[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book II)]
[August 9, 2000]
[Pages 1592-1595]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Dinner for Hillary Clinton in McLean, Virginia
August 9, 2000

    Thank you very much, Claire. Thank 
you for your wonderful words, and I thank you and Al once again for being so generous. And I want to say to all 
of you what I said to them at dinner: I apologize that we had to 
reschedule this, but it worked out very well. I was involved in the Camp 
David peace talks at the time we were going to have this dinner before. 
I think that--believe it or not, we still might get there, and at least 
we headed off a disaster and got them talking about the fundamental 
issues, really for the first time in an official setting. So it was very 
good.
    Claire asked me if I'd be willing to 
answer a couple of questions, and I have to go on to another event 
tonight because we had to double up since we rescheduled, but what I 
think I'll do is abbreviate my remarks and then maybe answer some 
questions.
    I would just like to say a couple of things. In 1992 the country was 
in trouble, and I heard it in the stories of individuals all over the 
country. A lot of people have forgotten it now. And I ran for President 
because I thought that there was no plan for getting us out of the 
trouble we were in and maximizing the opportunities that were before the 
country. So I put together a plan.
    And some of you who are political junkies may even remember that 
when I went to New Hampshire, only Paul Tsongas and I put out little 
detailed books of exactly where we stood on the issues, and people 
actually, a lot of them, made fun of us. ``Nobody is so wonky they're 
going to read this 30- or 40-page book.'' But it turned out we got the 
biggest crowds at the town meetings because people knew America was in 
trouble, and they wanted to know exactly what we were going to do.
    And when I got elected with Vice President Gore on the commitment to 
put people first and restore the principles of opportunity, 
responsibility, and community to our national life, we actually 
implemented an economic plan and a crime plan and a welfare reform plan 
and an education plan and an environmental plan and a plan to down-size 
the Government in a way that would enable us to be more active but less 
oppressive in the way the Federal Government operated, and health care 
initiatives--right across the board.
    And the country has benefited. Whenever a democracy does well, most 
of the credit goes to the people who live there, not the politicians who 
serve. But it is clearly true that what we did was to establish the 
conditions and give the people the tools with which they have made 
astonishing progress in the last 8 years.
    So the question before the American people is, now what? My strong 
conviction is that the American people should not be lulled into a sense 
of complacency because of our prosperity and our social progress but 
instead should realize that this might be the most important chance in 
our entire lifetime that we ever get as a people--any of us in this 
room--to really build the future of our dreams for our kids; that change 
is the only constant in the global information society, nothing stays 
the same forever; and we need to be focused on what the big challenges, 
the big opportunities are. We ought to vote for people we believe will 
help to make the most of this magic moment.
    And essentially, that's why Hillary decided to run for the Senate--
that and the fact that half a dozen or more New York House Members came 
and asked her to run. And then she went up to New York and spent some 
time, and we talked about it. She was, frankly, reluctant to give up our 
last year in the White House and all the fun and enjoyment, the 
relaxation, the savoring of successes. But she knew that the things that 
can be done now are the things that she's worked on and dreamed about 
for 30 years, ever since I first met her.
    When we met in law school, she took another year--she took a fourth 
year in law school so she could work at the Yale hospital in the child 
study center on legal and health issues affecting children. When we went 
home to Arkansas, she led the move to build our first neonatal nursery 
at the Children's Hospital and then organized a group called the 
Arkansas Advocates for Families and Children. By the time I was elected 
President--and our little State was what my predecessor used to 
affectionately call a small southern State of which I was Governor--

[[Page 1593]]

[laughter]--had the seventh biggest children's hospital in America.
    And since she has been First Lady, she has taken an unprecedented 
role in issues affecting children and families, from lobbying for the 
family and medical leave law in 1993 to having the first White House 
conference on early childhood and brain development, dealing with issues 
of violence, working on the Children's Health Insurance Program, and a 
lot of the education initiatives we've done, to her, literally, 
nationally recognized work to make it easier for people to adopt 
children, to adopt across racial lines, to provide incentives to adopt 
children with disabilities, and to do better by the kids who are in 
foster care and especially children who age out of foster care. She has 
really done an amazing job, I think.
    And then, for the last 2 years she has been running our millennial 
program, giving a wonderful series of lectures at the White House on the 
big issues of the future. We've brought in people from all over the 
world to talk about--and launching this Save America's Treasures 
program. The head of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Dick 
Moe, told me a couple of weeks ago, when we were 
saving Abraham Lincoln's summer cottage at the Old Soldiers' Home in 
Washington, he said that Hillary's millennial treasures program has now 
provided the impetus for over $100 million for investment in historic 
preservation. That's 60 percent public money, 40 percent private money. 
It is the largest, single historic preservation effort in the history of 
the United States.
    So what she recognized was that I've done everything I could to turn 
this country around, leave it in good shape, get us into the 21st 
century going in the right direction. But all the great stuff is out 
there still. And we need people to carry on the work. That's why she 
took what I thought was a personally brave decision, after 30 years of 
helping other people in every election, to try to run herself. I'm very 
proud of her. And the latest Quinnipiac College poll had her up 3 points 
today--it came out today. And I think she's going to do well.
    But it's a very expensive election, and as you know, it has been 
heavily targeted, not only by the Republican Party but by their 
affiliate groups that didn't think much of anything we did. [Laughter]
    So we like--we love our time in New York. We've got a wonderful 
house in Chappaqua. It's a 111-year-old farmhouse. And I'm looking 
forward to the years ahead. I think she's going to win this race, but 
it's going to be quite expensive and quite controversial and quite 
difficult. But she's in good shape, and she has done an astonishing 
amount of work over the last year and a half to make sure that she is 
the Senate candidate that has actually been to all the counties in New 
York, that actually knows a lot about the upstate economy, the rural 
economy, the farm economy, the things most people who think of New York 
know nothing about. And I'm very, very proud of her.
    I feel the same way basically--I want to make the same argument 
about Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, who has been my friend for 30 years, since I 
supported him when he ran for the State Senate in 1970, when I was a 
first-year law student at Yale and he was a 28-year-old graduate there. 
And we worked together for 15 years in the Democratic Leadership 
Council.
    The issue is whether we're going to keep the change going in the 
direction of the last 8 years or take a U-turn. That's basically what 
the issue is. And I think that what we ought to do, those of us who 
agree with that, ought to take it as our mission from here to November 
to do two things. One is to make people understand this election is a 
very big deal.
    Look, we had a huge voter turnout in '92, huge, because everybody 
knew it was a big deal. I mean, our backs were against the wall. We had 
high unemployment. We had exploding welfare rolls. We had high crime 
rates. We had all the sort of social division and acrimony and riots in 
L.A., and we had a sense of political paralysis here. And there was a 
lot of wedge politics, pitting one group against the other. And you 
didn't have to be a genius to figure out it was pretty important.
    Someone gave me that great saying in 1992 that insanity is doing the 
same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different 
result. So the people gave us a chance to serve. Now, however, I think 
you can make a compelling case that how you use your prosperity is just 
as stern a test of your judgment, your values, and your character as a 
nation as how you deal with adversity.
    In my lifetime we never had a chance like this, so much economic 
prosperity, social

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progress, the absence of domestic crisis or foreign threat. We get to 
decide what kind of future we want for our children--huge, huge thing. 
So you have to go around and convince people of that, because all these 
surveys show that most people think, ``Ah, things are going so well, who 
could mess it up? It's not this an big election.''
    The second thing that we have to say is, you have to bring clarity 
of choice to this election, because people have to understand there are 
real consequences and profound differences. I enjoyed the Republican 
Convention, and I was flattered by all the rhetorical devices which 
recalled, apparently, exact phrases and things I said over the last 8 
years, and according to a news story I saw. And I don't think we should 
minimize it. It's a good thing for them to stop being harsh and mean-
spirited in their rhetoric. That's a good thing. But there was a 
difference between changing the rhetoric and changing the policies of 
the party.
    We actually came out with policies that were new in 1992, different 
on the economy, on crime, on welfare, on education, on the environment--
right across the board--foreign policy. So we have to bring clarity, 
because there wasn't much clarity. If you saw at the end of the--all the 
news stories of interviewing undecided voters at the end of their 
convention said, ``Well, we liked what we saw, and it sure felt good. 
But we don't know what they're going to do. We don't have a sense of 
that.''
    Now, there are profound differences on economic policy. Principally, 
they want to spend all the surplus on tax cuts, leaving nothing to 
lengthen the life of Social Security and Medicare, leaving nothing to 
pay for their Social Security privatization programs or Star Wars or 
anything they promised to pay for. We want to spend much less than 
half--just a little over a quarter of what they do, but 80 percent of 
the people would get more money out of it, because we want to pay this 
country out of debt and keep investing in education and technology and 
health care.
    We were just talking before we came up here about long-term care 
needs. The average person in America who lives to be 65 today has a life 
expectancy of 83. People over 80 are the fastest growing people in 
America, percentage-wise. We have to reimagine old age in America. It's 
going to be totally different than it ever has been. And as I never tire 
of saying, the other reason that they're wrong on their economic policy 
is, besides the fact that they don't leave any money for their own 
spending promises, the second thing is, if you spend all this, then you 
won't pay us out of debt. And that will keep interest rates higher, and 
that will cost most Americans more money in higher interest rates than 
they'll get in a tax cut.
    I'll just tell you what the numbers are. One percent for a decade on 
interest rates--one percent equals $250 billion in home mortgage 
payments, $30 billion in car payments, $15 billion in college loan 
payments; never mind the impact on business loans, which affects 
business growth, employment, and income.
    The other thing, as I've said over and over again, is this is a 
projected surplus. It's not there yet. And if I ask you what your 
projected income is for the next decade, and you thought about it, and I 
said, ``Now, be real sure. Be conservative. Be pretty sure. This is an 
optimistic projection, but you be conservative,'' and I said, ``Okay, 
right now I want you to contract, binding contract to spend it all right 
now''--if you would do that, you should actually seriously consider 
supporting them in this election. [Laughter] But if you wouldn't, you 
probably ought to stick with us and keep this thing going.
    Now, there are same differences on crime and gun safety, on health 
care policy, on education policy--I could go through them all--on choice 
and the question of who gets appointed to the Supreme Court, which is 
not just about choice; it's about civil rights, civil rights 
enforcement.
    So this is a huge election. And Al Gore 
understands what's happened the last 8 years and has been an integral 
part of every good thing that's happened. He has a keen understanding of 
the future. He understands the implications of the human genome project, 
not only the potential for it but the privacy issues that were raised. 
He understands climate change, and now nobody is making fun of him 
anymore, like they did in 1992 and 1988. It turns out he was right all 
along.
    But still they took a dig at him at the 
Republican Convention on the Internet because, like a lot of things 
people said about me--he did not say he invented the Internet. There is 
an article in the Washington Monthly or one of those things, which was--
he said, yes, he said he was instrumental in creating--he sponsored 
legislation that helped to create it. The actual

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fact is, the Internet was for a long time a defense research project 
that was the private province of research physicists. There was a bill 
introduced and passed which essentially helped to make the Internet 
technology available to businesses and individuals, from which--growing 
out of that, it became worldwide, the fastest growing communications 
network in all of human history by a good long ways.
    Do you know how many sites there were on the World Wide Web when I 
became President? Fifty, 5-0--50. You know how many there are today? 
About 15 million--7 years.
    So we've got two people running for 
President, and the Vice President understands 
all this stuff. They've got the right economic policy. And the most 
important thing to me is, they want us all to go along for the ride. 
They want the people that worked here and made this dinner possible 
tonight to have the same chance we do to send their kids to college. 
They want employment nondiscrimination and hate crimes legislation, and 
they don't think gay people ought to be discriminated against, as long 
as they show up for work every day and obey the law like everybody else. 
They believe in the minimum wage and Patients' Bill of Rights. They 
passionately share these things that I have worked so hard to advance.
    So if you want to keep the prosperity going and keep America more 
justified and keep ahead of the future, I think it's an easy choice--for 
Al, for Joe, and for Hillary.
    Thank you for your money, but remember, when you leave here, every 
one of you have great networks of friends and family. You need to make 
sure people understand. It is a big issue, this election. There are big 
differences. And clarity of our choice is our friend. If the choice is 
clear, our side wins.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:45 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Lisa Claire and Albert J. Dwoskin; 
and Republican Presidential candidate Gov. George W. Bush of Texas.