[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[March 29, 2000]
[Pages 562-567]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Reception for Representative James E. Clyburn in Columbia, South Carolina
March 29, 2000

    Well, it's certainly a relief, after this long trip I just took from 
Washington to India and Bangladesh and Pakistan and Switzerland, to be 
with such a laid-back crowd tonight. [Laughter] I'll tell you, I don't 
know how many people said to me tonight, ``You must be so tired.'' If I 
had been tired, I'd be so pumped after this, I may not sleep for 3 more 
days. [Laughter] I want to thank you all for the wonderful welcome. I 
want to thank the young people who performed for us tonight, and I want 
to thank all of you who brought your children tonight, to remind us of 
why we're really all here.
    I want to say to you, Bishop, Mrs. 
Adams, I am honored to be here with 
you. We've been friends a long time, since before I was President, and 
I've heard you give a lot of talks, and you get better every time you do 
it. [Laughter] I want to thank the first AME bishop I ever knew, Bishop 
Fred James, who is out here, my 
longtime friend. Thank you very much, my good friend.
    Dr. Waddell, thank you for having us 
here at Allen University. I want to say a special word of appreciation 
to Dick Harpootlian, who--he and 
Pam, they did have me down here 8 years 
ago, and I had a wonderful time, and he's been a great chairman of this 
party. I want to thank Don Fowler for his 
leadership of the Democratic National Committee, for being here with me 
tonight.
    I thank Bob and Beth Coble. And I'm glad to see that Mayor Riley made it upstate a little tonight. We're glad to see you, 
too; thank you. And thank you, Bob, for coming out to the airport to 
meet me and always making me feel so welcome in Columbia.
    I want to thank some of my old friends who are here: Dwight 
Drake, whom I've known now more than 20 years; 
and thank you, McKinley Washington, 
for being one of my cochairs in 1992 when even my mother wasn't sure I 
could be elected President. I want to thank Inez Tenenbaum and Jim Lander for being 
here. And I want to thank Governor Bob McNair; thank you for being here. And Governor John West, also my friend of more than 20 years, thank you for 
being here.
    I want to say, I might have been the happiest non-South Carolinian 
in the entire United States of America when Jim Hodges was elected Governor in 1998. When he filed, Erskine 
Bowles and his wife, Crandal, told me that he would be elected. And I got so used 
to Republicans winning down here, I have to admit I was a Doubting 
Thomas. But they turned out to be right, and it's been good for South 
Carolina. And he and Rachel have really 
brought dignity and direction to the Governor's office.
    And let me say that I am so delighted to be here for Jim Clyburn. 
You know, when the Governor was building Jim up, 
I was sitting

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there talking to Emily, and she said, ``You 
know, I'm going to have to talk to Jim after this introduction. He might 
get to believing all that stuff.'' [Laughter]
    I have to tell you that even though he told that golf joke, I still 
like Jim Clyburn. [Laughter] And I respect him. And I wish all of you 
could see him operate in Washington, and I say that in a complimentary 
way. But he has such a good, reassuring way of doing his business.
    When the freshman class in 1992--you know, he was elected when I 
was, so we went there together, but unlike me, he's not term-limited, so 
he can stay--he goes in 1992, and the freshman class of that year 
elected him the class president. First thing he did was to propose 
sharing his term with Representative Eva Clayton from North Carolina, to pay homage to the fact that it was 
the year of the woman. That's the kind of thing that he does that is 
genuine and generous and also smart. [Laughter] This guy didn't fall off 
the truck yesterday. [Laughter].
    He's got a way of standing up for what he believes in and still 
working to build consensus. That's how he became the unanimous choice to 
head the Congressional Black Caucus. And he's even trying to use his 
ability to build consensus to resolve this bitter debate over the 
Confederate flag.
    You know, I know everybody expects me to say something about that. I 
just want to say this: I was, a couple of Sundays ago, I went to Selma, 
Alabama, for the 35th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. And my mother-in-law 
said it was the best talk I ever gave. And I told her, it's because I'd 
been waiting all my life to give it. I was there with John Lewis and Hosea Williams and Mrs. 
King and Reverend Jackson, and Dick Gregory came back. 
Hosea Williams got up out of his wheelchair; we walked across the Edmund 
Pettus Bridge together. And I said then all I have to say about this, 
that as long as the waving symbol of one American's pride is the 
shameful symbol of another American's pain, we still have bridges to 
cross in our country, and we'd better go on and get across them.
    I very much agree with what Governor Hodges said when he said there 
is a new South Carolina. And I began to see it when I came here in 1991 
and 1992 and in all the times since. I saw it when Jim Clyburn was 
elected. I saw it when Jim Hodges was elected. I 
saw it in the dialog you've had on issues of racial and religious 
tolerance. I see it in the commitment you're made to education. I see it 
in the ratification of the leadership Jim has given on everything from 
supporting the vital mission of historically black colleges and 
universities to maintaining affirmative action to promoting economic 
development for all his constituents.
    He is one of the sponsors, as he said, of my new markets initiative. 
It's a simple little idea, really. We've been sitting around thinking 
about, for months, how can we keep this economic growth going without 
inflation, number one; and number two, how can we do something to get 
the benefits of this economic recovery to the people and places that 
have been left behind?
    We may have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, but there's 
still some people left behind. In my State, and I'll bet you in this 
State, there are still some counties with unemployment rates that are 
twice the national average. In the Mississippi Delta, where I come from, 
or in the Rio Grande Valley or in some of the inner-city neighborhoods 
from New York to Los Angeles, there are still people and places that 
have been left behind.
    Jim and I were talking tonight coming in here about the trip we took 
and how he went with me and we both saw Mount Rushmore for the first 
time at night when they turn the lights on. It was one of the most 
breathtaking experiences I think either one of us have ever had. And 
almost in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, there is the Pine Ridge Indian 
Reservation, the home of the Lakota Sioux, the tribe of Crazy Horse, 
where the unemployment rate is 73 percent.
    So we were thinking, well, guess what? It would be not only good to 
give people who are dying to work and aren't part of this deal yet a 
chance to do it, it would not only be the morally right thing to do, it 
would be good economics, because if you make new businesses and new 
employees and new taxpayers at the same time you're making new 
consumers, it's by definition noninflationary growth.
    So our idea with this new markets initiative is pretty simple. It is 
that we ought to give American investors with money the same incentives 
to invest in poor areas in America we give you to invest in poor areas 
in Latin America or Africa or Asia or any other place around the world. 
So I thank Jim for his leadership there, for the work he's done for the 
South

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Carolina Heritage Corridor or the--something that he really believes in 
that I thought was great.
    I signed the bill that he sponsored to protect the airline whistle-
blowers. If you ride the airplanes a lot, you'll appreciate that. 
[Laughter] And he said that Vice President Gore signed the bill--I mean, voted for the bill, cast the 
tie-breaking vote that passed the '93 Budget Act, which began all this 
marvelous expansion. That's true. But so did he, because we didn't have 
a vote to spare in either place, because we couldn't get any Republicans 
to help us. So thank you, Jim Clyburn, for bringing the America economy 
back and for sticking with us.
    I would like to say a word of greeting to you from three people who 
aren't here. The first is the best Secretary of Education this country 
ever had, Dick Riley, who is in China 
tonight.
    The second is Vice President Gore. We 
were together yesterday when we hosted the President of Egypt. And I used to complain, because he'd get to do things 
like this. When I was--before, whenever I was running or being 
President, they've never let me come to State party events. They'd 
always say, ``Well, you know, Al gets to do that.'' And it really used 
to steam me. [Laughter] So I told him yesterday, I said, ``You know 
where I'm going tomorrow night? I'm going to South Carolina. Eat your 
heart out.'' [Laughter] And he said, ``Well, tell them not to forget 
me.'' So I did. And you shouldn't. You shouldn't.
    And I thank you for the wonderful round of applause you gave to 
Hillary when the bishop mentioned 
that I'm trying to get into the Senate spouses club. [Laughter] She's in 
California tonight, and I'm flying back, and we're going to spend 
tomorrow in New York together. But I'm very proud of her for what she's 
done as First Lady and for doing what she's doing now, and I thank you 
for that.
    I want to say just a couple of words seriously, and then I'll let 
you go. You've been patient, and I know you're probably tired. But I 
don't get to come here very much, and Jim said, ``Just give them a whole 
dose tonight, will you?''
    I got tickled, you know, when the bishop said--he talked about how 
mad the Republicans got at me all the time. I was glad he told me why. 
[Laughter] You know, I always thought I was a pretty nice fellow. I've 
been sitting around here for 7\1/2\ years trying to figure out--he 
reminded me of the story--you know about the story about this guy's 
walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon, just an ordinary guy, a good 
guy, and he--looking over the side, and he slips off. And he's hurtling 
down to his certain demise. And he looks out on the edge of the Canyon, 
and he sees this little plant, and he grabs onto it, and it breaks his 
fall. And he just sighs relief. Then, all of a sudden, the roots of the 
plant start slowly coming out of the side of the cavern. He looks up in 
the sky, and he says, ``God, why me? I am a good man. I work hard. I pay 
my taxes. I take care of my kids. I contribute to my community. I have 
done everything in the world I'm supposed to do. Why me?'' And this 
thunderous voice comes out of the sky and says, ``Son, just something 
about you I don't like.'' [Laughter] Well, I've had a few days like that 
in Washington. [Laughter] But now that the bishop explained it to me, 
you know, I feel better about it.
    And I thank you for what you said about my knowing the lyrics to 
``Lift Every Voice and Sing.'' A couple years ago when I was in a--Toni 
Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning author, said 
that I had become America's first black President. [Laughter] And you 
know, Chris Tucker is making a movie in which 
he plays the first black President. So he came to the White House, and I 
sat him down at my desk, and he was feeling pretty good. And I said, 
``Eat your heart out. You're second.'' [Laughter] ``Toni Morrison told 
me so.''
    Then the next week, a man named Miguel Loisel, who is a great friend of mine from Puerto Rico, 
introduced me, and he said I had a Latino soul. And then I went to 
Turkey, and I went to see all these earthquake victims, and I picked up 
this little baby. And the baby squeezed me on my nose real hard, and it 
was in every newspaper in Turkey--this kid squeezing my nose. And so the 
headline said that ``He's a Turk.'' [Laughter] And I thought to myself, 
I'll never be able to go home to Ireland if this keeps up. What am I 
going to do? [Laughter]
    But I want to say a couple of things seriously about that. I think 
it is so interesting that at this time of unparalleled prosperity and at 
a time when, because of the nature of the economy we're living in, we 
can, if we're smart, bring technology and science and wealth to people 
and places that have never had it before. I was in a little village in 
India a week ago, a little village in a country where the per capita

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income is $450 a year. And in this little village, I met with the city 
government, representing all the different tribes and castes, women as 
well as men, in a society that never had such a thing before, people 
elected, governing together.
    And then I met with this women's dairy cooperative, and I watched 
these women, poor village women in India, every transaction they have 
now recorded in a computer that they get a receipt from and they can 
operate. And then I went into the little municipal building in this 
remote village in India, and I saw they had a computer there with a 
screen that you could work if you could speak English or Hindi or if you 
were virtually illiterate, because of the way the software was 
constructed. And I saw a woman come in there who just had a baby. And on 
this computer, she was able to get all of the kinds of instructions of 
what she should do with her child the first few months of life, and then 
she printed it out and took it home with her, stuff that would be 
unheard of in a society like that just a few years ago.
    And all these things that are out there. In the next few years, 
you'll be able to drive a car that gets 80 miles a gallon. And if we can 
crack the chemical barrier to converting agricultural products, not just 
corn, maybe rice hulls, other kinds of waste products, into fuel, you 
may be able to get the equivalent of 500 miles per gallon of gasoline in 
no time at all.
    We're going to release in the next several weeks the whole 
sequencing of the human genome, 3 billion elements, 80,000 segments. And 
within a few years, they will figure out how to prevent older people 
from getting Alzheimer's, how to cure cancer, how to find it when it's 
just a few cells, no metastasis. They'll be able to give young mothers 
sort of a roadmap of their baby's lives when they leave from the 
hospital. So if the little baby girl has one of the genes that's a high 
predictor of breast cancer, they'll be able to say, ``Well, if you do 
these 10 things, you can reduce the risk by two-thirds or more.'' All 
these things are going to happen in this very modern world.
    When I became President, there were 50 sites--50--on the World Wide 
Web. Today, there are 50 million--7 years. I've got a cousin in Arkansas 
that plays chess once a week with a guy in Australia--amazing. And don't 
you think it's interesting that all over the world, in the face of all 
this opportunity and all these modern things, that the biggest problems 
of the world are the oldest problems of human nature? Man, this flag 
controversy here, you shouldn't be surprised by how tough this has been. 
Why are the Catholics and Protestants still fussing in Northern Ireland? 
Why did the Orthodox Christians run the Albanian Muslims out of Kosovo, 
a million of them? Why did 800,000 people in Rwanda get killed in a 
tribal war in 100 days with no guns, practically? They were almost all 
hacked to death. And I could go on and on and on. Why can't we make 
peace in the Middle East? Obviously, if they would all quit fighting and 
figure out how to divide up the land and go to work on economics and 
education--both the Jews and the Arabs of the Middle East have a history 
of success in areas that are most rewarded in this economy.
    I just came from the Indian subcontinent where India and Pakistan 
are two of the poorest countries in the world, but they've got to have 
nuclear weapons and increase their defense budgets by 20 percent so they 
can argue about Kashmir. And you come to America, we've got 200 ethnic 
groups in this country, and the Indians and the Pakistanis in this 
country--of the 200 ethnic groups in this country--rank in the top 5 in 
education and per capita income. If they could just let it go, there's 
nothing they couldn't do.
    Now, I think the South has got something to teach the rest of the 
country and to help our country teach the rest of the world. We've got 
to let this go. And if we can--and I know, you know, you say, ``Well, 
it's easy for you to say, but look, everybody's got a beef in life.''
    I'll tell you, one of the most meaningful conversations I ever had 
in my life was with Nelson Mandela, who has been a wonderful friend to 
me and to Hillary and especially to our daughter. And I remember one 
time, you know, after I got to know him, I said, ``You know, Mr. 
President, you're a very great man with a great spirit and all that, but 
you're also a shrewd politician,'' kind of like what I was saying about 
Jim. You know, he is a good guy, but the stuff he does makes sense, too. 
And I said, ``That was pretty smart of you to have your jailers come to 
the Inauguration and all of that, but let me ask you something.'' I 
said, ``Didn't you really hate them for what they did?'' He said, ``Oh, 
yeah, I hated them for a long time.'' He said, ``I stayed alive on hate 
for 12 years. I broke rocks every day, and I stayed alive on

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hate.'' And he said, ``They took a lot away from me. They took me away 
from my wife, and it subsequently destroyed my marriage. They took me 
away from seeing my children grow up. They abused me mentally and 
physically. And one day,'' he said, ``I realized they could take it all 
except my mind and my heart.'' He said, ``Those things I would have to 
give to them, and I simply decided not to give them away.''
    And so--so I said to him, I said, ``Well, what about when you were 
getting out of prison?'' I said, ``The day you got out of prison in 
1990, it was Sunday morning, and I got my daughter up early in the 
morning, and I took her down to the kitchen, and I turned on the 
television, and she was just a little girl then, and I sat her up on the 
kitchen counter. And I said, `Chelsea, I want you to watch this. This is 
one of the most important things you'll ever see in your life.'''
    And I said, ``I watched you walk down that dirt road to freedom.'' I 
said, ``Now, when you were walking down there, and you realized how long 
you had been in their prison, didn't you hate them then? Didn't you feel 
some hatred?'' He said, ``Yes, I did a little bit.'' He said, ``I felt 
that.'' And he said, ``Frankly, I was kind of afraid, too, because I 
hadn't been free in so long.'' But he said, ``As I felt the anger rising 
up, I thought to myself, `They have already had you for 27 years. And if 
you keep hating them, they'll have you again.' And I said, `I want to be 
free.' And so I let it go. I let it go.''
    And you know, that's what I tried to tell the Kosovar Albanians and 
the Serbs and the other minorities that I met with in Kosovo recently. I 
said, ``Look, you know, I brought you guys home, but I can't make you 
behave now that you're here. And you do have a gripe. You've seen murder 
and slaughter, and you were all uprooted. And then the others, they have 
their gripes because, in retaliation, things have been done to them.'' I 
said, ``What you've got to understand is that everybody in life has got 
a beef, a real one. Some of them are truly horrible, but you've just got 
to let it go.''
    Now, what's the point of all this? If God came to me tonight and he 
said, ``I'm not going to give you 8 years. You've just got one more day, 
and then you've got to check out. And I'm no genie. I'm not giving you 
three wishes. I'll just give you one.'' I would not wish for all these 
programs that I talked about in the State of the Union. I would just 
wish simply for us to be one America, because if we could work together, 
the rest of it would take care of itself. It would take care of itself.
    And I'll leave you with this thought. When we celebrated, last 
month, America being in the longest economic expansion in history, I 
felt very humble. I felt so grateful that what we had done had made a 
contribution, and it had worked, and that it had been my great good 
fortune to be President at this time, see 21 million people get jobs and 
all of that.
    And so I got interested in when the last longest expansion in 
American history was. Do you know when it was? Nineteen sixty-one to 
1969. Now, here's the point I want to make. All the southerners of a 
certain age can identify with this. Every veteran from the Vietnam war 
can identify with this. Everybody who opposed the Vietnam war can 
identify with this.
    Nineteen sixty-four, up until that time the most prosperous year in 
American history, I graduated from high school. My President was Lyndon 
Johnson. I was heartbroken when President Kennedy was killed, like most 
Americans were. But Johnson had taken over this country and pulled us 
together. He was a southerner with a passionate commitment to civil 
rights. And in 1964, this country had low inflation, high growth, low 
unemployment. And everybody thought it was going to go on forever, I'm 
telling you. We thought, moreover, that the civil rights problems would 
be solved in the Congress and in the courts, not in the streets. We 
thought we would win the cold war as a matter of course. And if anybody 
told you that we would become mired in Vietnam and divided, no one would 
have believed it--1964--and we were just all kind of relaxed about it.
    Two years later, we had riots in the streets. Two years later, I was 
graduating from college. The day I graduated from college was 2 days 
after Robert Kennedy was killed, 2 months after Martin Luther King was 
killed, and 9 weeks after Lyndon Johnson said he wouldn't run for 
President anymore because this country was split right down the middle 
over the war in Vietnam. And then our cities started burning after Dr. 
King was killed. And we had a Presidential election based on what the 
winner, Mr. Nixon, called the Silent Majority.
    Now, that was one of those ``us'' versus ``them'' elections, the 
kind of stuff I saw in the Republican primary down here. You know

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what the--the Silent Majority means if you're not with them, you're in 
the loud minority. That's what I was; I was in the loud minority. But it 
was ``us'' versus ``them.''
    Now, we southerners are well-schooled in this sort of politics, 
aren't we? We were raised with it. But the point I want to make to you 
is, people thought they could just indulge themselves in those few good 
years in the 1960's. It was going to go on forever. And within 2, 3, 4 
years, it was gone. Poof.
    So we had our ``us'' versus ``them'' election in 1968. Within a few 
months, the economic recovery was over. And the country went through all 
those divisive elections, all of that economic turmoil, all that social 
division.
    And look, I want you to listen to this. I'm not going to be 
President anymore, after this election. I'm telling you this as an 
American citizen and as a southerner. I have waited 35 years for my 
country to again be in the position to build the future of our dreams 
for our children. And we dare not blow this opportunity. We will never 
have it again.
    So I tell you, yes, I want Vice President Gore to be elected, not just for personal reasons but because 
I know that he backed me on every tough, controversial, momentarily 
unpopular decision I had to make, because he understands the future and 
he can lead us there. And we need somebody who understands the future 
and can lead us there.
    This is not a sloganeering election. We can't let people be casual 
with their votes. We need people who care, who work, who have the kind 
of intensity about what they do that Jim Clyburn does. I'm telling you, 
we cannot afford to be relaxed just because times are good. I came of 
age when times were good, and I saw it go away in the flash of an eye.
    I want you all to think about that. I don't want you to be down. I 
want you to be up. I don't want you to be sober about it. But every 
grownup in this audience has lived long enough to be able to remember 
some time in your life when you got in trouble not because times were 
tough but because they were going along so well you thought you didn't 
really have to concentrate or be responsible.
    And this country has got the chance of a lifetime to build the 
future of our dreams for the kids in this audience. We need to support 
people like the people that are bringing the Democratic Party back in 
South Carolina. And we need, most important of all, to keep centered and 
keep in our heart a burning sense of humility and gratitude that America 
is so blessed at this moment in history that we can rear back and do 
what we always wanted to do.
    This is a moment for making tomorrows, not for just thinking about 
today. You go out, stick with these folks, and help them make tomorrow.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:20 p.m. in the John Hurst Gymnatorium at 
the Allen University. In his remarks, he referred to Bishop John Hurst 
Adams, Seventh Episcopal District, and his wife, Dolly Dresselle Adams, 
and Bishop Frederick Calhoun James, member, Council of Bishops, African 
Methodist Episcopal Church; James K. Waddell, president, Allen 
University; Dick Harpootlian, chair, South Carolina State Democratic 
Party, and his wife, Pamela; Donald L. Fowler, former national chair, 
Democratic National Committee; Mayor Robert D. Coble of Columbia, SC, 
and his wife, Beth; Mayor Joseph P. Riley of Charleston, SC; Dwight 
Drake, partner, Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, L.L.P. law firm; 
State Senator McKinley Washington, Jr.; State Superintendent of 
Education Inez Moore Tenenbaum; State Comptroller General James A. 
Lander; former South Carolina Governors Robert E. McNair and John West; 
Gov. Jim Hodges of South Carolina and his wife, Rachel; former Chief of 
Staff to the President Erskine B. Bowles and his wife, Crandal; Emily 
Clyburn, Representative Clyburn's wife; the President's mother-in-law, 
Dorothy Rodham; Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King, Jr.; 
Representative John Lewis; civil rights activists Hosea Williams, Rev. 
Jesse Jackson, and Dick Gregory; President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt; actor 
Chris Tucker; and former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa.