[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 33, Number 9 (Monday, March 3, 1997)]
[Pages 237-240]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Democratic Business Council

February 24, 1997

    Thank you very much, Tom and Carol. Chairman Grossman and Alan 
Solomont and Paul DeNino, thank you for taking on this important work.
    Let me begin by thanking all of you for being here tonight and for 
your support, for the things that you said earlier, and your high hopes 
for our country. And let me remind you that we are involved in an 
extraordinary endeavor with a great opportunity. In the last 4 years we 
changed the economic policy of this country, and we now are committed to 
investing in our people, expanding our trade, and balancing our budget. 
And the consequences have been truly extraordinary.
    In the last 4 years, for the first time ever in one Presidential 
administration, we had 11\1/2\ million more jobs and record numbers of 
new businesses in every single year. The so-called misery index is the 
combined rates of unemployment and inflation. It's the lowest it has 
been in America since the 1960's. And every one of you who supported our 
efforts, who fought for our policies, who stood up for what we are 
trying to do played a role in that, and you should be proud of that.
    We changed the direction of social policy in this country, putting 
family and community at the center of our concerns and substituting 
action for rhetoric. And that's one of the reasons, thanks for the crime 
bill, that we've had years of declining crime now and people actually 
can believe that their streets can be made safe for their children; one 
of the reasons we've had the largest decline in welfare rolls in the 
history of the United States.
    We now have--I was telling the folks at the table tonight, from 1972 
to 1989, it was an average of 4.8 percent of the American people on 
public assistance. When I took office there were almost 5\1/2\ percent 
of the people on welfare. Today, it's 4.6, lower than the average since 
1972 and going down.
    And the only thing I would ask you is, any one of you--my friend 
Stan Chesley has already hired two people off the welfare rolls. We have 
to set an example. We can't just exhort people. We now have to hire one 
million people from welfare to work in the next 4 years to meet the 
targets of the welfare reform law. Meeting the target of the welfare 
reform law means requiring people who can work to work but not cutting 
anybody off public assistance who is honestly committed to supporting 
her children and cannot find a job. So we changed the law. Now we have 
to do our part.

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    And I want to invite all of you to be part of what is a great and, I 
might add, a bipartisan effort to hire one million more people off the 
welfare rolls. And I ask for your support to pass the legislation in 
Congress to give special tax credits of up to 50 percent of a salary, 
capping out at $10,000 a year, for anyone who hires anyone from welfare 
into the work force. We can do this.
    And I know we can do it; I've added up all the numbers of all the 
employers of all sizes, of all kinds in America. This is a snap if we 
will just make a commitment as a country to do it. We owe it to the 
children in those families who deserve a chance to see their parents and 
themselves move into the middle class and have a shot at what we're all 
trying to build for our children in the new century.
    Let me say that today we had some very, very good news on the 
education front. You know from the State of the Union that I believe 
this should be the primary focus of our new endeavors in the next 4 
years. And today meeting in Washington, the National Convention of 
Community Colleges and all their trustees, and the American Council on 
Education, which includes 1,700 leaders of 2- and 4-year colleges and 
universities in America, both endorsed the education plan I put before 
the American people and the Congress in the State of the Union Address. 
So this is a good day.
    And we are going to be able to create a country in the next 4 years 
where every 8-year-old can read independently, where every 12-year-old 
and every classroom and library in America is hooked up to the Internet, 
where every 18-year-old has a chance to go on to college, and where our 
adults can continue to learn for a lifetime. These things are good 
things, and we are moving in the right direction.
    I can also tell you that I am confident that we will continue to 
reach out in a positive way to the rest of the world. The Secretary of 
State has had a great first trip on her first trip as Secretary of State 
around the world. I've been very proud of her, and I hope you have. And 
we have to continue to do that.
    Let me just make one last point here. In the last 4 years if you 
were to ask me, ``What did you do that was most significant,'' well, 
those of us who count votes might say, ``Well, you passed that economic 
plan in '93 by one vote, and it brought the country back and that's what 
happened in '96.'' Those of us who worry about the safety of our streets 
might say, ``If it hadn't been for the crime bill passing and the Brady 
bill and the assault weapons ban, well, we wouldn't have the crime rate 
coming down.'' Others might say the family and medical leave law and the 
other things we did surrounding family. Others might say the fact that 
we defeated the other party's attempt to drastically change the course 
of America by beating back the '95 budget, and we killed, I think, once 
and for all the dominant rhetoric of the last 20 years, which is that 
Government is the enemy.
    Government is not the enemy. Neither is Government the solution. But 
we now know that every modern society that seeks to fulfill the 
potential of its people needs, through its Government, leadership in 
creating conditions and giving people the tools to make the most of 
their own lives.
    I told somebody today that Hillary and I over the weekend needed a 
little break from all this seriousness, and we watched ``Dante's Peak'' 
at the White House movie theater--best perk about being President, the 
theater. [Laughter] And it's a movie about volcanoes, and I think it's a 
rather interesting movie because I'm interested in volcanoes. But I 
thought it was interesting that it was this movie, and the hero of the 
movie was an employee of the U.S. Geological Service. And the hero was 
nearly killed by the volcano, and in the end his life is saved by a 
technical contraption developed not for volcanoes but for space by NASA.
    Government is not the enemy. [Laughter] They would have had no movie 
but for the Government. [Laughter] And I think we've earned the right to 
say that, that this Government is now smaller by 285,000 people than the 
day I took the oath of office the first time--285,000, the smallest 
since President Kennedy was in office; hundreds of programs gone, 
thousands of pages of regulation gone. The reinventing Government effort 
led by the Vice President still gathering steam, not about to just sit 
around and do no more.

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    But we have got to say these are things we have to do as a country, 
as partners. But apart from all that, I think maybe the thing that I 
would highlight is that in the last 4 years I hope we have created the 
conditions for seeing this country fulfill all of its potential because 
we have rejected the politics of division, whether it was based on race 
or religion or anything else.
    I think I made the right decision in saying we should mend 
affirmative action and not end it. I think I made the right decision in 
saying that I did not think that we should turn our backs on legal 
immigrants in this country; this is a nation of immigrants. I think we 
did the right thing to support the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and 
protect the religious liberties even of people whose politics are very 
different from mine and who believe they have a religious duty to try to 
remove me from office in the last election. [Laughter]
    That's what made this country great. The first amendment guaranteed 
freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and 
freedom of religious faith. I think we did the right thing to try to 
combat in a very aggressive way these church burnings. And I might say, 
the recent bombing of the gay nightclub in Atlanta reminds us that this 
work is not over. That was wrong, and we have to stand against those 
things. We have got to go forward together. We don't have anybody to 
waste.
    And we surely have figured out finally that it is a great advantage 
to the United States to be the largest, most multiethnic, 
multireligious, diverse democracy in the world. We're still learning how 
to deal with it. But we still have to reach out to the rest of the 
world. We have to compete and win. And we have to educate our people to 
live and to be a humanizing, democratizing, freedom- and peace-promoting 
influence in the rest of the world. We can't do any of that unless we do 
it as one America. And I think that is a lasting legacy which you can 
all be proud of. And we have more work to do on that, and we will be 
doing more work.
    Let me finally say that I appreciate your being here for our party 
because this is not something a President can do alone. I'm glad to see 
Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater here tonight, who's going to 
acquit himself so well in that job, and my friend and sort of family 
member, Senator Barbara Boxer, here, who needs your help to get 
reelected in 2 years, and I hope you'll help her. She deserves it.
    And we're trying to do this together, and we're trying to do it 
together with the Republicans in Congress insofar as we and they--to be 
fair to them, because we have honest differences--insofar as we and they 
can in good conscience do that. The atmosphere is different here. And we 
have to keep it positive, constructive, building, trying to get 
something done to make this country great.
    And the last thing I want to leave you with is this. I said this in 
the State of the Union, but I want all of you to think about it because 
it applies to our personal lives and our business lives as well as the 
life of this Nation. It is rare when things are going well on almost all 
fronts. You have to go back a good while to find a time when the economy 
was as strong as it is, when it was working for small businesses as well 
as big businesses, when the welfare rolls were going down, the poverty 
rate was dropping, the inequality among classes of working people was 
dropping, when all these things are happening at the same time, and when 
we're not threatened from without. And the tendency when things are 
going that well is either to relax and just sort of lay back and let 
things happen and have a good time, or to, frankly, find small things to 
fight about and fall out about and to be divided about. It sounds 
counterintuitive, but it's true. If you think about it in your own life, 
you see that. And we must not do either one of those things.
    This is a unique moment in the history of a country. When Abraham 
Lincoln was President, in the middle of the Civil War, someone asked him 
what his policy was, and he gave an answer that if I were to give it I 
would be nationally ridiculed. He said, ``My policy is to have no 
policy. I am controlled by events.'' Think how you would feel if I said 
that. [Laughter]
    Now, the truth is, he did have a policy. His policy was ``I'm going 
to hold the Union together if I have to--if everybody in the country has 
to die, including me.'' That was his policy, and he adhered to it. But 
it was

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also true that on a day-to-day basis he could have no policy, he was 
controlled by events. We are not controlled by events. We get to shape 
events. It is rare when this happens to a country.

    And we cannot blow this opportunity, either by being complacent or 
by falling out over small things. This is a time to be big and visionary 
and active and aggressive and a time to do it together. That is what I 
want you to be invested in. That is what I want you to feel that you are 
participating in.

    And whenever we announce a new initiative you agree with, or results 
of something you support, I want you to understand that it is all part 
of a bigger effort to create a country in which, really for the first 
time in our history, every person actually does have a chance to live 
out his or her dreams, a country which really can help to shape a world 
where there is more peace, more freedom, more prosperity, and in which 
we are organized in a different way to meet the different challenges to 
our security and to our values around the world.

    This is a very good time, but it imposes a special responsibility on 
us because nobody is beating us on the back with a lash, making us do 
the right thing. Our existence is not hanging by a thread so that we 
pray for the largeness of spirit that people seek when they know that. 
We just have to do it because we understand that this is a unique 
opportunity, and we are not going to pass it by.

    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:10 p.m. at the Sheraton Carlton Hotel. In 
his remarks, he referred to C. Thomas Hendrickson, chair, Democratic 
Business Council; Carol Pensky, treasurer, Steve Grossman, national 
chair, Alan D. Solomont, national finance chair, and Paul DeNino, 
finance director, Democratic National Committee; and attorney Stanley 
Chesley.