changing, to
be very dynamic, but to do it consistent with the principles and the
direction that we followed for the last 7 years.
I say all the time, and it normally gets a laugh, that if someone
were running for President this year and said, ``Vote for me. I'll do
just what Bill Clinton did,'' I would vote against that person because
we're not standing still; we're moving.
But I think, just to pick up on some of the things you said, among
the questions I think that should be asked and answered, that I tried to
answer in the State of the Union are: How are we going to keep this
economic growth growing? And how are we going to spread it to people in
places that haven't been part of it? We have a moral obligation to do
that, and it also will help to keep the economy growing. We've got some
people here today who don't live in parts of New York City that have
flourished, who live in other parts of New York that haven't
participated fully in the economic expansion. I think we ought to
continue to pay this debt down, to keep the economy going. And I think
we ought to give special incentives and make special efforts to get
people to invest in the areas that have been left behind.
What are we going to do to give all of our kids a world-class
education? What are we going to do to open the doors of college to all?
I think we ought to, at a minimum, do what Senator Schumer and Hillary
have suggested and give people a tax deduction for college tuition.
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We've got the college-going rate up 10 percent over the last 6 years. It
needs to go up some more, and we need to make sure when people go, they
stay.
What are we going to do to help people balance work and family
better? We saw Doug and Traie's beautiful daughter here tonight. I just signed cards for five kids over
here, that said, ``My Dad had dinner with the President,'' and I
affirmed that that, in fact, happened and signed my name. And I hope my
penmanship will not be taken as a model for the children. [Laughter] But
most of you who can afford to come here tonight may not have to worry
about that. But the truth is that most families in this country today
have to work for a living, both parents or a single-parent household.
And even if they make good incomes, they worry about where their
children are when they're working, particularly if they're in preschool
years. Do they have adequate care? What happens if the parents can't get
off work to go to the parent-teacher conferences at school? What do they
do if the children get sick? What do they do if they have a sick parent?
And we haven't done enough to help people balance work and family.
What are we going to do to help to continue to grow the economy and
meet these big environmental challenges that are out there? The truth
is, this is a gold mine if we'll look at it as an opportunity, not a
problem. There's a $1 trillion global market for environmental
technology to defeat global warming, if we embrace it instead of run
away from it.
What are we going to do to continue to be a force for peace and
freedom and against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction around the
world? And do we understand that our economic interests around the world
and our national security interests are increasingly merging? I believe
China, for example, should be taken into the WTO because it's great
economics for America in the short run, but I'm convinced it's the only
way to really assure a stable, peaceful Asia and a stable transformation
within China over the long run.
What are we going to do to maintain and improve the basic fabric of
life here at home? I think it's interesting, as I say continually, that
in this most modern of ages, where we talk about the wonders of the
Internet and bridging the digital divide, which is very important, that
we continue to be bedeviled by the oldest of human society's problems,
people who can't get along with people who are different from them.
We're horrified when we read about the tribal wars in Africa, the
continuing problems in the Middle East, the killing in the Balkans, and
on and on and on. But in this country, in just the last couple years,
we've had people killed because of their race, their religion, or their
sexual orientation. How are we going to get beyond that?
I think part of it is passing legislation like the hate crimes
legislation and the Employment Nondiscrimination Act. Part of it is
enforcing the laws, but part of it is setting the right tone and showing
a devotion to the differences among Americans and relying on our common
values.
You mentioned the court appointments. That could well be--I'll just
mention two issues that I think are very important, about how you strike
the balance between individual liberties and community responsibilities.
The Democratic candidate for President will support maintaining a
woman's right to choose and will act accordingly. The Republican
candidate for President, whoever it is, won't and will act accordingly,
according to both political obligation and conscience.
You know, it's fashionable now, and it has been for several years,
unfortunately--probably two decades now--for people who run against one
another basically to try to convince the voters that their opponents are
bad people. I just don't believe that. I think you here have a
difference of conscience. But you should not be naive and expect that if
someone who differs with us and whose political allegiances are
different gets elected, that they will abandon their conscience. And we
shouldn't ask them to.
And the next President is going to appoint somewhere between two and
four judges on the Supreme Court, and it will have a huge impact on
America. And so the American people should think about that.
On the other hand, there's another big party difference that's very
important to me, where, in effect, we've changed sides, where they
believe individual liberty means that they shouldn't adopt even the most
commonsense measures to keep guns away from children and criminals. And
we believe our common responsibility to one another means that we ought
to close the gun show loophole in the Brady bill, means that we ought to
do other things. For me and for the Vice President and for Senator Bradley, we
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believe at least we ought to license handgun owners. That's what we
believe. We license cars and drivers. Somebody steals your car while
you're here tonight and they drive it to New Jersey and leave it in the
parking lot and you call the police, you can be notified within a minute
or two, once it's found, because we have records of it.
And I think we have--and I say this as someone who comes from a
culture where half the people have a hunting or a fishing license or
both. I'm proud of the fact that we've got the lowest crime rate in 30
years. And don't kid yourself, one of the reasons is the Brady bill,
which has kept a half a million felons, fugitives, and stalkers from
buying handguns. I signed the bill. The last President vetoed it. I've
tried to strengthen it. That's what our party believes. They don't
believe that. They actually agree with the NRA. I'm not going to tell
you that I think they're bad people. That's what they think. They are
willing to pay a price, in a country that's less safe, that I'm not
willing to pay. And I don't think it has anything to do with individual
liberties. And I do not believe the 2d amendment says that you ought to
be able to get an assault weapon with a huge magazine that we ought to
continue to import. We have differences here, and you can see it in the
votes of the last 7 years. And these are big decisions the American
people ought to make.
But what I want to say to you tonight is, we have an unusual
responsibility, all of us in this room, individually because we've been
successful and blessed, but also as a nation. And a lot of people have
heard me say this, and they may think I'm a broken record, but one of
the nice things about not running for office is you can just say what's
on your mind. [Laughter] I have thought a lot and done many interviews,
and you've seen some of them, about why this expansion has gone on as
long as it has. And I think there are many reasons. I think our economic
program had a lot to do with it, but I think the unbelievable impact of
high technology on productivity throughout the American economy kept it
going longer and stronger than anyone had imagined. And there are lots
of other reasons.
The important thing to me, though, is not what caused it but what
are we going to do with it. And I told the group that I was with earlier
tonight, and I try to say this everywhere because I think it's important
for you to think about. Some of you, like Doug and Traie, are a lot
younger than me; some of you about my age; some of you a little bit
older. The last time we had the longest economic expansion in history
was in the 1960's, 1961 through 1969.
When I was a child, a young man graduating from high school, 1964,
John Kennedy had just been assassinated. Lyndon Johnson was the
President of the United States. Unemployment was low; inflation was low;
growth was high. The country had rallied behind a new President. We were
passing civil rights legislation. Most people, in spite of the
heartbreak of the loss of the President, felt pretty good about things.
They thought we were going to solve our civil rights problems
peacefully. They thought this economy would go on forever. They thought
we would prevail in the cold war, and they didn't think Vietnam would
tear the country apart.
Within 2 years, we had riots in some of our streets. And within 4
years, when I graduated from college, it was 2 days after Robert Kennedy
was killed, 2 months after Martin Luther King was killed, 9 weeks after
Lyndon Johnson said he couldn't run for reelection. Washington, DC, was
in flames. The country was split right down the middle over the Vietnam
war. The expansion was a few months away from being over, and we had our
first presidential election based on--in modern times--based on the
politics of real division, the Silent Majority. That means that those
who weren't in it, like me, were in the loud minority--``us'' and
``them.''
And we've been ``us-ing'' and ``them-ing'' ourselves to death for a
long time now. And when I ran for President in '92, I said I wanted to
create a country of opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and a
community of all Americans. I have tried to end the politics of
division. I think I've been more successful outside Washington than
inside, but nonetheless, I think we've made a lot of headway.
The reason I'm telling you this is, we thought it was going to go on
in 1964. If anybody had told most Americans that within 4 years the
wheels would have completely run off, no one would have believed it. And
as an American citizen, not President, as a citizen, I have waited 35
years for my country to be in a position for us to build the future of
our dreams for our children--35 years.
And we've got a second chance. We should be happy about it, but we
should be humble.
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And we should understand that life is a fragile and fleeting thing.
Nothing lasts forever--nothing good and, thank God, nothing bad. And if
somebody asks you why you came here tonight, you tell them, because you
like what happened but because you feel a heavy responsibility to make
sure that we make the most of a truly magic moment.
Thank you very much.
Note: The President spoke at 11:05 p.m. at the Four Seasons Restaurant.
In his remarks, he referred to dinner host Doug Teitelbaum, his wife,
Traie, and their daughter, KateRose; Edward G. Rendell, general chair,
Democratic National Committee; New York State Comptroller H. Carl
McCall; and former Senator Bill Bradley.