[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000-2001, Book III)]
[October 21, 2000]
[Pages 2247-2251]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Reception for Hillary Clinton in Indianapolis, Indiana
October 21, 2000

    Thank you very much. Well, when Bren was up 
here talking, I thought to myself, that pretty well covers it; why 
should I speak? [Laughter] Thank you for your incredible generosity and 
support and friendship to me and to Hillary. And thank you, Mel. I want to thank Cindy 
and Paul for hosting this in their beautiful 
home in this beautiful yard. And I think I should say that today is 
Mel's 74th birthday, and we ought to be among the first to wish him a 
happy birthday.
    You know, we're going to have to redefine our definition of aging, 
by the way. Anybody--today, Americans who live to be 65, on average, 
have a life expectancy of 82. Americans who live to be 74 have a life 
expectancy of over 85. And the fastest growing group of people by 
percentage in the whole country are Americans over 80. Pretty soon, 
because of the human genome project, young women will come home with 
babies from the hospital that will be born with a life expectancy of 90 
years, which means that in the context of the 21st century, Mel is just entering middle age. [Laughter] And we wish you a 
long and happy life. [Laughter]
    I want to thank my friend and supporter and Representative Julia 
Carson. I'm glad to be able to come back here 
and also do some events for her this morning. She is unbelievable in 
Congress. Everybody up there loves her. And she's--I told somebody that 
she may be an African-American woman, but she has the political skills 
of an Arkansas Ozark sheriff when she's working the Congress. [Laughter] 
She sort of sidles into a room. When she leaves she's got what she 
wants, and nobody knows what they gave away until it's too late. 
[Laughter] It's great. Thank you, Julia Carson, for doing a great job.
    And I want to thank Bart Peterson. I was 
so thrilled when he got elected, and I'm glad he and Amy are here today. 
And I want to say a personal word of appreciation to Frank and Judy O'Bannon. I have 
enjoyed my friendship with them. They have visited with Hillary and me 
at the White House. I want you to make sure that this election goes very 
well for the Governor, because he has done very well by Indiana. You can 
be really proud of him. And I'm delighted to be here with him today.

[[Page 2248]]

    And finally, I want to thank Joe Andrew, who has been a great chair of the DNC. Joe, I have to tell 
you, when I woke up this morning and I looked outside on this beautiful 
piece of land and the trees are all turning and I realized how close we 
are to a golf course--[laughter]--I questioned your judgment in leaving 
Indiana and moving to Washington to deal with the sharks to be head of 
the DNC. But I'm real glad you did. You've done a great job, and I thank 
you, and the Indiana people should be very proud of Joe Andrew. Thank 
you.
    Now, I will be brief. I enjoyed visiting with all of you inside. I 
just wanted to say a couple of things. This election is very important--
the election--Hillary's election for the Senate, in which you have 
helped immensely today, because she's doing well up there, I think she's 
going to win, but I don't want her to be outspent three to one in the 
last 2\1/2\ weeks. And obviously, the people who opposed us all along 
are trying to give it one last shot before they give up and Hillary wins 
the Senate and I'm not in the White House. So we've had a pretty brisk 
fundraising opposition to deal with, too. So I'm very, very grateful to 
you for that.
    But I also wanted to say that I think that as we come into the 
homestretch of this election, the only thing that concerns me about it 
is the repeated number of articles I keep reading which say that the 
undecided voters and the people who might decide not to vote are not 
quite sure whether this election makes a difference and what the 
differences between the candidates are for the various races they're 
considering.
    And all I can tell you is that I think the election makes a huge 
difference, and I can hardly remember a time when the differences 
between the candidates on the issues that will affect our families, our 
communities, and our children's futures were any more sharp. It is 
absolutely clear to me that if the American people--the people in 
Indiana, just starting in your Governor's race here--if you understand 
the differences between the candidates and the consequences to families, 
communities, and the future, we win. If people are uncertain about the 
differences and the significance, then we're in trouble.
    I met with my Democratic colleagues in the Senate and the House at 
the early part of this week, and I said, ``You know, you ought to look 
at yourselves as sort of a weather patrol: Clear, we win; cloudy, they 
do well. We've got to try to make the skies clear for people. They have 
to understand the choices.''
    And I would just say just two or three things this morning. Number 
one, Bren talked about the condition of the 
economy. And people ask me all the time, ``Why is the economy doing so 
well, and what did you do when you got in? What new idea did you bring 
to Washington?'' And the truth is we did have some new ideas about how 
to make the most of technology and speed up the retraining of the 
American work force. We had some new ideas, but the main thing we 
brought to Washington was an old idea, arithmetic.
    People ask me all the time, ``What's your new idea?'' 
``Arithmetic.'' Washington didn't practice arithmetic. They quadrupled 
the debt of America in the 12 years before I took office, because they 
pretended that you could take 2 and 2, make it add up to 6. And it never 
has, and it never will.
    Now, in some ways, this may be the most significant difference to 
all of you in this race. It's a difference in the race for the Senate in 
New York. It is certainly a difference in the race for the Presidency 
and the Vice Presidency. If you look at the leadership of Frank 
O'Bannon here and Evan Bayh before him, one of the reasons I think the Democratic 
Party came back in Indiana is that they proved that you could be 
fiscally responsible, live within your means, run a good government, 
grow the economy, and also invest in education and in helping people. 
That's basically what we do; that's what we Democrats do.
    And when I became President, the deficit was $295 billion. Do you 
know what it was supposed to be this year--$455 billion. Instead we've 
got a $230 billion surplus. When I leave office, we will have paid down 
over $300 billion of the national debt. When I became President, we were 
spending over 13 cents of every dollar you pay in taxes just paying 
interest on the debt. When I leave, we'll be down at or below 12 cents. 
We were going to be at 15 cents. And if you vote for Vice President 
Gore, we pay the debt off; you get rid of 
the third biggest item in the Federal budget.
    And that's why we can pay for more health care, more education, a 
more modest tax cut, and still get rid of that debt. Arithmetic.

[[Page 2249]]

    Now, the biggest difference here--and it affects every one of you, 
from the wealthiest person here to the people who have served this 
wonderful meal this morning--the biggest difference is their tax plan is 
3 times bigger than ours. Actually, people who make under $100,000 a 
year almost all do better under ours. But theirs is 3 times bigger. So 
what difference does that make? If you spend--if you have--these numbers 
boggle the imagination, but if you think you're going to have about $2 
trillion to spend, if you spend $1.5 trillion on a tax cut and then you 
promise people you're going to give young people some of their Social 
Security payroll tax back to put in the stock market, but you're going 
to protect old people who are already drawing their Social Security and 
they won't lose anything, that costs another trillion dollars. And then 
you promise people several hundred billion dollars worth of spending, 
you know if you just take out all the zeros you can add it up. If you've 
got two to spend and you spend three--that's the Republican proposal--
you're back in deficit. And that means higher interest rates and lower 
growth.
    The Democratic plan will keep interest rates about a percent lower 
over a decade, every year. And let me just tell you what that means. You 
hear people talking about tax cuts these last 2 weeks--one percent lower 
interest rates every year for a decade saves the American people $390 
billion in home mortgage payments, $30 billion in car payments, $15 
billion in college loan payments. That doesn't even count how much lower 
your credit cards will be or the fact that you will have lower cost 
business loans, which will mean more expansion, a stronger economy, and 
a better stock market.
    So we have a tax cut, all right. It's concentrated on helping people 
get tax relief to pay for college education, long-term care, child care, 
retirement savings, and to give people incentives to invest in the poor 
areas that aren't part of our prosperity yet. It isn't as big as theirs. 
We freely admit it. But the reason is we want to get rid of the debt. We 
think it's important. And we think low interest rates and a strong 
economy is the best tax cut we can give all Americans.
    Now, that is a clear choice. People need to understand that. And it 
is a huge deal. I've worked as hard as I know how to turn this country 
around, pull this country together, and move this Nation forward. And 
that is the single most important difference. Don't let anybody tell you 
there is no significant difference between these two economic plans.
    And I know here in Indiana, where there are a lot of conservative 
people, they say, ``Well, but Gore wants to 
spend more money than Bush.'' He does. But if 
you get rid of interest on the debt, you get rid of the third biggest 
item in the budget, and you quit paying interest payments on the debt. 
You can spend more money on education and health care and the 
environment and scientific research and still have a tax cut because 
you're not--you get rid of the third biggest item in the Federal budget.
    This is real important. People have got to understand this. All the 
work we have done in the last 8 years can be reversed if you go back to 
big deficits. And I think if people understood that, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman 
would win. Don't you? So you need to talk to people about it. It's a big 
deal. It's one of the biggest issues in the New York Senate race and all 
over the country, because we have proven that fiscal conservatism and 
social progress go hand in hand.
    So we've cut the welfare rolls in half, partly because we have good 
welfare reform but partly because we have a strong economy. And we have 
the number of people without health insurance going down, for the first 
time in a dozen years, partly because we have a program that helps 
insure children that the State runs and we send them the money to do it 
but partly because we have a strong economy. We have a lower dropout 
rate in high school and a higher college-going rate than ever before in 
history, and test scores are going up, and there's a movement of more 
and more kids to take advanced placement courses--a huge increase in 
it--partly because the education reforms are going in the right 
direction but partly because we have a strong economy, which rewards 
higher levels of skill.
    So I just would say to all of you, I think this is profoundly 
important. And if you don't explain anything else to any of your 
neighbors and friends before they vote, tell them this is still about 
arithmetic. And the numbers have got to add up. Our numbers will, and 
theirs won't.
    The second thing I want to say is I believe, in addition to economic 
policy, the central thing that we have done these last 8 years that has 
helped move our country forward is to have

[[Page 2250]]

an inclusive philosophy that everybody ought to be part of America's 
community, that everybody counts, everybody ought to have a chance, we 
all do better when we help each other, and we can't afford to let anyone 
be either left behind or abused and be the kind of country we want.
    America is growing more diverse. It's getting more interesting, but 
as you see all around the world today, most of the troubles in the world 
come from people who can't get along with other folks who are different 
from them, because they think their differences are more important than 
their common humanity. So I have worked very hard on things I thought 
would even the scales in America and bring us together. And in each of 
these instances, our party is in one place, and their party is in 
another. And I'll just give you a couple of examples.
    We're for raising the minimum wage, and they're not. We're for 
strengthening laws guaranteeing equal pay for women for equal work, and 
they're not. We're for a hate crimes bill that protects people against 
hate crimes and allows the Federal Government to come in and help local 
law enforcement when there have been crimes of hate against people, like 
we saw in the case of James Byrd or Matthew Shepard or these other 
highly publicized cases around the country. And it's a big problem, and 
you see it in your part of the country.
    So I just give you these examples. If you could see what I have seen 
around the world in the last 8 years, you would know how important it is 
for us to learn to live together, across the lines that divide us. When 
I flew to Egypt earlier this week to try to help put an end to the 
violence in the Middle East, all the way over there I was just aching 
for these people, whom I know. And I was thinking about the former Prime 
Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, who was killed because he was working 
for peace. And I thought how all these people have worked together for 7 
years, and it can just be thrown away in a day or two because things 
happen that raise all their old demons again.
    Four or 5 years ago, we had this horrible ethnic slaughter in 
Rwanda, in Africa, where the two tribal groups who had literally shared 
the same land that is Rwanda for 500 years, and on and off they'd had 
trouble, but they'd always managed it. And it wasn't like a lot of 
African countries where 100 years ago the lines of the nations were 
redrawn artificially and all these people that weren't used to living 
together were thrown together. These people had been living together on 
the same land for 500 years. And within 100 days, over 700,000 people 
were killed--without weapons. Basically, they did it all with machetes. 
Why? Because something set off this spark of fear and loathing among 
people who were different.
    So that's the last point I want to make today. I know this is all 
kind of heavy for Saturday morning, but you need to think about it. If I 
were told--if God came down tonight and said to me, ``You have to go. 
Your time is up, but I'll give you one wish for America,'' believe it or 
not, I would not wish to continue our economic prosperity if I only had 
one wish. If I had one wish, I would wish for us to all get along 
together as one America, to be one community, to see our differences as 
interesting and fascinating, but not nearly as important as our common 
humanity, because the American people are smart and they're innovative, 
and the fact that we're growing more diverse is a gold mine of potential 
for us in a global society. But all over the world I see it over and 
over and over again--whether it's in Northern Ireland, in the Middle 
East, or the Balkans or Africa, you name it, most of the world's 
troubles stem from the fact that people are determined to see their 
differences as more important than their common humanity. And then they 
slip from that into distrust and hatred and dehumanization and violence. 
And it's a little, easy slope to fall down.
    And one of the things that I think is important about being a 
Democrat in the 21st century is that we do believe everybody counts. We 
think the people who are serving us here ought to have the same chance 
to send our kids to college as we do--their kids to college as we do. We 
think everybody should have a chance. We think the role of Government is 
to give people the tools to make the most of their own lives. And we 
really believe that we all do better when we help each other.
    We can only secure the independence of people which our Constitution 
guarantees if we recognize that we live in a world where we are 
increasingly interdependent, and life is going to be more interesting 
but only if we can see our common humanity as more important than all 
those interesting differences.
    So you just go out and tell people that. Tell people our program 
adds up, and theirs doesn't,

[[Page 2251]]

and ours will pull people together, and theirs won't. Those are two good 
reasons to stick with our side and to show up on election day.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 9 a.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to reception hosts Cindy Simon Skjodt and Paul 
Skjodt and Mrs. Skjodt's parents, cohosts Bren and Melvin Simon; Mayor 
Bart Peterson of Indianapolis and his wife, Amy; Gov. Frank O'Bannon of 
Indiana and his wife, Judy; and Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, 
Democratic National Committee.