[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000-2001, Book III)]
[October 19, 2000]
[Pages 2226-2230]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks at a Reception for Hillary Clinton in East Norwalk, Connecticut
October 19, 2000
Well, thank you, Rick, and thank you,
Bruce. I'm so glad this worked out tonight. This
poor man would have had a heart attack. [Laughter] If I were still in
Egypt, it would be the end of our relationship. [Laughter] And thank you
for opening this magnificent home to us. I only wish I could see it in
the daytime with all the lights shining in all the windows.
I thank you all for coming tonight. Several of you commented on the
rather unusual schedule I've had the last 5 days. And I'm still
standing. [Laughter] I suppose I should be more careful about what I'm
saying, because I probably won't remember it. [Laughter]
Let me say, first of all, I'm really grateful for your support for
Hillary, and I'm delighted that I could come tonight. She's in New York
with Al Gore tonight, and you got me. I
suppose I'm now the consolation prize. [Laughter] I'm actually having
the best time of my life. This is the first time in 26 years, in an
election year, I have not been on the ballot for something, somewhere.
Most days, I'm okay about it. [Laughter] I'm having a wonderful time
going out across America, helping candidates for the Senate and the
House, and helping Al and Connecticut's own Joe Lieberman and especially Hillary. And in a way, I feel freer
to say maybe what is on my mind than I might if I were, myself, a
candidate. But I just want to make a few remarks.
First of all, this is an election that we ought to be enjoying. I
think we ought to be enjoying it as a people maybe a little more than we
are now, because the country is in such good shape economically and
socially, without any immediate crisis at home, that we're actually in a
position to have an old-fashioned citizens election, where we debate
where we are, where we ought to go, and what we should be doing to build
the future of our dreams for our children. And the American people
should feel good about that.
This election has been remarkably free of kind of intensely personal
recriminations. There's been a little bit of it, and any of it is a
little too much for me. But really you have two very clear choices for
President and Vice President, for the Senate race in New York, and
basically throughout the country. And so what I thought I'd do tonight
is just make a few remarks about that.
I've done everything I know to do over the last, as you pointed out,
7 years and 9 months--I've got something like 93 days to go--
[laughter]--everything I knew to do to turn the country around, pull the
country together, and move us forward. And I feel very strongly that
these elections should be viewed as hiring decisions, and you're
primarily hiring people to make decisions.
Every time somebody comes to see me, say a young person saying, `` I
want to run for this, that, or the other office,'' and they ask me
should they do it, I say, ``Well, you've got to be able to answer three
questions. One, are you prepared to lose? Can you stand it? I've done it
twice. It's way overrated. [Laughter] But it's important. Two, are you
prepared to do what it takes to win? And three, do you have a reason for
running that's bigger than the fact that you'd like the job? Because
people are hiring you to make decisions.''
And one of the things--I get frustrated when I watch these
Presidential debates--they're really not debates. They're actually joint
press conferences in which maybe you get a chance to clarify your
difference, but usually you don't. And what the voters need to know is,
what do these people have in common, where do they differ, and what are
the consequences to me, my family, and our country? That's really what
you ought to be thinking about.
[[Page 2227]]
So I would just start by saying that the question in every election
is not--in this year and in this century, certainly for the next 20
years, I think, will be not whether we're going to change but how are we
going to change? There is no status quo candidate in this election, not
for President and not for any other position, because the Nation and the
world are changing at breathtaking speeds. A lot of you have been a part
of that change, which is why you can afford to be here tonight.
[Laughter] But it's very important to focus on that. The issue is not
whether we're going to change; it is how we're going to change.
I think it's quite important that we keep this economic expansion
going, that we minimize any problems that come along in the future, and
that we break our backs to try to expand economic opportunity to the
people and places that have been left behind. You might know, but the
poorest parts of America are still the Native American reservations. It
may be hard to imagine in Connecticut, where the biggest casino in the
world belongs to an Indian tribe. But in 1994, I brought all the Indian
chiefs in the country--I invited them all, and most of them came--to the
White House for the first time since the 1820's. And we had people who
flew down on their own airplanes, and we had other people where they had
to pass the hat on the reservation to get up enough money to afford the
plane ticket.
So I think it's quite important that we think about how we can keep
expanding the circle of business owners and consumers to keep this
going. But several of you mentioned--at least three of you mentioned,
going through the line, that you were friends with Bob Rubin. So I'll
just start with that.
People ask me all the time--I go around the country--they say,
``What did you really do to change the economic policy? What new idea
did you and Bob Rubin and Lloyd Bentsen, that whole crowd, bring to
Washington?'' And I always have a one-word answer: ``Arithmetic.'' We
brought arithmetic to Washington, DC. [Laughter] Now, that may seem
laughable to you, but that's a big issue in this election.
And I don't really think the debate has been formed as I think it
should be in people's minds. The question is not--it's partly who should
get a tax cut. But the real issue, from my point of view, since I want
to keep the economy going, is how big a one can you afford? So it is
true that the Republican Party tax cut is about 3 times the size of the
Democratic tax cut. And because the Democratic Party tax cut is only
one-third as big as the Republicans', it has to be tilted a little more
toward people at incomes $100,000 a year and down.
But why is that important? Why is arithmetic important? Because if
you spend a trillion and a half-plus on a tax cut and a trillion dollars
on partially privatizing Social Security and several hundred billion
dollars keeping your spending cuts, you're back in deficits. And once
you get back to deficits--we tried that--you get higher interest rates
and lower economic growth. The real reason that successful people who
want a successful economy should support our approach is that, if you
keep paying down the debt, you'll keep interest rates lower.
And I had the Council of Economic Advisers do an analysis for me
that said that the difference in the two economic plans could be a
percent a year for a decade. That is $390 billion in lower home
mortgages, $30 billion in lower car payments, $15 billion in lower
college loan payments, way lower business loans, which means more
investment, more jobs, and a better stock market. It's arithmetic.
There is something else, I think, that's not become clear in these
debates that I'd like to emphasize, because--this is something Hillary
feels very strongly about. Most people don't know it, but the third
biggest item in the Federal budget is interest on the debt. There is
Social Security, defense, interest on the debt. If you pay the debt
down, you evaporate the third biggest item in the budget, 12 cents on
the dollar. When I became President, it was almost 14 cents on the
dollar, headed to over 15. But we're paying the debt down now.
So if you pay it down and 12 cents of every dollar you pay in taxes
goes away, then you have more for education; you have more for health
care; and eventually you have more for tax cuts; and Government is a
smaller share of the economic pie under our approach than it is under
theirs. This is very important. But people have to make up their minds
whether they agree with this with or not. All I can tell you is, you got
8 years of a test here, and you had 12 years of a test the other way,
and I think our way works better. So I think we should keep changing
that way. That's a clear decision people need to have.
[[Page 2228]]
The same thing is true on health care, on education, on
environmental policy. Let me just say that this is important to me. They
say there are never any votes in the national election on it, but I
think that it's very important that America have a good environmental
policy, and I believe it will become more important in the years ahead
as the global economy grows ever more intertwined and our resources are
shared.
We have proved that you can have cleaner air, cleaner water, safer
food, 90 percent of our kids immunized for the first time in history,
set aside more land than any administration since that of Theodore
Roosevelt, and grow the economy--big decision in this election. Because
they say our clean air rules are too tight for a good economy. They say
they want to repeal my order setting aside 40 million acres of roadless
lands in the national forests, which the Audubon Society says is the
most significant conservation move in 40 years. [Applause] I want you to
clap for that. I want you to understand there is a decision here, and
the decision you make will have consequences, and you have to decide how
important it is.
We just had another test last week that proves that the 1990's were
the warmest decade in a thousand years. A test on a polar ice cap proved
that the 1990's were the warmest decade in a thousand years. Now, we
have on-the-shelf technology today available that pays out in 2 years or
less, which would enable us to grow the economy even more rapidly and
reduce our contribution to global warming. Al Gore understands this. Hillary is committed to it. You've got
to make a decision. If you think it's important, you can't pretend that
this election doesn't have anything to do with that. It's a big, big
issue.
If you drilled in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, something
that we don't support, it would only be a few months' worth of oil for
the American people. If, instead, you figure out how to get fuel
injection engines, you get more mixed-fuel engines, or--we're very close
to cracking the chemical barrier to biofuels. Let me say what that is in
plain language.
If you take farmers' crops and you make ethanol, it takes 7 gallons
of gasoline to make 8 gallons of ethanol. That's why it doesn't work out
very well now. But we have chemists in the labs, funded by your tax
dollars, today, that are very close to figuring out how to crack the
chemical resistance just like when we turned crude oil into gasoline.
Once you break the resistance, you'll be able to make with 1 gallon of
gasoline, 8 gallons of biofuel. And it won't just have to be corn. It
could be grass. It could be anything. Then we'll all be getting 500
miles to the gallon, in effect, and everything will be changed.
Now, there's a big difference here between the way we approach this.
You have to decide. But you cannot assume that there are no
consequences.
Same thing in education. I think it's very good to listen to these
debates and know that both sides favor accountability. But you should
know--I mean, Hillary has been working seriously on education for over
20 years now. And the thing I want to tell you, the good news is we now
know something we didn't know when Hillary and I started this over 20
years ago. You can turn failing schools around. I was in a school in
Harlem the other day where--listen to this--2 years ago--2 years ago, 80
percent of the children were doing math and English below grade level;
by any standard, a failing school. Two years later, 74 percent of the
children are doing math and English at or above grade level. We know how
to do this.
So our strategy is: Identify the failing schools, have high
standards, and if they don't turn around, shut them down or put them
under new management. It's not complicated. But we believe that if
you're going to expect high standards, you ought to help fund more
teachers in the schools, you ought to help fund modern school buildings;
you ought to have after-school programs and summer school programs and
preschool programs for the kids who need it--big difference. It's one
thing to say you're going to hold somebody accountable and another one
to give them the tools to meet the accountability standard.
And the last thing I'd like to say--I'll say a little bit about
foreign policy, because you asked me to and because it's why I haven't
had any sleep in 5 days. [Laughter] But before I get into that, I want
to say that there is one other thing I've tried to do. I have tried as
hard as I could to get the American people to reconcile with each other
across all this incredible diversity we have. This is the most racially
and religiously diverse society we have ever had, and it is growing more
so every day.
And I have tried to get people to say, ``Hey, this is a good thing
for us in a global economy.
[[Page 2229]]
We should be glad that we're more diverse. We should relish and be proud
of our differences. But we can only do that if we understand our common
humanity is more important.'' That's the problem in the Middle East
today. It's why we still haven't finished the Irish peace process. It's
why they have tribal wars in Africa. You just think about it. Everywhere
people think their differences are more important than their common
humanity, eventually trouble ensues and grievances get piled high. And
as we've seen in the Middle East, it's easy to have 7 years of hard work
chucked out the door in no time.
So that's why I've worked for a hate crimes bill and the
``Employment Non-Discrimination Act'' and why I want stronger
enforcement of the equal-pay-for-women laws and why we've tried to have
the most diverse administration in history. And that again is a very
important issue in this election. You've just got to decide how
important you think that is. I think it is real important.
If somebody would only give me one wish for America on my way out
the door, I would not wish--if I only had one--for continuing
prosperity. I would wish for us to find some way to be one America,
across all the lines that divide us, because, hey, you're smart and so
is everybody else who lives in this country; you'll figure out how to
deal with all the rest. But if you can't bring diverse people together
in unity, then the rest of it eventually will fall to people's
blindness.
So that's what I wanted to say. I'm glad for the good things that
have happened in this country. I'm grateful that we've been able to be a
force for peace and freedom throughout the world. I think I was right
about the trade issue, and I appreciated you mentioning that, and I wish
I had persuaded more people in my party I was right, but time is on our
side there.
But what you have to understand is, America's public life is always
about tomorrow. That's why we're still around here after over 225 years.
We are always about tomorrow. We're always a country that is becoming,
always in the process of being something bigger and better and
different, because we're rooted in some values that stand the test of
time. That's what this election is about.
Now, the seat that my wife is running for was held by Robert Kennedy
and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, people that were important to New York and
important to America, people that had good minds and caring hearts. I
must say, of all the crazy things people have said in this election, the
only one that has really kind of steamed me is when somebody says,
``Well, she wouldn't be doing this if she weren't First Lady.'' I can
tell you that for 30 years all she ever did was work for other people,
other causes, other candidates, other things she believed in. And the
truth is, if she hadn't come home and married me 25 years ago, she would
have done this 15 years ago herself. That's the real truth.
I have had the great honor of knowing hundreds of people in public
life. One thing I'd like to say about that is that most of them--
Republicans and Democrats alike, conservatives and liberals alike--were
much more honest, much more hardworking, and much more likely to do what
they believed is right than you would believe if all you did was read
the press accounts. Most people do what they think is right. That's why
I urge the Democrats in this election to just posit that from Governor
Bush on down, the Republicans are good people
who love their families and love their country, and we just have
different views here. So people can get all of the cobwebs out of their
head and think about how this election was going to affect them.
Al Gore would be a good President
because he makes good decisions. I saw that again in these 2 days when
we were huddling over the Middle East crisis. He makes good decisions.
You hire people to make decisions.
In the Senate you need somebody who can work with other people and
bring order out of chaos and set priorities, because you don't have the
whole, sort of, power of the Federal Government working for you. You
have to have somebody who can really think and who really cares about
the right things and then can get things done.
I have personally never known anybody, ever, in all my years in
public life--and I've known several Presidents; I've known scores of
Cabinet members; I've known a couple of hundred people who have served
in the U.S. Senate--I have never known anybody who had the same
combination of mind and heart and knowledge and ability to get things
done that Hillary does.
I would be giving this speech today for her if we hadn't spent the
last over 25 years together. I would do that, because I'm telling you,
[[Page 2230]]
if the people of New York vote for her, the ones who didn't vote for her
will wonder why they didn't within a year.
So I am grateful to you. I think she's going to win. We can't let
her be outspent too badly in the last 2\1/2\ weeks. [Laughter] Thanks to
you, she won't be. And I think on election night you'll be very proud
that you were here tonight.
Thank you very much.
Note: The President spoke at 8:37 p.m. at a private residence. In his
remarks, he referred to reception hosts Richard Stierwalt and Bruce
Orosz; Republican Presidential candidate Gov. George W. Bush of Texas;
and former Secretaries of the Treasury Robert E. Rubin and Lloyd
Bentsen.