[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[March 12, 2000]
[Pages 438-442]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the National League of Cities' Congressional City Conference
March 12, 2000

    Thank you very much. Mayor Knight, thank you 
for your leadership of the NLC and for your focus on eliminating racism. 
Mayor Archer, thank you for your speech and 
your many years of friendship to Hillary and me. Mayor 
Anderson; Executive Director Borut; we have the NACo president, Vernon Gray, here today, I know. And I want to thank Mickey 
Ibarra from the White House for being a good 
liaison for you and keeping me in touch with you over these years.
    Appropriately enough for your commitment, Mr. Mayor, to eliminate racism, I'm thinking today that last Sunday 
at this time I was in Selma, Alabama, commemorating the 35th anniversary 
of Bloody Sunday, the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, with John 
Lewis, Hosea Williams, 
and many others, and the mayor of Selma, 
Governor Siegelman. And this time, when the 
marchers went across the bridge, the State police saluted them rather 
than beating them up. It was a great, great day.
    I was talking last night with a gentleman who's worked in the White 
House for 28 years--not much older than me--and we were saying that it 
was hard to believe that when we were young men, people could still be 
killed for trying to vote in this country. So it's important that we 
recognize we have come a mighty long way. It is important that we 
recognize that in the last 7 years, as Dennis outlined, we have come a 
long way economically and socially.
    But I want to focus--even though you were kind to say that, 
Dennis, I always feel when people talk 
about me now, I feel like I'm a witness at my own funeral. [Laughter] 
You know, I have nearly a year left in office and a lot of energy, and 
I've got a few ideas about what to do with the remaining time.
    So I want to talk to you very briefly today about what I think we 
should do to be your partner in the endeavor to build this one America, 
devoid of racial bigotry, and what is involved economically and socially 
to make that happen. Dr. King said 35 years ago that we would never 
truly overcome until there was equal economic opportunity and hope for 
every American. So the first thing I would like to say is, I think it's 
quite important that we keep this economy going and that we spread its 
benefits to people and places who have been left behind.
    And to me, that means we have to have a big strategy, which is to 
keep interest rates as low as possible by continuing to pay down the 
debt; to continue to open markets around the world, which is why I think 
this China trade agreement's so important. We give up no market access, 
and they give us unprecedented market access for our farmers, for our 
manufacturing products, for our services. It's why I think it's 
important to save enough of this surplus to make sure we can accommodate 
the retirement of the baby boomers by saving Social Security and 
Medicare, because I think this is very important to maintain the overall 
health of the economy and structure of opportunity.
    Then I think we need to build on the work that Vice President Gore 
and I have done for the last 7 years to expand the winner's circle. We 
increased the earned-income tax credit, which helped lift a couple 
million more Americans out of poverty. We raised the minimum wage. We 
passed the family and medical leave law that 20 million Americans have 
now used to take some time off from work.

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    But I think we should raise the minimum wage again, and I hope that 
all of you will support that. I believe we should increase the earned-
income tax credit, and particularly try to do more to help parents who 
have more than two children, because they're actually disadvantaged by 
the law the way it works today. I think we should increase the number of 
empowerment zones and enterprise communities, because those that have 
done it have worked so well.
    And I hope you will help me to pass my new markets initiative, which 
is designed to give businesses the same incentives to invest in 
Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta and the Rio Grande Valley and our 
Indian reservations that they now have to invest in Latin America or in 
Asia or in Africa. I want to continue to push this.
    We also supported a special investment of over $100 million in the 
Mississippi Delta, which is now the poorest part of America outside the 
reservations, and another $1 billion initiative in Indian country, a 
Southwest border initiative designed to encourage further economic 
development along our border. All these things are profoundly important, 
because--you know, it's easy to minimize, and not all our problems are 
economic, but if people have the dignity of a job, if their children can 
get education, if there's something to get up in the morning and look 
forward to, it's a lot easier to bring people together, to eliminate 
social problems, and to move forward.
    One big part of this division we have has become known by the slogan 
``the digital divide.'' What it basically means is that access to 
computers, understanding of how to use them, and access to the Internet 
and all of its economic and educational opportunities is still divided 
in this country by region, by income, by level of education, and by 
race. That's the digital divide.
    The bad news is that as we have become a more information-oriented 
economy, education has acquired a premium, the density of population has 
been an advantage, and a lot of people have been left behind, and 
inequality increased for several years. The good news is that the very 
forces that are powering this economy, education and technology, if made 
available to people everywhere, can reduce inequality and lift people 
up.
    I'll just give you one little example. I was in Silicon Valley, oh, 
a couple of months ago, with a lot of executives, young executives from 
eBay, the Internet trading company. A lot of you have probably bought 
and sold stuff on eBay. And I learned there that there are 20,000 
Americans making a living on eBay, and that--not working for the 
company, making a living trading on eBay--and that a very significant 
number of them, according to the company's research, were on welfare not 
very long ago.
    So we can use technology to liberate the energy, the intelligence of 
the poor, of people who've been left behind--if they have access to it, 
if they know how to use it, and if the educational opportunities are out 
there. So bridging the digital divide is a profoundly important part of 
our ability to build one America, to reduce racial and ethnic tensions, 
and to give everybody a chance to fulfill their dreams. So I hope you 
will support that.
    And I know many of you are working in your own communities to just 
do that. In our budget, we have funds to establish 1,000 community 
computer centers so that adults as well as children--who will benefit 
from hooking up all the classrooms to the Internet and training all the 
teachers, another part of our initiative--but adults should be able to 
benefit as well.
    And finally, let me say, I think it's very important that we 
continue our commitment to educational opportunity, to put more teachers 
in the classroom, to make sure they're better trained, to get the class 
size down in the early grades, to give after-school and summer school 
programs to every child who needs it in every difficult environment in 
the entire United States, to modernize and repair and build schools so 
that our kids are in school buildings that are worthy of their dreams. 
All these things are important.
    And one other point that I would like to make that I think is very 
important is that you have done a magnificent job of making our streets 
safer. The crime rate is down to a 25-year low, the murder rate to a 30-
year low in America. We've tried to be good partners with you: with the 
100,000 police on the street--we're trying to give you 50,000 more, now, 
for high crime areas; with the other support we've given; and the Brady 
law, which has kept half a million felons, fugitives, and stalkers from 
getting handguns; and the assault weapons ban. I think these things have 
made a difference.

[[Page 440]]

    But as we have seen again in recent weeks, with the heartbreaking 
death of little Kayla Rolland, the result of a gunshot fired by another 
little 6-year-old, her own age, and the deaths in Memphis and elsewhere, 
this is still a country where the crime rate is too high and where 
there's too much violence.
    And I asked the Congress, as soon as the terrible Columbine tragedy 
hit, to put legislation to do more to protect our children from 
unnecessary gun violence on a fast track: to close the gun show 
loophole, to require child safety locks, to ban the importation of large 
ammunition clips--it's bizarre, you can't make them and sell them in 
America now; we still allow them to be imported, which undercuts the 
assault weapons ban--and to hold adults accountable when they knowingly 
or recklessly allow little children access to guns.
    A few days ago, I met with the congressional leadership, the 
Republicans and the Democrats from the House and the Senate who have 
control over this bill. And I pointed out that the House and the Senate 
passed versions of this bill 8 months ago, and the conference committee 
has still not met once. And that is wrong.
    Now, I know that they are under a lot of pressure not to meet. And 
you know why: because those who don't want any legislation don't want to 
get caught killing it. So if they don't meet, then hopefully you'll 
think about something else tomorrow. And this is wrong. This is wrong.
    I remember when I signed the Brady bill, after it had been vetoed in 
the previous administration, you know, there were all these attacks 
saying this was just a cheap publicity stunt by me, and criminals didn't 
buy their guns in gun stores, and it wouldn't make any difference at 
all. Lo and behold, 6\1/2\ years later we've got 500,000 felons, 
fugitives, and stalkers that couldn't get guns. Who knows how many 
people are alive because of that?
    Now, the same people who then said criminals didn't buy guns in gun 
stores--they bought them from other criminals on the street or at urban 
flea markets or rural gun shows--now say we shouldn't do background 
checks at rural gun shows or urban flea markets, unless we can do them 
instantaneously, because we don't want to inconvenience anyone. Now, let 
me say to all of you, I actually--I've been out in the country, I mean, 
in the real country, at one of these rural gun shows. I come from 
Arkansas. And I'm missing the SEC championship game right now, talking 
to you. [Laughter] But so is everybody here from Alabama, too, so I 
forgive you.
    So I've been there. There is something to this. But look, there's a 
way to handle this. And I want to say exactly what the issue is here. We 
can do 95 percent of the checks we need to do, background checks on 
people that buy guns at gun shows and urban flea markets, in a day. 
Ninety to 95, somewhere--anyway, less than 10 percent can't be cleared 
in a day. But there's some people--particularly since a lot of these 
occur on the weekends--that can't be cleared in a day, that involve 
mental health records or certain criminal records. And here's what the 
hangup is: Of the somewhere between 5 and 10 percent you don't clear in 
a day, the rejection rate for them under the standards is 20 times 
higher than the rejection rate of the other 90 percent. So this is not 
an idle deal here. I don't know about you, but I don't mind being 
inconvenienced a day or two if it saves another child's life and if 
it'll save hundreds of children's lives.
    So this is profoundly important. And again, I don't think this is 
much of a partisan issue out there in the cities of America. And it 
shouldn't be here. Now, I asked the Senate and the House to take action 
by the anniversary of the Columbine tragedy, on April 20th. And I hope 
and pray that they will. But we could use a little help from our 
friends. You could just nudge them along there.
    And you need to know that after I had this meeting the other day--I 
was stunned by this, but after I had this meeting the other day and I 
thought we were making progress, I then found out there was a movement 
in the Congress to stop us from giving you money for the gun buyback 
program. Now, a lot of you have run these gun buyback programs. And I 
think that's very important, because while you hear all these stories 
about, ``Oh, there are over 200 million guns in America. There's nothing 
we can do about any of this anyway''--come on, that's true but it's 
misleading, because a lot of guns are in the hands of serious hunters 
and sports people, and they're totally secure, and nothing's ever going 
to happen. A lot of these guns are in the hands of serious collectors, 
and they're very responsible, and they're protecting them. And a lot of 
them are out there rolling around, and they're very dangerous. And

[[Page 441]]

a lot of cities, under Republican and Democratic mayors' leadership, 
have had these gun buyback programs which have actually helped reduce 
the number of these guns that are out there rolling around.
    So again, I ask for your help here. I think we ought to be giving 
you more money for gun buyback programs, not less. It's totally 
voluntary, and I think they work.
    So, I've said enough about that, but it's a big deal. It's a big 
deal. I see my friend Mayor Menino down 
here, and you know, I've been in Boston a lot. I've spent a lot of work 
and time in Boston. I've watched the crime rate go down there. I saw 
them go nearly 2 years without a single kid under 18 being killed by a 
gun. And I saw them do it, and I actually believe racial relations 
within the community were improving, which is something we--again, I 
would argue, if you want to build the safest big country in the world, 
you've got to succeed at the mayor's project here. You can't have the 
communities pitted against one another. You can't have people who 
believe the quality of the justice they get and the way they're treated 
by the police depends upon the color of their skin. And you can't have 
police believe that they can't be respected in the community because of 
the color of their uniform.
    And the mayors, of all people, and those of you who are in city 
government, you know this. And if there was ever an argument for getting 
rid of racism and working through this, it is our desire to make America 
the safest big country in the world. We will never get there if we don't 
get there together. And so this whole crime issue is still, I believe, 
profoundly important.
    And finally, let me just say that the longer I serve here and the 
older I get, and maybe the shorter my tenure of service gets, the more I 
try to focus on, you know, the big things, the things that will really 
make a difference over the long run to America. And I--the reason I 
think this issue of race is so important is that I think it sort of is a 
magnet for all the fears that people have. It becomes a convenient 
explanation for all the problems that people have.
    And it's not just in this country. You think about the troubles in 
this old world today. We thought--oh, probably 15 years ago, naively--if 
we could just win the cold war and nobody believed in communism anymore, 
then nobody would want to have these big old bombs and blow people up 
anymore, and we could go on together to bring the Earth forward. And 
what have we seen since then? From the Middle East to the Balkans, in 
Bosnia and Kosovo, to Northern Ireland, to the tribal conflicts of 
central Africa, all over the world, we see people--and what are they 
fighting over now? They're fighting over their racial, their ethnic, 
their religious, their tribal differences, their primal differences, the 
oldest problems of human society. In the Internet age, people are 
fighting over our difference from other people.
    And once you decide that what's different about you is more 
important than what you've got in common, then it's not very far from 
different to dehumanization. And once you get to dehumanization, it's 
not very difficult to justify violence. And once you think you're 
beating up on somebody who's not really somebody after all, it's not 
very far from there to get to killing them. And so you had in Rwanda 
800,000 people, more or less, killed in 100, 120 days, most of them 
without the benefit of a gun. Can you imagine that? Most of them with 
machetes and sticks. And you had one million people driven from their 
homes in Kosovo because they were Muslims. And on and on and on.
    And I'm honored that the United States is in a position to try to 
minimize those problems and heal those wounds. But make no mistake about 
it, we won't be able to do that over the long run, we won't be able to 
do good around the world, unless we are good here at home.
    And a lot of this work is something that you have to do. You know, 
when Matthew Shepard's put out on a rack in Wyoming, or James Byrd's 
dragged to death in Texas, or those little kids at the school in Los 
Angeles were shot at because they were Jewish, or a Filipino worker was 
killed because he was Asian and he worked for the Federal Government, or 
that Korean Christian was shot coming out of his church in the Middle 
West, all those things--the former basketball coach at Northwestern 
murdered walking on the street because he was an African-American--when 
those things happen, there are things we can do. We ought to pass the 
hate crimes legislation. We ought to pass the employment 
nondiscrimination legislation. We ought to put more police on the street 
in the high-crime areas. There are things we can do.
    But fundamentally, we have to get people to define their worth and 
their merit in ways that

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are affirmative, not negative. We have to get people to understand that 
this brilliant new human genome project is uncovering the fact that we 
are genetically 99.9 percent the same. And I know that's tough for some 
people to deal with. When I said that in the State of the Union Address, 
in the House Chamber, the Republicans and the Democrats looked at each 
other in total disbelief. [Laughter] I mean, we've got to think all this 
stuff really matters. You know, we all get all puffed up.
    I want to tell you, just in that vein, I keep on a little table--
you've seen these pictures of these meetings I have in the Oval Office? 
You know, there's two chairs; the President sits in one, somebody else 
sits in the other, and then there's two little couches, and there's a 
table. Well, on that table, I now have a vacuum-packed Moon rock that 
Neil Armstrong gave me when he came in and we 
celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Moon landing last year.
    And the thing I want you to know about this Moon rock is, it is 3.6 
billion years old. So I leave it right there on the table. And then 
people get so exercised and angry, and they're talking about this, you 
know. And I say, ``Time out. See that rock there? It's 3.6 billion years 
old. We're just passing through. Chill out, here.'' [Laughter] We're 
just passing through.
    I want you to laugh about it, but it does, it kind of puts it in 
perspective, doesn't it? You've got to see all these things in 
perspective.
    I heard a cute story the other day. You know what a snail says when 
he's riding on a turtle's back? Whee! [Laughter] I mean, it all depends 
on your--you've got to--I'm telling you, I'm having a little fun, but 
this is a big deal. I mean, how you look at these things is everything.
    It's funny, isn't it? After we live our lives and we turn gray--the 
mayor and I, anyway; Dennis wishes he could turn gray--[laughter]--and you think about 
all the things you learned and how hard you worked and all the stuff you 
think you did. And then you strip it all away, and what really matters 
is what you told your kids when they were little. You know, what's in 
your heart? And how do you view your neighbor? And can you love your 
neighbor as yourself? And who is your neighbor, anyway?
    So I say to you, I'm happy about the way we're starting the new 
century. I believe we can reach all of our big goals. But I think that 
your leader here is right. We can reach all the rest of them if we do it 
together. And some of what we have to do we can legislate, and some of 
what we have to do is an affair of the heart. But the real trick in life 
is to take what is right in the heart and make it live in life. And that 
requires systematic, sustained, organized effort.
    I watched them in Boston. They didn't have no racism in the police 
department overnight and by accident, and they still have challenges 
with it. But they train to do the right thing. They work to do the right 
thing. It is a disciplined effort. You have to care about these things.
    So we will do our part. But I came here more than anything else to 
thank you for the last 7 years and to tell you that this mayor and this 
program is the most important thing you could be doing today. If on this 
Sunday the good Lord came to me and said, ``Your time on Earth is over, 
and you've got to check out today, and you don't get to finish your 
term. And I'm not a genie; I'm not about to give you three wishes''--
[laughter]--``but you can have one,'' I wouldn't wish for continued 
prosperity. I wouldn't wish for finding outer galaxies, to see if 
there's life there. I would wish for our country to be one America.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 1:05 p.m. in the International Ballroom at 
the Washington Hilton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Donald J. 
Borut, executive director, and Mayors Bob Knight of Wichita, KS, 
president, Dennis W. Archer of Detroit, MI, first vice president, and 
Karen J. Anderson of Minnetonka, MN, second vice president, National 
League of Cities (NLC); C. Vernon Gray, president, National Association 
of Counties (NACo); civil rights activist Hosea Williams; Mayor Joe T. 
Smitherman of Selma, AL; Gov. Don Siegelman of Alabama; Mayor Thomas M. 
Menino of Boston, MA; and former astronaut Neil Armstrong.