[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book II)]
[September 14, 2000]
[Pages 1838-1842]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Dinner for Hillary Clinton
September 14, 2000

    Thank you very much. Vernon has got this 
microphone here. It's not on. It's feeding to the press. And if I know 
Vernon, he's already fed the press, which may mean that I will get a 
little bit of slack from them if I say anything I shouldn't.
    Let me begin by saying this is my second home. Usually, when I'm a 
surrogate for Hillary--and I try to do this as much as I can, because 
that way she can be out getting votes. I'm glad to do it, but tonight I 
really got the better end of the deal. Vernon 
and Ann have been so wonderful to us, and we have 
had these seven--soon to be eight Christmas Eves together, with 
Dwight and Toni and the 
rest of their family.
    And he's always letting me bring all my 
family here. And sometimes, that's a pretty large and rowdy bunch. I 
have two young, impish nephews who, from time to time--[inaudible]--
grandchildren. And I'm very grateful for their friendship, and I want to 
thank Dwight and Toni and 
Ann and Vernon one more time for being there for 
our family tonight.
    We've had an interesting talk around the table tonight about 
everything in the wide world. But I'd just like to say a couple of 
things. This is a rather interesting time in my life. I'm not running 
for anything for the first time in 26 years. [Laughter] My party has a 
new leader. My family has a new candidate. I cast what may well be the 
last vote of a long and rich life in my native State of Arkansas for Al 
Gore for President.
    And Tuesday I got to vote for my wife for the first time, in a 
little school in Chappaqua, New York. And it was the most extraordinary 
experience. You know, I was happy as a kid on Christmas morning. It was 
amazing. We got to go in and shake hands with all the election 
officials. And I go into this little voting booth, and I realized what I 
was doing, and it was just an unbelievable feeling. So for me, 
personally, this is a source of great pride.
    And I was very proud of her last night, because I thought she gave a 
good account of herself in a difficult and challenging format. It should 
have been difficult and challenging. These jobs are not being given 
away. Candidates ought to be tested. But I was very, very proud of her. 
And apparently, the people who saw the debate liked her pretty well, 
too. And I always believe you can trust the people. People almost always 
get it right if they have enough information and enough time to digest 
it. So I felt good about that.
    But what I would like to say to all of you relates more to you than 
to her and to this campaign. I appreciate what Vernon said. I thought 
when I ran for President in 1991 and 1992, we needed to change not only 
the content of our policy but the way we did our politics and the way we 
related to each other as citizens. We needed to adopt a more unifying 
language and rhetoric and attitude toward one another,

[[Page 1839]]

because we're growing more diverse in a world that's growing more 
complicated and more interconnected. And we can't get much done if all 
we want to do is to figure out how to segment the election in every 
political season in a way that divides the American people against one 
another so that, hopefully, we have at least one more vote than the 
other side.
    That's not the way the world works its best. It's not the way the 
best companies are run, not the way the best nonprofits are run. It's 
not the way people want to run their families or their communities. It's 
not to say that we shouldn't have vigorous debates, but I thought that 
the country had been disadvantaged by a harsh and exceedingly personal 
political style that, I thought, needed to go away for good.
    So we set about trying to turn the country around and change the 
policy and change the politics. And the result proves that a lot of 
sunshine and a lot of storms have been pretty good for the American 
people. We'll leave it to the historians to judge how good and what role 
we had in it, but I feel very grateful. I have a heart full of 
gratitude.
    But the point I want to make tonight--and we discussed this at our 
table--is that I think this is an election that's at least as important 
as the election of 1992, and in some ways it presents as big, if not a 
bigger challenge to people, because what you do when times are good is 
sometimes harder to judge than what you do when times are tough.
    The people took a chance on me in 1992. And we were laughing 
outside, and I have no idea how many people were in that polling place. 
``Can I really vote for this guy? He's only 46 years old, a little 
State. I've never been there. I'm not quite sure, you know? They say all 
these bad things about him. Aw, heck, times are tough. I'm going to give 
him a chance.'' People felt, ``Well, it's not that big a risk. I mean, 
after all, we're in tough shape here.''
    Now, the country's in good shape. People have a sense of well-being 
that they have earned. Current trends are going in the right direction. 
The important thing in this election, I think, is for people to be quite 
clear about what they want out of this and what they want for their 
country.
    I've always believed that if we could, all of us who feel as I do, 
if we could just bring clarity to this election, to get the American 
people to sit down and take a little time to think, ``What would I like 
my country to look like in 10 years? What is it that I should do with 
this truly magic moment? What are the big challenges; what are the big 
problems; what are the big obstacles? What are the big changes, and who 
can manage them best?'' I've always thought that we could all come out 
okay in this election, because very often, the person for whom you 
decide to vote depends in large measure on what you think the election 
is about in the first place.
    So, I think the Vice President and 
Senator Lieberman are doing very well. I 
think Hillary's doing very well, but I don't think any of these 
elections are over yet, because I think the debate is still stewing out 
there. People are trying to come to grips with what it all means. I'd 
just like to say a couple of things, first about Hillary. One of the 
things that--not much gets me mad anymore, I'm feeling pretty mellow--
but one of the things that still kind of steams me is when I hear 
somebody say, ``Well, why is she doing this?'' She wouldn't be doing 
this if she weren't his wife and the First Lady.''
    You can ask Vernon. The truth is, if she 
hadn't decided to spend the last 30 years helping me, helping other 
people, being a public servant as well as a private lawyer, she could 
have been doing this 25 years ago. She chose to be a citizen rather than 
a candidate. She chose to do things like be on the board of the 
Children's Defense Fund and found the Arkansas Advocates for Children 
and Families and start our neonatal nursery down there and be the 
chairman of the board of a legal services corporation before she was 30 
and did other things where she could serve and not ask for anything.
    This is the first time in 30 years she's ever asked anybody to do 
anything for her. So when people say to me--well they don't say it to 
me, to my face, but I hear it all the time. It's sort of--that's just 
not true. I've never known anybody that I thought was more qualified to 
serve as a Senator who wasn't one already than her, because she knows 
how to organize things. She knows how to get things done. She knows how 
to work with people who disagree with her.
    She's worked for 30 years on issues that are central to this 
country's future, not just children and families and health care and 
education but also some of the big issues in New York: How

[[Page 1840]]

do you bring economic opportunity to economically distressed places? We 
had to make a living doing that in Arkansas for a dozen years.
    So, I think she's superbly well qualified. She's been to all 62 
counties in the State. She's the only person running, I think, for the 
Senate in New York this year that's done that. If you saw the debate 
last night, you know she's thought a lot about these issues.
    But the second thing I want to say, in a larger sense, is that there 
are big things we know that we're all going to have to deal with as 
people, that our elected officials will be at the center of. We know 
right now we've got to deal with the aging of America, all us baby 
boomers retire, two people working and one person retired.
    We know right now that in the world economy we live in, education is 
more important than ever, and we have the most diverse and largest 
student body we've ever had, a little picture of the changes in America. 
I'll just give you just a sample.
    There's a new movie out starring Denzel Washington. I don't even 
know if its premiered yet, and it's about the integration of T.C. 
Williams High School and the football, over the river there in 
Alexandria. T.C. Williams High School today, just three or four decades 
later, is a magnificent school, still. It has one of the best 
antiviolence programs in America, by the way, but it is part of the most 
diverse school district in America, where there are people from 180 
different racial and ethnic groups, whose families speak over 100 
different native languages, in one school district.
    It's a whole different world out there. How are we going to give all 
these kids a world-class education? The truth is, we know how to turn 
around failing schools, so we're going to do it. I was at a school in 
Harlem, in New York, a couple weeks ago, that 2 years ago had 80 percent 
of the kids reading and doing math below grade level. Two years later, 
it has 76 percent of the kids doing reading and math at or above grade 
level.
    This can be done everywhere in America. The question is whether 
we're going to do it. How are we going to do that? What should the 
Federal Government's role be? What should we focus on? So there are 
things we know. Then there are all these things that are imponderable. 
When will global warming change our lives? See the polar ice caps are 
melting? What does that have to do with you? If you're from Illinois, 
what's it going to do to agriculture? Why? Will it bury the sugarcane 
fields in Louisiana? Now that we've saved the Florida Everglades, will 
they be overrun with water? How could we deal with that in ways that 
grow the economy and create jobs for working people, instead of take 
jobs away?
    Don't you want somebody in the Senate and somebody in the White 
House that's curious and thinks about that kind of stuff? The world is 
growing closer together. What are our responsibilities to deal with the 
AIDS epidemic in Africa, growing even more rapidly in India now, and 
soon to have the most rapid growth of all in the states of the former 
Soviet Union?
    What are our responsibilities for that? When you all--when new 
mothers can bring home their babies with a little gene card that tells 
them what their genetic makeup is likely to be, what their life 
expectancy is likely to be, and what the probability of a girl getting 
breast cancer in her thirties is, a little baby girl coming home from 
the hospital, or a man having a debilitating stroke in his forties 
because he's got a little genetic crook--what are our responsibilities 
there? How are we going to protect the privacy of that information and 
still get them the kind of--on the kind of regime that will be 
drastically minimize the chances that those bad things will happen and 
increase their life expectancy?
    How are we going to bridge the digital divide that exists in the 
world so that poor kids, not just in America but all around the world, 
get the same chance that others do? What are you going to do if somebody 
decides--figures out how to get a terrorist group a biological weapon 
that can be carried in a plastic case that can be not--that won't be 
detected in airports.
    Something like this could all happen. This is just some of the 
questions. If we had all night, I could give you a thousand questions. I 
think about this all the time. So, quite apart from the fact that I 
think we're right and they're wrong on how big the tax cut should be, 
whether we should pay down the debt, what's our obligation to the poor 
areas in America, whether we should raise the minimum wage, whether we 
should have the Patients' Bill of Rights, whether we should have a 
Medicare drug benefit, we need to elect people this year who are curious 
and think about the future and who have the capacity to deal with these 
big things

[[Page 1841]]

and imagine how it's going to effect our little children and 
grandchildren, because I'm convinced that for all the good things that 
have happened in the last 8 years, all the best stuff's still out there.
    But I'm also convinced that the future is not about to stand still, 
and therefore it will be more important than ever to have people who not 
only have very clear and unambiguous political values and common 
commitments that are clear to all of us at elections but people who are 
really curious in the best sense and learning and flexible and care 
about this.
    I have never known anybody that I thought had a better combination 
of mind and heart and of constancy and ability to work with other people 
than Hillary--ever--not anybody. I've never known anybody that I thought 
has thought about the future with a greater capacity to predict than 
Al Gore--not anybody.
    These are not the things that you necessarily think about in 
political campaigns. You know, they may not--it's hard to make a 30-
second ad on those two things. But I'm telling you, that's the kind of 
stuff we need to be thinking about, because all the best stuff's still 
out there, but there are a lot of profound challenges out there.
    I went down to Colombia last week, and we're trying to help 
Colombia, and also Bolivia and Ecuador and the countries around there, 
you know, root out the scourge of cocaine, get the farmers to do 
something else for a living. Fourteen thousand kids die in America every 
year directly from drug overdoses, as a consequence of their drug 
habits.
    They can lose their democracy down there. Nobody really knows 
exactly how to save it all, but I can tell you one thing. We won't get 
it done by just shouting at each other. We're going to have to work with 
people and think about it.
    Just the last thought I'll leave you with: The most important thing 
about the whole human genome project to me is that the people who did it 
figured out, with the most sophisticated computer technology available, 
that we're genetically 99.9 percent the same. And that the genetic 
differences within different racial and ethnic groups, within the group, 
among individuals, are greater than the genetic differences between any 
two racial groups, as a profile.
    There is a book that's out that I've been kind of touting lately, 
that I'm very interested in. It's called ``Non Zero,'' written by a man 
named Robert Wright. I don't know if any of you have seen it, but he 
wrote a book a few years ago called ``The Moral Animal,'' which got a 
lot of interest.
    Essentially, the argument of ``Non Zero'' is this: The world is--it 
is a scientific and historical argument. When Martin Luther King 
propositioned that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward 
justice, and essentially what the argument is that we have to become 
more just as a society, if we want to survive, as we grow more complex 
and more interdependent.
    He's not naive. I mean, he understands that science was abused by 
Nazi Germany, modern organizational techniques, and military capacity 
was abused by communists, totalitarians, dictatorships. But he basically 
argues that if you look at it over the whole sweep of history, it is a 
good thing that we are growing, A, more complex, and B, more 
interdependent, because it forces us to try to find solutions in which 
we all win, instead of solutions in which some of us win at everybody 
else's expense.
    As I said, he's not naive. If you have a race for President, one of 
these guys is going to lose, and one of them's going to win. You know, 
somebody's going to win, somebody's going to loose the race for Senate. 
But he argues that the leadership style that is required for this time 
is that we work together to try to find principled compromises but not 
say you'll split the difference. Things that are always on the edge of 
change, so that we can all win.
    And what I've tried to do is to modernize the Democratic Party but 
rooted on very simple ideas: Everybody counts; everybody deserves a 
chance; people that need help ought to get it, to be empowered to make 
the most of their lives; and we all do better when we work together--
very simple ideas. But you have to have people who can take those simple 
principles in a very complicated world and make it work for ordinary 
people.
    I don't know anybody I think can do that better than Hillary, and I 
know I'm biased, because I know we spent 30 years together. I'm just 
telling you I've seen hundreds and hundreds of people in public life, in 
both parties, and most of them were better than most folks thought they 
were. Most people in public life I've known have been honest, hard-
working, and

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did what they actually thought was right 95 percent of the time. But 
I've never known anybody I thought could do it that well.
    So I think that she would do a great job for New York, and I think 
she will win, only if she can continue to bring clarity to the message, 
and your presence here tonight and your support for her guarantees that 
she'll be able to be heard in her own voice, rather than somebody's 
clever transfiguration of it. And you should be very proud of that. I 
hope you'll always be proud you came to this dinner tonight.
    But the stakes are far bigger than another Senate race, even far 
bigger than another President's race, and they are just as important, if 
not more important, than what we did in '92, because we now have the 
future to run ourselves, and we've got to do a good job of it.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 10:10 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Vernon and Ann Jordan; and Dwight 
Bush, chief financial officer, Sato Travel, and his wife, Toni.