[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[March 15, 2000]
[Pages 467-475]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Baltimore, Maryland
March 15, 2000

    Thank you very much. Peter, Mrs. 
Angelos, thank you for this incredible 
evening. Thank you all for coming and for your support. Thank you, 
Governor, for the kind words you said 
and for the great work you're doing in Maryland to try to protect people 
from gun violence. And I want to say, I agree with you; you do have the 
best Lieutenant Governor in the United States in Maryland. Thank you, 
Kathleen, thank you very much. And 
I'm something of an expert on that subject, having served as a Governor 
for a dozen years, served with 150 different Governors. And I think--
it's amazing to me how many times the team of Glendening and Kathleen 
Kennedy Townsend have put Maryland first in all kinds of reforms, from 
education to what's good for children to community service, and now in 
your attempts to do everything you can to protect your children from 
violence. And you should be very proud of this. This State is very, very 
well-governed, and I'm grateful to you.
    I want to thank the other leaders who have come here: your State 
treasurer; your secretary of state; speaker of the house, who invited me to come back to address the delegates one 
last time before I leave. That's good. When people come up to me and 
start thanking me for what I've done, I feel like it's a eulogy, and I 
have to pinch myself to make sure I'm still alive. [Laughter] I'm always 
kind of surprised anybody wants me to show up anymore. [Laughter] So I 
thank you very much for that.
    President Dixon, Commissioner 
Daniels, I thank all of you for being 
here. I want to say a special word of appreciation to the Congress 
Members who are here, Ben Cardin and 
Elijah Cummings, who have been great 
friends and allies of ours throughout these last 7 years. I thank you. 
And Peter Franchot, thank you for

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your support. And Pete Rawlings, before 
he was the head of your fortunes with his legislative position, we used 
to work together on the education commission of the State. And whenever 
I needed somebody who'd stand up and say I was right when I was 
challenging people to change 15 years ago, he was there. And I thank you 
for that.
    Mayor D'Alesandro came up to 
me tonight, and he said--you may know that his sister is Congresswoman 
Nancy Pelosi, and one of the ablest people in 
the Congress--he came up to me tonight and said, ``Well, I want you to 
know there's life after politics.'' [Laughter] For which I thanked him. 
[Laughter] And I hope I'll be around to see the evidence. [Laughter]
    And I want to thank Dr. Richardson, 
the president of Morgan State. I want to acknowledge him. Morgan State 
gave me an honorary degree a couple years ago, and I got to speak there. 
It's the only commencement I've ever attended where there were five 
different musical selections, and every one was better than the one 
before. You've got a lot to be proud of, having that fine institution 
here.
    Mr. Mayor, I want to thank you and 
Katie for coming out to meet me at Fort 
McHenry and standing in the wind. And I'm glad the Irish saved 
Baltimore. [Laughter] I wish the same could be said of Washington--
[laughter]--which the British did burn. And every night when I go home 
to the White House, there's a big block we've left unpainted that still 
has the burn marks from where the British assaulted it in 1814, and I 
always--periodically, at least, I remind the people who work with me 
just to be humble because you never can tell what's coming up the river 
there. [Laughter] And generally in life, that's a good lesson to 
remember. [Laughter]
    I'm thrilled by your election. I enjoyed working with your 
predecessor, Kurt Schmoke. I was jealous when 
you got over 90 percent of the vote. I couldn't get over 90 percent of 
the vote if my name were the only one on the ballot. [Laughter]
    And I am, particularly in this week, profoundly grateful for what 
you said about Ireland. My people are from Fermanagh, in County Armagh, 
which is right on the border of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. 
And I have a little watercolor in the Residence at the White House of 
the oldest known residence of my mother's people, the Cassidys. It's an 
early 18th century farmhouse which still is in existence. I've never 
been able to trace my roots, beyond speculation, back before that. And 
it has been a great honor. And we're having a little trouble in Ireland 
now, but we're working through it, and I think it's going to be all 
right. And if it hadn't been for the Irish-American community, the 
United States never would have been able to do that. And so it means a 
lot to me that you said that tonight, and I thank you for that.
    I want to finally, by way of introduction, beyond thanking Ed 
Rendell for agreeing when he left the 
mayoralty of Philadelphia, which has been fabulous to me and given me 
massive margins--I said, ``I've got a little part-time job I'd like for 
you to do. Would you become chairman of the Democratic Party?'' And he 
had earned a rest, and he didn't take it, because he knows how important 
these elections are to our future, for the same reason Peter Angelos 
said. So I want to thank him.
    Now, I'd like to say some things tonight in a fairly straightforward 
way. You can do that when you're not running for anything. Most days I'm 
okay with that. [Laughter]
    First of all, I feel profoundly indebted to Baltimore and to the 
State of Maryland for how good you've been to Hillary and me and Al and 
Tipper Gore. You've given us your electoral votes. You've always been 
there to support us. And through this administration of the 
Governor, you've been an ardent partner 
for us in so many of the things that I've tried to do for America. I 
don't know how many times in the last 7 years I've come to Maryland to 
give the country evidence that this or that or the other thing could be 
done, whether it was in law enforcement or education or the economy or 
the environment. And so I thank you for that. I am very, very grateful.
    Tomorrow somebody might ask you why you came here tonight, and so I 
want to ask you to think about what answer you would give. I hope you 
will say, as has been said, ``Well, you know, when President Clinton and 
Vice President Gore were elected in 1992, they said they wanted to 
change America for the better, to give the Government back to the 
American people, not just to restore the economy but to bring our 
society together, to build a more united community, and to enhance 
responsibility on the part of all citizens. And the economy is the best 
it's ever been. And the crime rate

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is down. The welfare rolls are down. Adoptions are up. Ninety percent of 
our kids are immunized for the first time; 150,000 of our kids have 
served in AmeriCorps, serving their communities in Maryland and every 
other State and earning money for college. America has been a force for 
peace and prosperity around the world. We've got cleaner air, cleaner 
water. We've cleaned up 3 times as many toxic waste dumps as the 
previous administrations did in 12 years. We've had the first back-to-
back balanced budgets in 42 years.''
    So the first answer is, you know, ``They did what they said they'd 
do. They did what they said they would do.'' And one of the most 
personally rewarding things that has happened to me since I've been 
President occurred actually fairly early in my first term, when a 
professor I had never met, who was a scholar of the Presidency, wrote me 
and said I had already kept a higher percentage of my promises to the 
American people than the previous five Presidents had. And that was in 
the first term.
    I believe in laying out a program and sticking to it. I think it's a 
great mistake to ask for a job if you don't know why you want it. So 
that's the first thing I hope you'll say.
    The second thing I hope you will say is, there's an answer to 
Governor Bush's question about what Al 
Gore has been doing in Washington for the 
last 7 years. And again, I can say this: I haven't been Vice President, 
but I have made quite an extensive study in my life, intensified in the 
last 7 years, of every one of my predecessors and the Office of Vice 
President.
    Much as I love and revere Franklin Roosevelt, he did not pick Harry 
Truman expecting he would be President or with some great thought for 
why he would be. And when he tragically died, then-Vice President Truman 
did not know about the existence of the atomic bomb. He did not even 
know that. And thank the good Lord, we were lucky Harry Truman turned 
out to be a great man and a great President who made the tough decisions 
that were necessary to build the next 50 years.
    President Eisenhower gave some more thought, and President Kennedy 
did, and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon both had more influence as 
Vice President than anyone before them. Then President Carter 
inaugurated a whole different way of dealing with Vice Presidents with 
Walter Mondale, who met with him every week, would come to every 
meeting. And to be fair--I don't want to be like our friends in the 
Republican Party--one of the things that Ronald Reagan did was to give 
then-Vice President Bush more responsibility, because the Carter-Mondale 
model had worked so well and because any President in his right mind 
knows that anything can happen in life and you might not be here 
tomorrow.
    I had a different idea. I thought: Why would you want to be Vice 
President unless it was a real job, all day, every day? Who wants to 
hang around waiting for something bad to happen to the President? 
[Laughter] And I believed that the role that had been given to Vice 
President Mondale and then-Vice President Bush was a good thing but only 
the beginning.
    So in 1992, when I asked Al Gore to run 
with me, I defied all political convention. Some people thought I was 
too young; I picked a guy who was a year younger than me. Some people 
thought I was too southern; I picked a guy from a border State. Some 
people thought I was too much of a New Democrat; I picked a guy who 
basically agreed with me on the issues. But I also picked someone who 
knew about things that I did not know about, who had experience in the 
Congress, who knew a lot about science and technology, who understood a 
lot about the environment, who knew an enormous amount about arms 
control and foreign policy. And I picked someone who I thought had 
strengths that I didn't have, because I thought we could work together 
in harmony.
    And I can tell you that if you look at the whole history of the 
United States and you ask any objective historian who has really studied 
it, Vice President Gore has been, by far--
not even close, by far--the most influential, productive Vice President 
in the history of our Republic, without regard to party. No one has ever 
been close.
    He broke the tie that passed the 
economic plan in 1993, without which we wouldn't be here celebrating 
tonight, because it drove the interest rates down and got this economy 
going again. He recently, as you just heard, broke the tie on the gun 
safety legislation. In between, he headed our empowerment program 
designed to bring economic opportunity to designated poor cities and 
rural areas in this country. He headed our partnership with Detroit to 
develop new generation vehicles, some of which are now

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at the Detroit auto show, that we developed over a 6-year period, 
working with the auto companies and the auto workers, getting 70, 80 
miles a gallon. They'll be in the showroom in the next couple of years. 
He headed a special commission with Russia and helped to continue to 
reduce the number of nuclear weapons; had a special commission with 
South Africa to try to make sure that once they got real freedom and 
democracy after 300 years, it had a good chance to work.
    And every tough decision I've had to take, whether it was a decision 
to try to restore democracy to Haiti or stop the slaughter in Bosnia or 
stop the slaughter in Kosovo or give financial aid to Mexico--on a day 
when a poll came out saying the people were 81-15 against it--every 
single tough decision, he backed it to the hilt. When we took on the 
tobacco interest and the NRA in a way that no previous administration of 
either party had ever done, he backed it to the hilt. So if somebody 
asked you the Governor Bush question, what's 
Al Gore been doing for the last 7 years, 
give them an earful, will you, because it's a good story. It's a good 
story.
    The third thing I hope you will say is, you agree with the fights 
we're waging now. You can thank me later, when I'm a former President, 
if you're still so inclined, but I'm interested in what we're doing 
today. We're trying to pass the Patients' Bill of Rights. We're trying 
to pass a bill to build 6,000 schools and modernize 5,000 a year for the 
next 5 years--very important issue. We're trying to double the number of 
children in after-school and summer school programs and pass a budget in 
Congress which would give every child in every disadvantaged school in 
the entire United States the chance to be in an after-school mentoring 
program. We're trying--we have opened the doors of the first 2 years of 
college to all Americans through the HOPE scholarship. We've got 5 
million people in college now getting the tax credits that were in the 
'97 Balanced Budget Act for college. I want to give people a tax 
deduction of up to $10,000 for college tuition so we'll open the door 
for 4 years of college to all Americans. This is what we're trying to do 
now. These are important things.
    We're working on the peace processes, from Northern Ireland to the 
Middle East, and I'm going to the Indian subcontinent at the end of the 
week. We're moving. The country is on the move. We're fighting attempts 
by the other party to pass tax cuts so big that we wouldn't be able to 
save Social Security and Medicare and pay the debt down and do the 
things that need to be done for our country.
    So you ought to say, ``The last 7 years have been good. They did 
what they said they'd do. Governor Bush wants 
to know what Vice President Gore has been 
doing the last 7 years. I think he's been doing good, real good. And 
third, I agree with the fights that they're waging.''
    The most important thing that we're doing right now, of course, is 
we're embroiled in this fight over gun safety. And I always--I suppose I 
should be glad because they're kind of unmasked, but it's always kind of 
sad to me when one of these fights turns real mean and personal. I have 
a pretty thick hide after all these years, and it's not really very 
effective when they say things like they've been saying the last few 
days, the gun lobby. But it obscures the reality.
    Sometimes people just don't like you, and you don't know why. Have 
you ever had that happen to you? One of my favorite stories is this 
story about this guy that's walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon, 
and he slips off, and he's careening to his certain demise. And all of a 
sudden he sees this little twig sticking out of the canyon, and he grabs 
onto it, and it breaks his fall. And then all of the sudden the roots 
start coming out of the twig. And he looks up in the sky and he says, 
``God, why me? I'm a good man. I've taken good care of my family. I've 
worked hard, and I've paid my taxes all my life. Why me?'' And this 
thunderous voice comes out of the sky and says, ``Son, there's just 
something about you I don't like.'' [Laughter]
    Now, everybody has been in that situation. I know why the NRA, 
however, doesn't like me. They don't like me because I was shooting cans 
off a fencepost in the country with a .22 when I was 12 years old. They 
don't like me because I governed for 12 years in the State where half 
the people had a hunting license. And therefore, I know how to talk to 
people they try to scare up against us, those of us that want to have a 
safer world.
    But the real issue is not the spokesman for the NRA saying that I want more deaths in America, or that 
somehow we're responsible for the death of that wonderful former 
basketball coach from Northwestern, and all these absurd

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claims which they will doubtless use to raise money on. The real issue 
is, we have the lowest crime rate in 25 years and the lowest gun death 
rate in 30 years, but no one in their right mind believes America is as 
safe as it ought to be or could be. And no one believes we should stop 
until we make America the safest big country in the world. Now, that's 
what I believe.
    You know, when people start batting around responsibility for 
people's lives--one of the jobs that I was not prepared for as 
President--I never dreamed about and I confess I never thought about 
it--was the responsibility to comfort the grieving when their loved ones 
had died. I never thought when I was running for President I'd be 
meeting a plane carrying the body of my friend and brother, Ron Brown, 
and all those people who died in Croatia, trying to give those people a 
better life. I never thought I'd have to go down to one room after 
another at a military base and greet 19 families of 19 airmen that were 
killed by terrorists because they were serving us in Saudi Arabia. I 
never thought I'd have to go to a place like Oklahoma City, where nearly 
170 people were killed by a man consumed by his hatred for our 
Government.
    I never thought I'd have to have parents like the grieving 
mother and stepfather of young Kayla Rolland sit 
in the Oval Office. And what can you tell them, if you've got a little 
girl and their little girl is gone? So I don't really think we should be 
talking about this debate in these terms.
    When they fought me on the Brady bill, because they said it would be 
so burdensome to hunters and sports people, and I said it wouldn't, and 
we won. We had evidence now: 500,000 people have been kept from getting 
handguns because they were felons, fugitives, and stalkers. 
Unfortunately, the man who killed Ricky Byrdsong in Chicago and a young 
Korean Christian walking out of his church and several other people was 
able to get a gun illegally in another way.
    Well, one of the ways people get guns, as the NRA said way back in 
'93, when they were against the Brady bill, they said, ``Oh, well, 
people don't buy these guns at gun stores. They get them at these gun 
shows and these urban flea markets.'' So I said, ``Well, let's just do a 
background check there.'' That's what this is about: child safety locks, 
money for smart gun technology, banning the importation of large 
ammunition clips--assault weapons are illegal in this country; then we 
let people import the ammunition clips that can convert legal weapons 
into assault weapons--and closing the gun show loophole.
    And oh, there's been the awfullest outcry about how terrible this is 
and how burdensome this will be. And one of the reasons they don't like 
me is I've actually been to these country gun shows. You're the Governor 
of Arkansas, you've got to get out there and hustle around and go where 
the people are. And I've got a lot of friends that have bought hunting 
rifles at these country gun shows. And it's true, if you're out in the 
country and somebody has to go someplace else, it's a little bit of an 
inconvenience if you have to wait a day to get your gun. But every one 
of these places has a nearby police office or a sheriff's office where 
those guns could be deposited while a background check is done.
    Most people I know of good conscience, that love to go into the deer 
woods, would do anything to keep another child alive. This is not what 
this is about. And 95 percent of these people could be checked in a day, 
and the other 5 percent that I want to wait 3 days to make sure we can 
check--their denial rate, because of their background problems, is 20 
times the denial rate for the 95 percent to clear in a day.
    We're going to hold up the whole United States Congress, go 8 months 
after the Columbine slaughter? I didn't even talk about that, going to 
Columbine High School, going out to Springfield, Oregon, calling those 
people in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where I knew the people in the school. 
You know, I'm sorry, but I think it's worth a little inconvenience to 
save a lot of lives, and I think you do, too.
    Ben Cardin was with me today when 
they won a great legislative victory over a tiny thing, because the NRA 
was trying to beat a resolution by Representative Zoe Lofgren from California, that simply said: Look, the Senate 
passed a good gun safety bill 8 months ago, and the House passed one 
that wasn't so good, but at least they passed a bill--and what Congress 
does when the Senate and House pass different bills, they get together, 
just like you do in Maryland, and you have a conference committee, and 
you work out a compromise, and you send it to the chief executive, and 
he signs or vetoes it.

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    They haven't met in 8 months. And the reason is, they know that our 
friends in the media back there cannot run a headline story every day 
for 8 months saying they haven't met; I mean, they can't. They've got a 
lot of work to do; tomorrow there will be something else on the news. So 
they thought, ``This thing will just go away if we just don't meet. But 
if we meet and we have to say what our position is, we'll get hurt, or 
something might happen.'' So they just never met.
    So Zoe Lofgren introduced a resolution in 
the House today that simply said one thing: Meet. [Laughter] You draw a 
paycheck every 2 weeks; earn it. Meet. Do something on this bill. Even 
if it's wrong, do something. That's all it said.
    Well, the NRA acted like we were going to go confiscate guns. And 
they were up there pressuring people, handing out these awful pamphlets, 
running all these ads and everything.
    So a bunch of them came down to the White House today, a bunch of 
the Members of the House, including about three Republicans, including 
Connie Morella from Maryland, who 
spoke. And Carolyn McCarthy spoke, whose 
husband was killed and whose son was nearly killed by the man who was 
using an automatic weapon on the Long Island subway 7 years ago. She was 
a lifelong Irish Catholic Republican. She switched parties, ran for 
Congress, became one of our Members. And I can tell you, we're really 
proud of her. She got up and talked about how callous it was for people 
who disagree with us on the issue to act like we don't care whether 
people die or not.
    And the point I made was that--I was trying to get a little levity 
in the situation because it's so profoundly sad, but I also wanted 
people to think. I said--but these people at the NRA, what their 
position is is that guns are different from every other single safety 
threat. Every other threat, we do as much prevention as possible, and 
then if somebody does something wrong and we catch them, we punish them. 
But we try to prevent. I mean, every one of us was raised with that old 
``ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,'' right? But they say, 
``No, no, no, no prevention. Just throw the book at them if they do 
something wrong.''
    And I asked the crowd, and I'll ask you, how would you feel if I 
called a press conference tomorrow morning and I said the following: 
``My fellow Americans, I have been really concerned about how difficult 
it is in crowded airports, with airplanes already delayed, for people to 
have to go through these metal detectors. And you've got a money clip in 
your pocket or a belt buckle that's too big, and you have to go through 
2 or 3 times, and it's just a pain. Now, most people who fly on 
airplanes are completely honest. And 99.999 percent of them are being 
terribly burdened by these metal detectors. So I'm just going to take 
them out. And the next time somebody blows up a plane, if I catch them, 
I'm going to throw the book at them.'' [Laughter] You guys would think I 
had completely lost it, wouldn't you?
    What if somebody said to you, ``You know, most people who drive cars 
are really good people. They're responsible drivers. They're never drunk 
when they drive. They're just as good as they can be. And I'm just tired 
of them being burdened with having to get a license and having to 
observe the speed limit. And by the way, we're going to rip all the 
seatbelts out of all the cars, because most people do the right thing 
anyway.'' I mean, it's absurd, right? You know it's absurd. That is the 
argument: no prevention, only punishment.
    So this is a huge deal, much bigger than just the issue at hand. 
Look, I know what the Constitution says. And quite apart from the 
Constitution, the American people believe they ought to have the right 
to hunt; they ought to have the right to sport shooting. But the death 
rate from accidental gun shootings is 15 times higher in this country 
than it is in the next 25 biggest countries combined, for kids.
    I had a fellow call me yesterday when he saw all the press about 
this, an old friend of mine, just to remind me that once in his garage 
many years ago his little boy and his little boy's best friend were 
playing with a gun that they got somewhere else. The gun went off and 
killed his little boy's best friend. I've known this guy forever. He 
said, ``I just want to remind you of that; don't forget that.'' He said, 
``It took my son years to get over that. He had no wounds, no burdens 
himself, but he had to live with seeing his friend die, and in front of 
him, as a kid, in a game they were playing together with something they 
had no business in their hands.''
    So I say to all of you, these are not issues to be taken lightly. 
And there are huge differences here between the parties and their

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leadership and between our nominees for President. And that's going on 
this year.
    Now, the last thing I would like to say to you is, we've got--what I 
hope this election will be--I hope and pray that there will be no votes 
on this gun issue in November. But the only way there can be no votes in 
it is if Congress does the right thing and starts saving kids' lives and 
putting the lives of our children first.
    But I want you to think about this. I want you to think--I want you 
to lift your sights now. I want you to say, ``So I came here because 
they did good. I came here because Al Gore 
was the best Vice President in history. I came here because I agree with 
them on the fights they're waging now.'' The fourth thing I hope you'll 
say is, the big issue, ``This is the best time this country has ever 
known in many ways, and we have to make the most of it.''
    That's what I tried to say at the State of the Union Address. You 
know, when I became President, everybody was just worried about keeping 
the ship afloat and turning it around. Well, we've got it turned around 
now. What are we going to do with it?
    How many times in your life have you made a mistake--if you're over 
30, you have, whether you admit it or not--how many times in your life 
have you made a mistake not because times were bad but because times 
were good in your life, because you thought everything was--in a 
business or in a family situation or just in your personal situation, 
you thought things were rocking along so well there was absolutely no 
questions to be asked and no consequences to breaking your concentration 
or indulging yourself a little when you should have been thinking down 
the road?
    That's what I want you to think about. We have a chance to save 
Social Security and Medicare for when the baby boomers retire, so we 
don't bankrupt our children and their ability to raise our 
grandchildren. We've got a chance to get this country out of debt for 
the first time since 1835, so we keep interest rates low for a 
generation and the economy hot. We have a chance to give an excellent 
education to every child in this country by working with the schools and 
the States. We have a chance to meet the enormous environmental 
challenge of global warming and our local environmental challenges and 
to do it in a way that actually increases the rate of growth of the 
economy, not undermine it.
    We have a chance to help people balance work and family by doing 
more for child care, by broadening family leave, by raising the minimum 
wage, by providing more health insurance coverage to lower income 
working people who can't afford it. We have a chance to do these things.
    We have a chance to be the world's leading force for peace and 
freedom and justice, to help people solve their racial, their tribal, 
their religious conflicts. And we have a chance to truly build one 
America at home and to stop the prejudice against people just because of 
their race or their religion or just because they're gay or just because 
of their politics.
    You know, the difference between us and our friends in the 
Republican Party is, I don't have any problem with people on the so-
called religious right practicing their religion and taking their 
religion into politics. That's their business. I've never tried to 
demonize them. But if they were in power, they would demonize us, just 
like they did before. They don't think we should have the same rights 
that we're willing to give to them. They want us to live according to 
their rules. We're perfectly willing to let them live according to their 
rules. They want us to live according to theirs. And that's the 
difference.
    And I just want you to think about that, because this is such a 
hopeful time for our country, but it will only work if we are very 
serious about this election. Now, you heard Peter talking about the 
money involved. The only reason the money is important is it costs money 
to communicate with people. The American people nearly always get it 
right if they have enough information and enough time. They've got a 
great internal compass, and they nearly always get it right. That's why 
we're still around here after over 200 years.
    And it doesn't matter if they have more money than we do. They had 
$100 million more than we did in 1998, and we still picked up seats in 
the House of Representatives, in the sixth outyear of a President's 
term, for the first time since 1822. But we have to have enough.
    So I want you to think about--this is the most important thing you 
can say. When you talk to people when you go home, more important than 
``They kept their promises,'' more important than ``Al Gore was the greatest Vice President,'' more important 
than ``I agree with

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them on the fights,'' more important than the specific issues going 
toward the future, the most important thing is this: We have got to be 
one united country, committed to making the most of this moment.
    Sunday, a week ago, I went to Selma, Alabama, for the 35th 
anniversary of the voting rights march on Bloody Sunday across the 
Edmund Pettus Bridge. And for me as a white southerner, it was a moment 
of a lifetime. Unless you were part of all that back then, you can't 
imagine what it meant to me, the honor I felt just to be there, to be 
with John Lewis, who I admire and love, and 
Coretta Scott King and Hosea 
Williams, getting up out of his wheelchair to 
walk across the bridge, and Dick Gregory and 
Reverend Jackson and all these other people. 
Kids find it hard to believe that 35 years ago you could get killed--
white or black--you could get killed for fighting for the right to vote.
    And what's that got to do with this? Here's what it's got to do with 
this. We're now in the longest economic expansion in American history--
20-year low in poverty, record lows in African-American and Hispanic 
unemployment--the longest one we've ever had. Do you know when we broke 
the record? Do you know what record we broke? The economic expansion of 
1961 through 1969.
    I finished high school in 1964. President Kennedy had just been 
killed. President Johnson was in office. The country had rallied behind 
him. Unemployment was low. Growth was high. Inflation was low. And I'll 
tell you something, we thought it would go on forever--and not just the 
economy. We thought we'd win the cold war without incident, and we 
thought our President and our Congress would solve the civil rights 
problems of America through legislation in the Congress. And we thought 
we were going to rock on forever.
    In 1965 we had Bloody Sunday. In 1966 we had riots in our streets. 
By 1968--I graduated from college on June 8. It was 2 days after Senator 
Kennedy was killed, 2 months after Martin Luther King was killed, 9 
weeks after Lyndon Johnson said he couldn't run for President anymore. 
Our country was split right down the middle. Richard Nixon was elected 
President, saying he represented the Silent Majority, which meant those 
of us who weren't for him were in the loud minority. It was just a 
version of what you see today. It was, ``This old country is divided 
between `us' and `them.''' And we've had these ``us'' and ``them'' 
elections. I've done my best to end it, but that's what you see, ``us'' 
and ``them,'' ``us'' and ``them.'' And a few months after that, the 
longest economic expansion in American history was gone.
    I've been waiting for 35 years--not as President, ever since I was a 
young man--I have waited for 35 years for my country to be in a position 
to build the future of our dreams for our children. Now, that is 
fundamentally what this election is about. And when you hear the gun 
debate, the education debate, the tax versus pay-down-the-debt-and-save-
Social-Security-and-Medicare debate, you need to be asking yourself 
every single time: Which decision is more likely to allow us to come 
together as one America and to build the future of our dreams for our 
children? Because when I was a kid, we thought all this was going on 
automatic. And then one day it came off, the wheels came off, and it was 
gone. And for 35 years I have waited.
    I have worked as hard as I can for 7 years to give you this chance. 
And it is in your hands. Don't let anybody you know vote in this 
election without asking themselves that question: How do we build the 
future of our dreams for our children?
    Thank you. God bless you.

 Note: The President spoke at 9:30 p.m. in the White Hall Ballroom at 
the Harbor Court Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to dinner hosts 
Peter and Georgia Angelos; Gov. Parris N. Glendening and Lt. Gov. 
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend of Maryland; Richard N. Dixon, State 
treasurer, and president, State board of education; John T. Willis, 
Maryland secretary of state, Casper R. Taylor, Jr., speaker, and Peter 
Franchot and Howard P. Rawlings, members, Maryland House of Delegates; 
Sheila Dixon, president, Baltimore City Council; Ronald L. Daniels, 
commissioner, Baltimore City Police Dept.; former Mayors Thomas 
D'Alesandro III and Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore; Mayor Martin O'Malley of 
Baltimore and his wife, Katie; Earl S. Richardson, president, Morgan 
State University; Edward G. Rendell, general chair, Democratic National 
Committee; Gov. George W. Bush of Texas; Wayne LaPierre, executive vice 
president, National Rifle Association; Veronica and Michael McQueen, 
mother and stepfather of 6-year-old Kayla Rolland, who died

[[Page 475]]

after she was shot by 6-year-old classmate Dedrick Owens in Mount Morris 
Township, MI; Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King, Jr.; 
civil rights activists Hosea Williams and Dick Gregory; and Rev. Jesse 
Jackson, founder and president, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.