[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000-2001, Book III)]
[October 25, 2000]
[Pages 2322-2325]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
[[Page 2322]]
Remarks at a New York Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee Reception
in New York City
October 25, 2000
The President. Thank you.
Audience members. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!
[Laughter]
The President. I'm just looking forward to being a good, law-abiding
taxpayer of New York. [Laughter] Let me say, Mr. Speaker, I thank you for inviting me here tonight
and for your truly outstanding leadership. You've had a lonely post in a
State with a Republican Governor and a
Republican Senate. And I have watched for years, long before I could
have known we'd be in the positions we're in today, where I'm out here
campaigning for a Senate spouse. [Laughter] And I admire so much what
you have done, and I was honored to be invited to come by and be with
you tonight.
I thank our Democratic Chair, Judith Hope,
and all the members of the assembly who are here. I feel so grateful to
New York for many reasons--for the extraordinary support that you have
given to me and Al Gore from 1992 on. Knowing that there would be 33
electoral votes in the can before we had to worry about the rest has
been an enormous sense of psychological support for us these past 8
years.
I thank you for the uncommon kindness and generosity that so many of
you have shown to my wife in this very long campaign, about a 16-month
campaign she's waged now. And I think it will be successful, in no small
measure because people like you have helped her. And I'm very grateful
to you for that.
I, also, as a lifelong baseball nut, I thank you for giving us the
best World Series in 50 years.
I want to say just two things seriously, if I might. First of all,
as I think all of you know, I was a Governor for a dozen years before I
ran for President, and I think I understand the connection between the
Federal and State Government about as well as anybody. I understand that
no matter what we do in Washington and how well we do it, the impact
that our policies have on real people depends in part on how
aggressively a State does its job.
New York, for example, because you had a program to insure children
previously, has been one of the most successful States in enrolling
children in our Children's Health Insurance Program. And I know a lot of
you have been very active in that. I'll give you--the polar opposite
case is the legislature in Arizona got a bill passed through the
legislature which literally prohibited the schools of Arizona from
enrolling children in the program in school. So not surprisingly,
they're not doing very well.
But that illustrates the point. The flip side is that no matter how
well you try to do your job, if you have a lousy economy, it will be
harder for you. There won't be as many taxpayers, and there will be a
lot more drain on the State treasury. And if we make bad decisions in
terms of how these funds are allocated, it will be tough for you.
And I tried to be very, very sensitive to that for the last 8 years.
And I can give you one example of that now, that our friend Congressman
Engel, who also previously served in the New
York Assembly, and he's here with us tonight, is helping me on.
In 1997, when we passed the Balanced Budget Act, because the
Democrats had taken all the tough decisions in '93 alone, without any
help from the other party--when the Vice President cast the tie-breaking vote and began to turn this country
around, something I believe he'll be rewarded for 2 weeks from
yesterday--we knew we had to slow the rate of growth of health care
expenditures. And we agreed to take the estimates of the Congressional
Budget Office, just like your legislative budget operation here, about
what changes would be necessary to achieve a certain level of savings.
Now, we thought at the time that they had overestimated what had to
be done. But we all agreed to play by the same rules. We did it in good
faith, and we had a remarkable moment of bipartisan harmony. Now there
is 100 percent agreement that the changes that we instituted in 1997
were too draconian and that the Medicare programs are not properly
funded. And there is a bipartisan agreement to put $28 billion back into
Medicare. But we're having a huge fight down there about how to allocate
it. And our friends in the Republican caucus basically asked the
Democrats in Congress and
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the representatives of the White House to leave, and they cut the money
up and gave a third of the money to the HMO's, without any guarantees, I
might add. The argument was that all over America, especially in a lot
of small towns in rural America, HMO's were dropping their Medicare
recipients. That's true. But they put the money in without any guarantee
that they'll take them back and keep them once they take them back.
So it has the feeling of a political decision that won't have a good
policy impact. And it has the consequence of depriving urban hospitals,
teaching hospitals, nursing homes, home health care agencies, hospice
operations, and a few other smaller health care providers of the funds
they need to serve people on Medicare.
So we're in--one of the last-minute struggles we're in as we try to
finish this congressional session, already about a month late this week,
is trying to get a fair share for New York of these health care funds,
but not just for New York, for everybody in the country that's in the
same situation you're in.
But it will have a lot to do with how well you can do your job in
the coming year whether we make the right decision or not in the next 48
hours. So I come here basically as a Governor and as a President who has
8 years of experience understanding that if you do your job well, the
policies I've fought for will be validated. If you don't, the impact of
the policies will be severely limited. And I know that if we don't do
the right things in Washington, we're making your load an awful lot
heavier. So that's why I'm honored to be here.
Now let me just say three things that I promised myself I would say
to every group I saw between now and the election. And they're the same
things I would say if I were sitting alone in a room with any of you and
you asked me why we should be supporting Al Gore, Joe Lieberman,
Hillary, Eliot, all the Democrats. There are three great questions that
the voters will resolve in this election, whether consciously or
unconsciously. Whether they vote or stay home, there will be three great
questions resolved.
One is, are we going to keep this prosperity going and extend it to
the people who aren't a part of it yet? We say the first thing we've got
to do is keep paying this debt down, because the decision we made to get
rid of the deficits in '93 led to an immediate drop in interest rates, a
big increase in the stock market, and people saved huge money on
business loans and everything else that requires credit. And we have to
keep doing that.
We set aside the money to do that and then say, with the money
that's left we'll have a tax cut we can afford, that will focus on the
needs of working families, to educate their children, send them to
college, for child care, for long-term care for the elderly and the
disabled, for retirement savings, but we'll have one we can afford and
still have the money we need to invest in education, health care, the
environment, national security, and our future.
Now, that's very important, because our friends on the other side
say that we can afford a trillion and a half dollar tax cut, a trillion
dollar Social Security privatization program, and $500 billion worth of
spending. There is no way you can cram $3 trillion into a $2 trillion
projected surplus--which won't be that big; ask Eliot; there's no way it's going to be that big, not after
this session of Congress--without going into deficit.
If you go into deficit, it means higher interest rates. The Gore-Lieberman
plan will keep interest rates about a percent lower for a decade. That's
worth $390 billion in lower home mortgage payments, $30 billion in lower
car payments, $15 billion in lower college loan payments, lower credit
card payments, lower business loans, means more businesses, more jobs,
and a higher stock market. This is not rocket science. This is
elementary mathematics. You need to drive this home to everybody you
talk to. It's an issue in the President's race. It's an issue in the
Senate race. It's an issue in the races for Congress, and it will
dramatically affect what you do in the State Assembly for the next 4
years.
The second issue is, are we going to build on the progress we've
made in bringing our society together or reverse policy? Now, look, in
the last 8 years the welfare rolls have been cut in half; there is a 26-
year low in crime; the environment is cleaner; the air is cleaner; the
water is cleaner; the drinking water is safer; we've cleaned up 3 times
as many toxic waste dumps. And we've proved you can do it and grow the
economy. We've got a decline in the number of people who don't have
health insurance, for the first time in a dozen years--again, thanks a
lot to people like you who have made sure we enroll these children in
the Children's
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Health Insurance Program. And the schools are getting better: The drop-
out rate is lower; the college-going rate is at an all-time high; the
reading and math scores are up. We know now how to turn around these
failing schools.
So we have to decide, are we going to build on this prosperity, this
progress? That's what Gore and
Lieberman and Hillary and all the people running for Congress have
advocated. They'll give you more tools to help make the schools better,
to help improve the health care system and provide insurance to people
who don't have it, to provide a Medicare drug program, to pass a
Patients' Bill of Rights. They'll continue to make the environment
cleaner. They'll continue to drive the crime rate down by putting more
police on the street.
In every single one of these areas they're running against people
who, in good conscience I think, want to reverse all these policies.
Now, it's not like you haven't had a test run here. You need to talk to
people about that. We tried it our way. We tried it their way. Our way
works better. [Laughter] It works. The evidence is in.
And the third great question is whether we're going to continue to
build one America as we grow more diverse. Shelley mentioned the work that we've done in the Middle
East and are doing. And that takes about half of every day I have now
and most of the night. We are, as ever, committed to the security of the
State of Israel and committed to the proposition that if it can be done
honorably, the long-term security of Israel is best served by a just
peace. It is very tough over there now, and I'm doing what I can.
Some of you mentioned the work we've done in Ireland. I thank you
for that. New York also has a lot of people from the Balkans who have
commented to me in the last few weeks how grateful they are that Mr.
Milosevic is gone and that we ended
ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo.
But the point I want to make for tonight is that in order for the
United States to continue to do good around the world, we have to be
good at home. We have to be an example of a genuine, tolerant, open
society. And the Democrats, therefore, are for the hate crimes bill.
They're for the employment nondiscrimination bill. They're for
immigration fairness legislation that we're fighting like crazy for in
the closing days of this legislative session. They're for continuing our
national service program. They're for equal pay for women. They're for a
woman's right to choose and appointments to the judiciary that will
generally reflect the ability of legislative bodies, including the
Congress to protect the rights and the interests of the American people.
Now, that is a very important--[inaudible].
And this election will determine, therefore, whether we keep the
prosperity going and extend it to people who aren't part of it yet,
whether we keep the social progress going and build on it, and whether
we continue to build one America. Those are the three great questions.
And I just hope that every day you can, between now and election, you
will share those three points with as many people as you can, because
this is a great time. I've done as--I've worked as hard as I could to
turn the country around, to move it forward, to pull it together. But
when Al Gore says to you that the best is yet to come and you ain't seen
nothing yet, when a person running for office says that, it may sound
like a campaign statement. But I'm not running for anything for the
first time in 26 years--[laughter]--and I believe that.
It takes a long time to turn a country around. All the best things
are still out there. All the best things are still out there. That's
what he and Joe Lieberman have been talking about. That's what
Hillary has tried to talk about in
this election. And we may never have another chance in our lifetime to
have a moment like this, that we can mold for our children and our
grandchildren.
So I think you should all be happy; you should be confident; you
should be proud to be members of the Democratic Party. And you ought to
go out there and bear down, every day between now and election, and turn
as many voters as you can here and in New Jersey and in any other place
in America where you know people that would be more likely to help us if
they knew those simple three things. And remember, not voting is almost
as bad as voting against us.
So turn them out, and we'll have a great celebration in 2 weeks.
Thank you.
Note: The President spoke at 5:45 p.m. at the Four Seasons Hotel. In his
remarks, he referred to Sheldon (Shelley) Silver, speaker, New York
State Assembly; Gov. George E. Pataki of New
[[Page 2325]]
York; Judith Hope, chair, New York State Democratic Party; and former
President Slobodan Milosevic of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
(Serbia and Montenegro).