[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000-2001, Book III)]
[October 29, 2000]
[Pages 2369-2374]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Congregation of Alfred Street Baptist Church in 
Alexandria, Virginia
October 29, 2000

    The President. Thank you so much. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. 
Good morning.
    Audience members. Good morning.
    The President. I want to thank Reverend Peterson and Mrs. Peterson and Reverend 
Jackson, all the staff and members of the Alfred 
Street Baptist Church family. I'd like to say a special word of 
appreciation to the young choir and the choir director for the music. 
Thank you, sir. They were great. You made the rest

[[Page 2370]]

of us feel pretty young again, there singing. [Laughter]
    I am delighted to be here with a large number of folks from the 
White House. You saw them all stand up. [Laughter] You should know, we 
have--we actually have two ministers in the White House: Zina 
Pierre, who works in the Office of 
Intergovernmental Affairs, and Kevin Jefferson, who is the Deputy Director of Vice President 
Gore's Community Empowerment Board. They're 
doing their job every day.
    I am also very grateful for one of your members who works with us, 
Ms. Jena Roscoe, who made sure I got here today. 
Where's Jena? She's here somewhere. Where are you? Stand up there. 
[Applause]
    This church, I am well aware, is not just a Sunday church. You 
minister to the spiritual and physical needs of the people every day of 
the week, from nurturing boarder babies to promoting good health, to 
this Habitat project that your pastor just told you how much you were 
giving to today. [Laughter] The Scripture says, ``While we have time, 
let us do good unto all men.'' And a week from Tuesday, it will be time 
for us to vote.
    I am grateful that your Representative in Congress, Jim 
Moran, came with me today. He is a very fine 
man and a great Member of Congress, and he's been a good ally of mine 
for these years I have served as your President, and I thank him. But 
for many reasons, I am especially grateful that Lynda Robb came with me today to be with you. You know, her 
husband, Chuck, has been your Governor, your 
Lieutenant Governor, your Senator. Her father, President Johnson, did 
more for civil rights than any President since Abraham Lincoln.
    Lynda and Chuck 
have been friends of Hillary's and mine for almost 20 years now. We've 
seen our children grow up together. We served as Governor together. We 
have fought the battles of the last 8 years together. In the United 
States Senate, almost no one had more to lose than Chuck Robb by voting 
for my economic plan in 1993. You know, we'd been living on that deficit 
medicine so long, we were pretty well hooked up. [Laughter] We were 
addicted.
    I used to have a Senator from Arkansas named Dale Bumpers, who just retired, who used to joke that if he could 
write everybody in America $200 billion worth of hot checks, he could 
show them a good time, too. [Laughter]
    And I remember when I became President, Senator Robb knew he had to run for reelection the next year. And once 
you get in that big a hole, there's no easy way to crawl out; everybody 
has got to hurt a little bit. But, without blinking, he came in and 
voted for the economic plan, and he and--thanks to him and thanks to 
Vice President Gore--if we'd lost Chuck 
Robb, Vice President Gore never would have gotten the vote. By one vote, 
the narrowest of margins, it turned the economy around, got interest 
rates down, got things going again. And we've gone from the biggest 
deficits in history to the biggest surpluses.
    I think you shouldn't forget that on election day, that he was 
there. But in so many other ways, large and small, Senator Robb always tries to do the right thing, even when it's 
not the popular thing. When it comes to civil rights and human rights, 
he's always tried to do the right thing. When it comes to the safety of 
our children on the streets, the Brady bill, assault weapons ban, 
100,000 police, even if some big, powerful interest group is going to 
get mad at him, he just sort of stands up there and does the right 
thing.
    I don't know how many times--there's been a time or two in the last 
8 years I've tried to get him to vote 
against me. [Laughter] I have. I've said, ``Chuck, what are you doing? 
You're from Virginia; you've got to run again.'' He'd just say, ``It's 
the right thing.''
    When I normalized relations with Vietnam, Senator Robb, who probably saw more combat in Vietnam than any 
other combat veteran, stood by my side and said it was the right thing 
to do. So we've been friends a long time. And I'm highly biased, but I 
want you to know, there is not a braver person in the United States 
Congress, or a person more likely, day-in and day-out, no matter what 
the pressures to do wrong are, to stand up and do right for you.
    Now, mostly I came here to say thank you. You know, this is the 
first time in 26 years I haven't been on the ballot somewhere. 
[Laughter] I have been coming into African-American churches for almost 
27 years now, listening, learning. And today my mind is both here, 
concentrated on the task at hand--which is to try to persuade you to go 
out and talk to every friend, family member, co-worker, and stranger on 
the streets you see between now and November 7th and drag them to the 
polls--but my mind is also wandering back over this

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amazing life the American people have given me and the people of my 
native State of Arkansas.
    I've thought about all the early times in the 1970's I was in 
various churches. I can still remember the songs that were sung. I can 
still remember when I was in poor churches when they didn't have all the 
instruments, and men would sit in chairs around the singers and use 
spoons on their knees to provide the rhythm. I can still remember going 
to investitures of pastors in churches built for 200, where there were 
300 people there and 8 choirs. And it was hot. And we couldn't tell 
whether the people were being seized with the spirit or just having 
strokes. [Laughter]
    So I just came mostly to say thank you. I have a heart filled with 
gratitude that I have had the unusual opportunity to serve. I have tried 
to turn our country around, to move it forward, and to bring it 
together. I am proud that we have had an administration, from the 
Cabinet to our appointees--at least one of whom is a member of this 
church--to our judicial nominees, that looks like America.
    I am grateful that we have had an economy that has not only given us 
the longest economic expansion in history but has benefited all 
Americans. We have the lowest African-American and Latino unemployment 
rates ever recorded. We have a 15 percent increase, after inflation, in 
income over the last 8 years for African-Americans; in just the last 3 
years, it's almost 10 percent; 1.1 million African-Americans buying 
their own homes for the first time; child poverty at a 20-year low.
    I am glad that this has been about more than economics. We're a more 
united country. We have the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years, the lowest 
crime rates in 26 years. The teen birth rate has dropped by one-third 
for African-American teens since 1991 alone--by one-third. For the first 
time in history, over 90 percent of our children have been immunized 
against serious childhood diseases. And for the first time in a dozen 
years, the number of people without health insurance is going down, 
because 2.5 million kids have been given health insurance under the 
Children's Health Insurance Program that was part of our balanced 
budget.
    Listen to this: For the first time in history, African-American 
children are graduating from high school at the same rate as white 
children, and the number of African-American children taking advanced 
placement exams in the high schools is up 300 percent in just the last 3 
years--it has tripled in the last 3 years; record college-going rate; 
and record levels of support through the HOPE scholarship, the lifetime 
learning tax credit, the Pell grant, and so many other things for our 
young people to go on to college.
    Now, what I want to say to you is not, ``Didn't we do great?'' 
That's not why I came here. I came here to say thank you, and now it's 
your turn. I have done everything I could to turn our country around, to 
move it forward, to pull it together. But it is in the nature of, first 
of all, human beings, secondly, democracy, and thirdly, America, that 
there's always something to be done. And our public life always is about 
tomorrow.
    When the framers of the Constitution wrote the Declaration of 
Independence and the Constitution--hey, they were smart guys. They knew 
that the world was about more than white male property owners. They 
weren't dumb. They knew what they were saying when they said all men are 
created equal. They knew they meant men, women, and kids. And they knew 
they meant blacks and whites and whoever else shows up--the Native 
Americans. They were not stupid.
    I've got a copy of the only book Thomas Jefferson ever wrote, ``The 
Notes on the State of Virginia.'' I believe it was the first printing; 
certainly, it was printed in the 1700's, before he became President. And 
there is in one of these chapters about a paragraph on slavery, but it's 
pretty obvious that Mr. Jefferson knew before he became President that 
it was a bad deal, and that it would have to fall, and that change would 
have to come. So we would start with a set of ideals, and then we would 
work on making our Union more perfect.
    So that is the eternal purpose of America. And election time is your 
time to make a more perfect Union. It's your job. On November 7th, you 
count as much as I do. Your vote counts just as much--unless you stay 
home; then mine counts more than yours.
    And there are still issues out there: racial profiling; affirmative 
action; diversity on the bench. I have named 62 African-American judges, 
3 times the number of the previous two administrations combined, but--
[applause]--wait a minute. That's not why I came here.

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I came here for you to think about your responsibility to the future. 
But there has never been an African-American judge on the Federal Court 
of Appeals here in Virginia for the fourth circuit, which has the 
largest number of African-Americans in the entire United States, because 
I have been trying for 8 years to do it, and for 8 years I have been 
blocked in the United States Senate. I appointed Roger Gregory from Virginia; I appointed two people from North 
Carolina. I have virtually gone out with a searchlight looking for 
people that could get by the folks in the Senate. They were all 
qualified. This was not about qualifications.
    And so, in the year 2000, when we still don't have an African-
American jurist on the Federal Court of Appeals and we're running over 
with qualified people, there's still work to do in this country.
    While poverty among African-American children has dropped by almost 
30 percent since I took office, it's still way too high. Poverty among 
people over 65 is below 10 percent, for the first time in the history of 
our country. But the poverty rate among our children is still nearly 
double that. There is still a digital divide. Even though we've hooked 
up 95 percent of our schools to the Internet, thanks to Vice President 
Gore's E-rate program, which gives a 
discount to poor schools, you and I know there's still a digital divide, 
and if we don't close it, the world will not come together.
    Well, there are lots of other issues, but you get the point. You 
know, I'm 54 now, and it looks younger every day. [Laughter] The pastor 
said it was young. And I can honestly say there has never been a time in 
my lifetime where we have had the longest economic expansion in history 
and lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, so we're moving in the right 
direction economically. But we also have declining crime, declining 
welfare rolls, declining teen pregnancy and drug abuse among young 
people, improving schools, improving health care coverage, and a cleaner 
environment. So you've got the economy getting better, the society 
getting stronger, with the absence of severe domestic crisis or external 
threat to our security.
    We all know it's still a dangerous world, as the people of Virginia 
felt most of all when our U.S.S. Cole was attacked and we lost those 
fine young men and women sailors several days ago. But we are as free 
from external threat to our security and internal paralyzing crisis as 
we have ever been. And all these things are going well.
    Now, what's the point of--why am I telling you this? Again, not to 
make you clap but to make you think. Everybody in this church over 30 
has made at least one big mistake in your life not because things were 
going well at the time--poorly--but because they were going so well at 
the time, you thought you didn't have to concentrate anymore. Isn't that 
right? Is that true? Has everybody here over 30 made a mistake because 
things were going well in your life at least once? You didn't think you 
had to concentrate. At that moment, it's just going so well, everything 
is on automatic.
    Nothing is ever on automatic, ever--ever. And the reason I am here 
today is, I don't know if we'll have another chance in my lifetime, or 
yours, to go and vote as equals, to shape the future of our country--
when you have economic prosperity, social progress, the absence of 
internal crisis, or external threat.
    We can paint the future of our dreams for kids. We can figure out 
how to deal with the aging of America, how to save Social Security and 
Medicare when the baby boomers retire, how to give all of our kids 
excellence in education, how to make the most of the scientific and 
technology revolution. The young women in this audience will be having 
babies within 5 or 10 years that have a life expectancy of 90 years 
because of the human genome project.
    These young people behind me that sang for us so beautifully today, 
when they begin to have their children, just be a matter of a couple of 
years until they'll--every mother will come home from the hospital with 
a little gene card that will tell you everything about your baby's 
biological makeup. Some of it will be kind of scary, but at least you 
will know. And they will say, if you do these 10 things, you can 
dramatically increase your child's life expectancy.
    We worry about the energy crisis now, but GM just announced they 
developed a car that gets 80 miles to the gallon. And yesterday I signed 
the Agriculture appropriations bill which funds research into energy--
listen to this--and right now, some cars in America, but not many, run 
on ethanol. You know, that's basically, you make fuel from corn. And the 
problem with that is, it takes 7 gallons of gasoline to make 8 gallons 
of ethanol, so the conversion is not too good. But the chemists are 
working on cracking the resistance to this, and when they

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do, they estimate that you'll be able to make 8 gallons of ethanol with 
1 gallon of gasoline; furthermore, that you'll be able to make it--you 
don't have to use corn; you can use rice hulls or even grass--anything.
    Now, when that happens, all of you will be driving around in cars 
that will have the equivalent of 500 miles to the gallon. And the world 
will change.
    Audience member. Amen! [Laughter]
    The President. Now, why is that important? Because the 1990's were 
the hottest decade in a thousand years, and we don't want these kids and 
their children to grow up in a world full of storms and troubles and 
burned-up fields and global instability and wars because we couldn't 
take care of our environment.
    So all this big stuff is out there. This is very exciting. I just 
hope I can stick around long enough to watch it unfold. It's really 
great. The best stuff is still out there. But it all depends on the 
choices we make. And look, I don't have to--I shouldn't tell you who to 
vote for; you already know who I'm for. [Laughter] So this is not rocket 
science. But here's what I want you to know. You may not ever get 
another chance like this in your lifetime to vote in an election like 
this, ever. And those of us who are older have a solemn responsibility 
to tell that to the younger people who may take this for granted, who 
may think this kind of a ride just goes on and on and on.
    You know, my first election was between Hubert Humphrey, Richard 
Nixon, and George Wallace. And my country was torn clean apart. This 
stuff does not last forever. We've got to make the most of this moment, 
number one.
    Number two, there are--we can have a happy election. We don't have 
to say anything bad about anybody in this election. We don't have to 
badmouth--the Republicans don't have to badmouth the Democrats; the 
Democrats don't have to badmouth the Republicans. We can just posit, 
everybody is patriotic; everyone loves their family; everyone loves 
their country. Now, let's just see what they say and where they 
disagree.
    But I'm telling you, there are huge differences on economic policy, 
on health care policy, on education policy, on crime policy, on 
environmental policy, on foreign policy, and how we deal with arms 
control and how we relate to Africa and other emerging areas of the 
world. And you need to know that.
    One side believes that it would be better if we had a very large tax 
cut and we partially privatize Social Security and we spent a fair 
amount of money--even though to do this would get us back into deficit--
because they believe that tax cuts grow the economy more than deficits 
hurt it.
    Then one side, our side, believes that we ought to first say, 
``Let's stick with what works and keep paying this debt down; get the 
country out of debt, because if we get the country out of debt, we won't 
be borrowing money, and therefore, you can borrow money more cheaply.'' 
That's the biggest tax cut we can give everybody. If we keep interest 
rates one percent lower a year for a decade, do you know what that's 
worth to you? Listen to this: for the American people, $390 billion in 
lower home mortgages, $30 billion in lower car payments, $15 billion in 
lower college loan payments. That's a lot of money. But more important, 
it keeps the economy healthy.
    But anyway, that's our view. Our view is, first things first; let's 
go on and get out of debt here. And then whatever is left we'll invest 
in our education, health care, our children, and then give people a tax 
cut we can afford. But there are differences. And you should listen to 
them and listen to us and make up your mind. But don't pretend that 
there aren't any differences.
    When I hear people say, ``This is not really a very significant 
election,'' it makes me want to go head first into an empty swimming 
pool. [Laughter] I mean, this is--we really do have a good choice here; 
I mean, a big, clear, unambiguous, stark choice. We don't have to get 
upset; we don't have to get mad, but we need to be smart.
    So I want to tell you, as I said, you know how I feel, but that's 
not what's important. What's important is how you feel, because on 
November 7th, you're just as important as the President. And I will say 
again, I have done everything I could do to turn the country around, 
move it forward, pull it together. I have loved doing it. It has been a 
joy for me. I am thrilled to see an election unfolding in a more 
positive environment than so many in recent years have. It is wonderful. 
But the only thing I'm concerned about is people believing that it 
doesn't much matter whether they vote, that the consequences are not 
great, that there

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aren't any significant differences. Those things are not true.
    It matters whether you vote. It's the most important election in, 
arguably, that you've ever had to vote in, because you've never gotten 
to vote at a time when you could be completely faithful to your vision, 
to build a future of your dreams for your children.
    So I implore you, show up. Call every friend, family member, co-
worker, and halfway interesting-looking stranger you see on the street--
[laughter]--between now and November 7th. It's a great chance for these 
kids here in this church to avoid some of the mistakes and trouble and 
heartbreak all of us had to live through--to keep making America the 
beacon of hope in the world. What a great chance it is; what a great 
responsibility it is.
    For me, I'm grateful--I'm grateful that I got to serve. I'm grateful 
that you stuck with me. I'm grateful that I got to serve with people 
like Jim Moran. I'm grateful that when I'm 
gone, I hope Chuck Robb will be left behind, 
because he is a rare bird. I want you to remember what I told you. I've 
known a lot of people in politics; I never saw anybody take more chances 
to stick up for little people and lost causes. I never, ever, saw 
anybody do it in a tougher environment. And I think that kind of courage 
should be rewarded. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
    God bless you.

 Note:  The President spoke at 12:40 p.m. In his remarks, he referred to 
Rev. John O. Peterson, pastor, and Rev. Ed Jackson, associate minister, 
Alfred Street Baptist Church; Reverend Peterson's wife, Joyce; and Jena 
Roscoe, Associate Director of Public Liaison, White House Office of 
African-American Outreach and Youth.