[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book II)]
[June 28, 2000]
[Pages 1338-1342]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a New Democrat Network Dinner
June 28, 2000

    Thank you very much. I have here in my hand a Mont Blanc pen left on 
this platform, I presume by Simon--
[laughter]--who could not afford one of these when he worked for me. 
[Laughter] I am really proud of you--[laughter]--and I thank you. You've 
been great. This is really wonderful.
    Now, I don't know how well the rest of you know Senator 
Lieberman. I think I know Senator 
Lieberman reasonably well--30 years worth of reasonably well. And 
normally he's so laid-back and so buttoned-down and so controlled. And 
that's the image of the whole New Democrat crowd. But when he gets in 
front of a New Democrat group, he becomes positively ebullient. 
[Laughter] I mean, you could mistake him for Chris Dodd up here, the way he was talking. [Laughter] It 
was amazing.
    Listen, this deal he did tonight is a big deal. Getting the 
disclosure of these secret committees is a big deal for America, and we 
thank you. This is great. And this could really influence the outcome of 
some of the elections this year, and more importantly, it could ratify a 
principle that we all, in both parties, say we believe in, which is full 
disclosure. So now we're going to be given our chance, and it's a great 
thing.
    Let me--I thank all the rest of you for coming. I want to say, 
Joe, of all the nice things you said 
about me, you know, when we started in '93, we carried the economic plan 
by a vote--just a vote. As Al Gore says, whenever he voted, we won--in 
both Houses. And I want to pay special tribute to those of you who were 
there then and who were part of the whole idea base of the New 
Democratic movement. And I want to say a special word of appreciation to 
my friend and neighbor of many years Dave McCurdy, who was a big part of that. I thank you so much. Thank 
you.
    We have all these people running for office today. I guess I want to 
say a few words about all of them. And I'll come back to that. But let 
me begin by saying that I hope this group will stay together after this 
election. And I hope that it will become a constant vehicle to merge 
politics and policy in the best way.
    In Washington, we have too many people who do policy but don't do 
politics. And then we have people who do politics but don't do policy. 
And really it only works if you do both. There's nothing wrong with 
politics. I've always sort of enjoyed it. [Laughter] And I think I've 
embarrassed a lot of people because I'm not ashamed of it. I love 
politics. I love the system. If it weren't a pretty good system, we 
wouldn't be around here after over 200 years. It's really nothing more 
than saying you like people. You're interested in what they have to say, 
and

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you think everybody counts. But we need a place where people can be 
brought together with their ideas and their legitimate political 
aspirations.
    And I said this when the DLC had its sort of every-decade meeting to 
figure out the charter for the organization up in Hyde Park the other 
day. But let me just remind you what the New Democrats have wrought in 
the last 7 years.
    In addition to the dramatic turnaround in the fiscal picture of the 
country that Senator Lieberman mentioned, we had the family and medical 
leave law; welfare reform; 100,000 police; the Brady bill; doubling the 
earned-income tax credit; going from one to 1,700 charter schools in 
this country; all the trade initiatives, including now over 280 separate 
trade agreements; the empowerment zone program and the reinventing 
Government program, both of which were strongly pushed by the New 
Democrats, which the Vice President led; 
and of course, my personal favorite, national service, where now 150,000 
young people have followed Alan Khazei and City 
Year's lead to go out across this country.
    And they built a great, broad bipartisan support. Former Senator of 
Indiana, Republican Senator Dan Coats had a great 
article in the Hill newspaper yesterday talking about how he changed his 
mind about AmeriCorps, that we were never interested in supplanting the 
civic sector of our society but wanted to strengthen it and support it. 
And that's exactly what the national service has done. So you can be 
proud of that.
    In this year alone, we've had the Africa/Caribbean Basin bill. We 
are about, I believe, to pass the China trade bill. We have the bill to 
help Colombia, which I strongly believe is a New Democratic measure. We 
took the earnings limit off Social Security. And we still have a chance, 
in addition to passing this campaign finance measure, to expand the 
earned-income tax credit again; to pass the new markets legislation, 
which has broad bipartisan support; to do more to close the digital 
divide and reduce hate crimes in our country; to pass Senator 
Landrieu's great initiative to permanently 
set aside massive funds to protect precious lands along our coasts and 
throughout the country forever. And we've got this possibility for 
paying the country out of debt, for the first time since 1835. That's 
pretty good. That's pretty good.
    But what I want to say to you is our continued progress depends upon 
ideas, continuous movement, and good politics. And that means, among 
other things, that the people who are here tonight who are up for 
reelection have to be helped. And you're helping them here, but I don't 
want you to stop here. I'll just mention a few.
    First of all, Governor Nelson from 
Nebraska back there--most people say we couldn't hold Bob 
Kerrey's Senate seat, but he's going to 
hold it. And I served with him for many years as Governor. I have 
enormous respect for him. He will be a genuine New Democrat in the 
Senate. He needs your help to win.
    I think in some ways, the ultimate test of whether you can combine 
fiscal conservatism, social liberalism, and astonishing personal 
courage, will be whether Chuck Robb will be 
reelected in Virginia. And I think you can help him.
    Debbie Stabenow is going to give us a 
seat in Michigan. But she's in a hard race, and she needs your help. Cal 
Dooley has to fight in every election he 
ever runs in. [Laughter] And he spent a lot of time with this New 
Democratic Network. I just want to say one thing about Cal.
    He spends a lot of time that he doesn't 
have to spend, working on getting us all together for trade, working on 
getting us all together for the New Democratic Network. Whenever they 
need any of us to get together, and all the rest of us will come when 
we're asked, Cal's there doing the asking. He comes from a tough 
district. They've been very supportive of him, and very understanding, 
but he needs and deserves your help. Because all the times he's been out 
here working to get us together--and half the time to do things we 
should have done on our own without his having to ask us--he could have 
been home getting votes. So I want you to help him. He needs it. Thank 
you.
    I want to thank all the rest who are here. I want to mention one or 
two others. But I thank Adam Smith and my 
Congressman, Vic Snyder, who's here, and Bob 
Etheridge, my longtime friend from our 
education days, and Loretta Sanchez, who 
made Orange County safe for Democrats--[laughter]--and Jim Davis and John Larson and Ron 
Kind and Jim Moran and 
my good friend Harold Ford. And I want 
to say a special word of thanks to Rush Holt. 
Now,

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Rush Holt is the first guy to represent his district in a century or 
more. And he's the only scientist we have--serious, serious scientist in 
the Congress. We also had a great science teacher, Bruce Vento, from Minnesota, but he's retiring this year.
    You know, I just announced the human genome, and we're all talking 
about how we have to preserve privacy of medical records, and we've got 
a thousand decisions to make. This Congress is going to be--Joe told 
that joke about me organizing a DLC chapter on Mars--[laughter]--but let 
me just tell you, we're all laughing about this, but I believe some of 
the most serious decisions Congress will have to make in the next decade 
will relate to science and technology.
    Now, we can get all the money we need from Democrats or Republicans 
for the National Institutes of Health, because we all want to live 
forever. And I say that not in a bad--that's good; that's not bad. I 
don't say that in a critical way. When I'm gone from here, I'll probably 
be writing you all letters, asking you to put more into it as I get 
older. [Laughter]
    But there are a whole range of other issues. Should we try to find 
out if there was life on Mars, or should we be determining what's in the 
black holes in outer space, or should we be shifting another few hundred 
million dollars to explore the deepest depths of the ocean, because we 
now know there are forms of life there that we had not even discovered 
yet that might have all kinds of answers? Should we do them all? If so, 
what do we have to take money away from?
    I'm telling you, this is a big deal. Rush Holt is really important to the Congress. He's a serious 
scientist who actually knows stuff that the rest of us just give 
speeches about. [Laughter] And he had the guts to run in a district 
where nobody else would run because they thought there wasn't any way a 
Democrat could get elected. So he also is a test of whether our ideas 
can sway people who otherwise were not reachable by us. And I want you 
to help him. He deserves to be reelected, and I want him to be 
reelected. Thank you.
    And finally, of course, I want you to help the Vice President, because I want you to make Bill Daley look like a genius. [Laughter] He is, but I want 
him to look like one.
    You know, I just want to say a word about this. First of all, there 
are a lot of people who, if they had a job like Secretary of Commerce, 
would try to find some way to say no if they were being asked to run and 
do another political campaign. He could say, ``Well, I've already been 
in the Cabinet once. What else can I do?'' And he didn't say no. And 
that means a lot to me.
    Because I can tell you, all the stuff we talked about, and a lot of 
other issues that you know well, including what kinds of people get 
appointed to major positions from the Supreme Court to the Cabinet to 
many other things, are hinging on the outcome of the Presidential race. 
And how well a lot of our friends out here run in their reelection 
campaign will turn in some measure on this Presidential race. And Bill 
Daley said yes, and I'm proud of him. And it's going to be a better 
campaign and a winning campaign in no small measure because he did.
    I just want to remind you, very briefly, of some things. I know you 
know this. And I had a chance to talk about this in my press conference 
a little today. I worked real hard for the last 7\1/2\ years, with the 
help of a lot of good people in this room, in Congress, and those in my 
administration who'd been introduced, like Secretary Caldera, to kind of turn our country around, get it going in the 
right direction, give the American people a lot of self-confidence that 
we could move forward and we could move forward together. And now we 
really do have this unbelievable chance to kind of write the future of 
our dreams for our kids.
    But I get the feeling that there are people kind of approaching this 
election in a less serious vein, who basically act as if--and a lot of 
you have done this, a lot of you in the high-tech sector have done 
this--but a lot people act like this economy's rocking along so good; 
you couldn't mess it up if you tried. You could take dynamite to the New 
York Stock Exchange, and it wouldn't mess it up; you could do whatever 
you wanted; you couldn't mess it up--and that maybe people ought to just 
take their tax cut and run and just kind of enter an area of good 
feelings and just see what happens. And I just don't believe that.
    I think any of us who are at least 30 years old--I've said this 
1,000 times; I'm going to say it one more time--anybody in this room at 
least 30 years old can remember at least one time in your life when you 
made a mistake, not because things were going so badly for you but 
because things were going so well, you

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thought there was no penalty to the failure to concentrate. And that is 
how we're going to be measured this time. Are we going to concentrate? 
Are we going to bear down? Are we going to really, really cherish the 
extraordinary opportunity we have here?
    And I think that there are four simple arguments for Al Gore's election. First of all, his service as Vice 
President, from breaking the tie on the budget in '93 to breaking the 
tie on the commonsense gun safety legislation in 2000, to running the 
Rego program to the empowerment zones, to the technology partnership for 
the new generation vehicles, to managing big chunks of our relationships 
with Russia, South Africa, Egypt, and many other places.
    We have had a lot of Vice Presidents who made great Presidents. 
Thomas Jefferson did. Theodore Roosevelt did, and Harry Truman did. But 
we've never had anybody serve in that job who was as great in that job 
as Al Gore. Never, not one person in the 
history of the Republic has ever done that. And that counts for 
something. It really matters that he's had this experience, that he 
knows these things.
    The second argument is, now that I'm going out into private life, 
it's just purely selfish, but I'd kind of like to see this expansion 
continue for a little while. [Laughter] And I know that he will follow economic policies more likely to keep the 
expansion going, because we'll keep paying down the debt; we'll keep 
interest rates down; we'll keep investing in our future; he'll keep 
expanding trade, keep doing the things that have to be done.
    If you take all the non-Social Security surplus and give it away--
all of it right now, projected for the next decade--in a tax cut and in 
the partial privatization transition costs of any privatization plan and 
in the spending in other defense and other spending plans proposed by 
the Republicans, it's all gone. All the surplus is gone.
    Now, if I ask all of you, what's your projected income over the next 
10 years, and you tell me, and I say, ``Do you have a high level of 
confidence?'' You say, ``Yes,'' and I say, ``Good, come here and sign 
the contract to spend it all tomorrow,'' you would think I had lost my 
mind, wouldn't you? There's not a person in this room that would sign a 
contract tomorrow obligating you to spend your entire projected income 
over the next 10 years. We do not need to risk going back to the old 
days of deficits and high interest rates and weak economic performance 
because of that. That's the second reason that we ought to be for 
Gore.
    And the third reason is that he 
understands the future. And that's important. I'll just give you just 
two examples. With this incredible human genome announcement this week--
it was stunning. You know, I've been reading about this stuff for a year 
just so I would understand it when I made the announcement yesterday. 
[Laughter] Now, you're laughing, but it is the most fascinating thing I 
have ever studied in my life. It's unbelievable. But we have serious 
questions here. Do you believe that as we give up more and more of our 
genetic information so we can find out how to stay healthier, we should 
be denied jobs on the basis of it--or promotions, or access to health 
insurance? That's a big question, isn't it? Don't you want somebody who 
understands how to help you work through all that?
    I had a guy tell me the other day that Al Gore was talking to him about the Internet 12 or 15 years ago 
and saying that someday it would all be on all the--the Library of 
Congress would all be on computers, and we could all get it, and that's 
what it is--along with the Encyclopedia Britannica. Pretty soon, all of 
our health and financial information is going to be on somebody's 
computer. I think you ought to have to give permission before somebody 
else gets it. Wouldn't you like to have somebody who both understands 
that, and wants to keep the high-tech economy going and growing and keep 
this a fertile ground for new companies to start, being President?
    Everybody now admits we're having global warming. When we started 
talking about it 5 years ago, we had a House subcommittee that thought 
it was a subversive plot to wreck the American economy. My only defense 
was, if I was trying to wreck the American economy, I had done a poor 
job of it.
    You know, the first lunch I ever had with Al Gore, the very first one after we took office in the White 
House, he brought in his little chart showing me how there was more 
greenhouse gases being put in the atmosphere in the last 30 years than 
in the previous 500. But you know what? Eight years later it's the 
conventional wisdom. People made fun of him 8 years ago. It's the 
conventional wisdom now. He was right.

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    Don't you think we ought to have somebody that understands this 
going into a future that--somebody that can shape our children's future? 
If we don't do something about this, it's going to flood the sugarcane 
fields in Florida--I mean in Louisiana. It's going to flood the 
Everglades in Florida. It's going to change the whole pattern of 
agricultural production in the Midwest. I think it's important. I want 
somebody plotting the country's future that really understands this 
stuff.
    And the final thing I'd say is, we're Democrats because, whether 
we're more conservative or more liberal on this or that spending issue 
or this or that crime issue, we're inclusive. We want poor people along 
for the ride. We want middle class people to have a chance to catch up 
with everybody else. We want everybody's kids to have an education. And 
we're not for demeaning people because of their race, their religion, 
their sexual orientation, or anything else. And I want somebody as 
President that I absolutely trust to take us all along for the ride.
    So we actually made America a better place, and you guys have just 
gotten started. All the good stuff is still out there to be done, but 
you've got to win now to do it then.
    Thank you, and bless you.

 Note:  The President spoke at 9:20 p.m. in the Ballroom at the Westin 
Fairfax Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Simon Rosenberg, founder 
and president, New Democrat Network; Dave McCurdy, president, Electronic 
Industries Alliance; Alan Khazei, cofounder, City Year; and former Gov. 
E. Benjamin Nelson of Nebraska, a candidate for U.S. Senate. A portion 
of these remarks could not be verified because the tape was incomplete.