[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[March 28, 2000]
[Pages 543-545]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Reception for Representative Debbie Stabenow
March 28, 2000

    Thank you. Now, only a politician who is not running for office 
would take a stand on the Final Four before the results are in. 
[Laughter]
    Thank you very much. Debbie, I am a huge basketball fan. And I 
already lost my State school and my daughter's alma mater in the NCAA, 
so I'm just watching it with great fascination. It's been a good 
tournament.
    I want to thank Senator Torricelli 
for all that he has done for the Democrats, and the Senate candidates in 
particular. And I thank Carl Levin for more than 
I can say. You have no idea all the good things that he does in the 
Senate, many of which are not vote-getting issues; they'll never make 
the headlines. But someone needs to be going to work every day who cares 
about public policy and good Government and the way this country works. 
And Carl Levin does. You should be really proud of him. He's a really 
good man.
    I want to thank Gary and Bill and Michelle for 
helping Debbie to raise the money necessary to wage a campaign against 
an incumbent Senator of the other party. It's a difficult thing to do. 
And she is in good shape, but she needs your support to do it. And I 
want to thank John Conyers and Sandy 
Levin for being here, and so many other of 
my friends from Michigan who helped me these last 7 years and a couple 
of months. I thank you very much.
    I was thinking to myself, ``What am I doing here? I'm not running 
for anything.'' [Laughter] I'm trying to get this fine Member of 
Congress a 6-year term, and I'll never even have the privilege of 
working with her. Well, one reason is, on principle this year, I'm very 
big on women going to the U.S. Senate. I have a passing interest in a 
lot of these elections. [Laughter] But I would like to--I'll be very 
brief, because she's already told you why she's running.
    I think it's important that we remember that things were different 
in 1992 when I ran for President. We had economic distress. We had 
social decline. We had political division. And we basically had drift 
and gridlock in Washington.
    And I believed that this country could build a bridge to the new 
century with an America that offered opportunity for everyone who is 
responsible enough to work for it, with an increasingly diverse America 
that cherished that diversity but thought our common humanity was more 
important, with an America that continued to lead the world for peace 
and freedom and prosperity. And we're in better shape than we were in 
1992, and for that I am very grateful. And for the opportunity I've had 
to serve, I am profoundly grateful.
    But the real thing I would like you to think about is: What is it 
that we propose to do with this prosperity? You know, I've reached an 
age now when my memory stretches back long enough that I know that 
nothing lasts forever. And in tough times, that's reassuring. In good 
times, it should be sobering.
    This is a moment of phenomenal opportunity for our country. And a 
lot of the--I'm glad to see so many young people here, because you've 
got most of your lives in front of you. And it's very important that we 
take this moment to deal with the big challenges, the big problems, the 
big opportunities in the new century, in a world that is coming closer 
and closer together, in a world where increasingly what matters is 
whether you believe every person counts and every person is given the 
ability to develop his or her God-given potential.

[[Page 544]]

    You know, I just got back from India and Bangladesh and Pakistan, 
and I made a stop over in Switzerland to keep working on the Middle East 
peace process. But I'll tell you an interesting story. I was in this 
little village in India, one of the hundreds of thousands of little 
villages in a country with over 900 million people, with a per capita 
income of $450 a year, one of the poorest places on Earth.
    So I go to this little village, and I meet the local government. And 
it's required now that all the different tribes and castes have an 
opportunity to be represented, and 30 percent of all the local 
governments are women--elected officials.
    And I meet the women's dairy cooperative. And these women took over 
the milk business because they got a little machine that tested the fat 
content of milk, so they weren't cheating anybody out of their money 
anymore. And--now keep in mind, I'm in one of hundreds of thousands of 
villages, right, in a country with a rich and diverse texture but a low 
per capita income. Every single transaction that the dairy cooperative 
made was recorded on a computer. Every woman that brought milk in there 
got a computer printout of what the fat content was, what the price was 
that day, then got an accounting out of the same computer on who bought 
the milk and when she got her money.
    Then I go into the local government in this tiny village, and I see 
there the computer in the community center. And every person can come in 
and get on that computer in English or Hindi. And many of the things you 
can find, you can get even if you can't read, because of the software, 
the sophistication of the software. So poor village women can come in 
and see how they're supposed to care for their newborn babies in their 
first year of life. They pull it up on the screen, and then they had a 
printer, and they got it out. And it's just as good information as you 
can get here or in any other place in America, in the finest doctor's 
office in the land. This is going to be a very different world in the 
next 5 or 10 years.
    I went to Hyderabad in India, which is sort of their high-tech 
capital, and the head of the State Government there now offers 18 
different government services on the Internet, including getting your 
driver's license. Nobody ever has to wait in a line in the revenue 
office. [Laughter] Do not move to India just yet. [Laughter] We will get 
that done, but you get the picture, right?
    Today I met--when President Mubarak from 
Egypt was here today and we met with a bunch of Egyptian-Americans, one 
of them was a Nobel Prize-winner from Caltech. Another was a high 
official at the World Bank. Another was a big high-tech company 
executive. Another one ran a big biotech company. We talked a lot about 
the human genome and the sequencing of it, and how we were going to 
allow people to patent legitimate discoveries, but how we had to keep 
the basic information affordable so that the developing countries and 
poor people around the world and in this country could also benefit from 
the discoveries. I mean, we're talking about no more Alzheimer's and 
cures for Parkinson's and detecting cancers when they're just a few 
cells. These are amazing things.
    And the reason that I'm here tonight, even though I'm not running, 
is that I don't want our country to blow this opportunity. What's the 
big problem in all these peace negotiations around the world? People 
want peace. Young people like you, they're thinking about their future; 
they want a whole different world. They're not all caught up--it's a 
question of people's impulses, the basic good human impulses at war with 
old ideas cherished by people who can't let go.
    We have an American version of that, I think, in this contest here. 
One of the reasons that I want Al Gore to 
be elected President is that I know from personal experience he 
understands the future, and he knows how to take us there.
    And you can't--most of what is written is written about politics and 
politicians acts as if policies are inconsequential and acts as if 
things that really affect the lives of millions of people don't matter. 
But I would argue to you that the details of our welfare program 
mattered. The details of our education program mattered. The details of 
our environmental program mattered. The details of our anticrime program 
mattered. It matters what you do. The details of our approach to science 
and technology mattered. These things matter.
    This is not about a bunch of hot air and slogans and positioning. 
This is about whether this country, at its moment of maximum prosperity 
and opportunity and minimum threats from abroad and from within, will 
take the chance that we have had never before in my lifetime, except 
maybe in the 1960's, before all

[[Page 545]]

the wheels ran off, to write the future of our dreams for our children. 
That's what this whole thing is about. Don't make any mistake about it. 
That's what the whole thing's about.
    I worked hard to try to help turn this country around and get us 
moving in the right direction. But the big benefits are still out there 
to be reaped. Wouldn't you like your country to be the safest big 
country in the world? Wouldn't you like your country to be a place where 
every working parent could also succeed at rearing their children 
because there was adequate child care? Wouldn't you like your country to 
be a place where every child, no matter how poor, was held to high 
standards but had high opportunities in education; where there was no 
digital divide; where there were economic opportunities in the poorest 
urban and rural neighborhoods and on every Indian reservation in the 
country? And I could go on and on and on. That's what this whole deal is 
about.
    And I'm telling you, if I can do anything this year, I am going to 
try to convince the American people only to vote for those people that 
understand the future and are prepared to do what it takes to get us 
there--and all of us, together. That's why I'm here.
    And I hope tomorrow, if people ask you why you were here, you will 
tell them that--because Debbie Stabenow is a great human being, a great 
public servant, and she will take us there.
    Thank you very much.

 Note: The President spoke at 7:45 p.m. in the Columbia B Room at the 
Hyatt Regency Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to reception hosts 
William and Michelle O'Reilly; Gary Torgow, finance chair, Stabenow for 
Senate; and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Representative Stabenow 
was a candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan. Prior to the President's 
remarks, Representative Stabenow presented him with a Michigan State 
University T-shirt in recognition of the men's basketball team's Final 
Four standing in the National Collegiate Athletic Association 
tournament. The transcript was released by the Office of the Press 
Secretary on March 29.