[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[January 11, 2000]
[Pages 33-36]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Texas Legislative Victory Fund in Houston
January 11, 2000

    You know, when Debbie got into that, 
how we were probably related to each other--[laughter]--I did not know 
where she was going with it. I thought she was going to do some 
hillbilly shtick about how our eyes were too close set--[laughter]--or I 
could offer to play you that banjo song from ``Deliverance.'' I didn't 
know what was going on there for a while. [Laughter] And after I became 
President, I found that I had all these relatives I didn't know existed. 
[Laughter] They just kept cropping up all over, and most of them had 
more limited resources than I did.
    I'll tell you one real quick story. I did get one letter from a 
woman way up in her eighties in northeast Louisiana who showed me how 
John Grisham and I were like tenth cousins. And 
I wrote him a letter and said, ``Praise God, you're the first one that 
has any money''--[laughter]--``come to the White House tomorrow.'' 
[Laughter] And it was really funny. It turned out it was true. She wrote 
him identical letters. We checked our lineage, and we turned out to be 
kin. And one of us is still claiming it. [Laughter]

[[Page 34]]

    I want to thank John Eddie and 
Sheridan for having us here in their home, 
their modest little home. [Laughter] It makes the White House look like 
public housing. [Laughter] I also want to thank them, if you'll indulge 
me, for having Hillary here just a 
few weeks ago. She had a wonderful time and was jealous that I was going 
back today.
    I want to thank Debbie and 
Frank for being such wonderful friends to us, 
and for all of you being here tonight. You know, my interest in this 
legislative endeavor obviously relates, in part, to reapportionment. I 
have worked as hard as I could--and we've had some terrific fights in 
Washington--to preserve the integrity of the census. I just want 
everybody counted who's entitled to be counted, and in the most 
effective and complete and honest way.
    I also very much hope that members of my party will win the House of 
Representatives, and they have actually an outside chance to at least 
split the United States Senate this year. If we can pick up two or three 
more candidates, we maybe could do better.
    But then the census comes along, and it will be done in 2000, and 
the whole thing could be undone again. And so I think it's very 
important that--you know, when Debbie was 
saying what she was saying, I wanted to just stand up and say, there is 
a real meaning here. You could work your hearts out and have a great 
2000, and then have it undone in 2002, and you wouldn't like that. So I 
do want to thank you for being here, and I want to urge you to redouble 
your efforts.
    The only other thing I'd like to say is this. One other thing 
Debbie said made me think of a point I wanted 
to make. She said that I believe that you could have a country in which 
we protect the individual rights of our citizens, including their access 
to the courts, and still grow the economy. I do believe that. And when I 
was pondering whether I should run for President--it seems like a 
hundred years ago now, way back in 1991--one of the things that just 
drove me crazy about the way Washington worked at the time--and I 
obviously felt that the other party was more responsible, but I didn't 
think our crowd was blameless either, because when you get into a--you 
know how it is, you get into any kind of relationship and you're just 
frozen, and then if you're not careful you just keep making the same 
mistakes over and over again. And we all have to work on that, in our 
families and our businesses and everything we do.
    But the thing that really bothered me was that in order to sort of 
break through on the news or in the media or whatever, that it seemed to 
me that the people in Washington, beginning at the White House, kept 
posing false choices to the American people. You'd have to--are you 
going to be for business, or are you going to be for labor? Are you 
going to be for a strong economy, or are you going to be for all those 
trial lawyers having the right to bring suit? Are you going to be for a 
strong economy, or are you going to be for those chokingly burdensome 
environmental regulations? Are you going to be for American jobs or all 
that trade business?
    And I could give you 30 examples. It made a nice debate. And once 
you decided which side you were on of the either/or questions, it 
relieved you of all responsibility to think, which gives you a lot of 
free time to do other things. But it's ultimately a very unsatisfying 
way to live. And it's one of the big reasons our country got in the 
ditch we were in, in 1992, because you just had to get on one side or 
the other and they were bogus choices, by and large.
    There are real choices to be made, and they're hard enough in life. 
But you completely paralyze yourself if you spend all your time 
organizing your mind and your activities around false choices. And one 
of the things that we have tried to do in the last 7 years is to at last 
put real choices before the American people and to try to make the right 
ones. And I think the results have been pretty good.
    Some of you commented that you saw the television coverage today of 
how I was fortunate enough to start this day. I woke up on the edge of 
the Grand Canyon and watched the Sun rise not only over but in the Grand 
Canyon. It was an amazing experience. And I used authority established 
under President Theodore Roosevelt to set up national monuments, to set 
aside another million acres of land around the Grand Canyon to protect 
it--a very important part of the watershed there for the Colorado 
River--and a number of other places.
    And I was looking at some of the things that Theodore Roosevelt 
said. I admired him very much, and he actually served as President at a 
time very much like the time in which I have served, when we not only 
changed centuries,

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but we changed the paradigm of the economy, from a rural economy to an 
industrial economy, just as in my time we've moved from an industrial 
economy to a global information-based economy, with all the attendant 
upheaval and changes.
    But he said that if you were part of a growing young country, you 
had a special responsibility to take the long look ahead; that 
successful enterprises always took the long look ahead. And that's the 
last thing I'll leave you with.
    In my lifetime, anyway, our country has never had this much economic 
prosperity, social progress--you know what the economic numbers are, but 
let me also tell you we had--the welfare rolls have been cut in half; 
they're the lowest they've been in 32 years. The unemployment rate among 
African-Americans and Hispanics is the lowest ever measured. The poverty 
rate among Hispanics is the lowest in 25 years, among African-Americans 
the lowest ever measured. Among women, the unemployment rate is the 
lowest in 40 years; and keep in mind, 40 years ago there was a far 
smaller percentage of women seeking jobs in the work force. So the 
society is beginning to grow together. We have the lowest crime rate in 
over 25 years now.
    So we've never had in my lifetime this kind of economic progress, 
social progress, national self-confidence, with the absence of a crisis 
at home or a threat from abroad. You just think about it, in your 
lifetime.
    I've often--I'm glad to see, since I'm in Texas I want to say this, 
I've been telling this to folks at the White House--I'm glad to see a 
lot of people reassessing and revising upward their estimation of the 
performance of Lyndon Johnson as President, because of the work he did 
in civil rights and education and health care and against poverty.
    But basically, his Presidency was weakened in its potential impact 
because he not only had to deal with--he had enormously successful 
economy in the beginning, but he had to deal with the civil rights issue 
at home and the Vietnam war abroad. And the competing demands eventually 
undermined the economy, instead of opening the economy more so he could 
move ahead on the social problems. So we never had this happen before, 
in my lifetime.
    That's the last thing I'd like to tell you. Whatever you do in 
politics this year, this issue, the Presidential race, and everything in 
between, you just remember that. And I say that as a citizen. I'll be a 
citizen after this next election, for the first time in a long time. And 
what I want, what I tried to do, is to turn this country around and to 
bring it together so that we would be in a position to paint the picture 
of the 21st century we want to. And I think we have turned it around and 
brought it together.
    But very often, when things are going well, people get distracted or 
do what seems easiest and most at hand. And what we really ought to be 
doing is dealing with the aging of our society, make sure we've got 
Social Security and Medicare fixed before we double the number of people 
over 65. We've got all these kids out there who come from all different 
racial, ethnic, religious groups. They all need a world-class education 
if our retirement is going to be secure.
    We've got all these people and places that haven't participated in 
this recovery. They need to be empowered to be part of the free 
enterprise system. If we don't do that now--if we can't prove now that 
we can do something about poverty in terms of community and individual 
empowerment, we will never get around to doing it, because we will never 
have these conditions any better.
    We need to work with our friends around the world to build a truly 
interdependent world where we can lead but not dominate, where we can 
share responsibilities and be good neighbors and ask others to be good 
neighbors in return. We need to prove that just as we tried to get the 
Irish and the people in the Middle East and the people in the Balkans 
and the people in Africa to lay aside their racial and tribal and ethnic 
and religious hatreds, that we can do that here at home. We need to 
think about the big things.
    And we don't need to get into false choices. One of the reasons I 
went to the Grand Canyon today was to say that it is no longer 
necessary, for a country to grow rich, to burn up the environment. You 
can now improve the environment and get even richer. That's a 
fundamental difference in the last 20 years; it was not true in the 
industrial age. It is no longer true. The Detroit auto show, right now, 
they've got cars getting 70 miles a gallon, demonstration cars. They'll 
be on the market in no time. And it's just the beginning.
    So I think we're going into the most interesting, exciting time in 
human history. I'm proud

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that my country is in good shape. And I'm not running for anything. 
[Laughter] I came here today because you were good to me, both those of 
you who are having me here, John Eddie 
and Debbie and the others who brought me 
here, but also because this country has been good to me. And we're in 
good shape now. And I don't want to see us squander this opportunity. I 
don't know when we'll ever get it again. I just know it has never been 
here before in my lifetime.
    So you think about that every day between now and election day. Ask 
your friends and your neighbors, without regard to their party, not to 
make any bogus choices, not to divide people in artificial ways, and 
take the long look ahead. If we do that, I'm pretty confident how it 
will all come out.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 7:58 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to dinner hosts John Eddie and Sheridan Williams; 
Debbie D. Branson, president, Texas Trial Lawyers Association, who 
introduced the President, and her husband, Frank; and author John 
Grisham.