[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book II)]
[September 24, 2000]
[Pages 1930-1935]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Hidden Hills, 
California
September 24, 2000

    Well, first of all, let me tell you what I'd like to do. I like 
small events like this, with fewer people. And what I'd like to do--most 
of what I have to say about the last 8 years I said at the convention in 
L.A., and maybe you saw it, and if you did, there's nothing else I can 
say.
    I would like to just talk for a few minutes, not long, and then just 
take the microphone

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away and have a conversation. If you've got anything you want to ask me 
or you have anything you want to say or if you'd like to give a speech, 
just feel free to do it. [Laughter]
    I want to thank you, Mitch, for what you 
said. Thank you, Tracy, for being so good 
to me, and thank you especially for being so good to Hillary. It means more to me than I can say. I'm very 
grateful.
    I want to thank Sim and Debbie, who have been great friends to me and my family. We met 
them through Senator Boxer, but I cannot--I 
don't even have the words to say how grateful I am to you for how good 
you've been to all the members of my family, my mother-in-law, my 
brother-in-law, my nephew. I feel like a bag lady around you. It's just 
unbelievable. [Laughter]
    Here's what I'd like you to think about. If somebody asks you 
tomorrow, ``Why did you come here and give this money,'' what would your 
answer be? Besides, you know, you wanted to get in here and look at this 
unbelievable house. [Laughter] If I'd found this house when I was 6 
years old, I never would have gone out of it. [Laughter] It's 
unbelievable.
    But anyway, this is what I would like to say. When I ran for 
President in 1992, only my mother thought I could win. And I did it. It 
was not easy for me. I was very happy being Governor of my State. My 
family was in good shape. I was having a great time with my friends. But 
I had some very definite ideas about how our country ought to work and 
how we should change direction. And I was afraid that the country was 
really in trouble.
    And I thought, well, even if I don't win, maybe we can move the 
country off the dime. And the first time I realized I had a chance to 
win was when I was in the snows of New Hampshire in late 1991, and I was 
going to a little town called Keene, up in northern New Hampshire. It's 
one beautiful, beautiful town. There's a beautiful little college there.
    So I was asking these young people who were helping me in New 
Hampshire, I said--they said, ``We're going to go up here and have a 
town meeting, but you've got to understand there are six people running 
for the Democratic nomination. And President Bush is at 70 percent, but 
New Hampshire is a basket case, and people are hurting.'' And I said, 
``Look,'' I said, ``get to the bottom line here. How many people do I 
have to have at this town meeting to avoid being humiliated?'' 
[Laughter] And they said 50. And I said, ``Well, what if we get 100?'' 
They said, ``That's a pretty good crowd.'' I said, ``What if we get 
150?'' They said, ``It's great''--a little town. I was fifth in the 
polls in New Hampshire. I had nearly negative name recognition.
    But I had put out this booklet telling people exactly what I would 
do if I got elected, not what I would try to do. So we showed up in 
Keene, and 400 people showed up, and the fire marshal shut it down. And 
keep in mind, they didn't--they weren't coming there because they were 
committed to me. These people didn't know who I was. They were coming 
there because they heard that somebody who was serious about the 
problems of America wanted to talk to them and listen to them and try to 
change the direction of the country. And I saw those 400 people--I got 
on the phone and called Hillary and said, ``This thing may run a little 
further than we think here.'' [Laughter] And so the rest is history.
    But I say that to make the first point, which is that to a degree 
that is often underestimated, the Nation's business is like other 
businesses. It really matters if you've got a clear analysis of where 
you are, a clear vision of where you want to go and if you lay out what 
you're going to do. And it's a lot easier to do the job if you get 
people around you who want to be on the team, and they work like crazy. 
It makes a difference.
    The problems of the Nation yield to efforts in the same way the 
problems of any other enterprise does. And I think sometimes we forget 
that. We think that politics is somehow mysterious or its all words or 
whatever. It's just not true.
    And I have been very blessed and have had a great Cabinet and a 
great staff and people who work like crazy and who had far less 
destructive ego problems and far fewer sharp elbows than the previous 
administration had suffered from. And I think it was partly because we 
actually knew why we wanted to be there. And as hard as it's going to be 
to leave in many ways, that's the way the system is supposed to work.
    And so that brings me to the present moment. The only thing I ever 
worried about in this election was that the American people would 
somehow believe it wasn't important because

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times were good, that somehow the consequences of their collective 
decisions on election day were somehow not profound.
    It's very often easier to make a good decision when you're up 
against a wall than it is when times are good. Nobody over 30 years old 
can deny having made at least one colossal mistake in their life, not 
because times were so bad but because things seemed to go so well, you 
thought you didn't have to concentrate anymore--nobody. If you live long 
enough, you make those mistakes.
    So the first thing I want to say is, I've spent a lot of time in my 
life studying the history of my country. I love it very much. If you 
come to my office in the White House, you'll see a lot of--you'll see an 
original edition of the only book Thomas Jefferson ever wrote and two 
original printings of George Washington's Farewell Address. I've studied 
this country closely.
    I'm not sure we've ever had a time when we've had, at the same time, 
so much economic prosperity, so much social progress with the absence of 
gripping internal crisis or external threat. So the main issue here in 
this election season is, what do people believe this election is about 
anyway?
    And I must say the preliminary indications are very, very good. 
Witness the different responses to Governor Bush's speech in Philadelphia and Vice President Gore's. Governor Bush gave a beautiful speech in 
Philadelphia. It was beautifully written. It was eloquent, and it 
studiously avoided being specific about what he would do if he were 
President.
    Al Gore gave a very good speech in Los 
Angeles, which revealed who he was. But most important of all, he said--
he gave a lot of respect to the American people. He said, ``This is a 
job interview. And unlike other job interviews, you're running for 
President. You have to define the job. The people want you to say what 
you think the job is and then what you will do.''
    So he said, ``If you hire me, this is what I'll do.'' And lo and 
behold, he got a bigger bump out of our convention than they got out of 
theirs, even among people, I suspect, who weren't sure they agreed with 
everything he said or maybe he couldn't remember more than two or three 
things. He said, ``This is what it's about.''
    So the first thing I want to say to you is, based on 8 years of 
experience, is that anyone who wants to be President in a dynamic time 
should be flexible enough to admit that he might have been wrong, 
flexible enough to change course, but it really matters whether you have 
thought through what you were going to do with this job when you get it.
    It is a great comfort when the storms come and when you're in all 
kind of conflict and all this political stuff is happening in Washington 
the way it does, and people who are in the business or around it 
primarily for power are pulling back and forth--if you get up every day 
with a very clear idea of what you said you were going to do and what 
you believe the country needs, it is an unbelievable asset to America.
    So one good reason to be for this guy is, he actually talks about 
what he would do if he were President in great detail, with the benefit 
of a unique amount of experience. Now, this may seem self-evident to 
you, but you go back and look at all the Presidential campaigns in the 
20th century. In New Hampshire, I knew that America was moving to this 
because Senator Tsongas, who was from Massachusetts next door, who won 
the New Hampshire primary, and I got 60 percent of the vote between us 
in a six-way race, and we were the only two people that put out very 
detailed plans of what we would do.
    The second thing I want to say is, what I think we should be 
thinking about is how we keep this thing going, first of all. What could 
go wrong with this economy? How do we keep it going? How do we head off 
the problems, maximize the opportunities? And then what are the really 
big challenges out there for America? Because when you have this luxury 
and this kind of circumstance, you ought to be going after the big 
challenge.
    What are we going to do when all the baby boomers retire and there's 
two people working for every one person drawing Social Security? What 
are we going to do when all of America looks like California--there's no 
majority race--and we have the biggest bunch of school kids we've ever 
had from all these diverse racial, ethnic, religious backgrounds and 
with different first languages. The most diverse school district, 
interestingly enough, is not Los Angeles or New York or Chicago; it's 
Fairfax County, Virginia, just across the river from Washington, where 
there are children from 180 different racial and ethnic groups with over 
100 different native languages. And I spent a lot of time there.

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    What I want to say--because California has done a lot of good work 
in education the last few years, and I'm honored to have the attorney 
general and the speaker here tonight. We know something we didn't know 20 years 
ago, when Hillary and I started working on public schools. We actually 
know how to turn failing schools around. We actually know what it means 
to say all children can learn. I was in a school in Harlem the other day 
where 2 years ago, 80 percent of the kids were doing reading and math 
below grade level. Two years later--2 years later--in one of the poorest 
neighborhoods in New York City, 74 percent of the kids were doing 
reading and math at or above grade level--2 years.
    But the one thing America has never done, ever--and there was no 
real penalty to it before, but there is now--we have never taken what 
works in some places and been able to make it work everywhere for our 
schools. How are we going to do that? Huge issue. There are lots of 
other issues. People used to make fun of Al Gore when he talked about global warming. Now all the oil 
companies admit it's real. We just got a study from one of the polar 
icecaps that indicates the 1990's were the warmest decade in a thousand 
years. I think we ought to have somebody in the White House that 
understands that.
    So there are these big challenges. I personally think we ought to 
keep paying down the debt until we get out of debt for the first time 
since 1835, because that will keep interest rates lower, and our growth 
in this 8-year period has been more generated by private sector growth 
than any economic recovery in the 20th century.
    There are big, big things we can do. So that's the second thing. You 
can make your own list. But you think about the big things. That's what 
America ought to be focused on.
    The third thing I would like to say, and I think by far the most 
important, is that we need, as a nation, to have, in my judgment, a 
unifying, a synthesizing view of human society and human history. I've 
always tried to bring people together. I ran for President because I 
hated what I was hearing out of Washington every night. There was nobody 
in Congress to get on television and get their 15 seconds at night on 
the evening news unless they were somehow coming up with a wedge issue 
that divided us.
    But if you think about the way you run your family or your business 
or any other enterprise, if you spent most of your time on what divided 
you and none of your time trying to get together, the whole society 
would fall apart. And yet, national politics, because it's a long way 
from us and operates at a fairly high level of abstraction, at a time 
when people don't believe you can do anything right, there's no way to 
make any headway politically unless you have wedge issues.
    And I think one of the signal achievements of this administration in 
rolling back the Gingrich revolution was to reject the politics of 
division in favor of the politics of unity. And you know, my political 
philosophy is very simple and borne of my life experience. I think 
everybody counts; everybody ought to have a chance; and we all do better 
when we help each other. That's what I believe. I actually believe that. 
I think it's not just good morals; I think it's good economics, good 
social policy.
    And there's an interesting book out that I recommend, written by a 
man named Robert Wright, who previously wrote a book called ``The Moral 
Animal.'' It was widely acclaimed. It's called ``Non Zero,'' and it's a 
reference to game theory. You know, a zero-sum game is one where, in 
order for me to win, you've got to lose, or vice-versa, like a golf 
match. One person wins; one person loses. Or the President's race is a 
zero-sum game. One of them will win; one of them will lose.
    And Wright is not naive. I mean, he understands that there will be 
competitions and contests. But the argument he makes in this book is 
that as societies grow more and more complex and we become more and more 
interdependent, both within and beyond national borders, we have a 
greater and greater stake in finding ways to win together. And that, 
basically, he makes an historical argument for Martin Luther King's 
wonderful famous saying that, ``the arc of history is long, but it bends 
toward justice.''
    That's the argument, and it's a very compelling argument. And I 
guess we all like books that agree with us. You know, we're all that 
way. [Laughter] But I have spent my whole life believing that we waste a 
lot of our lives by trying to lift ourselves up by putting other people 
down.
    So if I could leave America with one wish, it would not be even for 
continued prosperity; it would be to find some way to get over all this 
stuff that we're hung up about, respect our differences, relish our 
differences, teach children

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to be proud of their ethnic, their racial, their religious heritage; but 
somehow understand that, underneath it all, the most important thing of 
all is our common humanity.
    And I think it is more important than ever before because of the 
scientific and technological advances we face. Because I'm just going to 
tell you, among the things you'll have to deal with in the next 20 years 
when I'm gone: Terrorists will be able to come across national borders 
with chemical and biological weapons in plastic cases that won't show up 
on airport metal detectors. The forces of division will be able to do 
things. If we don't do something about the AIDS epidemic in Africa and 
the growing rates in South Asia and the rapidly growing rates in the 
countries of the former Soviet Union, it will eventually come back 
around to this country where we're making real headway.
    If we don't do something about the total breakdown of public health 
systems in poor countries around the world, all these places that we're 
looking for to buy our products, because we've got 4 percent of the 
world's people and 22 percent of the world's wealth, they're not going 
to have any money; they won't even have any people to buy our products. 
There are African countries that, within a decade, will have more people 
in them in their sixties than in their thirties.
    So what I want to say is, look, I think the best time in human 
history is unfolding. I think the children in this room tonight will 
grow up, if we make good decisions, in the most exciting, peaceful, 
prosperous, interconnected time in all of human history. But nothing 
happens by accident. We have to decide.
    Every House position matters. Every Senate seat matters, and it 
really matters how the White House comes out. So if somebody asked you 
tomorrow why you came, I hope you'll say, ``Well, I think they've had a 
pretty good 8 years. The country is going in the right direction. I'd 
like to keep it going. Number two, they seem to have a pretty good idea 
of what they'll do if I give them the job. Number three, I want somebody 
that will take on big things. I don't want to blow this, certainly the 
chance of 50 years. And number four, I think we ought to go forward 
together.'' And that's basically the defining, enduring dream of the 
20th century Democratic Party. And if I've contributed to it, I'm 
grateful.
    But you know, this is an interesting position for me. I always tell 
everybody, for most of my life, I was the youngest person who was doing 
whatever it was I was doing. Now I go in a room, most people are younger 
than me. [Laughter] Now people look at me like I've got a leg in the 
grave. What's the next President--[laughter]. My party's got a new 
leader. My family's got a new 
candidate. I'm the Cheerleader in 
Chief of the country. What am I supposed to do?
    I'll tell you, the thing that I really want out of all of this is 
just for you to make the most of it. And I'll just leave you with this 
one story.
    I think that if I had any success, part of it was the way I was 
raised. I think most American people thought I was pulling--I think the 
people that served this dinner tonight ought to have the same chance to 
send their kids to college that you do. I believe that. I believe that 
disabled people ought to be able to access modern technology, because I 
don't think their bodies ought to keep them from living however much of 
their dreams that they can live.
    I went to Flint, Michigan. I will close with this story, because 
this will make the point. I went to Flint, Michigan, this week to go to 
one of the community computer centers we're setting up around the 
country in low-income areas, to try to make sure that people can access 
the information resources for the Internet. And I got a bunch of stuff 
in the budget that would put a thousand of these up.
    But the reason I went to Flint is that it used to be the automotive 
capital of Michigan, even more than Detroit. There were 90,000 
automotive manufacturing jobs there. Now, there are only 35,000. They've 
had to rebuild their whole economy, but they have maybe the best 
outreach programs to the disability community in their city of anyplace 
in the country.
    So I saw software where blind people were working on braille and 
putting it into the Internet, and then the computer would speak back to 
them, so they know that they got the E-mail right or the message right. 
And I saw the deaf people working on it, and the computer would write 
back to them so that they could see that they had gotten it right.
    And this wonderful woman said to me, ``You know, I get E-mails every 
week from a guy in North Carolina named Joe Martin, and I understand you 
know him.'' And I said, ``Yes, I do know him.'' I'll tell you about Joe 
Martin,

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because I think we ought to empower everybody to live like this.
    In the 1980's, when I was a young Governor, I was active in 
something called the Southern Growth Policy Board. And it's a group of 
Governors and legislators and other folks, businesspeople and educators. 
And we worked on growing the southern economy and trying to catch it up 
to the rest of the country. And basically, we worked on jobs and 
schools; that's what we did.
    One of the North Carolina delegates was this guy, Joe Martin, whose 
brother was the Republican Governor of North Carolina. He was a chemist, 
the Governor was--a chemistry professor. Joe Martin was a banker. He was 
young, handsome, vigorous, had a drop-dead gorgeous, wonderful wife, 
great family. I loved him. He was full of energy, and he was just one of 
the two or three best people that I ever met in this outfit. And I 
worked with him for a decade. And I loved being around him.
    Joe Martin, while still a young man, got Lou Gehrig's disease. 
That's what Stephen Hawking, the famous British scientist, has. 
Eventually, you lose all your movement. Hawking still can move his 
fingers, and he uses his computer to speak.
    Now, Joe Martin has no movement anywhere. Nothing moves but his 
eyes. I used this laser technology now that the Internet has. You sit in 
front of it; they focus a camera on you; it gets your eyes on the 
screen; then they put the laser--it bounces off your eye. I turned 
lights on and off; I turned music on and off; I typed ``good morning'' 
to the people there and then pushed ``speak'' with my eyes and it said, 
``good morning.''
    And sometime in the next couple of months, Joe Martin is going to 
publish a book he wrote with his eyes. Even more important, he can still 
talk to his wife and kids. And so he's still got a story. I'm a Democrat 
because I know everybody has got a story.
    I was raised by an extended family of wonderful people. Most of them 
didn't have any education. Most of them didn't have any money, but they 
taught me that everybody had a story and should be treated with dignity, 
and we would all do better if we helped each other. I still believe 
that, and with 8 years of evidence, I think it's a pretty good argument 
for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman and Hillary and the rest of our crowd.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 10:27 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Mitchell Stein and Tracy S. 
Hampton; Sim Farar, treasurer, PAC for a Change, and his wife, Debra; 
Republican Presidential candidate Gov. George W. Bush of Texas; State 
Attorney General Bill Lockyer; and State Assembly Speaker Robert M. 
Hertzberg.