[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book II)]
[September 23, 2000]
[Pages 1918-1923]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Dinner in 
Brentwood, California
September 23, 2000

    The President. Thank you.
    Audience member. Four more years! [Laughter]
    The President. That's one song we won't sing tonight. [Laughter] 
Wow. Well, first, let me thank Michael and 
Jena and everyone who brought us all together for 
a perfectly wonderful evening. I think you've actually had a good time. 
I hope you have. I have.
    And my friend David Foster, thank you for 
putting together that show. It was wonderful. I love Richard 
Marx's songs. I'm glad I got to hear Kayla. 
Nita was stunning. Jessica took my breath away. Those of you who love 
opera know there's no 19-year-old in the world who has an opera voice 
like that, anywhere. She's amazing.
    I love the band. I like the sax player over here. [Laughter] I don't 
know that I like that Christian Slater can 
also sing and that Rob Lowe plays saxophone better 
than me. I don't think I like that. [Laughter] But we all had a lot

[[Page 1919]]

of laughs tonight. And I'm grateful for what has been said and for the 
songs that have been sung.
    But I'm especially--I'm just grateful to be here on behalf of my 
friend Dick Gephardt. He and 
Jane have been friends of Hillary's and mine a 
long time--and Charlie Rangel, Bob 
Matsui, Henry Waxman. Brad Sherman is here. I think 
Xavier Becerra is here. Patrick 
Kennedy, thank you for doing such a good 
job. I know we've got Jane Harman, Mike 
Honda, Adam Schiff, 
Janice Nelson, and Gerrie Schipske here, at least those candidates, maybe some more.
    I want to just talk to you; I won't take long tonight. But I want to 
ask you to do something besides give your money. So you have to listen a 
little bit.
    You might ask yourself why, in the last year of my Presidency, when 
things are going so well, I would do what is now 138 events. And you 
might say, ``Well, maybe he did a few for Hillary. He had to do that, but why did he do the others?'' 
[Laughter]
    And I told somebody the other day, this is a strange time in my 
life. It's the first time in 26 years I haven't been on the ballot. My 
party has a new leader. My family has a new 
candidate. I'm kind of trading in the 
title of Commander in Chief for Cheerleader in Chief. [Laughter] But I 
like it. I like it because the whole essence of freedom and democracy is 
that nobody is indispensable, but the principles and the ideals and the 
energy and the vision of the vast masses of people, that is 
indispensable.
    I'm doing this partly because we lost the majority because of what 
the Democrats were willing to do for you in '93 and '94, and the members 
of the other party wouldn't help them. When we adopted the economic plan 
and not a one of them would vote for it, they said we were raising taxes 
on people we weren't raising taxes on. They said we were going to break 
the economy and drive up unemployment and explode the deficit. And we 
did it in late '93. And in '94, when the voters were voting, they didn't 
yet know whether it would work or not.
    We adopted a crime bill in '94, after we passed the Brady bill in 
'93 requiring handgun owners to do background checks. Then we adopted a 
crime bill to put 100,000 police on the street and banned assault 
weapons. And the NRA said we were going to interfere with the hunters. 
And we didn't adopt the crime bill until '94, and so when the people 
voted, it was--they didn't know whether they were telling the truth or 
not.
    We tried to provide health care to all Americans. And like Harry 
Truman and Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon before us, everybody who ever 
tried it, we got beat. We got further, actually, even than Harry Truman 
did, and we didn't lose quite as many seats as he did for exactly the 
same reason.
    And I've had to listen to 8 years of misrepresentation now about 
what we proposed. But the people that wanted it were disappointed they 
didn't get it. And the people that thought it was a bad deal were 
inflamed. And all those things happened, and we lost the majority in the 
House of Representatives and the Senate in '94--because they did what 
was right for America.
    And we've gone from a $290 billion deficit to a $250 billion surplus 
because they were willing to lay down their majority. And there were 
good people who gave up their careers in Congress to turn this country 
around. There were good people--at least a dozen of them who lost their 
seats because they came from rural districts, where a lot of people had 
hunting licenses, and the hunters were told that their Congressman had 
voted to interfere with their right to go into the woods and hunt. There 
was nothing true about it. But the voters didn't know, and they were in 
a bad frame of mind. Turnout was low, and we lost a dozen Members 
because the NRA told the people--falsely--that the Brady bill and the 
assault weapons ban were somehow designed to interfere with them.
    Well, it's different now. They know that the economic plan works. 
We've kept interest rates down and gave the country a different future. 
The crime rate has dropped for 8 years in a row, a 27-year low, a 35 
percent drop in gun crime, and nobody has missed a day in the deer 
woods. [Laughter] It's different now.
    And so part of me wants to do this because they took the bullets for 
what I asked them to do to make America a better place. And they had to 
run in 1994, and I didn't. I had until 1996. By '96, everybody said, 
``You know, this thing is rocking along pretty good here. We might not 
want to mess it up.'' But they paid.
    Even more important, they ought to be in the majority because of the 
future. And that's the last thing I want to say. In 1996 we didn't

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win a couple of seats because people from California didn't vote when 
the people on the East Coast called the election for me. So a lot of 
people said, ``Well, that's over; I won't go vote.''
    What I want to say to you tonight is that--I just want to echo what 
Dick said. In my lifetime, which, unfortunately, is now more than a half 
century, and most days I'm okay about that, too--[laughter]--but in my 
lifetime we have never had, at once, this economic prosperity, social 
progress, and the absence of domestic crisis or external threat.
    Therefore, we have never had as much of an opportunity to build the 
future of our dreams for our children. And the real reason they ought to 
be in the majority is not that they were wrongly kicked out in '94, 
under the most adverse possible circumstances, are not so you can make 
it possible for me to sleep easier at night when I leave the White 
House, knowing that we helped to bring them back. It's because it's the 
right thing for America's future.
    Let me tell you what--we could actually in the next few years end 
child poverty in America. We could actually provide a world-class 
education to all the kids that live in this country. We actually know 
how to do it now. I've been working at this for 22 years, and when 
Hillary and I started out doing all of this school reform, we thought we 
knew what to do, but nobody really knew. Now we know.
    I was at a school in Harlem the other day, a grade school, where 2 
years ago 80 percent of the children were reading and doing math below 
grade level, and 2 years later, 74 percent of the children are doing 
reading and math at or above grade level--in 2 years. This can be done 
everywhere. This is not rocket science. We know how to do it now. Our 
plan will do it.
    But they need small classes and modern schools and trained teachers 
and the Internet hookups, and they need high standards. And then the 
schools that aren't cutting it need to be identified and turned around 
or put under different management. It's not rocket science. We know how 
to do this now, but we have to decide whether we're going to do it.
    We can make America the safest big country in the world, but we have 
to decide to do it. We can reverse this global warming--if you've got 
little kids, you better care a lot about this--and continue to grow the 
economy. But we have to decide to do it.
    And my only worry here is that things are going so well, people may 
just sort of sidle through the election, thinking there are no real 
consequences, not understanding the choices on health care and education 
and the economy and the way we relate to the rest of the world--on arms 
control, for example, huge differences between the two parties.
    So here's what I want to ask you to do. I thank you for your money. 
I thank you for the money you've given to Al and Joe and the 
Democratic Party. I thank you for the money you've given to the House. 
Many of you have given to the Senate candidates. A lot of you have given 
to Hillary. If you haven't, I hope 
you will. [Laughter] I thank you for all that.
    But remember, every one of you, every day, comes in contact with 
tons of people who have never been to one of these events, who never 
will go, don't know anybody in public life, but on election day they 
will go vote. And I would like to ask you to do something you probably 
have never thought of doing, which is to take some time every day 
between now and the election to bring this election up to somebody you 
know or you come in contact with and tell them why you came here 
tonight, why you forked over the money, why you know Dick 
Gephardt ought to be Speaker, why you're 
trying to help us win the Senate, why Al Gore and Joe Lieberman should 
be elected. This is very important.
    America is going to change a lot in the next 8 years. When Al Gore 
says the best is--you ain't seen nothing yet, you may think that's just 
a campaign slogan. It might interest you to know that I actually believe 
that. We've spent a lot of time these last 8 years just trying to turn 
this country around. And it's like--it's why the Titanic hit the 
iceberg; you can't turn a big ocean liner around in a split second. And 
that's what a nation is like.
    And now we've got it turned around. It's going in the right 
direction. And we, literally, are free to think about big things. We 
could get the country out of debt for the first time since Andrew 
Jackson was President. I mean, that's amazing, you know. Isn't it?
    Now, it would require you to take a smaller tax cut, but it'll keep 
interest rates lower--one percent lower at least for a decade--the 
difference in the Republican and Democratic

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plans. You know what that's worth? Three hundred and ninety billion 
dollars in home mortgage reductions, alone--just in home mortgages, 
never mind the business loan, what it will do to the markets and all 
that.
    So you need to do this, not for me, for you, for your kids, and your 
grandkids. Because anybody in this room tonight over 30 can remember at 
least one time in your life when you made a serious mistake, not because 
your life was going so badly but because things were going so well, you 
thought you didn't have to concentrate any more.
    Now, anybody who's over 30 has made one of those mistakes. I mean a 
big one. [Laughter] Unless you've just been comatose, you've made a 
mistake like that. Now that's where we are. That's where the country is 
today. Are we going to grab a hold of this? Now, a lot of you said some 
very nice things, and Kenny Edmonds and his wife, Tracy, 
they've been real friends to me, and I appreciated him saying that I was 
for real. Whatever that means, that's what I've tried to be all right--
for good or real.
    I want to tell you something. I want to tell you what this means to 
me. You know, if Dick Gephardt were in 
the majority, we would have raised the minimum wage this year. You know 
what that would have meant? Ten million more people--10 million more 
people would be out there working and having greater dignity in their 
work and being rewarded for it. The richest time in the world, this 
Congress has not restored the minimum wage in real dollar terms to where 
it was 15, 16 years ago.
    And if he had been the Speaker and 
we'd been the majority in the Senate, we'd have a Patients' Bill of 
Rights. You know, that sounds like a good thing, but 18 million people a 
year have their medical care either denied or delayed, even though the 
doctors want to give it to the patients because the insurance industry 
and the HMO's don't want to do it--18 million people. We're talking 
about real people here, 22 million people who have jobs because of the 
things we've done together, new jobs.
    So you're talking about--when you hear people talking about this, 
there are millions of older people who need to be able to buy medicine. 
You know, if you live to be 65 in America, your life expectancy is 82. 
And the young women in this audience, because of the human genome 
discoveries--those of you who will have babies over the next 10 years, 
at least by the end of that cycle, your babies will be born with a life 
expectancy of about 90 years.
    Now, that's the good news. But what are we going to do to make those 
years meaningful? How are we going to keep people healthy in those 
years? How are we going to make those years not only living years but 
life-full years? And don't you think that somebody ought to be able to 
have good years, even if they're not rich when they turn 65? That's what 
this Medicare drug thing is all about.
    You've got people out there, literally can't take medicine that has 
been prescribed for them without giving up what they had to spend on 
food today. So what I want you to understand is, these are big issues. 
One of the reasons that I want Al Gore to 
be elected is, in spite of all the people making fun of him and 
misrepresenting what he said about his role in the Internet, he 
understands the future, and he thinks about it.
    All your medical records and your financial records are going to be 
on somebody's computer. Don't you think you ought to be able to say yes 
before somebody gets them? And if you get to say yes, how are we going 
to allow the Internet economy to continue to grow? Wouldn't you like 
somebody in the White House who understood that and thought about it all 
the time?
    This is a magic moment. Believe me, the best stuff is still out 
there. And this is the last point I want to make. It's late, and I'm 
tired, and I'm jet-lagged. But I wanted to go back to what Kenny said, 
because Norm Mineta was riding with me up 
in northern California today, and he asked me why I did my politics the 
way I do, or how I came to be the way I am in public life.
    And I said, ``Well, when I was a little boy, I used to get on a bus 
two or three times a month and go about 80 miles down the road to my 
great uncle's house and sit out on the porch and listen to him talk. He 
had about a sixth grade education and about 180 IQ. And when I was a 
little boy, he used to say, `Now, Bill, you just sit here, and when 
these people come up here, you listen to their stories, and you just 
remember everybody's got a story. And the poor man's story is about as 
good as a rich man's story and is not but a turn or two in life that 
makes a difference between one and the other.' And so I would sit there, 
year-in and year-out, and listen to that.''

[[Page 1922]]

    And then when I became old enough to run for public office, even 
when I started working in campaigns, I noticed that every election, the 
people told their stories in slightly different ways, almost like there 
was a different song every 2 years or 4 years, always with the same 
theme, always using the same words, but the stories were always 
different.
    All of you are in a unique position to make sure that this is an 
election devoted to America's stories being heard. If you look at all 
the differences between our party and the other party on all the issues, 
it basically comes down to this: We think everybody counts; everybody 
ought to have a chance; we all do better when we help each other. That's 
what we believe.
    We believe that our independence as people depends upon recognizing 
our interdependence as people, that we are growing closer and closer 
together, that we have to reach across all the lines that divide us, 
that hate crimes are nutty hangovers from an earlier period where people 
were scared of those who were different from them or taught that they 
were somehow morally inferior, and that the truth is, America is the 
greatest place in the world today because it's the most diverse place in 
the world. That's what we believe.
    We believe the role of Government is to give people a hand up who 
need it, to create the conditions and give people the tools to live 
their dreams. But mostly we believe we're so interdependent we need each 
other. And all I know is, those ideas, in practice, worked pretty well 
the last 8 years. It turns out that what is the right thing to do is 
also good economics, good social policy, good crime policy, good 
environmental policy.
    But when you go home tonight, if somebody asks you why you're a 
Democrat, tell them that everybody counts; everybody deserves a chance; 
we all do better when we help each other; and everybody has a story.
    And I will close with this. Two days ago I went to Flint, Michigan, 
a town I spent a lot of time in that's been very good to me. And there 
is a bunch of people from Flint, from Arkansas because in the forties 
and fifties, after the war, a lot of people in the South couldn't make a 
living off the land. And blacks and whites alike exploded out of there. 
A bunch of people came to California from the South. A bunch of people 
even went back east to New York.
    But in our part of the South, nearly everybody who left went to 
Illinois and Michigan. That's why I won those places in '92, when I ran 
for President. Those guys are still trying to figure out how I won those 
places. They don't understand. Every third voter was from Arkansas. It 
was easy. [Laughter]
    So anyway, I go to Flint, which lost over half its auto employment. 
They went from 90,000 people working in the car plants to 35,000, and 
they've had to rebuild. So we put a community computer center in Flint, 
and Dick and I are trying to get the 
Congress now to approve funds to put a thousand of these across America, 
so that people even who don't have computers, whether they're children 
or older people--can at least come into these centers, at all hours of 
the day and night, and try to get hooked into the new world of the 
information economy.
    The one in Flint is the best one in America that we know of for 
working with disabled Americans. And so I went to the center, and I saw 
the stuff. And then I spoke to this huge crowd of people with every 
conceivable disability and ability known to man. So I went in, and I saw 
this software program. And there was this blind woman feeding it into 
the computer in braille and pressing a button so it spoke back to her, 
and she knew that she had done the right thing. And there was a deaf 
person feeding it into the computer in braille, and then it wrote back 
to her, so she knew it was real.
    And then they took me to this laser technology made for people who 
are totally paralyzed or have Lou Gehrig's disease or something else 
that keeps you from moving anything but your eyes. And I learned how to 
turn lights on and off in a house, start the tape deck and hear the 
music. I even wrote ``good morning'' to the people who were with me with 
my eyes.
    And the person there said, ``You know, we get E-mails every week 
from a guy in North Carolina named Joe Martin who's got Lou Gehrig's 
disease.'' I said, ``Yes, I know him.'' And I'm just going to tell you 
this one story, because we invest a lot to help people with disabilities 
access this technology. And remember, I think if they can do it and they 
can live their stories, we're all better off. So here's Joe Martin's 
story.
    When I met him 15 or 16 years ago, he was a very handsome man with a 
beautiful wife, who was North Carolina's representative on

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something called the Southern Growth Policies Board. And because I was 
the Governor of a southern State, we would meet and work together on how 
to develop jobs and education in the South. And of all the people I fool 
with from all the States that I worked with, I think I liked Joe Martin 
the best, which is sort of strange.
    His brother was a chemistry professor who became the Republican 
Governor of North Carolina. I liked his brother, too. But you wouldn't 
expect that guy to be my favorite guy, but I liked him, because he was 
serious and he was full of energy. He was vital. He was charismatic. He 
was dynamic. He was constant motion. Fast forward 15 years, and he's got 
Lou Gehrig's disease, and he continues to go down, and he can't move.
    So Joe Martin has lost all the things that I found most attractive, 
except the inner qualities, which have deepened. And he is a far more 
impressive man today than he was before.
    And in about 2 months, Joe Martin will publish a book he wrote with 
his eyes. Every day he talks to his wife and children on that computer 
with his eyes. And he's still alive because he can say what he knows and 
what he feels to other people.
    Now, I think it's a good thing that some of your tax money finances 
research into technologies like that and tries to spread it to other 
people and provides a center like that in Flint, where people can come 
who are disabled and get E-mails from--and he writes up there once a 
week. He E-mails them with his eyes. And when they know about Joe 
Martin, all those other people don't feel sorry for themselves anymore. 
I think that is a good thing.
    So that's what I want to tell you. To me, this isn't very 
complicated. I believe that we are growing more and more and more 
interdependent. I believe in order to make the most of the modern world 
we live in and all these wonderful technologies, we have to understand 
that our enlightened self- interests requires us to try to make sure 
every man and woman and boy and girl get to live their story, even if 
they have to do it with just their eyes. And I believe that the best is 
still out there. I nearly know the best is still out there if we make 
the right decisions. So thank you for being so nice to me. Thank you for 
all the things you said. Thank you for raising the $4 million-plus. But 
remember, if every day the people in this room took a little time to 
make sure that everyone you know understood what was at stake and why 
they ought to stick with us, we'd have the celebration we want on 
election night, and most important, you'd have the future that your 
children deserve.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 10:44 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Michael and Jena King; music 
producer David Foster; musician Richard Marx; actors Christian Slater 
and Rob Lowe; Representative Patrick J. Kennedy, chairman, Democratic 
Congressional Campaign Committee; Mike Honda, Adam Schiff, Janice 
Nelson, Jane Harman, and Gerrie Schipske, candidates for California's 
15th, 27th, 28th, 36th, and 38th Congressional Districts, respectively; 
and musician Kenneth Edmonds, popularly known as Babyface, and his wife, 
Tracy.