[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[May 7, 2000]
[Pages 858-861]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Reception for Hillary Clinton in Little Rock, Arkansas
May 7, 2000

    Thank you very much. Vic, thank you for being 
here. Marion, thank you for being here. Vic 
Snyder was one of the bravest people in the Arkansas State Senate when I 
was Governor. When he ran for Congress, I told Hillary, I said, ``I'm 
afraid he can't get elected. He's got too much guts. He'll say what he 
thinks about everything.'' But he got elected, and he got reelected. And 
I thank--when Marion Berry ran for Congress after doing a stint in our 
administration in the Agriculture Department, Dale and David and I really felt 
that he was entitled to be in Congress, almost as a conciliation prize 
for having hosted us at the coon supper in Gillette all those years. 
Anybody who could get us to eat coon for 10 or 15 years in a row should 
be given a seat in Congress, just as a matter of course. But I thank 
them so much.
    The other night, when I was home a couple of weeks ago--or maybe it 
was last week--to dedicate the law school here to Bill Bowen and to do the event in honor of our friend Daisy 
Bates, Dale and David and I went to dinner alone, just the three of us. And we 
needed adult supervision. [Laughter] If there were a tape of the 
conversation we had--we relived everything we had ever done together, 
and amplified it all in an unconscionable way. I don't know when I've 
had as much fun. And Barbara, you should have 
been there to give us a little civilizing influence, but we had a good 
time.
    Today mostly is a day for us that is full of sentiment and 
gratitude. I want to thank you for all you've done for us over the 
years. I want to thank you for things large and small when I was 
Governor and for backing us in the two times I ran for President. 
Yesterday I did have a chance to travel the backroads of Logan and 
Franklin and Madison and Washington and Benton Counties and to relive my 
first race for Congress in 1974. We went to Stephanie Streett's wedding in the beautiful chapel in Subiaco. I 
thought about all my old

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friends, including a lot of them, unfortunately, who aren't around 
anymore.
    And Hillary and I both agreed that if we hadn't had to start our 
careers in public life in a place where you actually had to go see 
people and listen to them, instead of someplace where you just spent all 
your time raising funds to run television ads, our lives would have been 
very different, and I never would have had a chance to be the President.
    I also was reminded of the first time I brought Hillary to Arkansas, 
and I picked her up at the airport here in Little Rock, and instead of 
going to Hot Springs, I drove her up to River Valley, and then we drove 
down Highway 7, a fairly indirect way, but I wanted to give her a sense 
of what I hoped she was getting into.
    I'm looking forward to building this library and policy center, and 
we're going to have big apartment on top of the library. We're 
finalizing the plans now. I'm trying to keep this library to a 
reasonable price, somewhere around $125 million. But I want it to be a 
world-class building, a place that is beautiful and distinctive for our 
State, that will capture the imagination of the people, and that will in 
some way, some small way, try to repay the people of Arkansas for all 
they have done for me. And we're going to have a nice apartment there, 
and I'll be there a lot. Even Senator Hillary will be there some, too, 
when I can work it out.
    I want to say a few things that are more comfortable for me to say, 
I think, than Hillary, before I bring her on. When Senator 
Moynihan announced that he would not 
run for the Senate again and the New York Democrats were trying to 
decide, you know, what they were going to do, they didn't just want to 
give the Senate seat back to the Republican Party and to Mayor 
Giuliani, and they knew he would be a 
very formidable candidate, that it was a seat that had been occupied by 
Robert Kennedy and then by Pat Moynihan. And all these House Members 
started calling Hillary. Then they started calling me to lobby Hillary.
    And we talked, and I had always hoped she would have a chance to run 
for office and to serve because I thought she would be so good. But we 
decided she needed to go up there and just visit people, just the way we 
did so long ago in all those communities I went through yesterday. Every 
town of any size, I had been in every store in town more than once that 
we went through. And so she did and came back and said, ``You know, the 
stuff I've worked on all my life is really what they need: someone who 
cares about the education of our children, how families balance work and 
child-rearing; somebody who knows something about health care; somebody 
who knows something about bringing economic opportunity to 
underdeveloped areas.'' If New York State, upstate--that's exclusive of 
the suburbs and the city--were a separate State, it would be 49th in job 
growth in my tenure as President, something that I have tried to help 
on. And much of what needs to be done there is what we've tried to do in 
the Delta and other rural areas of our State.
    And she had so many people who wanted her to run and wanted her to 
do it that she really decided that she ought to try. And then I just 
practically beat her up, time and time again, working on this 
announcement speech. She said, ``I've given a zillion speeches. Why do 
you keep doing this?'' I said, because an election is a job interview, 
and if you get the job, it helps to have decided in advance what you 
intend to do when you get there.
    And one of the reasons I think that the people here were good enough 
to elect me Governor five times is I always tried to be the candidate of 
change. I always tried to lay out what I wanted to do, and I always 
tried to be doing what I said I would do in the election. And one of the 
things I'm proudest of, a little known fact, is that in 1995, a 
Presidential scholar who at that time I had never met said that by '95 I 
had already kept a higher percentage of my campaign promises than the 
previous five Presidents. And I'm proud of that.
    So she worked on that. And I thought she gave a terrific speech that 
day, with a wonderful program. And she showed that movie, which has a 
lot of Arkansas in it, as you saw.
    Now, I want to make one general statement before I bring Hillary up 
here. This is a huge election. This election is just as important as 
what happened in '92, when this country was in terrible trouble. A lot 
of people have forgotten how bad it was in '92. And that's not good. 
It's just as important as it was in '96, when the American people 
decided to give me another chance to try to finish what I'd set out to 
do.
    But we have worked so--I've tried hard to take good care of this, 
and Hillary has been involved in so many of the things we have done

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together these last 8 years. But so much of the time we spent--Dale and 
David were saying they were glad they were part of it--all we did was 
make unpopular decisions in '93 and '94, because we had to do hard 
things to get this country turned around again. Hillary made fun of me 
today. She said there was some article talking about that I had real 
good job ratings, and if they could just take out the first 2 years, 
they'd be perfectly astronomical. Well, in the first 2 years, I had to 
do all the hard stuff that made it better the last 6.
    And so we got the country turned around. And the unemployment rate 
last month was 3.9 percent, for the first time in over 30 years, and 
that's good. The welfare rolls have been cut in half; 90 percent of our 
kids immunized for the first time, something I know is very important to 
Dale and Betty Bumpers. Today the statistics were to be released, or have 
already been released, showing that crime has come down every year, down 
another 7 percent across the board. Only about three dozen cities in the 
United States last year, in the whole country, had an increase in the 
crime rate.
    So things are going in the right direction. But the big test for a 
country is, what do you do when things are going well? What do we 
propose to do with our prosperity, with the fact that our social 
problems are lessened, with the fact that we've got the lowest African-
American and Hispanic unemployment rate ever recorded? What are we going 
to do with this?
    And in all fairness, one of the reasons that our adversaries in the 
other party, beginning with the Presidential nominee, are sort of trying 
to blur all these issues and say, ``We care about all those things that 
Bill Clinton and Al Gore worked on for 8 years,'' is that they hope that 
people will forget what it was like in '92. But there are huge decisions 
before you.
    And as sentimental as I feel today, elections are always about 
tomorrow. And what I wanted to do with all my heart is literally build a 
bridge for this country to the 21st century, so that when I left office, 
America would be in a position to build a future of our dreams for our 
children. To me, that's what this whole thing was about. And I was 
furious and disappointed in 1991, when I saw our country just paralyzed 
in Washington, nobody getting anything done, everybody fighting, 
partisan politics the order of the day--which, unfortunately, there's 
still too much of there.
    And so we set about doing things. But it's important for all of you 
to focus--if you believe that the results were good, it's not just 
because you knew me and you saw I gave a good speech and I was a pretty 
good guy. What we did was--those were the right things to do. You can be 
as eloquent as you want, and if you advocate the wrong thing, you'll get 
the wrong result.
    That's what--this election for the Senate is a big issue. It really 
matters who is in the Senate. The Republican Senators from Texas just 
announced a couple of days ago that they weren't even going to even 
permit a hearing on an Hispanic judge who was 
from El Paso, who graduated cum laude from Harvard and Harvard Law 
School and was endorsed by every single organization with an informed 
opinion. Why? Because he wasn't ideologically far enough to the right.
    This is a big election, and I can tell you who's in the Senate makes 
a huge difference, for good or ill. And you're going to have to decide, 
including in Arkansas, whether you want to build on the progress for the 
last 8 years or reverse the policies. Do you like this economic policy? 
If you do, you better stick with it and build on it. Do you believe that 
it's a good thing that the educational attainment is going up, the 
college-going rate is going up, more people than ever before can afford 
to send their kids to college? If you do, you've got to build on it, and 
the same thing with the environment and the same thing with health care 
and with national security. The other party is honestly opposed to the 
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And if they do what they say they're 
going to do, there's a real chance we could have a new arms race again 
in the world, which is the last thing in the wide world we need. We've 
got enough problems out there with the terrorists and the drugrunners 
and the organized criminals, without setting off another arms race.
    So, you know, I'd like to come home and just make this a perfectly 
happy thing, but I'm telling you, this is a big decision that the people 
will take. And this election of 2000 is every bit as important, even 
though I'm not on the ticket. And a lot of you did a lot for me. You 
went to New Hampshire. You did all the things in the wide world. What 
was going on in '92 and '96, that was important. But the 2000 election 
will determine whether we really like the

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direction of the country and we want to continue to change built on 
that, or whether we say, ``Well, we feel so good now, what they say 
sounds good; I think we'll go back to their economic policy and their 
education policy and their health care policy and their environmental 
policy and their foreign policy.'' This is a huge, huge decision.
    And that's why I thought it was a good thing for Hillary to run. 
Because I've been doing this a long time. I don't think any State ever 
had two Senators working together that were remotely as good as Dale 
Bumpers and David Pryor. They were the best team I ever saw. I served with 150 
Governors, and I've seen another 100 run through the White House since 
I've been there. You know, I realize I am prejudiced in this, but I know 
a lot about public service and public service efforts. And I have spent 
the last almost 30 years, now, having conversations with my wife about 
every conceivable issue.
    I watched her when she started the Arkansas Advocates for Children 
and Families. I watched her when she ran this education standards 
program here, when a lot of our kids couldn't even get science and math 
courses in their schools. I watched her labor to try to get rid of all 
the ridiculous Federal barriers to people adopting children, and to try 
to get us to adopt policies up there that would enable working families 
to afford health insurance and deal with a whole lot of other issues.
    And in my whole life, I have never known anybody that had a better 
grasp of the issues, a better ability to organize, a better ability to 
get people who thought they would never get along to work together, and 
could get up every day and just keep going, than Hillary--never, not a 
person.
    So, I think the Senate would be a much better place if she were 
there. I think she would do a superb job for the people of New York. I 
think she would be great for America. I think you know that, and you 
will never know how grateful we are that you're here today. And I hope 
you'll make her feel welcome.
    Come on up, Hillary.
    Thank you.

 Note:  The President spoke at 2:50 p.m. in Hall A at the New Statehouse 
Convention Center. In his remarks, he referred to Representatives Vic 
Snyder and Marion Berry; former Senator Dale Bumpers and his wife, 
Betty; former Senator David H. Pryor and his wife, Barbara; William H. 
Bowen, former dean, University of Arkansas at Little Rock School of Law; 
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York City; Enrique Moreno, nominee for 
U.S. Court of Appeals Judge for the Fifth Circuit. The transcript 
released by the Office of the Press Secretary also included the remarks 
of the First Lady.