[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[May 15, 2000]
[Pages 936-938]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Reception for Representative Robert Wexler
May 15, 2000

    Thank you very much. When Rob started saying all that, I had to 
pinch myself and make sure I was still alive. [Laughter] I want to, 
first of all, thank all of you for being here for Rob and for 
Laurie. And I want to thank you for your 
support for what his career has embodied.
    I feel just as strongly about him, if not more strongly, as he 
apparently does about me. I was very pleased. I admire him because he 
stands up and fights for what he believes in. He'll take a tough vote 
when it has to be taken, and he tries to think things through in ways 
that always have an eye on the future.
    You know, the great problem that any advanced society has is that 
it's always well organized, and that's good. But the bad news is, too 
often there are too few people who will be willing to change and move us 
toward the future.
    And he was a part of this, what we called the New Democratic 
movement, when I started back in '93. We believed we could be pro-
business and pro-labor. We thought we could balance the budget and still 
invest in education more. We thought we could be pro-economic growth and 
pro-environmental preservation. And I think part of it was his 
experience with State Government before coming here, because a lot of us 
who had lived in the real world before we moved to Washington--
[laughter]--thought that it was sort of strange here. Everybody expected 
you to get on one side of an issue or another, and then just scream as 
loud as you could and hope every third or fourth day you'd get your 15 
seconds on the news. It wasn't a very efficient way to govern or run a 
country, and we were paying for it.
    And so we've had a pretty good run here. But you must understand 
that very little I've achieved would have been possible if I hadn't had 
the support of Members of my own party in Congress at critical times. 
And nobody embodies, in my view, the approach we ought to be taking 
toward the future any better than he does. I'm really proud of him.
    And we have a lot of big decisions to face this year and next year. 
But when you encapsulate them all, I would say, here's the story line: 
When I took office in 1993, a lot of people didn't know whether America 
would work or not. If I said to you in '92, in the election, ``Vote for 
me, folks, and when I get done here, we will have turned deficits into 
surpluses, and we'll pay off $300 or $400 billion on the national 
debt,'' you'd say, ``You know, he seems like a pleasant young man, but 
he's slightly deranged. We'd better send him home.'' [Laughter]
    So what did we do? We had to worry about, first of all, getting our 
priorities in order, putting people first, as I called it in '92, 
getting the right kind of ideas, and then, basically, pointing the 
country in the right direction. That was the metaphor I used in our '96 
campaign, building a bridge to the 21st century. And a lot of it was 
really tough.
    We passed our economic plan by one vote in the House and the Senate 
in '93. And there were several other times during the last 7 years when 
we won by one vote, especially in the Senate. As Al Gore always says, 
``Whenever I vote, we win.'' [Laughter] And lamentably, he had to vote a 
lot. So it wasn't easy.
    Now the country plainly is going in the right direction. Just last 
week we announced that for the eighth year in a row, crime is down, gun 
crime down 35 percent since '93, the lowest overall crime rate in over 
25 years. So it's not just the economy--welfare rolls cut in half, 90 
percent of our kids immunized for the first time in history. And I could 
go on and on.
    So what's the question this time? The question this time is, what do 
we as a people propose to do with this prosperity? When you go home 
tonight you ought to think about it. Those of you that brought your 
children, you ought to look at them before you answer.

[[Page 937]]

    You know, as I get older--and unfortunately, it seems to be an 
irrevocable process--[laughter]--and I have a longer memory and probably 
more days behind me than ahead--there are some good things about it. And 
I know that it is a very rare time when a country has so much 
prosperity, so much social progress, so little internal dissension and 
relatively distant external threat. And a time like this comes along 
just once in a while. But it's happening now at a time of breathtaking 
change. So nothing lasts forever, and a long time is quicker than it 
used to be.
    So this is very, very important. This election this year is just as 
important as the ones we had in '92 and '96, don't kid yourself. And 
yet, the danger is, because things seem to be going very well, everybody 
will take a relaxed attitude. And in fact, you should say, ``Goodness 
gracious, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I'm going to think 
real hard about what to do with this election.''
    For me, this kind of opportunity means just one thing: We have the 
space, the emotional space; we have the money; and we have the knowledge 
to identify what the big, outstanding challenges are facing this country 
and what the greatest opportunities are and to actually go after them. 
In other words, in '93, we were bailing water out of America's boat. Now 
we have a chance to build the future of our dreams for our children, and 
in so doing, I might add, to be a much more responsible and constructive 
member of the world community.
    I appreciate what you said about what we did in Kosovo and Bosnia 
before, and what we tried to do throughout the world on ethnic and 
religious and racial conflicts. We have to decide, what are we going to 
do?
    Now, I gave the Congress an agenda that would choke a horse back in 
my State of the Union Address because I wanted to make the point that we 
ought to be building the future of our dreams for our children, and that 
if we let this moment get away from us, if we're at all confused about 
what the subject of this election is, we'll never forgive ourselves, 
especially those of us who are old enough to know better.
    And I'll just tell you one last little story here. The last time we 
had a time which even approximated this was in the mid-sixties, the 
early sixties. We just celebrated the longest economic expansion in 
American history, longer than any expansion, including all the ones 
including our wars. But the last longest economic expansion was during 
the Vietnam war, 1961 to 1969. But it started in peacetime.
    Frankly, I think people--those of us who came of age--I graduated 
from high school in 1964. We thought the thing would go on forever. I'm 
telling you, I graduated from high school with an attitude like I am 
afraid people will take in this election. Oh, I was for all the right 
things. But I thought the economy would expand forever. I thought the 
civil rights crisis of America would be resolved in the Congress and the 
courts, not in the streets. I never dreamed Vietnam would tear this 
country in two. And neither did most other people, and they didn't think 
about it when they were voting.
    And by the time I got ready to graduate from college in 1968, it was 
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 
reelection, and just a few months before the longest economic expansion 
in American history came to a shrieking halt, with not much to show for 
it.
    And I can tell you--I'm not running for anything, you know? 
[Laughter] And pretty soon I'll be Joe Citizen again. I'm telling you, 
as an American citizen, I have been waiting for 35 long years to see my 
country once again in a position to build the future of our dreams for 
our children. And we ought to be doing these big things. That's why I 
was thrilled all those million moms showed up here yesterday. You know, 
yes, we've got the lowest crime rate in 25 years. Does anybody think 
it's low enough? We can make America the safest big country in the 
world, but not if we don't have prevention. And he's taking this issue 
on, and I appreciate it.
    I told somebody the other day, every time we get ready to do 
something that make sense, the other side screams ``gun control,'' talks 
about we're infringing on the constitutional right to keep and bear 
arms. And yesterday I said what I always say, ``You know, there's a 
constitutional right to travel, too.'' There is. But when we have speed 
limits and seatbelt laws and child restraint laws and we require drivers 
to get a drivers' license, you don't hear people standing around on 
street corner screaming about car control. [Laughter] They're talking 
about highway safety, and we like it, and we wish there were more of it, 
don't we? Now, if I come get your car and take it away from you, that's

[[Page 938]]

car control. Otherwise, it's highway safety. And it's the same thing 
here.
    It's a classic example of what I mean. It's easy to take a pass on a 
tough issue like that because times are good and your constituents are 
in a good humor. But it's not the right thing to do. The right thing to 
do is to say there will never be a better time to take on the big 
challenges; there will never be a better time to seize the big 
opportunities. And we need more people in public life who have the kind 
of mind and the kind of heart that he does. That's why I'm here tonight.
    Thank you very much.

 Note:  The President spoke at 7:35 p.m. in the Dining Room at the Hay-
Adams Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Representative Wexler's 
wife, Laurie.