[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book II)]
[September 27, 2000]
[Pages 1956-1961]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks at a Gay and Lesbian Leadership Council Luncheon
in Dallas, Texas
September 27, 2000
The President. You've got to calm down now. We've got work to do.
[Laughter] But I thank you for that welcome. And I want to thank
Chuck and Jim for
welcoming us. This is a really beautiful place. I love the art. I love
the architecture. I love the light. This is the first time I've ever
gotten to give a speech under Bette Davis eyes. [Laughter] I bet I hear
about that one. [Laughter]
Thank you, Julie and Kay. I'd like to thank Ed Rendell for agreeing, after he left the mayor's job, to do this
old part-time job as chair of the DNC. And my friend of many, many years
Andy Tobias, who has really done a wonderful
job in more ways than most people know. Thank you, Elizabeth. I thank Julian Potter, my
White House liaison, and the others who are here from the White House
today.
I also want to thank Brian Bond, who is the
director of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund. And we have one very
important candidate for Congress here, Regina Montoya Coggins--[inaudible]. And Molly Beth
Malcolm, thank you for being here, for
getting on that--what was that talk show you were on last night, taking
up for our side? That guy just talks louder when he starts losing
arguments. You hung in there really well. [Laughter] You did a good job.
I want to say to all of you that this is an interesting time for
America. It's a time of enormous progress and prosperity but a time of
real ferment, too. And people are trying to come to grips with all the
currents of change that are running through America: The Fort Worth City
Council voted to extend discrimination protection to gays and lesbians;
gay Dallas city councilman changes party. Good
deal. Regina wants to represent the
community, and the Congressman says he doesn't--not sure he does.
[Laughter] It's a big deal. We're debating all these things.
I'm honored to have had the chance to be President at a time when
all these issues were coming to the fore, and to have a record number of
members of the gay community in my administration. We are fighting for
the hate crimes bill, and basically, we now have a bipartisan majority
in both Houses for it. We've got all the Democrats but one, and about--I
don't know--12 or 13 Republicans in the Senate voted for the hate crimes
bill. And we have 41 Republicans in the House who voted with about 200
of our crowd to instruct the conferees on the defense bill to leave it
in there.
I was asked just before I left Washington--a couple of you mentioned
it to me that one of--someone in the leadership of the Republican
Congress said that he didn't think this would get to be law this year.
Well, if it doesn't get to be law, it's because the leadership doesn't
want it, because we've got a majority of the votes for it. So I would
urge you do to whatever you can.
There's been a sea change movement. Gordon Smith, who is the Republican Senator from Oregon and an
evangelical Christian, gave an incredibly moving speech in the floor of
the Senate for it. I don't know if you saw it, but there was a
Republican State representative from Georgia who gave a decisive speech
in the Georgia legislature for the hate crimes bill. And I don't know if
you've circulated that, but it's an overwhelmingly powerful speech. And
I think it could have, if we can get it around, an impact on some more
Members in the House, but we've got the votes. It's just a question of
whether the leadership of the Republican Party in the Congress stays to
the right of the country on this issue.
The same thing is true of the employment nondiscrimination
legislation. I actually hope that we might pass that this year. There
are big majorities across the country for this. It is
[[Page 1957]]
not just a Democratic issue. It is not just a liberal issue. It's not
even just a gay rights issue. It's a fundamental fairness issue in
America. And we get a few changes in the Congress, that will pass next
time too, assuming the election for President works out all right.
So we're moving in the right direction. But we're dealing with
this--this election, in some fundamental way, I think, is a referendum
about whether the whole approach we've taken to our national problems in
our national life is the right one. I ran for President partly because I
just got sick of seeing my country held back by the politics of
division, by a sense of political and economic and cultural entitlement,
almost, on the part of the people who had been running things for a long
time, with absolute confidence that they could divide the American
electorate in ways that made their opposition look like they were out of
the mainstream and not part of ordinary American life.
And it seemed to me that it gave us bad economic policies, bad
social policies, ineffective crime and welfare policies, and a lot of
hot air and not much results. So when the people gave Al Gore and me a
chance to serve, we tried to adopt a unifying approach that would bring
the American people together and that would not make choices that were
essentially phony.
We believed we could cut the deficit and invest more in education
and the American people, and sure enough, it worked. Today, before I
came here, I announced that we would have this year a $230 billion
surplus, the biggest in the history of the United States, that we would,
when I left office, have paid off $360 billion of the national debt.
Keep in mind, the annual deficit was supposed to be $450 billion this
year when I took office. So it's gone from $450 billion projected
deficit to a $230 billion actual surplus.
And yesterday we released the annual poverty figures, which show
that poverty is at a 20-year low. Last year we had the biggest drop in
child poverty since 1966, the biggest drop in minority poverty in the
history of the country since we've been measuring the statistics; 2.2
million people moved out of poverty last year alone; all income groups
experienced roughly the same percentage increase in their income. But in
America--and the bottom 20 percent actually had slightly the higher
percentage increase, which is good because they've been losing ground
for many years while working hard.
So I think it makes sense to have economic and social policies that
bring people together. And it's rooted in an essential Democratic belief
that everybody counts, everybody ought to have a chance, and we all do
better when we help each other. It's not complicated, but it turns out
to be good economics.
And it turns out to be quite effective social policy. If you look--
we said that we ought to put more police on the street, punish people
who are particularly bad, but do more to prevent crime in the first
place and keep guns out of the hands of criminals and kids. And lo and
behold, it worked. Now, that hasn't stopped people from fighting us,
because they're driven by ideology and control, not by evidence.
One thing I respect about our opponents, they are totally undeterred
by the evidence. [Laughter] I mean, in a way, you've sort of got to
admire that--``I don't care what works. This is what I believe.''
[Laughter] ``So what if they've got the longest economic expansion in
history and 22 million new jobs and the lowest minority unemployment
rate recorded and the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years. I
don't care. I still want to go back to running the deficit and having a
big tax cut.''
``So what if keeping a half a million felons, fugitives, and
stalkers from getting handguns, and not interrupting anybody's day in
the deer woods, and putting 100,000 police on the street has given us
the lowest crime rate in 27 years. I still don't want to close the gun
show loophole, and I want to get rid of the 100,000 cops program.''
That's their position. It's not just about guns; it's about police. They
do not favor the Federal program that is now putting 150,000 police on
the street, and they have promised to get rid of it. And I could go on
and on.
``So what if 18 million Americans every single year are delayed or
denied coverage by an HMO when a doctor is pleading for it. I'm still
not for the Patients' Bill of Rights.''
Now, I could just go on and on, but the point I want to make is,
this election is about way more than gay rights. I have a unifying
theory of how America ought to work. I've tried to build one America.
I'm elated when the human genome project revealed we are all 99.99
percent the same, genetically. [Laughter]
I've been touting to a lot of people this new book by Robert Wright
called ``Non Zero.'' He
[[Page 1958]]
wrote an earlier book called ``The Moral Animal.'' The essential
argument of the book is that notwithstanding all the depravity of the
20th century and the Nazis and the Communists, that essentially society
is moving to higher and higher levels of decency and justice, because
it's becoming more complex and we're becoming more interdependent. And
the more interdependent people become and the more they recognize it,
the more they are forced to try to find solutions to their
disagreements, in game theory parlance, which are non-zero-sum solutions
as opposed to zero-sum solutions--those are where in order for somebody
to win, somebody has got to lose.
It's not a naive book. I mean, we're going to have a race for
President. It's a zero-sum race. One will win; one will lose. But the
general idea is that we ought to organize society in such a way that we
more and more and more look for solutions in which, in order for me to
win, you have to win, too. We have to find respectful ways to
accommodate each other so that we can honor our differences but be
united by our common humanity.
So, for me, cutting the welfare rolls in half, adding a couple
million kids to the rolls of children with health insurance, being for
the hate crimes bill and the employment nondiscrimination bill, being
for new markets legislation to expand opportunity to people and places
left behind, and continuing to get the country out of debt so interest
rates stay low and prosperity stays high, so the rest of the country is
secure enough to reach out to people who are different from them--which
is easier to do when you're secure than when you're insecure--to me,
this is all part of a unified strategy.
And I guess what I would like to ask you to do is to continue to
reach out and to keep working. Never allow yourselves to be marginalized
or divided against your friends and neighbors, because the progress
we're making is because more and more people are identifying with our
common humanity. As horrible as it was when young Matthew Shepard was
stretched out on that rack to die in Wyoming, it got a lot of people's
attention. And when that police commissioner from Wyoming stood up and
said, ``I was against hate crimes legislation before, and I was wrong.
The experience of knowing this young man's family, knowing his friend,
knowing what his life was like, and understanding the nature of this
crime and why the people committed it has changed my life--seeing his
parents stand up and talk''--obviously, not exactly a liberal Democratic
activist living out there in Wyoming--[laughter]--talking about this
whole issue in profoundly human terms has helped to change America. And
they are trying to redeem their son's life by making sure that his death
was not in vain.
And the American people are fundamentally good people. They nearly
always get it right once they have a chance to have personal experience,
if they have enough information and they have enough time to absorb it.
Now, that's why, in this election, it's important that you keep
reaching out and understand that clarity is our friend. I just get so
tickled watching this Presidential campaign, maybe because it's
interesting for me--I'm not part of it now. [Laughter] Except as I often
say, now that my party has a new leader and
my family has a new candidate, I'm
now the Cheerleader in Chief of the country. [Laughter] But it's sort of
like--one week we read in the press that there is something wrong with
one of the candidates. Then the next week, ``Oh, there's something wrong
with the other.'' And let me tell you something. I totally disagree with
that whole thing. I think we ought to posit the fact that we have two
people running for President who are fundamentally patriotic, good,
decent people who love their country but who have huge differences that
tend to be obscured by the daily and weekly coverage of this or that
flap.
And sometimes, I get the feeling that the flaps are being
deliberately used to obscure the underlying reality. Now, the underlying
reality is that these people have huge differences on economic policy--
huge. And the Republican position would basically take an enormous
percentage of the non-Social Security surplus, roughly three-quarters of
it, and spend it on a tax cut. Then, if you partially privatize Social
Security, that's another trillion bucks. You're into the Social Security
surplus, and that's before you have kept any of your spending promises.
That means higher interest rates.
We just got a study which said that the Gore plan would keep interest rates roughly a percent a year
lower, over a decade, and that's worth--there's some dispute about it,
but somewhere between $300 billion and $390 billion over 10 years in
lower home mortgages and $30 billion in lower car payments and $15
billion in lower student loan payments. That's a big tax cut.
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It also keeps the economy going. There are huge differences in
economic policy, big differences in education policy. Even though both
say they're for accountability, I would argue that the Democratic
program on accountability is stronger, because it says we favor
voluntary national exams. We favor identifying failing schools and then
having to turn them around, shut them down, or put them under new
management. So there are real consequences here.
And we favor, in addition to that, which they don't, putting 100,000
teachers out there to make smaller classes and rebuilding or building a
lot of schools, because you've got kids just running out of these
buildings and a lot of school districts just can't raise property taxes
any more.
There are huge differences in health care--a Patients' Bill of
Rights, Medicare drug program. You know, all this medicine flap, it
obscures--what is the underlying reality here? The underlying reality
is, we have the money to give senior citizens, who cannot afford it
otherwise, a drug benefit through Medicare. And our position is that we
ought to do it and that, over the long run, it will keep America
healthier, make lives longer and better, and keep people out of the
hospital. It's a simple position--that if we were creating Medicare
today, there's no way in the world we would do it without a prescription
drug program.
Their position is, ``We ought to do that for the poorest Americans,
and everybody else ought to buy insurance.'' Now, half of the seniors
who cannot afford their medical bills are not in the group of people
they propose to cover, number one. Number two, even the health insurance
companies, with whom I've had my occasional disputes, if you've
noticed--I've got to hand it to them. They have been perfectly honest in
this. They have said, ``We cannot write a policy that makes sense for us
that people can afford to buy.'' Nevada passed the bill that the whole
Republican establishment is for, and you know how many health insurance
companies have offered people drug coverage under it? Zero. Now, so the
evidence is not there. But like I said, I've got to give it to them.
They are never deterred by evidence. [Laughter]
Now, what's the deal here? What's the real deal? The real deal is,
the drug companies don't want this. Why don't they want it? You would
think they would want to sell more medicine, wouldn't you? They don't
want it because--I can't believe we just don't read these things--they
don't want it because they believe if Medicare provides this many drugs
to this many seniors, they will acquire too much market power and
require them, through market power, not price controls--there are no
price controls in this; this is totally voluntary--that they believe
they will have so much market power, they will be able to get down the
price of these drugs a little bit and cut the profit margin.
Well, we can argue about how much more expensive drugs are here than
drugs made here are in other countries--and it's different from drug to
drug--but instead of getting into one of these sort of nitpicking deals,
let's look at the big picture. The big picture is, you can go to Canada
and buy medicine made in America cheaper in Canada. Why? Because all
these other--and Europe--because they impose limits on the price.
So we all, Americans, we have to pay for all the research and
development for the medicine. Now, we've got great drug companies. We
want the drugs to be developed. I personally think we ought to be
willing to pay a premium. But I don't think there's a living person who
needs the drugs who should not be able to get them. And we can do this
for seniors on Medicare now. The fastest growing group of people in
America are people over 80.
So it's not just about gay rights. It's about seniors' needs. It's
about kids' needs to be in decent schools. It's about what works to make
our streets safer. And then, there are the environmental issues.
Now, it's not like we don't have any evidence here. We've got the
toughest clean air standards in history. We've got cleaner water, safer
drinking water, safer food. And we set aside more land than any
administration in history except the two Roosevelts, and now we've got
the longest economic expansion in history. So that's the evidence,
right?
We also know, in terms of the present energy crisis, that we've been
trying for years to get this Congress to give tax credits to people to
buy presently available energy conservation technologies and products
and that, off the shelf today, there are available products that would
dramatically increase the efficiency of our energy uses. We've tried to
put more and more money into research for new fuels, new engines, fuel
cells, the whole 9 yards, without success.
[[Page 1960]]
What's their approach? They still say, ``Don't bother me with the
evidence. You cannot grow the economy and improve the environment, so
put us in there. We will reverse President Clinton's order setting aside
43 million acres--roadless acres in the national forests. We will review
even the national monuments, may get rid of some of them. We will relax
the clean air standards, because you can't do it. Don't bother me with
the evidence.'' This is about the air gay and straight people breathe.
[Laughter]
What I'm saying to you is, this is a big deal. I get so frustrated
because I wish--that's why I hope these debates serve to clarify this. I
mean, I know it's hard for them, because it's hard for them to get up
and say, ``I'm sorry, I just think we ought to have dirtier air.'' I
mean, it's hard. [Laughter] I understand it's a hard sell. I understand
that.
But you've got to understand, there are differences here that will
affect the lives of real people, that will affect the kind of America
this young man grows up in. That's what these elections ought to be
about. And I'm perfectly prepared to posit that they're all good people.
And I'm sick and tired of everybody trying to pick them both apart.
That's not the issue. The issue is that people--study after study after
study after study shows that people who run for President, by and large,
do what they say they will do.
And by the way, there was one independent study that showed that in
my first term, even before all the stuff I've done in my second term, I
had already kept a higher percentage of my promises to the American
people than the last five Presidents.
Now, you couldn't possibly win a Pulitzer Prize or a Niemann
fellowship if you said that. But we ought to be better. We do not need
to jump on our opponents, personally, but we do need to make darn sure
that every single person knows what the differences are. And these
Congress--I'm telling you, every House seat, every Senate seat is
pivotally important to the future of this country.
Audience member. [Inaudible]
The President. That's one example--assume they are honorable people
in the Senate and the House and the people running for the White House.
One of them believes in Roe v. Wade; one of them doesn't. There's going
to be two to four judges on the Supreme Court coming up. Why wouldn't
they each do the honorable thing, that is, what they believe is right?
Now, we ought to have--we've never had a time like this in my
lifetime. We may never have another time where we've got so much peace
and so much prosperity, where people are secure enough to talk about a
lot of things we used to not talk about. I mean, let's face it. Here we
are in Dallas, Texas, having this event, right? Because America has come
a long way. Your friends and neighbors have. Your fellow citizens have.
This is a different country than it was 8 years ago. So now we've got to
decide, what do we propose to do with all this? You have friends all
over the world. Most of you have friends in virtually every State in
America. I am imploring you to talk to people every day between now and
the election.
Regina will win if people understand exactly what the choices are.
The Vice President will be elected if people understand exactly what the
choices are. Hillary will be elected to the Senate if people understand
exactly what the choices are. And yet so much of what passes for
political discourse is designed to obscure, rather than clarify, the
differences. Somebody doesn't agree with me, let them stand up and say
what they think the differences are, but let's talk about the things
that will affect other people.
Most people I've known in politics have been good people who worked
harder than most folks thought they did and did the best they could to
do what they thought was right. But we have honest differences here in
health care, education, the economy, human rights, gay rights, foreign
policy. One side is for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the other
isn't. You talk about something that could have huge consequences on
your kids' future.
So I am imploring you. I thank you for this money. We'll do our best
to spend it well. We need it. They're going to outspend us, but we
proved in '98 we could win at a $100 million deficit. But there's some
deficit at which we can't win, because we've got to have our message out
there, too. So we'll be less in the hole because of what you've done
today.
But you just remember this. There are a significant number of
undecided voters--that's why these polls bounce up and down like they
do--and they're having a hard time getting a grip on the election, the
undecided voters are, partly because there's not enough clarity of
choice.
[[Page 1961]]
So I implore you. You wouldn't be here today if you didn't have a
certain amount of political and citizen passion and courage and if you
didn't have clarity of choice about some issues that are very important
to you. So I ask you, take a little time between now and the election,
every day, and try to find somebody somewhere that will make a
difference and give them the same clarity that you have.
Thank you very much.
Note: The President spoke at 1:15 p.m. at a private residence. In his
remarks, he referred to luncheon cohosts Chuck Marlett, Jim Vasilay,
Julie Johnson, and Kay VanWey; Edward G. Rendell, general chair, and
Andrew Tobias, treasurer, Democratic National Committee; Elizabeth
Birch, executive director, Human Rights Campaign; Regina Montoya
Coggins, candidate for Texas' Fifth Congressional District; Dallas City
Councilman John Loza; and Molly Beth Malcolm, chair, Texas Democratic
Party.