[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book II)]
[September 17, 2000]
[Pages 1856-1859]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks at a Brunch for Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
September 17, 2000
Thank you very much. I was telling Ed
that I left the Black Caucus dinner last night about 12:15--the
Congressional Black Caucus--I was hoping that I would be compos mentis
by the time I was introduced to speak, and you gave me such a warm
welcome, I'm about to wake up. [Laughter]
Let me say, first of all, how grateful I am to all of you for being
here, and so many of you have already helped Hillary. I appreciate you
being here, and I'll explain in a minute why we're doing this.
I want to thank Congressmen Borski and
Congressman Brady for being not only friends
of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania but true friends of mine in the
Congress. I'm very proud of what we've done together.
I can't say enough about Ed. It's been wonderful for me to close out
my Presidency with a chairman of the Democratic Party who has as much
energy as I do--[laughter]--because we knew we would have to work, and
work we did. That first 7 months of this year, I don't think either one
of us slept very much, but we worked very hard. And everybody was
saying, ``Oh, the Democrats didn't have a chance. We were all going to
get wiped out. We couldn't hold the White House.''
And people thought Rendell and I
needed a dose of reality serum because we'd go around and say, ``What do
you mean? We're going to win this thing. It's''--[laughter]--didn't we?
And we would go around, and these people in farflung places, a long way
from Philadelphia and Washington, would look at us like, ``What have
these guys been drinking tonight?'' [Laughter]
You know, now all those people who were doubters think we're
geniuses. And we just need about 50 more days of effort so that they'll
be right. But I'm very grateful to you, Mr. Mayor, because after you did such a good job here, you could have
taken a well-deserved rest, and instead, you went on the road, and we've
had a good run. I'm very grateful.
Let me say to--I don't even have the words to express the gratitude
I feel to the people of Pennsylvania and especially the people of
Philadelphia in this area who have given me and Al Gore such an
overwhelming endorsement in 1992, and in 1996, the margin was truly
breathtaking. I will never forget it. It does an amazing thing for a
Democratic campaign for President not to have to worry about whether
you're going to win in Pennsylvania.
What happens--I can just tell you, after the conventions are over,
the candidates and their folks, they sit down and look at a map. And
they look at where they're going to get to 270 electoral votes, what
they have to carry that's up in the air, what they have to go take away,
what they have to defend. And after the convention, there are only a
relatively small number of days left. And the candidates accept their
public funding, so they have a limited amount of resources to travel, to
organize, to advertise.
And so it's like this elaborate chess game, quite apart from what we
all see when we pick up the papers every day and they're talking about
issues, debating issues--and, this year, debating the debates, of all
things--and what's in the debates. Underneath it all there is the sure
knowledge that we still have--since we're dedicating the Constitution
Center today, we still have the same system we started with. We elect
Presidents by States and by the electoral votes of States, which is all
the House Members plus two Senators. That's how many electoral votes
every State has. And even after reinforcement, when they get shifted
around, it all still adds up to 538, and you have to have 270 to win.
And Pennsylvania has 23 votes. And it's also in the heartland of
America, with Ohio and Michigan and Illinois and Wisconsin and
Minnesota, and you go over to New Jersey and up to New York. If you have
Pennsylvania, it
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drastically increases your chances of carrying New Jersey and of
carrying Ohio. No Republican has been elected since the Civil War
without carrying Ohio. And it is very hard for a Democrat to be elected
without carrying Pennsylvania.
So I am profoundly grateful, because for two Presidential elections
we got to go play on their field. If you're playing on the other team's
end of the field, you have a chance to score. And the people of
Pennsylvania trusted me and Al Gore to deliver for America, and I hope
you're not disappointed. It's been an honor. [Applause] Thank you.
There's something else I would like to say, and I won't give my
standard speech because it's Sunday and a lot of you want to go do
something else, and because you've heard it before, but I will say this.
I promised myself between the first of the year and election day I would
never, ever give a public speech without reminding people that it is
sometimes more difficult to make the right decision when times are good
than when times are bad. And I know the American people took a chance on
me in '92, but maybe it wasn't such a big chance because the country was
in trouble, right?
But now things are going well, and there must be clarity. People
have got to stop and think about what is it they want for their future.
Because I can tell you, in my lifetime, we've never had such a good
chance to build the future of our dreams for the children that are in
this room today and all the other kids in this country. We could
actually do things that were unthinkable when I ran for President. We
could actually get the country out of debt for the first time since
Andrew Jackson was President. We now know, without any question, what it
takes to turn around a failing public school, and we could put in place
a system if we had the will and were willing to commit the resources to
do it, that would guarantee a world-class education to all the kids in
this country.
We know how to do it now. When I started on this back in 1983, we
had some ideas, but we didn't know. We now have mountains of evidence. I
was in a school in Harlem the other day, a grade school. Two years ago
86 percent of the kids--80 percent of the kids, excuse me--were reading
below grade level, doing math below grade level--2 years ago. This year
74 percent of the kids are doing reading and math at or above grade
level--in 2 years. We know how to do this. Then the question is, are we
going to do it for all these kids? We've got more kids in schools than
ever before; it's the most diverse student body. We could do this.
We could actually get rid of child poverty. We could provide health
insurance to all the working families in the country, something we've
never done. We could turn around the environmental problems of the
country, in the world, including global warming, in a way that would
generate hundreds of thousands--maybe even over a million--jobs for the
American economy alone.
And all the best stuff is still out there. The human genome project,
I believe, will have young mothers bringing babies home from the
hospital within 10 years, with a life expectancy of 90 years. So all the
best stuff is still out there. We've got to make the right decisions.
And we need people who understand the future and understand the bedrock
values and institutions that build the future of America and who are
curious and thinking about what all these dizzying changes mean.
I know you can never make an ad out of it, but I really think one of
the best reasons to vote for Al Gore is his
relentless curiosity and passion about the future and the issues that
are central to the future. And one of the best reasons to vote for
Hillary is that she has always understood the importance of taking
everybody along into the future.
So that's really important. But let me tell you why we're here. She
has been very blessed. I thought she did great in that debate the other
night, even though it was two on one half the time. [Applause] Thank
you. I was really, really proud of her. I thought she did best when they
got meanest, and that's good. It's a contact sport. [Laughter] But it
also matters whether you're big or little, and she's nothing if not big,
and I'm proud of her.
She's doing well in the campaign. She's been very successful with
fundraising, both in New York, where an astonishing number of people who
have never been really involved before have helped her, and around the
country. But in order to maximize her impact between now and the
election day, she has to raise more money for her campaign--in $1,000
and $2,000 contributions; if nobody has given to her at all before, they
can give $2,000--and for the Democratic Committee, more money in so-
called hard money.
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I think all of you know that there's a limit under our Federal laws
how much soft money can be spent, unless there's a matching amount of
hard money. And we need a lot of contributions at a more modest but
generous level. So I told Ed I was coming
here today, and he said that he would try to get us some more help in
Philadelphia.
Philadelphia is one of the States, outside New York, that can be
most beneficially impacted by having a good Senator from New York,
because you can't be a responsible New York Senator unless you have a
great urban policy. You can't serve there. But it's like Pennsylvania.
You also can't be good unless you know something about agriculture. Most
people don't know that both New York and Pennsylvania are huge
agricultural States.
But it's very, very important, as we get down here in the stretch
when--I think she said on her debate the other night there are 32--32--
third party committees who can spend 100 percent soft money. If you set
up one of these sort of front committees to attack someone--unless it's
the Republican Party--if it's some other committee with some funny name
that's misleading, 100 percent of their money can be soft money. They
just throw the stuff on the air and lob those bombshells at you. And
believe me, the better she does, the more they want to beat her. I know
something about that.
So it's very important that she be able to make the most use of the
resources that have already been committed to her and have enough to
stand up to whatever comes in the next, how many, 50-odd days between
now and the election.
But I think she's going to win if she has the horses to stay in the
race until the end. And that's what this is about. And I think when she
does, a huge number of people who don't even vote for her the first time
will wonder what they were thinking about on election day. And people
will see what I have known for 30 years. I have never seen anybody with
the same combination of mind and passion and heart and, actually,
ability to get her ideas transformed into reality that she does.
I get tickled. They attack her on health care. You might be
interested to know that even though our health care plan didn't pass in
'94, it got further than Richard Nixon's health care plan, further than
Lyndon Johnson's health care plan--I mean, Jimmy Carter's health care
plan--and further than Harry Truman's health care plan. And the same
people that attacked Harry Truman attacked Hillary and me, with the same
results in the next congressional election.
But after a while, people decided he was right, and they'll decide
we're right, too. It would be a better country if every working family
could afford health insurance. And we've made a lot of progress. We're
insuring over 2 million kids now. We have a law on the books that will
allow 5 to get health insurance.
One of the things that went in her health care plan was a strong
Patients' Bill of Rights. One of the reasons the health insurance
companies campaigned against it was because there was a strong Patients'
Bill of Rights in it. And now, 70-something percent of the American
people want a strong Patients' Bill of Rights because they've been, or
they know someone who's been, on the receiving end of a medical decision
being made by somebody other than a medical professional.
So these are big, big issues here. The country is in great shape.
We're doing right. If everybody is serious about what the choice is, I
feel wonderful about what's going to happen in the Presidential race,
the Senate races, the House races.
I want to say one other thing, since I'm in Pennsylvania. We're
trying to win--if we just win six or seven House seats, the Democrats
will win back the House. And we probably will, and then a few. But what
you should know is, today, if Mr. Corzine
wins in New Jersey--and I believe he will--and Hillary wins--and we will
have two Senate seats that are in some question, one in Nevada, where
we're still behind, but we have a chance; one in Virginia, where Chuck
Robb is running against the former
Governor, and I believe with all my heart
Senator Robb is going to win because he's one of the bravest people I've
ever known in public life. He's got more courage than is good for him
sometimes, given his State. But those are the only two seats we have in
play. We are 11 points ahead in Florida for a Republican seat; almost 10
points ahead in Delaware for a Republican seat. We are 25 points ahead
in Georgia for a seat previously held by a Republican. We are ahead
today, only 5 days after the Minnesota primary, for a seat held by a
Republican. One of the two candidates for the Democratic nomination in
Florida--I mean, in
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Washington State, is already ahead of the incumbent Republican Senator,
and the other one is nearly ahead. We are even, to a little ahead, in
Missouri. We are within five points in Michigan, where our candidate is
fabulous but has been badly outspent, and if she can get back up and go
all the way, she'll be fine. And I believe we can do right well here if
our candidate had enough money.
So it's something I want you to think about because the future of
the Supreme Court is at stake; the future of all these policies is at
stake. And I can tell you, every single Senate seat really does matter.
As President, I know. I mean every single one of them has an enormous
impact on the way Americans live and the framework within which we build
our future.
So that's it. If you can help Hillary with some more of these
contributions, if you know anybody that hasn't made one, may be willing
to make a modest contribution to her campaign, it could make a big
difference to her. Because remember, in New York, it's the Democratic
Party against the Republican Party, Hillary against her Republican
opponent, and then they have 32 other committees, bringing pleasant
messages--[laughter]--of every conceivable stripe.
She'll do just fine with it. She showed last week she could take a
punch, and she can take a lot of them. But she needs to have something
to respond, and if you can help, I'll be profoundly grateful.
Thanks again for everything you've done for Hillary.
Note: The President spoke at 11:40 a.m. at the City Tavern. In his
remarks, he referred to Edward G. Rendell, general chair, Democratic
National Committee; Jon S. Corzine, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate
in New Jersey; and former Gov. George Allen, Republican candidate for
U.S. Senate in Virginia.