[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 32, Number 19 (Monday, May 13, 1996)]
[Pages 804-810]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic Dinner in Jersey City, New Jersey

May 7, 1996

    Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank 
you for the warm New Jersey welcome. Whoopie Goldberg, thank you for 
what you said and what you've done and for all the time you have given 
and the time you're willing to give because you never forgot where you 
came from and never stopped caring about how other people are doing who 
aren't as fortunate as you are. Thank you, and God bless you.
    I want to thank all the dinner Chairs and Chairman Fowler and your 
State chairman, Tom Byrne, and my former colleagues, Jim Florio and 
Brendan Byrne, and Peter Duchin who've I've been enjoying for a year or 
2 now, since I was a younger man.
    I want to say a special word of appreciation to Ray Lesniak because 
it's his birthday tonight, so I know we're all glad--[applause]. I want 
to thank Senator Lautenberg for what he said and for what he's done in 
Washington, for standing up especially for the environment under a 
period of incredibly intense assault from the majority in Congress. 
[Applause] Yes, you ought to clap for him because he did that.
    And as he leaves the United States Senate, I'd like to thank Senator 
Bradley for his 18 years of service to New Jersey and to America, for 
many, many years of friendship, counsel, and advice to me, and for the 
support that he gave this administration in the last 3\1/2\ years. I 
know we all wish him well, and we know that the next chapter of his life 
will doubtless be just as exciting as the ones that

[[Page 805]]

have gone before. Thank you very much, Bill, and God bless you.
    You know, there have been a lot of sort of asides tonight about why 
Congressman Torricelli is not here. I think he is here for you, because 
he's down there voting on something you care about. And I have a message 
for those--if there was some designed effort to keep him from coming up 
here tonight, guess what? He's still going to get the contributions, and 
we still know where he is, and we know what's at stake, and we're going 
to elect him in November, so it doesn't make any difference.
    One thing you know about Bob Torricelli is that he will stand up and 
fight for you with every fiber of his being. He doesn't do anything 
halfway; he is full of passion. He will fight for the water you drink, 
the land you live on, the air you breathe, the education of your 
children, the safety of your streets, and the example of your country as 
a beacon of freedom and democracy.
    He's been leading the fight to protect Sterling Forest here, the 
watershed for most of Northern New Jersey. He wrote a section of the 
Superfund act that is focused on the chemical sites that are polluted 
here, something I am determined to see us finish the work on and another 
reason I don't want to see any further attempts to erode our investment 
in environmental protection. Bob Torricelli will protect all that.
    So I ask you to do what you can for the next 6 months to send Bob 
Torricelli to the United States Senate. Bill Bradley's shoes may be 
impossible to fill, but the people of New Jersey deserve someone 
fighting for them who is on their side and fighting for their future, 
not someone in the grip of an ideological theory that will only 
undermine our ability to go forward together. So I ask you again, do 
what you can, send him to the Senate. Do what you can for yourselves and 
your children and your future. We need Bob Torricelli, and I'm going to 
depend on you to deliver New Jersey for us.
    Ladies and gentlemen, I don't want to keep you a long time tonight, 
but I want to just give a speech that in some ways is not particularly 
political. And after, I'm going to ask you to do something that is 
intensely political. Usually these fundraisers--we all know that our 
political system wouldn't work without them, but a lot of times I think 
you come and go and you have your blood stirred, but I wonder if, when 
you leave, you think you have done your part and that's all there is to 
it.
    I want to talk to you tonight about what I believe is really going 
on in this country now, what I think is really at stake in this 
election, and why I hope you believe your financial contributions are 
only the beginning of your responsibilities as citizens for the next 6 
months.
    We are clearly living through a time of change as profound as any 
the United States has endured in a hundred years in terms of the ways we 
work and live. Every so often our country is confronted with huge 
challenges, either to our very existence or at least to the ideals with 
which we started, that all of us are created equal and that we have 
inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and 
that the Government is instituted to promote the general, the common 
welfare.
    We had a lot of trouble getting started in working that out. Then we 
had to fight a great Civil War to hold the country together and to 
redeem the promise of equality by extending it when it had to be 
extended. And then, 100 years ago, we faced a period of change rather 
like today, when we moved from the farm to the factory, from the country 
to the city. There were vast new opportunities, but there was a lot of 
uprooting; a lot of people's lives were dislocated. And the progressive 
era began, with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson saying that the 
power of the United States Government should be used to curb the abuses 
of that era and to make sure its benefits could be extended to all 
Americans.
    They had the antitrust laws, the child laws, the environment 
protection laws, all designed to let us have the benefits of the new 
industrial age without being broken by it, without having our identity 
as a nation, our character as a people, our ideals as expressed in the 
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution savaged. That's what it 
was all about.
    And then we underwent the Depression and World War II, and President 
Roosevelt

[[Page 806]]

and the Congress and the leaders of that time had to, first of all, 
defeat the opponents of freedom who would have killed our way of life 
beyond our borders and rally the American people to overcome that 
profound Depression and find a way to build a safety net under this 
country so that we could manage our economy in ways that didn't permit 
it to crash again and break the lives of so many millions of people.
    Then we had to gird ourselves for the cold war, which we did, and 
wait for our victory to come, because communism was always founded on a 
total misunderstanding of human nature and the human condition.
    Now we are going through another period of change--economic and 
social change and the way we relate to the rest of the world, sort of 
like what happened 100 years ago. Now we've moved from a cold war world 
to a global society, not just a global economy. Now we've moved from an 
industrial age to one in which all work is dominated by information and 
technology and has vast ramifications which New Jersey has felt for the 
organization of work: Big companies dramatically downsizing; new 
companies starting at a rapid rate; a lot of people doing exceedingly 
well, other people left behind, other people feeling uncertain about 
their future.
    When I ran for President in 1992, I got into that race because I was 
convinced we could no longer just sit by and let it happen, that we 
needed an aggressive response. And I said then what I repeat to you now: 
I still believe our vision for the future should be animated by three 
things:
    One, the desire to give the American dream of opportunity to every 
person in this country without regard to their race, their gender, their 
station in life, where they live and what they're up against. That ought 
to be the first thing.
    Two, the understanding that we cannot achieve that in the world in 
which we are living unless we find a way to come together to respect our 
diversity, to bridge all those gaps of race and religion and region and 
ethnicity. This country now has, more or less, 200 different racial and 
ethnic groups. It's an astonishing thing that we can find ways to come 
together around our core values and our respect for one another's 
differences. And I am sick and tired of seeing elections used as wedges 
to divide people one from another, to try to get people who are in the 
majority to look down on those who aren't, and then hope we can pick up 
the pieces after the election. We should be uniting the American people 
and going forward together.
    And the third thing we have to do is continue to be the world's 
greatest force for peace and freedom and prosperity. And as I have said 
many times, that sounds great and everybody is for that in general, but 
often in particular they're not.
    When I took the action I did in Haiti and Bosnia, in becoming the 
first President to try to do something in Northern Ireland, all of the 
things we have done in the Middle East, what all the polls said was the 
most unpopular decision of my administration, trying to keep Mexico from 
collapsing, everything I did, I did because I know that our country has 
got to try to be the world's greatest source of energy for peace and 
freedom and prosperity, and because I know that 20 years from now we can 
be the strongest country in the world, but others will grow stronger, 
and we have to work with Russia, we have to work with China, we have to 
work with a uniting Europe, we have to work with emerging countries, to 
have them define their greatness in a way that helps us all to go 
forward in peace and prosperity.
    How will these other countries define their greatness? Will it be as 
we do, by how well they educate their people and what their economic 
achievements are and what their cultural achievements are and whether 
they can help their less fortunate neighbors? Or will it be by whether 
they can bully people just because they are smaller than they are? This 
a big issue. We cannot walk away from this. You cannot live in the world 
we are going toward and pretend to stay within your own borders.
    So that's what I tried to do in 1992. And ever since I have been in 
this office, everything I have done can be explained in terms of either 
trying to create opportunity or to bring us together around our basic 
values and respecting our diversity or maintaining our leadership for 
peace and freedom. And you heard Senator Lautenberg talking about it.

[[Page 807]]

It is true that we are better off today than we were 4 years ago, 8\1/2\ 
million jobs better off. The deficit is less than half of what it was. 
The crime rate is down. The welfare rolls are down. We are moving in the 
right direction. That is true.
    It is also true that there are a lot of challenges out there. In the 
economic arena, we have at least three big challenges, don't we? In New 
Jersey, you know what one of them is. We have to figure out what to do 
about all these people who get downsized from big companies, but who 
still have a lot of good years left. And we're working on that. In the 
next few days, I'm going to have a lot of companies in the country come 
in, and we're going to highlight the companies that have been able to 
avoid that and have been able to do things that really help their 
employees if they have to leave.
    We have got to find a way, secondly, to give all of our working 
people a greater sense of economic security. I have heard Senator 
Bradley talk about this. If you can't guarantee somebody the same job 
with the same company for a lifetime, then they have to know if they 
work hard and play by the rules, they will always be able to get new 
training for new work, they will always have access to health care, and 
they will always be able to have a pension they can carry around with 
them, even if they change jobs. They have to be able to know that.
    And lastly, we have to remember that here in New Jersey and 
throughout this country, in spite of the 8\1/2\ million jobs, there are 
vast expanses within our inner cities and in our rural areas that have 
not felt any new investment opportunity. And don't kid yourself, when 
you have new jobs and growth, you also drive down the welfare rolls, you 
drive down the crime rate, you drive down the despair that people feel. 
So we have to find a way to bring free enterprise back to the inner 
cities and back to the rural areas of America. I know we can do it. If 
we can do it for other countries, we can do it for our own.
    If you look at this great country of ours, and you ask, how can we 
come together instead of be driven apart, you have to start with our 
basic values. We need to build up families and the integrity and 
strength of childrearing, not tear it down. That's why I've said many 
times, I'm all for welfare reform that's tough on work if people can 
work, but I don't want to hurt the children. We should be supportive of 
good parenting and work. All of us try to succeed as workers and 
parents. That's what we should want poor people to do, too. Everybody 
should be able to succeed in that way. That should be our goal.
    We have to create an educational system that gives everybody genuine 
opportunity. And that means, among other things, what I was doing here 
in New Jersey a couple of weeks ago, which is ensuring that we hook up 
every classroom and every library, even in the poorest schools in 
America, to the Information Superhighway in the next 4 years. We can do 
that, and we can revolutionize education if we do it.
    We have got to continue our work to lower the crime rate by having 
more police on the street, more prevention strategies, being tough in 
keeping the assault weapons ban in the Brady bill and not giving them 
up, and by actually doing something to give our young people something 
to say yes to as well as something to say no to. We can bring the crime 
rate down; we can make our streets safe again; we can make our 
neighborhoods whole again. We know how to do it. The question is whether 
we will.
    We have to continue this fight to protect the environment. It is 
woefully short-sighted to believe that we can walk away from our 
obligations to clean up the messes we've made and protect ourselves from 
making further ones and gain anything economically by it. Yes, we have 
to find smarter ways to do it. Our administration has worked hard to 
find ways to grow the economy and clean the environment. But if we walk 
away from that, we will not go into the 21st century as a country that 
is stronger with stronger families and stronger communities and a 
stronger future. All of these things we must do.
    We have to keep working and reaching out to the rest of the world, 
even when it's frustrating, when there are no easy answers. And to do 
it, we have to have an idea of Government that is fundamentally 
different from that embraced by the congressional majority. If you 
listen to them, what they say is: Government is the source of all of our 
problems; this new world is going to be so wonderful;

[[Page 808]]

if we could just get Government out of the way, all of our problems 
would be solved.
    What we need is empowerment defined as more choice and freedom from 
Government. If you listen to our crowd, what do we say? We're not for 
big Government anymore where it's not necessary. Just remember, folks, 
when election time comes, they bad-mouth the Government, but we're the 
ones that reduced it. It's 240,000 smaller today than it was the day I 
became President.
    But we did it in a way that treated those Federal workers with 
dignity. We gave them generous early retirement packages and severance 
packages and time to find other jobs. And we didn't try to make some big 
thing out of it. We just did it because it needed to be done. But we 
believe that there is a different sort of empowerment. We believe that 
real opportunity means not only choice but the ability to exercise the 
choice.
    You remember the great French writer, Anatole France, said the rich 
and poor are equally free to sleep under the bridge at night. Now, 
that's what choice is without the capacity to exercise it. We believe 
our job in Washington is to give people the ability to make the most of 
their own lives as individuals, workers, as citizens, in families, in 
communities, and as citizens of this great Nation. That's what we 
believe. The power to make the most of their own lives. We cannot 
guarantee results for people, but if we don't make sure everybody has 
got a chance to do the most that they can with their lives and live out 
their dreams, this country will never be what it ought to be in the 21st 
century. That is the main choice you face in 1996.
    And let me say, in terms of the election, why you have to work at 
it. This is a complicated time. There is a lot of kind of paradox out 
there. And you have to talk to people about what the nature of this time 
is, what the nature of this period of change is, and what should we be 
doing. And every one of you who can afford to be here tonight has a 
voice, a mind, a spirit, that can be brought to bear on your friends and 
neighbors. And you need to take this opportunity to use this election as 
elections should always be used, as a genuine educational opportunity to 
learn about where we are. And every question then becomes: How do we do 
this in a way that gives everybody a chance to make the most of their 
own lives? How do we do this in a way that brings the American people 
together and doesn't divide them? How do we do this in a way that 
maintains our leadership in the world for peace and freedom?
    So it is not a question of whether we balance the budget. We have 
reduced the deficit more than our predecessors. The question is, how we 
balance the budget, not whether we do it. So in every case, I ask you to 
think about this. And you're quite fortunate now, you don't have to 
guess. You don't have to guess. You know what the choices are. You can 
look at the budget of 1995, which I vetoed, at the environmental 
initiatives, at the differences between us. And you don't have to guess.
    Who is right about family and medical leave? Were we right to say 
that you shouldn't lose your job if you've got to take a little time off 
when a baby is born or a parent is sick or a child is in the hospital? 
Or were they? We said yes, and they said no. We now have gotten a 
bipartisan study of the family and medical leave law that says one in 
six American workers covered by the law have taken advantage of it, and 
about 90 percent of the businesses say it didn't cost them any money to 
comply and didn't cause them any problems. I think that's what we're 
about.
    All we did was to empower people to succeed at work and at home. 
That's what we should be doing. I think we were right. Were we right? 
Were we right to fight for the 100,000 police and the assault weapons 
ban and the Brady bill? Were we right? I believe we were.
    All I know is that the crime rate is down all across America now for 
3 or 4 years in a row because of more police and prevention. All I know 
is that no lawful hunter has lost his or her weapon, but there are 
60,000 people who did lose their weapons, the 60,000 people with 
criminal records who tried to buy a handgun and couldn't do it because 
of the Brady bill in the last year and a half.
    Were we right to fight for national service, to give people a chance 
to serve their community, solve the problems, work with people of 
different backgrounds and earn some money to go to college, or were they 
right

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to say that's a luxury we can't afford? Were we right to change the 
student loan laws so that more people could borrow money to go to 
college on better terms and pay it back as a percentage of their income 
so that if you have a high tuition cost but you want to be a 
schoolteacher, a police officer, a nurse, or somebody else doing public 
service and you know you're not going to be rich, you still can always 
borrow the money to go to college, and you can still always pay it back? 
I believe we were right about that.
    And in every case, there was no big Government guarantee. All we 
were trying to do was to give people the means to make the most of their 
own lives, to seize the American dream, to come together instead of 
being divided, to stand up for the things we believe in around the 
world. That's all we did, and it makes all the difference.
    So I say to you this is not like 1992 when the question was the 
status quo or change. There is no status quo option. There are two very 
different views of change. They can be well-known and completely 
understood. The question is: Which road will you walk into the 21st 
century? And I tell you, I see pictures in my mind all the time that 
give me the answer.
    The other day I was at Eastern High School in Washington, DC, where 
all of the students are African-American except the Russian exchange 
students, a program you've done a lot of work on. There they were, 
reaching for unity over diversity. There they were, struggling to come 
out of poverty. There they were, asking not for a guarantee, but just 
for a good education and a chance at the American dream. And if I've got 
anything to do about it, they're going to get it. That's what they're 
going to get.
    I got two letters from two married couples I got to know not very 
long ago, because they had desperately sick children. I know as the 
father of only one child, there must be no greater pain in the world 
than having a child die before you do. And both these couples lost their 
children, but they got to be good parents because of the family and 
medical leave law that they helped us fight for. I think we were right, 
and I think that's the kind of change we want.
    I got a letter that I signed today back to a man who is now in his 
mid-sixties who lost a job 4 years ago at an aerospace plant, didn't 
know where to turn. But he wrote us, and because we found him the kind 
of training program that others are trying to eliminate, that man 
started his life over again in his early sixties and is working again 
and has dignity and is supporting himself and his family. That's what I 
believe we ought to be doing.
    This is not complicated. It is not about big Government programs. It 
is not about yesterday's ideas. This is about which road we will walk 
into the future. It is about whether we will walk it together.
    Today in Woodbridge, basically your good--anybody here from there? I 
was over there today at the high school. We were at the high school, 
Senator Lautenberg talked about it. We did this anti-smoking program. 
And I was talking to the mayor on the way in about what kind of 
community it was. He said, it's sort of a standard New Jersey blue-
collar community, and it was. It was, except they had not only 
Christians and Jews among the student body, they had Hindus and Muslims 
among the student body, even there.
    America is changing. I'm telling you, this business of trying to 
drive a stake between people in this country based on their race, their 
ethnic background, or their religion has got to stop. We have got to 
stop it. We have got to stop it. Now, you don't have to guess about 
this, look around the rest of the world. Which road do you want to walk 
into the future? And I know that either I or my successors will make 
some mistakes in our judgments about what the United States should do 
around the world. But basically, it is right for us to continue to reach 
out to other countries. It is right for us to support peace and freedom 
and to try to expand our own prosperity by expanding that of others.
    It is right for us to be partners with other countries, even when 
we're tired and we want to lay our burdens down, because it's the only 
way to fight terrorism, the only way to fight drug-dealing, the only way 
to fight organized crime; it is right to do that. So you get to decide 
about that, which road will you walk into the future.
    And I want to ask you when you leave here tonight to think about 
what else you can do

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for the next 6 months. I appreciate the money you've given Bob 
Torricelli and the Democratic Party and our efforts. I am grateful for 
that. But it is not enough, because the American people are trying to 
get a grip on this period of change. They're trying to understand what's 
going on, and you can help.
    And it's exciting. You should feel privileged to live in time. 
Believe me, there's a lot more good than bad in it. Believe me, if we do 
the right things, the children that are here in this audience will have 
the opportunity to live out their dreams more than any previous 
generation of Americans ever has. You should be happy and proud to have 
the responsibility of citizenship at this time.
    And so I ask you as you leave tonight to think about it: What do you 
want America to look like for your children and grandchildren, and what 
are you willing to do to make it happen? And what do we have to do in 
Washington to help everybody have their chance at the American dream in 
a country that's going forward together? That is what is at stake.
    I think I know what road the American people will walk into the 
future if they understand what the choices are. You must help your 
fellow Americans understand the choices.
    Thank you, God bless you, and goodnight.

Note: The President spoke at 8:30 p.m. in the Old Central New Jersey 
Railroad Terminal at Liberty State Park. In his remarks, he referred to 
comedian Whoopie Goldberg; former Governors Jim Florio and Brendan 
Byrne; jazz musician Peter Duchin; and Raymond J. Lesniak, chairman 
Clinton-Gore Campaign Committee, New Jersey.