[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 30, Number 11 (Monday, March 21, 1994)]
[Pages 521-525]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the New England Presidential Dinner in Boston

March 14, 1994

    Thank you. Thank you, Mayor, for your strong and supportive words 
and your good leadership and for the wonderful, wonderful entry into 
Boston today. When you had the boat out there spewing water and all 
those thousands of people and all those young people from City Year out 
there cheering, I began to feel like a real President. [Laughter] I 
thank you, Lea Salonga, for traveling thousands of miles to sing for me 
tonight. And I'm glad I got to shake your hand. You're a great talent, 
and we were graced by your music. Thank you so much. I want to thank 
Alan and Fred and Elaine and my good friend Paul Montrone, in his 
absence, and all the rest of you who made this dinner possible tonight. 
I want to thank David Wilhelm for the hard work that he's given to the 
Democratic committee and for that fine film that makes my speech 
irrelevant. [Laughter] It was wonderful, wasn't it? It was a good movie. 
It reminded us of--[applause]. I thank Senator Kerry for his remarks and 
for his leadership, for his defense of the spirit and the objectives of 
this administration on the floor of the Senate and his leadership in so 
many areas but especially now in trying to enact a crime bill that is 
both tough and intelligent and his belief that we could enact a major 
piece of anticrime legislation that would really begin to attack some of 
the root causes of crime and to adopt some things that actually work to 
reduce the crime rate instead of just to raise the decibel level of the 
rhetoric that is in the air. John Kerry was the first Member of the 
Congress who convinced me we might actually be able to persuade people 
of both parties to approve a bill in the range of $22 billion and that 
we might actually be able to put 100,000 more police officers on the 
street and take these assault weapons off the street and give our young 
people some things to say yes to and have adequate drug treatment and do 
some things that really make sense. The whole country is in his debt, as 
am I and are you. I want to thank, too, as strongly as I can say your 
senior Senator, Ted Kennedy. I'm glad that he seems to be well on his 
way to a strong reelection.
    You know, long before I had ever really thought about the 
obligations of this country in the area of health care, and I was the 
youngest elected Governor in America but not yet in office in 1978, the 
Democratic Party had a mid-year convention in Memphis. And I received a 
call from the White House when President Carter was in office, asking me 
if I would moderate a discussion of this issue, featuring Joe Califano, 
the then

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Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and Senator Kennedy, neither 
of them being shrinking violets. [Laughter] I was 32 years old at the 
time and mortified. So of course I said I would do it. And people were 
there from all over the country. I only had to cross the Mississippi 
River from home to be there. But I remember--it's been 16 years ago 
now--as vividly as if it happened yesterday, when Ted Kennedy stood on 
that stage and said for the first time, I think, to a truly national 
audience that the health care that had been given his son when he was 
desperately ill should be available to every American. He said it then, 
and we're going to make it happen now.
    The film was about what we did last year, only a little about what 
we're trying to do this year. I can say that in a couple of minutes and 
then make the one central point I wish to make to all of you tonight. 
Last year we had a very good year. This year we have to keep working on 
the economy. If we can keep the growth going, we'll have a very good 
year, indeed. We've had 2.1 million new jobs in 13 months, 90 percent of 
them in the private sector. Most job growth was in State and local 
government in some years of the 1980's, or at least a huge percentage of 
it was. And we want to keep that going. We want to pass health care, 
health security that is always there in a way that keeps what is best 
about health care, which you can appreciate in this shining tribute to 
the American health care triumph, and fix what is wrong. We want to pass 
a comprehensive welfare reform bill that will liberate people from the 
dependence of a system that has aggravated some of the worst pressures 
in the breakdown of the family in this country. We want to pass this 
crime bill. We want to pass, as John Kerry said, a campaign finance 
reform bill, a lobby reform bill. We want to pass a comprehensive 
overhaul in the unemployment system, which is designed for a time which 
no longer exists. It used to be when people went on unemployment they 
needed a little money to get by on until the economy picked up again and 
they were called back to their old jobs. Now the huge majority of people 
who are unemployed don't get called back to their old jobs, they have to 
find new ones. It's wrong to tax employers to pay for an income system 
that's inadequate, that is leading nowhere. We need to change the whole 
system and begin immediately to prepare people when they lose their jobs 
for another--a different job, one in which they can succeed and win in 
the global economy. These are all things we need to do. And we mean to 
do them this year, in spite of the fact, or maybe because of the fact 
that it is an election year.
    Now, this is a Democratic Party dinner, and it occurred to me that 
those of you who are here have supported this administration and me 
personally and the fine people who are associated with our efforts in 
spite of the fact that on April the 15th almost all of you will get a 
higher tax bill--[laughter]--because you know all the money is going to 
reduce the deficit, and you know it's meant lower interest rates, 
record-high markets, new investment, and a growing economy.
    As has already been said, our trading partners around the world beat 
on us for a decade to get the deficit down. If my new budget passes the 
Congress, and it's well on its way already, we'll have 3 years of 
deficit reduction for the first time since Harry Truman was President, 
and we will have laid the foundation for a strong private recovery.
    These things are terribly important. But that's not the point I want 
to make tonight. The point I want to make tonight is that there have 
always been differences between Democrats and Republicans. And these 
differences have taken different forms at different times. On occasion, 
the Republican Party has been the party of true and progressive change. 
The best example was, of course, the first and greatest Republican 
President, Abraham Lincoln. Another example was Teddy Roosevelt, who 
helped to usher in the modern era of new Presidents, of activist 
Presidents, a man who wanted to save much of our natural resources, a 
man without whom there would be no buffalo in America today, just for 
example, and many of our national parks would not be there, a man who 
understood the dangers of great concentrations of power, whether in 
Government or in the private sector--people like President Eisenhower, 
who really tried to build a bipartisan foreign policy to help to move us 
away from the military industrial complex, but leave us strong enough to 
win the cold war.

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Even Richard Nixon, though he's been much maligned, signed the bill to 
create the Environmental Protection Agency and first proposed that all 
employers should contribute to their employees' health insurance so that 
everyone could be covered.
    I say that to point out that there have been good and bad ideas 
embraced, I guess, by both parties at different times. I'm a Democrat by 
heritage, instinct, and conviction because I believe most of the time in 
American history we've been on the side of ordinary people, on the side 
of bringing people together, and on the side of the future. We have been 
the party of change in a constructive and profound way. I thought when I 
ran for President I would have the chance to enter one of these great 
debates and we would see what would happen, whether I was right and 
wrong or my ideas were right and wrong.
    Almost from the beginning I saw a very different edge to the 
Republican Party in this time, not the party of Lincoln and Roosevelt or 
Eisenhower but the party dedicated just to being against whatever we 
were for and committed to the politics of personal destruction. They 
were so busy with it they even tried to look in my passport file in the 
campaign in '92, something that didn't bother me. I was happy to have 
them rummaging around in my passport file instead of coming up with a 
good idea that might sound better than one of my ideas. Let them go. 
Now, as you pointed out, they are at it again. They have a little health 
retreat, and they can't agree on a health care plan, so they come back 
and get at it again.
    I just want you to know something. You look at the people that are 
in our administration; they get up every day and try to make something 
good happen for America. Senator Kennedy mentioned my wife, well-known 
to many of you here because she went to Wellesley and spent a lot of 
time in Massachusetts, has just committed herself in a passionate way to 
trying to figure out how to solve this health problem to give ordinary 
people the chance to get health care. Let them come and debate her. Do 
they want to do that? No, they would rather take out after her. It saves 
them the trouble of having to come up with an alternative health care 
plan.
    The Vice President of the United States, I think the ablest and most 
influential person ever to hold that office, and someone who has been a 
credit to this country, who cares passionately about what he is doing, 
Eli Segal, we passed a national service bill; it will stand as the 
symbol of what this administration tried to do. Did you see those kids 
holding that sign when we came in the harbor today? ``Thank you for 
believing in the youth of America.'' This is a big deal. This is a very 
important time in our history--sweeping changes going through our 
economy and society, terrible problems that beg for honest debate from 
people of different perspectives.
    Even if we get the economy going, even if we provide health care to 
all, even if we revise the unemployment system, if we do all the things 
I said, how can we survive as a country if within a few years over half 
of our kids are born into families where there was never a marriage? How 
will we transmit the kinds of coherent values to our people? How can we 
expect the young people, if they are born into fairly chaotic 
circumstances where they're not isolated so someone can come in and help 
them, to behave 15 years from now?
    These are profound problems. They beg for debate. We need to think 
about new and different things in totally different ways than we have in 
the past. No one, even our party--let's be honest about it--we don't 
have all the answers. We need an honest debate about the future of 
family in America, about how we're going to rebuild our communities in 
America. People say they're concerned about crime and violence; they 
ought to be. But you tell me how you can avoid it if you have people 
living in square block after square block after square block where the 
family, the community, and the work base is broken down and where 
vacuums are created into which drugs and crimes, gangs and weapons move?
    We need a serious debate about that. We need a serious debate about 
the fact that wage earning--hourly wage earners have been working in 
this country for 20 years now with virtually no increase in their income 
and that every country--I just came from De- 

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troit, from our G-7 jobs summit--every wealthy country in the world is 
now having trouble creating new jobs even when their economy is growing.
    We have always known in the past that productivity was good for jobs 
and incomes. I came from a part of the country where everybody used to 
work on the farm. You can't go back more than one generation older than 
me without finding somebody in your family that was on the farm. The 
farm jobs went away; people went to Detroit and Chicago and got jobs in 
the plants. Those economic changes have always happened. And every time 
technology and productivity took away jobs in one sector, more were 
created in another sector. Now we find that these wealthy countries are 
really having trouble with the explosion of technology, the explosion of 
productivity, and the globalization of the economy creating new jobs. Is 
something new happening in world history? I don't think so; I just think 
there are different lags. But the point is no one knows for sure. This 
begs for honest political debate and genuine conflicts of ideas.
    Why then are we confronted in this administration with an opposition 
party that just stands up and says, ``No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, 
no''? When I was a Democratic Governor and they had the White House, I 
constantly sought them out, engaged them in debate, offered to work with 
them on issues from education to welfare reform to crime to you name it. 
I never did them the way they are doing us in Washington, DC, today. It 
is wrong, and it is not good for the United States of America.
    I'll tell you something else. The mayor talked about me being a 
marathon runner. The marathon comes from a certain place inside me. I am 
an old-fashioned, really old-fashioned American. I believe more than 
half the time, in the contest between good and bad, good wins. In the 
contest between truth and falsehood, the truth wins out. I believe that 
most people want something that will elevate them and bring them 
together with different people, instead of something that will demean 
them and divide them from others. That's what I believe.
    I believe fundamentally in the common sense and the essential core 
goodness of the American people. Don't forget that Alexis de Tocqueville 
said a long time ago that America is great because America is good, and 
if America ever ceases to be good, she will no longer be great. We have 
to appeal to what is good in this country. And we have to ask people to 
face hard truths and debate hard issues and come together and think new 
thoughts about problems that we are, frankly, not solving today. That is 
what I wanted to do when I became President and what I am doing my best 
to do. And I am only sorry that too often, in too many ways, on too many 
days, it is a debate which engages only members of my party.
    I will say this: Senator Kennedy has had some good success in 
getting a substantial number of Republican Senators to talk seriously 
about health care. We are having some help in dealing with the issues of 
crime. But this overriding negative, intensely personal, totally 
political, devoid of principle attack is not good for the country, and 
it is inconsistent with the tradition of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy 
Roosevelt.
    If I ask you to go home tonight and make a list of the greatest 
Presidents who ever served here and the greatest things that were ever 
done in Washington for the American people, you would have members of 
both parties on your list. But every one of them would have done 
something good for the American people, would have tried to elevate the 
dignity and the human potential of the men and women of this country, 
tried to give the children of this country a better future than their 
parents had.
    I got into this work because that's what I wanted to do. And I am 
old-fashioned enough to believe that in every age and time the central 
purpose of our common political life will be to find new and important 
ways to get people together and to get things done so that we can 
elevate the meaning and content and direction of people's lives and do 
right by our children and by our future. That is what I think. And I'll 
tell you something. In 1994, in 1996, if there is only one party that 
believes that, the American people in droves will come to us.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

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Note: The President spoke at 9:08 p.m. at the Boston Park Plaza. In his 
remarks, he referred to Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston; entertainer Lea 
Salonga; Alan Leventhal, Fred Seigel, Elaine Shuster, and Paul Montrone, 
dinner organizers; David Wilhelm, Democratic National Committee 
chairman; and Eli J. Segal, chief executive officer, Corporation for 
National and Community Service.