[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book II)]
[August 13, 2000]
[Pages 1636-1638]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Brunch Honoring the Cabinet
in Los Angeles
August 13, 2000
The President. Well, first of all, let me say I'm glad to see you
here in good spirits. Are you ready to leave and win? [Applause] I want
to thank Mayor Rendell and Mayor
Archer and Congresswoman Sanchez, Joe Andrew, all the
leaders of our Democratic Party. I want to thank all of you who have
helped me over these last 8 years. I want to thank you for your
commitment to helping Al Gore and Joe
Lieberman.
I want to say something--I hope we can be more positive and more
specific than our friends were in Philadelphia. But I do just want to--
I'm just standing up here on the stage thinking about one thing. You
know, when they wanted to show harmony and inclusion and all that, they
had to put their leaders in a closet and go scare up people off the
street to get on the stage. [Laughter] When we want to show harmony and
inclusion, all we have to do is bring our team up on the stage.
When they want to show harmony and inclusion, they have to use the
people they've got on the stage to hide their policies. When we want to
show harmony and inclusion, all we have to do is talk about what we've
done, and even more important, what Al Gore
and Joe Lieberman are going to do.
There's a big difference.
And so, I just want to say when I heard them talking about how we
coasted through the last 8 years--[laughter]--I sort of thought, where
did I get all this gray hair anyway? [Laughter] I sort of thought, where
do they think those jobs came from, where do they think those
educational statistics came from, where do they think the cut in the
welfare rolls in half, and the decline in the crime rate, and the fact
that over 40 million more Americans are breathing clean air? And I could
talk here until dawn about it.
Do you remember when they were in? They took credit when the Sun
came up in the morning. [Laughter] The Republicans are in, and ``It's
morning in America. The Sun came up again today.'' [Laughter] ``Look at
it. There it is in the sky. We did it. There it is.'' [Laughter]
Well, God made the Sun rise, not the Republicans or the Democrats.
But President Kennedy once reminded us that ``Here on Earth, God's work
must truly be our own.'' That is what this
[[Page 1637]]
Cabinet has tried to do--has tried to make the work of making this a
more decent, more just, as well as a more prosperous country, their
work.
Let me just tell you one story. One night in a rather dark period
for the administration, not long after the American people decided to
give the Republicans a chance to run the Congress in the '94 election,
in early '95, Vice President Gore and I invited a couple of Presidential
scholars to come to the White House to talk to us in a very quiet way
about where we were at this moment in history, what was going on, what
we ought to be thinking about and looking at. And one of these scholars
looked at me and the Vice President, and he said, ``You guys don't have
to worry. You're going to win reelection.'' And I said, ``Why do you say
that?'' He said, ``I spent my whole life studying administrations. You
have the most loyal Cabinet since Thomas Jefferson's second
administration.''
Now, you may take that for granted, but you've got to understand, we
live and work in a town where most of the people who write about things
think loyalty is a vice, not a virtue--[laughter]--and where all the
pressures are designed to get people to think about anything other than
the work they're doing for the American people, to divert their
attention, to break their concentration, to undermine long-term plans.
It's about politics, not people.
This administration has been about people, not politics. And that's
why these folks behind me have done so much good. A lot of them have
been here the whole 8 years. Let me say to all of you--I don't want to
give the speech I'm going to give tomorrow night--[laughter]--but I do
want to say this----
Audience member. Practice on us. [Laughter]
The President. Practice on us. [Laughter] It's kind of like these
singers who have been around a long time; they always sing their old
songs. I once went to a concert where Tina Turner sang ``Proud Mary,''
and she said, ``I've been singing this song for 25 years, but it gets
better every time I sing it.'' [Laughter] So there won't be any
surprises. [Laughter]
What I want to say to you is this. Elections are about the future.
And people get--the people who vote in elections are all of us, and
they've been making pretty good decisions for over 200 years, or we
still wouldn't be around here. But the world is growing ever more
complex, and they have access to more and more information than ever
before, which is good on the one hand, but on the other hand, it means
it may be harder to concentrate on and distill out the essential meat of
any decision that has to be made.
When I was a boy coming up, we had three television stations, one
for each of the networks, and we didn't have much option on what we
watched at night in the news. Now you can watch news in seven or eight
different formats, and if you just want to watch a movie and skip it
altogether, you can. So there's more information than ever before out
there, but it's also harder to get clarity.
And I want to ask you something seriously. All of us have done our
best, and we've still got a little ways to go, and we've got a lot of
things we think we can get done before we leave. But this is a political
convention to nominate the next President and Vice President and to
clarify for the American people the choices before them.
The modern role of the political convention is to get the American
people, just for a few moments every night for 4 days, to stop, look,
and listen. That's what it is. And in those 4 days the two parties get
to say, ``I know you're busy. I know you've got other things on your
mind. You may think you already know what this is about, but we want you
to know who our leaders are, what their values are, what their vision
is, what they intend to do.''
Now, I've said this all over America, and you've heard me say it
until the cows come home, but we have a big mission this year, first to
convince the American people how important this election is. We cannot
allow the Democrats to be punished by the good job all these folks have
done, by the good job Al Gore's done, by
the good job Joe Lieberman and our
Senators have done, by the good job Dick Gephardt and our House Members have done, because people will be in
such a good humor that they think, ``Well, everything is rocking along
here. What could possibly be the consequences of these elections?''
So you have to say, ``Hey, what a country does with its prosperity,
a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, is as big a hurdle, a big a test, and
as important a decision as what we did in adversity in 1992.'' You have
to get that out.
Now, that is not a case we had to make in '92. Everybody knew what
the deal was, right? You didn't have to be as bright as a tree full
[[Page 1638]]
of owls to know we had to change the economy--[laughter]--and the social
direction of the country. You didn't. But you've got--listen, this is
serious. You have to do that.
The second thing you've got to do is to convince the American people
that there are big, meaningful differences between the two candidates
for President and Vice President and our Senate and our House
candidates. And that will be harder because, as you saw from their
convention, we're the only side that wants the American people to know
what the differences are. Because if the other side--you know, they know
if the American people figure out what the real differences are, we win.
Right?
You don't have any doubt of that do you?
Audience members. No-o-o!
The President. Do you have any doubt at all?
Audience members. No-o-o!
The President. If people know what Al Gore stands for and will do as President as compared with what
his opponent will, the difference in Joe Lieberman's voting record in the Senate and Dick Cheney's voting record in the House, if people know the
difference in what's in our vision for the future and what we're going
to build on and what they intend to dismantle, do you have any doubt
what the decision will be? Of course you don't.
Therefore, you should be of good cheer because we can turn around
these polls. But it's not the work of a day. It's going to take every
day between now and November, and you're going to have to go to every
friend you have. And most of the people you know are not as political as
your are. Isn't that right? Even the Democrats--they're not as political
as you are. And you've got to go out of this convention committed to
telling people, ``This is a big election. There are big differences. In
spite of all the good that's been done in the last 8 years, you haven't
seen anything yet. You give Al Gore and Joe
Lieberman 8 years and you will see that
the best is yet to be.'' That's what we want you do to for us.
Thank you very much.
Note: The President spoke at 11:50 a.m. at the Casa Del Mar. In his
remarks, he referred to Edward G. Rendell, general chair, Mayor Dennis
W. Archer, general cochair, Representative Loretta Sanchez, vice chair,
and Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, Democratic National Committee;
Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Senator Joseph I. Lieberman; and
Republican Vice Presidential candidate Dick Cheney.