[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[April 2, 2000]
[Pages 591-593]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]


[[Page 591]]


Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Brunch in Las Vegas, Nevada
April 2, 2000

    The President. Let me, first of all, say I'm glad to be back. I 
never get tired of coming here. And most of you know that 
Brian and I went to college together; in 
spite of the fact that he now looks younger than me, we did. [Laughter] 
What can I say? I've had a harder life. [Laughter] And he and 
Myra have been wonderful to us. And 
Amy has been good enough to work for me at the 
White House and for Mrs. Gore, and we feel that 
she's a part of our family.
    Arnold and Rachel 
have taken me in in Arizona, as well as always coming up here when I 
show up. And I'm just so grateful to all of you. And Jane always whispers in my ear and tells me what I 
should really be working on as President and how I should be doing it. 
[Laughter]
    Janie Greenspun Gale. Have I been 
wrong? [Laughter]
    The President. And the thing I really hate about it is that 
she's normally right. [Laughter] So I 
feel very much at home here. I'll be quite brief, but I want you to 
think about a few things.
    First, I am very, very grateful to the people of Nevada for 
supporting me and Hillary and Al and Tipper through two Presidential 
elections. It's highly unusual for a Democrat to carry this State. And 
we did it--not by much, but we did it twice. And a lot of you in this 
room helped.
    I am very grateful for the support that you have given all my 
policies. The nuclear waste issue is very important. I will say this to 
you--I was not wrong when I said last year--and Brian ran an article in the paper--that we needed Harry 
Reid back in the Senate, so we would have a veto-
proof minority. And we also got--and that was really important. And 
Shelley Berkley also worked very hard on 
that, and we now have--my veto can be sustained. And that's very, very 
encouraging, and I want to thank all of you for that.
    But I'd also, in a larger sense, just like to thank you for 7 years 
and a couple of months of genuine support for a new direction for our 
country. I want to particularly thank Congressman Bilbray, who would still be in Congress if he hadn't 
supported me. But I want you to know that.
    We didn't have a vote to spare in August of 1993, when I asked the 
Congress to cut the deficit by at least $500 billion. And I knew if we 
didn't do it, we'd never get the economy turned around. And it passed by 
a single vote in the House and the Senate. And Al Gore cast the tie vote in the Senate, and as he said, whenever 
he votes, we win. [Laughter] That broke the tie, I mean. And every 
single Member of the House that voted for that bill can claim a large 
share of responsibility for the economic prosperity this country has 
enjoyed ever since. And many of them laid their jobs down to do it, and 
I will never forget it. And I want you to know that I never forgot, and 
I thank you.
    Now, here's what I want to say, and I say this to you partly as your 
President and partly as a citizen, because I'm not running for anything 
this year. I'm the only person I know, practically, who's not running 
for anything. [Laughter] And most days, I'm okay about it.
    We're in a position today that is highly unusual for any nation. You 
know, we're in the middle of the longest economic expansion in history. 
We have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, lowest minority 
unemployment rates ever recorded, lowest female unemployment rate in 40 
years, lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, lowest poverty rates in 20 
years, lowest crime rates in 25 years. And the question before the 
citizens of our country in this election is, now what? What are we going 
to do with what is truly an unprecedented moment?
    If you saw my State of the Union Address, you know what I think we 
ought to do. I think that we ought to say, this is not a time for 
relaxing, this is a time for bearing down; that this is a chance of a 
lifetime, and we ought to identify every major challenge and every major 
opportunity our country's got out there and go after it, because we will 
never have a better chance to do it. That's what I believe.
    I think that this is the time to build the 21st century education 
system. This is the time to help all these families, where both mothers 
and

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fathers work, balance work and family. This is the time to help deal 
with the aging of America, with families who provide long-term care to 
their parents, for disabled members of their families, to save Social 
Security and Medicare and add a prescription drug benefit.
    It's time to pay the country out of debt. We can get this country 
out of debt for the first time since 1835. And if we do, we'll give a 
whole--when Amy's my age, this country will be more prosperous than it 
otherwise would have been, if we do that.
    It's a time to deal with the big environmental challenges. It's a 
time to deal with the possibility we now have of making this the safest 
big country in the world. When I became President, most people didn't 
think the crime rate could go down. It's gone down now 7 years in a row. 
But no one believes America's as safe as it ought to be.
    It's a time to make a major commitment to 21st century science and 
technology. We were talking at the other table about energy technology 
and how, if we can just make one more discovery with biofuels, we'll be 
able to create 8 gallons of ethanol with 1 gallon of gasoline. And when 
you have cars getting 70 miles per gallon, which will be soon, it would 
be like getting over 500 miles to the gallon of gasoline. It will change 
the whole future of the world when this happens.
    In a few weeks, we'll have the honor of announcing that the 
consortium that the United States and Great Britain have been part of 
for some years, to unlock the mysteries of the human genome, will be 
completed. And 3 billion genes in 80,000 sequences will all be out 
there, thanks to computer technology. And when that happens, it won't be 
long until somebody figures out how to stop people like me when we get 
old from getting Alzheimer's. Two people in my family have had it.
    They'll be able to figure out how to block the gene that causes 
Parkinson's, that the Attorney General and many other well-known people, 
including Michael J. Fox, now are dealing 
with. They will be able to figure out--and Muhammad Ali. They'll be able to figure out how to identify all 
kinds of cancers when there are just a few cells collected, and it will 
dramatically increase the cure rate. All this stuff is right around the 
corner. Not to mention the fact that I think within a couple of years, 
you'll actually know what's in those black holes in the universe. This 
is going to be a very interesting time to be alive.
    We also see, in a more sort of tangible way, the role the United 
States still has for peace and freedom around the world, from the Middle 
East to Northern Ireland, fighting against terrorism and the spread of 
weapons of mass destruction, the work I tried to do when I was in India 
and Pakistan recently.
    And I guess what I would like to say to you is that beyond all of 
the specifics, the simple question of this election is, what are we 
going to do with this money? And the American people have big choices. 
And the reason that I support Vice President Gore, quite apart from my personal loyalty to him and affection 
to him, is that I've worked with him for 7 years, and I know that he 
understands the future and has the knowledge and experience and the 
strength to take us there. And that swamps every one of the specifics.
    The second reason is that I believe that the Republicans' advocacy 
of a tax cut even bigger than the one I vetoed last year--for it to 
become law would mean we could not get the country out of debt; we would 
not have the money to save Social Security and Medicare; we would not 
have the money to invest in 21st century schools. All of you would be 
better off, but only for a little bit. And I think, far better to have a 
more modest tax cut that helps people educate their children, provide 
decent child care, deal with this long-term care crisis, which is going 
to become bigger and bigger and bigger for all of our families, and get 
the country out of debt, keep interest rates down, and keep the economy 
going.
    That's what I believe. But these are huge choices. And underneath it 
all there is something that I have--basically has been the great passion 
of my life, and that is whether we're going to go forward as one America 
or we're going to go back to politics as usual, where we just divide up 
in camps and see which camp is bigger.
    A couple of Sundays ago--more than that now, but just recently, on a 
Sunday, I had an opportunity to go to Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 
35th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, where Congressman John Lewis, then just a young man, and Reverend Hosea 
Williams and comedian Dick Gregory and a lot of others marched across a bridge over a river 
at Selma on their way to Montgomery. They were beaten

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and beaten back. But a few days later, they marched to Montgomery, and 6 
months later we got the Voting Rights Act.
    And it was one of the--for me as a southerner, it was one of the 
great moments of my life. And most of the people who walked over that 
bridge are still alive, and most of them walked over that bridge with me 
again. But I was thinking about the 35 years that have--some of you are 
too young to remember; most of you are around my age. Let me tell you 
something about 35 years ago.
    We celebrated the longest economic expansion in history this 
February. So we were sitting around talking about it one day, and I had 
all my economic advisers there. And I said, ``Now, before we broke this 
record, when was the last longest economic expansion in history?'' 
Nineteen sixty-one to 1969. So in '64, I graduate from high school--low 
inflation; low unemployment; high growth; Lyndon Johnson is President; 
high optimism that he will be able to lead the country away from the 
heartbreak of President Kennedy's assassination, and we'll solve all the 
civil rights problems in the Congress and in the courts. We've got some 
people in Vietnam, but nobody thinks it's going to tear the country 
apart, and everybody believes America will prevail in the cold war--'64.
    And even in the bloody conflicts like Selma, it was all part of 
progress, you know. Things were happening. Okay. Four years later, 1968, 
we're graduating from college, Brian and I 
are. June 8, 1968, we're at Georgetown finishing college 2 days after 
Robert Kennedy was killed, 2 months after Martin Luther King was killed, 
9 weeks after Lyndon Johnson said he couldn't run for President anymore 
because the country was just split right down the middle on the Vietnam 
war.
    A few weeks later, President Nixon is elected on one of these ``us'' 
and ``them'' campaigns. I call them ``us'' and ``them'' campaigns. He 
represented the Silent Majority--that was his slogan--which meant those 
of us that weren't for him, we were in the loud minority, and there was 
something wrong with us. A few weeks after that, the longest economic 
expansion in American history came to an end.
    Now, what's that got to do with this? You know, I'm not trying to be 
a downer here; I'm an inherently optimistic person. But this is a moment 
for making tomorrows. This is not a moment for indulging ourselves in 
all this good stuff that's going on today. And the only way to really 
ensure that it continues to happen is to keep thinking about tomorrow 
and keep trying to make them and to take on these big challenges we know 
are out there.
    There are going to be twice as many people over 65 in 30 years as 
there are today. It's a big challenge. We can fix it right now. We can 
basically prepare ourselves for it right now. That's just one example. 
But that's the decision the American people are going to have to make. 
More than anything else is the general thing: Are we going to go back to 
an approach that is more satisfying in the short run that we know 
doesn't work, or are we going to try to keep building on the change of 
the last 7 years? Are we going to pick leaders that we know understand 
the future and can take us there, or are we going to pick people who say 
things we like to hear and may make it easier for us in the next month 
or two?
    That's really what's going on here. And I guess what I would like to 
tell you--it hit me with Selma--and I say this more as a citizen than as 
President. I have waited now for 35 years for my country once again to 
have a chance to build a future of our dreams for our kids. It's a long 
time. It may not happen again in our lifetime. That's why this election 
is so important.
    So if they ask you why you came here today, I hope you can give them 
that answer.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 11:39 a.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to brunch hosts Brian L. and Myra Greenspun and 
their daughter, Amy; Mrs. Greenspun's parents, Arnold and Rachel Smith; 
Janie Greenspun Gale, vice chairman, board of trustees, Las Vegas 
Springs Preserve; former Representative James H. Bilbray; actor Michael 
J. Fox; former boxing champion Muhammad Ali; and civil rights activists 
Hosea Williams and Dick Gregory.