[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 32, Number 21 (Monday, May 27, 1996)]
[Pages 919-925]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic Dinner in Stamford, Connecticut

May 22, 1996

    Thank you very much. Well, ladies and gentlemen, now that all these 
other fine people have spoken and told you every good thing about our 
record, I ought to quit while I'm ahead. [Laughter] But I won't. And 
besides that, we can't.
    I want to thank Senator Dodd for his remarks and his remarkable 
leadership and his personal friendship and his willingness to take a 
leap into the unknown when I asked him to do this job after our setback 
in the campaign of 1994. It looked like a job with a lot of downside and 
not much upside. It could cause him grief at home and not help him 
abroad. And he did it anyway, because he believed it was the right thing 
to do. He's done it superbly, and every person in Connecticut should be 
very, very proud of him.
    I also want to assure you that that little riff he went through 
about you can always move the capital to Hartford and make the Seawolf 
the national fish and the Comanche the national bird and all that, you 
know, believe it or not, he does that in private when nobody is looking. 
[Laughter] The first time he did it in private I didn't think it was 
very funny; it's a lot more funny in a crowd. [Laughter] I think if 
things get any tighter he'll just buy me a couple of pets and call them 
Seawolves and Comanches so I'll never be able to forget it. [Laughter]
    I want to thank Senator Lieberman, who's been my friend for more 
than 25 years now, for his leadership in Connecticut and leader- 

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ship in the Democratic Leadership Council and for being a source--a 
constant source of new ideas for me about how we can move this country 
forward and bring it together. And I want to thank Don Fowler for his 
incredibly indefatigable work.
    I thank my friend, Marvin Rosen--now that Chris Dodd has grounded on 
him tonight about how Connecticut raised more money than Florida, Marvin 
might not get any sleep for the next month--[laughter]--he'll be 
thinking about how to get even or get ahead.
    I have a lot to be grateful to Connecticut for, as has been said, 
not the least of which are the people who were up here before me. I 
thought Harvey and Paul looked pretty good up here when they were doing 
their one-two act. You ought to give him a better part, Harvey. He'll do 
a movie if you do that. But give them a hand, they were great.
    And I understand that Mr. Newman introduced me about 15 minutes 
before I came out. [Laughter] That may be because in my old age I'm 
getting hard of hearing. Or it may be because now that he's become a 
grandfather he's just preoccupied and he's gotten his lines all mixed 
up. [Laughter]
    I thank Governor O'Neill, my former colleague, for being here; and 
my friend and law school classmate, your attorney general, Dick 
Blumenthal; your secretary of state, your controller, and all the other 
officials. I want to say a special word of thanks to Bill Curry, who 
came down from Connecticut to Washington to work in the White House. And 
I thank Michael Bolton for both those wonderful, wonderful songs.
    You know, when I first met Michael Bolton I tried to figure out what 
his ethnic heritage was, and I figured he was Polish. Then he said, 
``This is a song I sang with Pavarotti.'' I figured he was Italian. Then 
he sang ``Georgia On My Mind.'' The only other person I ever heard sing 
that in public--this will show you how much I like the song--on June 24, 
1967, in Constitution Hall, I heard Ray Charles sing that song. I 
remember that. I carried the ticket stub with me for 10 years. 
[Laughter] I was so excited, I couldn't go to bed. At 5 a.m. in the 
morning I went out and ran 3 miles just so I'd get tired enough to go to 
bed.
    So I thought you were Polish, then I thought you were Italian. Now I 
know you're African-American. [Laughter] Most of all, you're a good 
person and a good friend, and I thank you for bringing your talents to 
bear for the benefit of your country. Thank you very much.
    I couldn't believe Chris made that joke--I guess it was Chris--about 
that Peruvian mummy. [Laughter] But I want you to know that Hillary went 
to welcome that mummy to the National Geographic building yesterday, she 
and President Fujimori of Peru. And then he came over to see me and he 
kind of hurt my feelings that I didn't get to go. He brought me two 
pictures of that mummy. I don't know if you've seen that mummy. 
[Laughter] But, you know, if I were a single man, I might ask that mummy 
out. [Laughter] That's a good-looking mummy. That mummy looks better 
than I do on my worst days. I'm telling you. You need to go see her. 
[Laughter] If there was ever an argument against ageism, it's that 
mummy. I mean, really. You need to go see her. [Laughter] Let me say--I 
can't believe--I'll hear about that before it's over, but anyway. 
[Laughter] It's been a long day.
    I want to say that I wish Hillary were with me tonight. She's coming 
back from Colorado. But I did something today that she and our daughter 
did 2 years ago. I went to the Coast Guard Academy to give the 
commencement address, and it was a wonderful experience. And I want to 
tell you about just some of the other things that have happened today 
because I think they are appropriate. It reminded me of many of the 
times I have been in Connecticut and the various places I have been.
    When I got off the helicopter today the first time, I met the people 
who are active in the Big Brother and Big Sister program who were cadets 
at the Coast Guard Academy. And they told me that the--you know, the 
students at the Academy have to work very hard. It's a very rigorous 
program, both physically and intellectually. They still do 1,100 hours 
of community service a month at the Coast Guard Academy. That's pretty 
remarkable.
    And then I met a representative of our Department of Education who 
coincidentally

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has been a friend of mine for almost 30 years, introducing me to 
children from Guilford, Connecticut, and children from New Haven, 
Connecticut. And most of the kids from New Haven were African-American 
or Hispanic, and most of the kids from Guilford looked like they live in 
those beautiful houses in Guilford that I remember so well from law 
school.
    And these kids worked together through E-mail and they sent E-mail 
messages to each other and they're trying to help each other learn about 
their different lives and trying to help broaden their horizons and 
improve their performance in school. And these kids, they've got a 
little team jacket they wear to show they're part of the same group. It 
was an astonishing thing. And they were very excited about what they're 
doing.
    And the reason I mention those two things is it seems to me that 
that really is a big part of what this election is all about, because 
the Coast Guard folks, they're doing the best they can with their own 
lives, and they're doing superbly well; they're very impressive. But 
they're still taking a little time to help people who are less 
fortunate, partly because they believe it's part of their responsibility 
and partly because they know their country will be better if those kids 
do better. The kids from Guilford and the kids from New Haven are like 
all children, they're preoccupied with their own lives, but they know if 
they care about each other their country will be stronger and we'll all 
be better off.
    And that really is the central question before the American people. 
I'm very gratified about what's been said. It is true that when I ran 
for President I said that if you vote for me we'll put in a program, 
we'll cut the deficit in half and create 8 million jobs in 4 years. And 
we've more than cut the deficit in half, and we've got more than 8\1/2\ 
million jobs now. I'm glad about that; the economy is stronger than it 
was before.
    One of the things that has especially benefited Connecticut is that 
we have had the biggest expansion of trade in the history of this 
country, with GATT and NAFTA and 200 separate agreements, 21 with Japan 
alone. Our exports to Japan in the 21 areas we've made agreements with 
them are up 85 percent in 3 years. It's really a record without 
precedent. And it's mostly due to the vigilance and aggression of 
American companies and their workers and the productivity of their 
workers. But the fact that we changed the rules had a little something 
to do with it I think. And I'm proud of that. And you should be, too.
    And I am--they talked about the crime issue--I'm proud of the fact 
that all the serious crimes are down in America. And it did have 
something to do with the fact that we passed the crime bill and began to 
put 100,000 police on the street, and banned 19 kinds of assault weapons 
and passed the Brady bill.
    And a lot of Members of Congress underwent unbelievable withering 
criticism. And we lost a lot of House Members and maybe a couple of 
Senators because we banned assault weapons and passed the Brady bill, 
because there were a lot of people that were told they were going to 
lose their weapons. Well, we've now had a couple of hunting seasons; 
there hasn't been a single hunter, man or a woman, in any State in this 
country lose their rifle. But 60,000 people did lose their weapons; they 
were people with criminal records who got found out and couldn't get 
their handguns under the Brady bill. It was the right thing to do.
    I am proud of the advances we've made with the leadership of the 
Vice President in improving the environment, and finding ways to grow 
the economy and protect the environment, which I think is a central 
commitment this country has got to make to itself. I had a fascinating 
conversation a few months ago with the President of China, Jiang Zemin, 
in which we were having the kind of discussion we often have in public, 
and you can imagine what it was like.
    And I looked at him and I said, ``Mr. President, I do not want to 
contain China. I want to engage China. I want us to have a good 
partnership. But,'' I said, ``there's only one way that you really 
present a threat to our security, and I'm sure it's never occurred to 
you.'' And he said, ``Well, what are you talking about?'' I said, ``If 
everybody in China decides to get rich in exactly the same way people in 
America got rich and you all insist on buying cars that don't get any 
better mileage than the ones we've got now, we're going

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to burn up the atmosphere together. That is a threat to our security. We 
have to find a way for the Chinese to grow their economy and preserve 
the global environment, not tear it up.'' And I believe that and I think 
it's a great opportunity for us. So I'm glad we've done that.
    I'm glad that we proved that the Democratic Party is not the party 
of big Government. We've reduced the size of the Government. We've 
eliminated thousands of pages of regulations. We've gotten rid of a lot 
of specific stupid things. When I became President the SBA loan form was 
78 pages long; now it's a page long. It took months and months to get an 
answer; now you can get an answer in 3 days. I'm proud of that. I'm glad 
we--we cut the budget by 25 percent and doubled the loan volume for 
small businesses. I'm proud of that.
    But, in spite of all that, that's really not what this election is 
about. This election, like all elections, is about the future. And I 
just want you to take just a few minutes, because every one of you will 
leave here--and the election is still a long way away, and an enormous 
number of things can happen and there's more than enough time for it to 
change.
    The American people will vote in November based on what they think 
this election is about and what they imagine their future will be like. 
And, therefore, every one of you, if you can afford to be here and you 
have the ability to get other people to be here, you also should take a 
little time to be an influential citizen, to have arguments and 
discussions and debates about this election that have nothing to do with 
raising funds, but everything to do with delivering voters in the polls 
in November.
    And so I ask you to think about it. Ask yourself, we're 4 years away 
from a new century that happens to be the beginning of a new millennium; 
what would you like it to be like? How do you imagine your country in 
2010? What kind of country do you imagine your grandchildren living in 
when they are your age? If you could make it the way you would like it 
to be, what would you have to do to do that? Does that bear any 
reasonable relationship to the kind of issues we debate today? And every 
one of you just think about it.
    Before I entered the Presidential campaign in 1992 I decided that 
more than anything else I had to be able to ask myself those questions 
and give an answer, and then be prepared to update and modify that 
answer as I learned more about the American people and our circumstances 
and the world that's unfolding. And I have a very simple answer, even 
though it's obvious that the road up ahead is not simple.
    I want this to be a country in which every single person, without 
regard to their race, their gender, or how much they start out with or 
without in life, has a chance to live up to their dreams if they're 
willing to work for it and be responsible. I want this to be a country 
in which we relish the diversity that we have, all of it. As long as we 
adhere to the same set of laws and the constitutional values that have 
kept us around for more than 200 years, we should see our diversity as 
an asset of unimaginable proportions as we move into a global society. 
So I want this country to be coming together instead of coming apart.
    And that's very important. That's what all of you try to do in your 
families, in your businesses, in your community activities, in your 
religious organization. It's only in politics that we try to see how 
quickly we can divide people. And it doesn't make any sense at all; it 
is a dumb way to build a future. And I think we should reject the 
politics of division in this election.
    And, finally, I want this to be a country which, 20 years from now, 
30 years from now, is still the strongest force in the world for peace 
and freedom and democracy and prosperity. And that means for me I've had 
to take some fairly unpopular decisions to keep that possibility alive. 
Not many people thought it was right to go into Haiti, but we don't have 
all those refugees at our shore and they've got freedom now. And I'm 
proud that we did it, and I'm proud of our people who did it.
    I was even criticized for becoming the first American President to 
try to take a hand in affairs in Northern Ireland, but it helped to lead 
to a cease-fire and I think we're going to get a resolution to that.

[[Page 923]]

    There was literally no support for the steps I took to try to help 
Mexico when our neighbor to the south was about to collapse, but it 
didn't collapse. And if it had it would have been a disaster for us and 
for our efforts to control our own borders. And there were more than 
half the people against the action we took in Bosnia, but there are 
people alive today, and that country has a chance for peace and Europe 
has a chance for peace because of the action that was taken.
    So the same thing is true on the trade front with GATT and NAFTA and 
all the other things we have done. I know that a lot of trade issues 
have caused some disruption, but this country has come out ahead on the 
efforts we have made in trade. And we cannot run away from the world, we 
have to lead it, we have to compete in it, we have to reach out to 
others and give them a chance to make the most of their own lives as 
well.
    That is what I believe we ought to have. And when you imagine that, 
you can have--well, my vision is not quite the same. But if you have a 
vision, then you can say, well, how are you going to get there? Well, 
the first thing you have to have is a structure of opportunity. And this 
is a big difference between the two different visions of the future, and 
I'll come back to that. But I want a structure of opportunity.
    We spent now nearly 4 years trying to get the deficit down and all 
of that. We need to look to the future and say, we're going to have to 
provide a system that gives people education for a lifetime and access 
to health care and retirement for a lifetime. Education is the most 
important thing, and that's why I made the proposals that I've made. If 
you look at that, that is terribly important.
    Then I believe we need a structure for defining our community, or at 
least a roadmap. What are our obligations to each other? That's really 
what the welfare reform debate is all about. That's why I tried to say 
about affirmative action we should change it, but we shouldn't get rid 
of it until we get rid of discrimination. That's why I tried to say, as 
Senator Lieberman said, this is a deeply religious country, but we ought 
to stop using religion to divide it, we ought to find ways that we can 
come together around religious values we all share.
    That's why we had this meeting the other day that some people in 
this room came to, where corporate executives came and met with labor 
leaders and others and said, what are our obligations to our employees 
in the 21st century in the global economy? Because I believe we have to 
find a way to say this is what we owe to one another so we can come 
together around it.
    And as you look ahead it means we need more young people in national 
service. It means we need more people asking themselves, how can we make 
it economically attractive to invest in our inner cities so that we can 
create jobs and free enterprise where Government can't pick up the 
slack? It means that Bridgeport and Hartford and Newark, New Jersey, and 
poor rural areas in my part of the country ought to be able to reap the 
benefits of the global economy if we can find ways to make it attractive 
for people to invest there.
    It means that we have to recognize that in the rest of the world we 
can never solve all the problems, but we must have, we must have, a 
system for working with others to fight terrorism and organized crime 
and drug running and the proliferation of dangerous weapons. And that's 
why I am working with all these other countries, so we'll at least have 
a system to give our kids and our grandkids a chance to live in the most 
peaceful world human history has even known. Those are the things that I 
think about and dream about.
    Why do we want to fight crime? Because you can't have any sense of 
community if people are scared to death. Why do we want to preserve the 
environment? Because you cannot have an organized civilized society 
without clean air and clean water and natural resources.
    Let me tell you, I have concluded a long time ago that what we do in 
public life is in and of itself not the most important thing, by a long 
shot, that goes on in this world. But if you think about it, what you do 
in your worklife is not in and of itself the most important thing that 
goes on in this world. Why do we work? Why do we have political life? 
why do we do these things? Because if we do it right we give more and 
more and more

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people a chance to live out their dreams. That's why.
    And if you look at what's going on in this election today, if you 
look at every single issue being debated, and you listen very closely 
through all the rhetoric for the differences, you see two very different 
world views about how we should move into the future. And let me give 
you a charitable description, I think, of the other world view--but 
essentially accurate, but charitable.
    The other folks believe, as I do, that we're living in an era of 
enormous possibility because of technology and information revolutions 
and the globalization of the economy; that unlike the great industrial 
age that we've left, the future will probably not be dominated by big, 
top-down organizations, either governmental organizations or private 
ones; that entrepreneuralism, that creativity and rapid change will 
dominate the future. And, therefore, they say all big, outdated, 
centralized organizations are the enemy, and especially Government. And, 
therefore, we're always better off without Government unless we need it 
for national defense and one or two other things that we can't get any 
other way.
    But there aren't many things on that list. That's why when they come 
up with a budget that cuts education they say it's okay; the Government 
would mess up a one-car parade, you can't do anything good in education. 
Or they come up with a budget that says, we don't need 100,000 police 
anymore. Or why don't we repeal the assault weapons ban or the Brady 
bill, or why don't we oppose the Family and Medical Leave Act that Chris 
Dodd labored for--oh, because the Government can't do anything good. Get 
the Government out of it and let people of a thousand flowers bloom.
    Well, I believe that we have to reform the Government. But I don't 
believe any country ever became great by deciding to give educational 
opportunity to just a few, or deciding to pollute the environment to 
advance the economy, or deciding we don't have common responsibilities 
to make safe streets for our children. So that is the difference. What 
do we owe each other? What do we have to do together to create 
opportunity and to grow together and to build a better country?
    And let me just say this in closing, and remember this. I've said 
this a lot of times and a lot of people think it's a strange thing for a 
person in public life to say. If God gives you the gift to know when the 
last time you put your head on a pillow before you end your life on this 
Earth, 5 will get you 10, you won't say, I wish I'd spent more time at 
the office; you won't be thinking about the last political campaign you 
worked in. You'll be thinking about who you loved, who you liked, what 
happened to you that made you feel more alive and more like a human 
being. The purpose of politics is to give more people the chance to live 
out those dreams, so when they lay down for the last time they feel good 
about what they've done. That is what this whole thing is about. That is 
what this whole thing is about.
    So I ask you to remember this. I thank you for this money. We will 
invest it wisely in taking this country into the next century in the 
right way. but you have to be willing to stand up and let your voice be 
heard. You have to be willing to keep talking and keep working all the 
way between now and November. You can't let the American people be 
diverted. you can't let us be divided.
    If this election is about how we've going to get to the next century 
with opportunity for everybody, with a country that's coming together 
instead of being driven apart and a country that's leading the world to 
a brighter tomorrow, I don't have any doubt about how it's going to come 
out. And, more importantly, we'll have more people living out their 
dreams in a better and more decent world.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 9 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom at the 
Stamford Marriott Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Donald L. 
Fowler, co-chairman, and Marvin Rosen, finance director, Democratic 
National Committee; movie producer Harvey Weinstein; actor Paul Newman; 
former Gov. William O'Neill of Connecticut; secretary of the State Miles 
Rapoport; Controller Nancy Wyman; and singer Michael Bolton. A tape was 
not available for verification of the content of these remarks.

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