[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[April 24, 2000]
[Pages 767-769]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Luncheon for Representative Michael P. Forbes in
New York City
April 24, 2000

    Thank you very much. Well, first, I want to thank Bill and Nancy for having us in 
their beautiful apartment. I must say, they've been so wonderful to 
Hillary and me. I'm going to forgive them because they stripped me of 
one of my important legacies today. I felt a little awkward standing up 
here on these beautiful stairs, and now people will never be able to say 
what one man came up to me and said when I was out in the West recently. 
He said, ``I'll tell you one thing, Bill, they will never say that when 
you were President, you looked down on the American people.'' [Laughter]
    But I actually enjoyed it up there. I could see everyone's face. I 
was thinking how proud I am to be here and to be here with you.
    I want to thank Congressmen Nadler, 
Towns, and Ackerman for being here. And, Gary, thank you for rounding out the 
funds race today. That was a--[laughter]. Gary Ackerman just went to 
India with me. I heard how many people lived in India--over 900 million 
people. Do you know every third person I met knew who Gary Ackerman was? 
[Laughter] It was very disorienting. It was utterly amazing.
    Let me say, these three people have really 
represented not only New York but the United States very well. And you 
can be proud of them. Jerry Nadler is everyone's conscience, including 
mine when he thinks I'm straying too far. Ed Towns was with me in 1991, 
when only my mother thought I could be elected President. [Laughter] So 
I really like them very, very much.
    I want to welcome again Mike and Barbara 
and Abby--who is going to be a teacher, by 
the way. She's a senior at the University of Virginia, and she's going 
to be a teacher. We ought to give her a hand. [Applause]

[[Page 768]]

    And I want to be brief but fairly pointed here. I believe that Mike 
Forbes became a Democrat because of his convictions on education, the 
environment, the Patients' Bill of Rights, campaign finance reform, 
prescription drugs for seniors, continuing the economic path the country 
is on, doing more for the poor, and being even more aggressive in 
education. That's why I think he did it. I don't think it's very 
complicated.
    In a larger sense, I think he did it because we have been able to 
prove in the last 7 years that our party can be for economic growth and 
for improving the environment, that we can be pro-business and pro-
labor, that we can be pro-work and pro-family. And divisive politics, 
which have served the other party rather well from election to election, 
are no way to run a country, particularly a country in a global economy, 
an increasingly globalized society, where diversity and the power of the 
mind is becoming more important every day.
    What I want to say to you is that there will be an attempt in this 
election to blur the distinctions between the parties in the hope that 
the traditional advantage that our friends in the Republican Party have 
enjoyed among large voting blocks around the country will be there and 
that they will basically make people sort of feel like it's okay if they 
win, things are going so well, and there are no consequences.
    What I want you to understand is, there are sharp consequences to 
whether we hold the White House and whether we win the House and whether 
we pick up seats in the Senate--sharp, dramatic consequences that will 
make a significant difference in the lives of the American people. And 
I'll just give you a few, but I think it's important. You need to tell 
people that if they want to vote for person X or person Y, there are 
consequences.
    Number one, on the economy: Our position is, we ought to keep paying 
down the debt; save Social Security and Medicare; provide a prescription 
drug benefit for seniors; make substantial investments in education, 
health care, and the environment, science and technology; and then we 
can afford a tax cut, but it's a modest one designed to help people who 
need help most to educate their kids, to provide child care for them, to 
provide for health care; and that we ought to give people like those of 
you in this room who can afford to be here a tax cut if you help us 
solve some of our biggest problems. I want to give you the same tax 
benefits to invest in poor areas in America we give you to invest in 
poor areas overseas. I want to give you tax incentives to produce or to 
purchase energy-efficient products that will help us deal with climate 
change and other things that are investment oriented. We had an 
investment strategy to get this economy going again, and it worked, and 
we ought not to abandon it.
    Their strategy is to pass a tax cut even bigger than the one I 
vetoed before. And they'll do it. You have to assume they're honorable 
people. [Laughter] People normally mean what they say in elections. 
There have been a lot of studies done on politicians and--even though 
I'm proud to say that one said that I had kept a higher percentage of my 
campaign promises than the last 5 Presidents, even though I made more, 
in more detail. By and large, people who run for President do what they 
say they're going to do when they get in. So you have to assume that 
when they run for President and for Congress, based on a tax cut even 
bigger than the one I vetoed--which will certainly take us back to 
deficits and higher interest rates and slower growth--that they mean it.
    And now, the second thing is, there will be enormous consequences 
for our other objectives. I think we ought to meet the challenge of the 
aging of America. I'm the oldest baby boomer. And when we retire, all of 
us, there will only be two people working for every one person retired. 
And I do not want our retirement to bankrupt our children and their 
ability to raise our grandchildren.
    So we're for taking the interest savings we're getting from paying 
down the debt, put it in the Social Security Trust Fund, because they 
can't--we're paying it down because of Social Security taxes--so we take 
this Social Security Trust Fund out to 2054, beyond the life of the baby 
boomers. And they're not for it.
    We're for a prescription drug program for seniors, to benefit all 
the seniors that need prescription drugs. Their program primarily 
benefits the people that are producing the drugs. There are significant 
differences.
    If you look at the children--and Mike and his whole family's passion 
for education--no matter what they say they're for, they're not going to 
have the money to invest in education after they pass their tax cut and 
their defense increases. Somebody asked me the other day what the 
principal economic reform I brought

[[Page 769]]

to the United States when I became President was, and I said, 
arithmetic. [Laughter] That was the dramatic new idea in the information 
age we reintroduced into budgeting, arithmetic; all of a sudden, the 
numbers added up again. The money won't be there.
    We say we ought to give a tax deduction to people for up to $10,000 
for the cost of college tuition. Their leader says that we don't need 
any more help to help people go to college. I think everybody needs to 
be able to go to college. We've tried to open the doors of college to 
all Americans because of the world we're living in. These are 
significant differences.
    On work and family, we favor raising the minimum wage, and they 
don't. We favor increasing tax relief for child care coverage, and they 
don't. We favor expanding health care coverage to people who could never 
afford to come to this fundraiser, but they all work, and they all pay 
taxes--people between the ages of 55 and 65 who lose their jobs and 
therefore don't have health insurance and are not old enough for 
Medicare; low income families who can get their kids insured today, but 
they can't get insured. We're for that. We think we ought to do that and 
give them health care coverage, and they don't.
    On the environment, I don't even think I need to say anything about 
that. Ever since the Republicans got the majority in Congress, with a 
few notable exceptions, like Mr. Forbes, I have waged a relentless 
battle to try to prevent an assault on our efforts to improve the 
quality of our air, our water, and our land, and to set aside precious 
spaces both in the vast unpopulated areas of America and green spaces 
within our own neighborhoods. I don't think--there may be no issue on 
which the record is clearer, particularly given the decisions of the 
Republicans in the nominating process.
    Now, these are significant. My belief that we all belong in America 
and that we've all got to get along as long as we're law abiding--we're 
for hate crimes legislation and the ``Employment Non-Discrimination 
Act,'' and they're against it. I could go on and on. But those are just 
six things. There will be significant consequences to the American 
people from the outcome of the elections in the House and the Senate and 
the Presidential election. You should know what those consequences are.
    And you don't have to say a bad word about our opponents to 
understand that. I don't like all the politics of personal destruction. 
Most people who do that do it because they're more interested in power 
than people. And they think voters are ultimately not very smart, and so 
if they can make their opponents look bad enough, they can get some 
votes.
    The truth is, this is not about all of us who run for office. And 
besides that, I'm not running for anything; I'm telling you this as a 
citizen. But I've worked very hard for over 7 years now to turn this 
country around, to move us in the right direction, and to pull us 
together. And I promise you, everything I have learned in my entire 
public life tells me that these differences are real, that we mean what 
we say and they mean what they say. Now, they will attempt to paper over 
all this between now and November, in the hope that basically a 
satisfied, almost somnambulant electorate will give them the reins of 
power.
    So I want you to leave here--and if they ask you how come you showed 
up at Mike Forbes' fundraiser, tell them it's because you'd like to see 
the economy grow. Tell them it's because you want to see more people 
brought into the mainstream of American life. Tell them it's because you 
want to see investments made in education and the environment and health 
care. Tell them it's because you think we ought to go forward together, 
instead of being divided. These are significant consequences. This is 
very important.
    I know the country was in trouble in '92, and it looks like we're 
doing great today. But believe me, this election is every bit as 
important as the elections we had in '92 and '96 because we are going to 
decide whether to ratify the direction of change we have embraced or 
abandon it. And there will be substantial consequences, positive or 
negative, to that decision. If you go out and tell the people that you 
know in New York and in other States around this country that, we'll be 
all right. And if you tell the people you know that can vote in Mike 
Forbes' congressional district, he will be overwhelmingly reelected.
    Thank you very much.

 Note:  The President spoke at 2:06 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to luncheon hosts Bill and Nancy Rollnick; and 
Representative Forbes' wife, Barbara, and their daughter, Abigail.