[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 32, Number 18 (Monday, May 6, 1996)]
[Pages 758-764]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic Dinner in Coral Gables, Florida

April 29, 1996

    Thank you very much, Lieutenant Governor MacKay and Senator Dodd. 
Thank you, Marvin Rosen, for leaving Florida for so much of the time to 
help me and the Democratic Party return to victory in November. I thank 
Howard Glicken and Larry Hawkins and Mitch Berger and M.J. Parker and 
all others who worked to organize this phenomenally successful dinner 
tonight.
    And I want to thank all of you for coming here and for giving us 
your support in our fight to make sure that America takes the right road 
into the 21st century.

[[Page 759]]

    My fellow Americans, this is a very different race than it was in 
1992. In 1992 when I ran for President, I did it because I really felt 
that the country had no animating vision, that we did not understand as 
a people the changes we were going through and where we wanted to come 
out on the other end. We had no strategy for achieving it. And I sought 
to bring that contribution to that campaign. And I think the American 
people basically saw that race as status quo versus change.
    Now this is a very different circumstance. We now have two very 
different visions of change before the American people. And the American 
people don't have to guess; they really know what those visions are. 
There is no option; when we vote now in 1996 we will be voting to take a 
certain path right into the 21st century. The only question is which 
road we decide to walk. There has been a lot of talk over the last 
couple of years about what we Democrats stand for, whether it is clear, 
what is the difference between the two parties. Does it matter anymore?
    Well, I can tell you this: My belief is that we are going through a 
period of change in this country as profound as any we've endured in a 
hundred years, since we moved from farm to factory, from country to 
city. We are now moving from the cold war into the global economy in an 
ever more global society. We celebrated that here in Miami a couple of 
years ago at the Summit of the Americas.
    We are moving into an economy in which all forms of endeavor, 
including agriculture and industry, are dominated by technology and 
information. If you were to come home to Arkansas with me at planting 
time or harvesting time, you would see farmers riding around in their 
machinery with computer screens, often working with software they 
prepared themselves to do the work that they now do.
    And we've changed so much the way we work, and in the course of 
that, the way we live, that we are moving into a time of almost 
unbelievable possibility but also significant disruption. That is the 
fact of the time in which we live.
    When I became President, I had a very clear idea, which I want to 
restate to you, of what I think we ought to be working for. We ought to 
be working for an America in which every person, without regard to their 
race or their gender or how they start out in life, should have the 
chance to live up to their dreams if they're willing to work for it.
    We ought to be working for an America in which all the incredible 
diversity in this country is the source of our strength, not a source of 
division and weakness, because we have shared values and because we 
respect the honest differences among us. And we ought to stop using 
politics as a way of dividing the American people and start uniting them 
again. And we ought to be working for an America that is still the 
world's leading source of inspiration and strength and support for peace 
and freedom and democracy and security and prosperity. Those are the 
things that we ought to do.
    Now a lot of that work has to be done by all of you in your private 
capacities. And we know in this new world of information technology and 
lightning change, big, centralized bureaucracies are not as important as 
they once were, including the big, centralized bureaucracy of the 
National Government. But that does not mean we do not need a Government 
in Washington and a spirit in Washington and a presence in the White 
House committed to those three ideas, that everybody should be able to 
live out their dreams if they'll work for it, that we ought to be coming 
together, not being driven apart, and that we must continue to be the 
world's strongest force for peace and freedom and democracy. That is 
what has driven me for these 3\1/2\ years.
    So I say to you, we have--our friends in the Republican Party have 
condemned the Government and talked about how bad it is. And they say 
that it's the source of all of our problems, but it was the Democrats 
who reduced the size of Government so that now in Washington, DC, the 
United States Government is the smallest that it's been since 1965. They 
condemned heavy-handed Federal regulation, but we have gotten rid of 
more regulations than they did. We have given more authority to State 
and local governments than they ever did--ask Lieutenant Governor 
MacKay. There are over one mil- 

[[Page 760]]

lion fewer families on welfare today than there were the day I took 
office because we've given 40 States the power to have welfare reform, 
to move people from welfare to work.
    But when the great crisis over the budget came, and the power of 
Congress and the majority was used to shut the Government down because I 
wouldn't go along and Senator Dodd wouldn't go along and the Members of 
our party wouldn't go along with doing things to Medicare which were 
unconscionable and unnecessary to save the program; with walking away 
from a Medicaid program that not only provides care for poor children 
and pregnant women but also for middle class families with children with 
disabilities and with parents in nursing homes; with an absolute 
evisceration of the environmental protection policy of the country, 
which had been for 25 years a bipartisan policy, shared by Republicans 
and Democrats until that time; and with a reduction in our commitment to 
education at a time when what you can earn is more tied to what you can 
learn than at any time in our history. We said no.
    We said there is a national responsibility. There is a national 
responsibility for putting 100,000 police on the street. There's a 
national responsibility for helping schools to be drug free and to be 
safe. There is a national responsibility for, in other words, growing 
the economy, expanding opportunity, helping the American people, coming 
together and maintaining the leadership of the United States of America. 
That is what this choice is all about in 1996, which road are we going 
to walk into the future.
    There's a lot of talk about the word ``empowerment.'' And I used it 
a lot in 1992 and long before I decided to run for President. I believe 
in it. To use the words of my friend, James Carville, and Larry Hawkins 
said, ``Everybody in America ought to read James Carville's book, `We're 
Right and They're Wrong.' '' So I'll flack for it tonight. But Carville 
said, ``You know, people criticize the Democrats for giving people fish 
when we ought to be teaching them to fish, but our opponents want to 
drain the pond.''
    Now, what does that mean? That means if people can be taught to 
fish, it's a lot better than giving them fish. That means no one should 
get anything if they can do for themselves. But it also means don't 
drain the pond.
    Empowerment means more than giving people a choice. The great French 
writer, Victor Hugo, once observed that the rich and poor are equally 
free to spend the night under the bridge. Empowerment means not only 
having the choice but having the capacity to exercise the choice. That's 
why we're for education and safe streets and a clean environment and a 
strong economic policy and a strong foreign policy.
    Now sometimes we reach agreement. And when we do, I'm happy. If you 
think about the good things that have happened in the last year-and-a-
half--and I'll just mention some--I signed a budget bill last week that 
protects education and the environment and our major economic programs 
and reduces the deficit so that now we'll have 4 years of deficit 
reduction. And I'll keep my commitment to you: We will cut the deficit 
by more than half in just 4 years. We did that.
    And I signed a very tough anti-terrorism bill which will give us the 
tools we need to kick terrorists out of the country when we find them 
here from other countries, to kick people out of this country when they 
come here and raise money for terrorists, which is wrong, to do more to 
prevent terrorist incidents and to catch terrorists when they commit 
terrorism. We passed that bill. That was a good thing.
    Just a few weeks ago I signed a telecommunications bill which will 
create at a minimum hundreds of thousands of very high wage jobs in the 
next few years.
    What do all those things have in common? They were passed by a 
Congress overwhelmingly working in a bipartisan fashion, putting aside 
the labels and the ideologies and the extremism of the past and the 
recent past and working together for the practical benefit of all 
Americans. When we have done that, we do just fine.
    In this budget bill, Congress gave me the authority to do something 
that I did this afternoon. I want to tell you about it. I've been very 
concerned about this dramatic, although apparently temporary, rise in 
the price of gasoline at the pumps. It affects the

[[Page 761]]

take-home pay of working people who have to commute to work. It offers a 
great problem for tourism centers like Florida. We're about to get into 
the high driving season, and if gasoline is 20 percent higher, there are 
not going to be as many people driving as far to do whatever it is 
they're going to do this summer.
    So today I instructed the Secretary of Energy to immediately begin 
the orderly sale of about 12 million barrels of our Nation's strategic 
petroleum reserve to try to moderate the price of fuel. And I've also 
asked Secretary O'Leary to report back to me within 45 days about all 
the elements that caused this sudden burst in the gasoline prices to 
determine whether it is likely to be short-term or long-term, what the 
likely impact on our economy would be.
    Now I say that in this context. The Congress gave me explicit 
authority to do that, and I applaud them for doing it. What is unique 
about it? Well, we stopped all these partisan wars and rolled up our 
sleeves and sat down and said, ``What would be a good thing to do for 
America?'' Not which party can gain the advantage, not can we put the 
President in a corner and threaten to shut the Government down, but what 
would be good for America? It would be good to reduce the deficit and 
increase our investment in education, the growth of the economy, the 
protection of the environment. And, oh by the way, here's some authority 
to release barrels of oil from the strategic petroleum reserves.
    I say that because I want to follow up on something that Senator 
Dodd said and Lieutenant Governor MacKay said. This is a very great 
country. We need two strong parties. There are plenty of differences 
between us. But when the most extreme position dominates a party's 
governing, so that governing is less important than making a point, even 
if the point requires you to shut the Government down, then we have gone 
too far.
    Now the same thing is true on the issues before us. And I want to 
talk a little more about where we go from here. But there are two great 
issues still before us. We could solve them both and make the American 
people much better off. We've now adopted a budget 6 months late for the 
remainder of this year. I would have happily signed it on the first day 
of this year, the very first day of this fiscal year.
    We have not yet adopted a balanced budget plan, but we have 
identified savings in common to both the Republican and Democratic plans 
that are more than enough to balance the budget, provide a modest tax 
cut, and still protect Medicare, Medicaid, and our investments in 
education and the environment and economic development and in reducing 
the crime rate and violence in this country. We could do all that.
    The question is, will we? The answer is, depends upon whether the 
majority in Congress decides to play politics a long time before the 
November election or will it go back and work with me in good faith to 
pass the right sort of balanced budget plan for America. That's what we 
ought to do. There's plenty of time for the elections after the 
conventions this summer. Let's go back to work and give the American 
people the balanced budget plan they deserve.
    There's another big issue that will tell a big tale about where 
we're going now. That's the so-called Kassebaum-Kennedy bill, a 
bipartisan bill that passed the Senate last week--listen to this--100 to 
zero. You say, ``Well, if anything got a hundred votes, could it have 
any significance?'' You bet it does. You know what it does? The 
Kassebaum-Kennedy bill says that you cannot lose your health insurance. 
If you change jobs or lose your job, you can still keep it. It says that 
you cannot be denied the right to purchase health insurance just because 
somebody in your family has been sick. It can provide immediate help in 
health security to millions of Americans who are self-employed, who are 
working in small businesses, who are working for businesses that may go 
broke or that may have to lay them off for a while. It can make a huge 
difference. That's why it passed 100 to nothing. It's a very big deal.
    But the version of the bill in the House, it didn't pass by 435 to 
zero in the House. Why? Because there are all these other things in the 
bill that are extremely controversial, not necessary to protect the 
health care interest of American families and designed basically to jam 
those who don't agree with them into voting for them and me into

[[Page 762]]

signing them in order to get the good things of the Kennedy-Kassebaum 
bill.
    So watch this. Why don't we take the things we disagree with and 
throw them into the fall election, and let's have it part of all the 
debates? But why don't we pass Kennedy-Kassebaum pure and clear, 100 to 
nothing, one more time for the American people? That's what we ought to 
do.
    If you ask me to say in a sentence, Mr. President, what is the role 
of the President and the Government in Washington as we move into this 
new era, I would say it is to give citizens, families, and communities 
the ability they need to meet their challenges and seize their 
opportunities and make the most of their own lives. And to do it not 
with big, centralized bureaucracies, but with whatever it takes to forge 
the kind of partnership that will genuinely empower people, genuinely 
empower people to do that, and to maintain our commitment abroad for 
security, peace, freedom, and democracy.
    Let's just take a few simple issues. The issue of education. Today I 
was here announcing the new national drug control strategy at a school 
that has no guns, no violence, and no drugs for the last 2 years. Now 
that was done by the people at the school--the principal, the parents, 
the teachers, the kids, they deserve the credit for that. The National 
Government will never be able to replace that magic and shouldn't try. 
But we should make sure that every school has the resources to provide 
what needs to be provided to be safe and drug free. And that's why I 
fought to save the Safe and Drug-Free Schools Act.
    Well, let's take another issue. One of the news magazines this week 
has the cover--the news magazine--how expensive it is to send a child to 
college--a thousand dollars a month. That won't touch it for some of 
you, depending on where your children go. But we know that every young 
person in America ought to have the opportunity to go to college. That's 
why we worked so hard to totally redesign the student loan program, so 
that anybody could borrow money to go to college and pay it back as a 
percentage of the income they earn from whatever job they get, so that 
no child should ever drop out of school because of the burden of the 
money that has to be borrowed. That's important and we should keep that.
    That is why I've asked the Congress to invest more money in college 
scholarships and college loans, and why I said to them, ``If we're going 
to give families a tax cut in this country, let's give them a deduction 
for the cost of college tuition.'' It would be the best money we ever 
spent in terms of a tax incentive.
    Let me take a controversial issue that always gets me a few 
demonstrators when I come to Florida. We have very different views in 
Washington about the environment, although now those views are quickly 
being blurred as we come toward election day. Here's what I believe. I 
think Teddy Roosevelt, our first great environmental President and a 
Republican, was right. I believe that we cannot preserve the American 
economy unless we have a system for sustaining our natural resources, 
our land, our air, our water, our trees, our species. That's what I 
believe.
    I believe you can't preserve the very idea of American democracy 
unless people at least have some ability to preserve the nature, the 
heritage that they grow up around. I believe you can't maintain the 
integrity of the democracy of this country if millions of kids live 
within a couple of blocks of a toxic waste dump and cities have no 
devices to clean up the environmental pollution of former eras when we 
didn't know what we were doing. That's what I believe.
    I believe Florida will not be able to sustain the population growth 
that is coming unless you find a way to save the Everglades. That's what 
I believe. And I believe your Nation has a responsibility to help you. I 
think it is a national treasure, as well as a local treasure.
    I believe there are a lot of good people in the sugar industry. 
There are a lot of good people who have worked hard in that. I believe 
that many of those companies are doing a better job today with 
conservation practices than they were doing just a few years ago. I know 
that is true. All these things are true.
    The question is, who is going to pay what in order to save the 
Everglades. I believe that we can find a way to sustain the economy of 
Florida in the short run while we move

[[Page 763]]

to preserve it in the long run and while we preserve one of the globe's 
most precious natural resources. We have to save the Everglades. That's 
what I believe, and I think the National Government has a responsibility 
to do that.
    I believe that we did the right thing to take action in Washington 
to try to reduce the hazards of young people beginning to smoke 
cigarettes. Three thousand kids illegally begin to smoke every day, and 
a thousand of them will die early because of it, and it is wrong, and we 
ought to stop it. That is what we are trying to do. But it is very 
controversial.
    I believe we did the right thing in Washington to pass the Brady 
bill, but it was very controversial. All I know is there are 60,000 
people with criminal records who were unable to buy handguns in the last 
2 years and to go out and victimize other people because that law was on 
the books. It was the right thing to do.
    You have to ask yourself, what do you believe? None of this had to 
do with a big, centralized bureaucracy, but I believe we were doing the 
right things. And as you look ahead, there will be more that has to be 
done to protect the environment, to invest in education and technology 
and the growth of the economy, to continue to reach out to the rest of 
the world with broader commitments to free and fair trade.
    And we also have to stand up for freedom. I know a lot of the things 
that I have done in foreign policy have been controversial, but you 
know, one of the things that I see, and I wish every one of you could 
see, is that when I leave the borders of the United States, I am no 
longer just Bill Clinton or the President. I become all of you, the 
symbol of America. It is the greatest honor you can imagine.
    And I know that there are things that if we don't do them they won't 
be done. That's why we stood up for peace in Bosnia. That's why we took 
the initiative to try to bring peace in Northern Ireland, working with 
the Irish and the British Governments. That's why we have worked so hard 
for so long in the Middle East and why the Secretary of State was there 
to try to bring an end to the violence between Lebanon and Israel. And 
that's why I signed the Helms-Burton bill and why I am working for a 
free Cuba.
    Now the problem with our involvement around the world is that most 
everybody can find something they like about that. You hear the 
different sources of cheers there. But what I want to convince you of is 
that the general principle is right, too. Think about what the world 
will be like 20 or 30 years from now. The United States may not have the 
same dominance we have now. I'm convinced we'll be the strongest country 
in the world, but others will grow richer. Others will exercise 
influence. What we do now in this critical period coming out of the cold 
war and moving into a global economy and a global society will have a 
profound impact on whether other great countries stand up for peace and 
freedom, whether other great countries define their greatness in terms 
of whether they can help people live their own lives or whether they can 
dominate people just because they're smaller and weaker.
    And because no one believes we wish to dominate anyone and our 
purpose for peace and freedom and prosperity and democracy is so clear, 
we are able to do things that no other country can do now. And I believe 
we are safer because of it. There are no nuclear missiles pointed at 
America's children for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age. 
We are working to reduce that threat more every day.
    We have cooperation from other countries in fighting terrorism at 
home and abroad. And I can tell you, if you look at terrorism, the drug 
threat, organized crime, money laundering, if you look at the 
proliferation of dangerous weapons, every one of these things requires 
the United States to lead and cooperate, and they will affect how your 
children and your grandchildren live and what kind of future we have in 
the 21st century.
    So I ask you all, when you go into the next few months--I thank you 
for your financial contributions. I am profoundly grateful. We will 
spend the money well. Marvin Rosen will make sure we spend the money 
well. But every one of you who can be here tonight is here because you 
have accomplished something in your own life. You will be listened to. 
There are people who look to you. There are people who will listen to 
what you

[[Page 764]]

have to say and care what you think and care how you feel about your 
country. And I'm telling you, the American people have to decide how 
we're going into the 21st century. There is no status quo option, and 
you don't have to guess about our views. We now have almost 2 years 
where the leaders of the two parties and their philosophies have become 
clear. And that is a great, good fortune.
    I believe that it's clear that we did what we said we'd do in 1992. 
We have cut the deficit in half, 8\1/2\ million new jobs, a new 
commitment to invest in our people and our future and our communities. 
We did that. I believe in Florida you can see it. The unemployment rate 
is 2 percent lower. We brought the Summit of the Americas here. We 
brought SOUTHCOM here. We have a commitment here to help people do what 
they can to deal with the challenges you face today.
    It is clear that we have a record. But the far more important thing 
is, this is a record to build on, not to sit on. We have created jobs, 
but we haven't raised everybody's income. We have to do more to allow 
people who are working for a living to be able to generate lifetime 
education, lifetime access to health care, and develop a pension they 
can carry around with them, too, if they move from job to job.
    We have done a lot of things to try to bring the American people 
together and to bring down the crime rate and to reestablish a common 
national commitment to the preservation of our environment, but there is 
a lot more to do. We have done a lot of things to do things to make the 
Government work better and to be smaller and less burdensome to you, but 
Lord knows there is more to do.
    And we have taken a stand for America's role in the world. We dare 
not adopt the easy, short-term, but short-sighted isolationist position 
that others have advocated. So I ask you--I thank you for what you have 
done here tonight, but it's a long time between now and November.
    So I ask you to take every opportunity you can to be good citizens 
between now and then. Talk with your friends and your neighbors and your 
co-workers. Engage people over coffee. Visit with them on the weekends 
when you run into them wherever they are and say, you know, this is an 
election about America's future. This is an election which will 
determine what kind of country we're going to be in the 21st century. 
This is an election which will determine what our children and our 
grandchildren will live like. And this is an election in which I have 
taken a stand that I want to tell you about. That's what I want you to 
do. If you do, it will be fine.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 7:48 p.m. at the Biltmore Hotel. In his 
remarks, he referred to Marvin Rosen, finance director, Democratic 
National Committee; Larry Hawkins, Dade County commissioner; and 
Democratic fundraisers Mitch Berger and M.J. Parker. A portion of the 
content of these remarks could not be verified because the tape was 
incomplete.