[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 33, Number 14 (Monday, April 7, 1997)]
[Pages 447-452]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic Business Council Dinner

April 2, 1997

    Thank you. I wonder if you were just clapping because you were 
surprised I could stand up. [Laughter] Let me say I'm delighted to see 
all of you here tonight. I want to say a special word of thanks to Carol 
Pensky for her willingness to lead this group and for her leadership 
ability and to my good friend Alan Solomont for agreeing to come on as 
the finance director of the Democratic Party when he knew it would be 
such an easy job just now, to Roy Romer for what he said and for what 
he's been and for the friendship we've enjoyed over so many years. And 
I'd

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also like to say a word of thanks to Steve Grossman, who is not here 
tonight because they've had 24 inches of snow in Boston. Now, Solomont 
didn't use that for an excuse, and I haven't quite figured out how. But 
anyway, I thank them all.
    I'd like to thank Secretary and Mrs. Pena and Secretary and Mrs. 
Slater and Frank Raines for coming tonight, as well as the people from 
our staff in the White House and the Vice President's staff. We're glad 
to have this opportunity to visit with you and to talk tonight.
    You know, this was an interesting day for me at the White House for 
more reasons than one. But you may have seen reported in the news that 
today we had an event in which the secretary of public instruction for 
the State of California--which has over 10 percent of the schoolchildren 
in the country--and the heads of 240 different high-tech companies 
jointly endorsed the national standards movement in education that I 
have been advancing and that I talked about in the State of the Union 
and agreed that the children of California would participate in 1999 in 
the examination of fourth grade students in reading and eighth grade 
students in math to see if they had met those standards. And that meant 
that within a period of only 2 months since the State of the Union, we 
now have 20 percent of all the schoolchildren in the country already 
committed to be a part of that.
    And we had--the most moving thing to me was we had a teacher of 30 
years and a parent who was the vice president of her local PTA, both of 
them from different California communities, both of them, as it 
happened, Hispanic-Americans, who said that they strongly believe that 
all of our children should be held to high standards. And the teacher 
said, ``If there's one thing I've learned about kids, it's if you have 
high expectations, they rise to meet them, and if you don't have high 
expectations of them, they don't. And we owe it to them to have high 
expectations.'' And then the parent said that she had been educated at a 
time when everyone just assumed that, and she didn't know how we lost 
our way, and that she wanted to see the country come back.
    Then Jim Barksdale, the CEO of Netscape, talked about how everything 
that was done in the high-tech community had to meet high international 
standards, and it was amazing that America had escaped applying those 
kinds of standards to our system of education for as long as possible. 
Then the head of the California School Board Association came up to me--
and I thought, well, this is interesting because the reason America has 
never had national standards in schools is that we have local control of 
our schools and every time we try to do something like this--and 
Governor Romer and I have been working at this for a very long time 
now--they would say, ``Well, this ends local control.'' So the head of 
the California School Board Association, who is herself a member of the 
local school board, said, ``I finally figured out that we couldn't have 
local control without national standards.'' She said, ``What kind of 
control is it if--what are you controlling for? The only reason I wanted 
to be on the school board is to improve the education of the children in 
the school district, and how could I do this unless I knew what the 
measure was--unless I could tell whether I was succeeding or not?'' And 
I thought to myself, we are doing something really important here. This 
is going to change America. This is going to give people opportunities 
that they would not have otherwise had. And it has ramifications in 
other ways.
    I want to talk a little more about this in a moment, but you know 
we've got this new welfare reform law that I signed, which requires us 
to move 40 percent of the eligible people on welfare from welfare to 
work over the next 4 years, which is about another million people. And 
we moved about a million people from welfare to work in the last 4 
years, but the economy produced 11\1/2\ million jobs, and that had never 
happened in a 4-year period before.
    This time, under the law, we have to move that many people whether 
the economy produces 11\1/2\ million jobs or not. And this was the 
anomaly. Last year in St. Louis, there were nine job applications for 
every entry-level job opening. In Chicago, there were six. The 240 
companies, however, represented in this press conference today have 
created, just themselves, 130,000 jobs in the last 4 years

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and today have thousands and thousands of job openings.
    So there is a mismatch between the people we're trying to move into 
the work force and the skills required to get there. This is a huge 
deal. I say that to make this point. I see what we are all doing as part 
of the seamless web of moving America into the 21st century, and I want 
you to know that I'm proud that you have decided to help support us, 
support these policies. If the election did not come out the way it did 
last November, that meeting would not have been held in the White House 
today. We would not be doing this. This would not be America's great 
national priority now. And you helped to make it possible, and you ought 
to be proud of it. You ought to be proud of it. So I thank you for that.
    Now let me give you just a quick rundown on where we are. Number 
one, on the budget, I have submitted my budget by the--the budget 
resolution requires the congressional majority to submit at least the 
outline of a budget by April 15th. That may or may not happen. But for 
whatever it's worth, I really believe we'll get a bipartisan balanced 
budget agreement this year. I think it is the right thing to do for the 
country. And because it's the right thing to do for the country, it is 
by definition good for the Democratic Party to do. But it is clearly the 
right thing to do for the country.
    And I want to say a special word of thanks to Frank Raines, who came 
into OMB at a difficult time and has helped us to produce a fine budget, 
and we're going to get there. And I hope that you will encourage your 
Members of Congress and your friends in the Congress, whether they 
represent you directly or not, to support this. If it's the right thing 
for the country it, by definition, is the right thing for our party. And 
we need to keep this economic expansion going, and we need to get an 
agreement for a balanced budget that protects our investments in the 
future and in our people. And ours does, and we can get that kind of 
agreement through Congress if we all work on it.
    The second thing I want to say is we need to continue to expand 
trade. I'm going to Latin America later this year. I have to go--because 
of my injury now, I have to go in two legs. I'm going to Mexico, Central 
America, and the Caribbean; then I'm going to go back to South America 
later in the year. There's some controversy, I know still, about whether 
we did the right thing in NAFTA or not. All I can tell you is our 
exports are at an all-time high as a percentage of our economy. And 
export jobs, on the whole, pay better. And for whatever our difficulties 
with Mexico are, if you look back at the last time the Mexican economy 
collapsed before NAFTA 10 years previously, they were 2 or 3 times as 
rough then. We have been in much better shape because we have created a 
trading bloc with Canada and Mexico. And we have to do more trade with 
our neighbors in Central and South America. We have to do it.
    Last year for the first time, while we're still debating what we 
want to do, the MERCOSUR countries in South America did more trade with 
Europe than the United States. And it is time--we've got to take a 
serious look at this. And again I would say, from the time of Franklin 
Roosevelt the Democratic Party has been on the side of free and fair 
trade, and we can achieve both. And I think any of you who've worked 
with Mickey Kantor when he was our trade ambassador or Charlene 
Barshefsky know that we have worked hard and we have fought hard for 
fair trade for the American workers and the American businesses. And we 
will continue to do that.
    But in a world growing ever more interdependent, when uncertainties 
abound, we need to be tied as closely as we can to our democratic 
neighbors who are willing to work with us and build a common future with 
us. So especially with regard to the important countries in South 
America and Latin America, I think we have to do more, and that will be 
a big issue in this year.
    On the social front, let me say one of the things I'm proudest of is 
that we've proved to ourselves as Americans in the last 4 years that we 
don't have to put up with social conditions we know are unconscionable. 
People now know they don't have to put up with a crime rate that's 
unconscionable. We have the crime rate now going down every year, and we 
have before the Congress a juvenile justice proposal that I believe will 
find strong

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bipartisan support and will enable us to keep lowering the crime rate.
    But I would just say again--and I hope we'll have your support in 
this--while the crime rate is going down, the juvenile crime rate is 
still too high. While drug use is going down, drug use among juveniles 
is still going up. Still too many kids out there who are disconnected, 
don't feel connected to the future, don't feel connected to their 
neighborhood, their families, their schools, or anything else. And while 
we need a juvenile crime bill that is tough, we also need one that is 
compassionate, intelligent, and gives these young people something to 
say yes to. And that's one of the reasons that I'm proud to be a member 
of this party, that we believe in the human potential of everybody. And 
I am determined that before I leave this job we will have put a stake in 
the ground that proves that we do not have to lose the thousands and 
thousands and thousands of our young people we continue to lose every 
year. And if we do the right thing, we won't lose them.
    Let me just mention two other things. We've taken a lot of steps to 
strengthen family life and work life for families in this country in the 
last 4 years, whether it was in the family and medical leave law or 
raising the minimum wage or passing the Kassebaum-Kennedy health care 
bill or the V-chip bill, the television rating standards, the anti-teen 
smoking initiative. But one of the biggest problems we still have is 
that there are still 10 million of our children who don't have health 
insurance. And a lot of them don't have health insurance because their 
parents lose jobs or change jobs. We have a proposal before the Congress 
that we believe would provide insurance to half of those children in the 
next 4 years. There are bipartisan proposals on that. I am very, very 
hopeful that we will do something in this Congress which will take a 
long step toward providing health insurance for all the children in this 
country. And that's important.
    We have also proved that we could lower the welfare rolls quite a 
bit and far more than the economy alone can account for. The welfare 
rolls have gone down by about 2\1/2\ million now in the 4 years and 2 
months that I've been in office. And we know from the patterns of the 
past that about half this decline would have occurred just because the 
economy got better. But we also know that about half the decline 
occurred because people were working at it, States, communities, people 
believing in welfare reform, people believing that able-bodied people 
who wanted to go to work ought to have the chance to go to work.
    Now, this welfare reform law, as I said, requires us to do more. And 
I will have more to say about this later. But I've asked every State in 
the country to take the welfare check and make it available to employers 
as a wage and training subsidy, if that will help. I'm trying to get the 
Congress to pass a very tightly targeted tax credit that's worth up to 
half of the wage of a welfare recipient who goes into a new job for an 
employer at a pay of up to $10,000 a year. But we are going to have to 
have help from the private sector and every community in this country to 
meet these goals. We cannot let welfare reform become an excuse for 
hurting children. It's got to be an excuse--or the pretext or the lever 
by which we liberate families from dependency. And we can do this. It is 
clear that we can do it. But we're going to have to work at it with 
great discipline. And I hope all of you will be willing to help. There 
are some people in this audience tonight who've already hired people 
from welfare to work and I want to--you know who you are, and I thank 
you for doing that. But that will be a big part of what we're up 
against.
    With regard to the work that the Vice President and I have been 
doing on reinventing Government and changing the way the Government 
works, you should know now that the Government has 285,000 fewer people 
than it did on the day I became President in 1993--dramatic downsizing. 
And yet I'm confident that we are providing better service to more 
people in different ways, because we've worked at it very hard. We will 
continue to do that.
    We passed lobby reform legislation. We passed legislation to require 
Congress to live under the laws it imposes on others. The next thing we 
have to do is to pass a campaign finance reform. I believe that the 
McCain-Feingold bill should pass. I am strongly supporting it. But there 
are some other things

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that I think ought to be done as well, and I would like to ask all of 
you to think about this. You've been involved in this deeply. You know 
as well as I do that the exponential rise in the costs of communicating 
with the voters is what has led the exponential rise in the costs of the 
campaign.
    There is a coalition in America today working to get free television 
time for candidates. And if we could get that free television time for 
candidates, only those candidates who agree to observe certain spending 
restraints, that would do more to change the incentives and to change 
the framework in which we all operate and to give everybody a fair 
chance to get their message across than anything else.
    I have just seen an interesting analysis of the unprecedented amount 
of time--free television time that was given to Senator Dole and to me 
in the last election. And while it shows that only about 22 percent of 
the American people saw our spots that we did--your know, we did spots 
for--several of the networks gave us time to talk--1 minute, 90 seconds, 
2 minutes--on various issues. Sometimes we were both asked the same 
questions, and our answers were run back to back on successive nights. 
Sometimes we were given the opportunity just to talk about certain 
subjects. But the analysis showed that, on the whole, there was more 
policy information in these free timeslots than either in our paid ads 
or in the news coverage of the campaign--more policy information--that 
they tended to be less negative, less personal, but they tended to draw 
out the legitimate issue differences between the candidates. I believe 
that would happen in the races for Congress as well.
    And so what I think we need to be thinking about is, how are we 
going to improve the way this thing works? I also would urge all of you 
to think about what we could do to make voting more accessible, to 
change the--to think about this campaign reform as a way of giving the 
country more and more to the people who have to live with the decisions 
that are made in the elections. But there are a lot of exciting 
opportunities out there that I hope you will help us to pursue.
    Finally, let me say that I think this will be a very big year in our 
country for charting our role in the world ahead. We had a very good 
summit with President Yeltsin in Helsinki. We have agreed to try to 
reach agreement within a short period of time to lower our respective 
nuclear arsenals to 2,000 to 2,500 warheads, which would be an 80 
percent reduction from the cold war high of just 5 years ago by 10 years 
from now. That's a very important thing, an 80 percent reduction.
    I am going to have this week a bipartisan event to try to highlight 
the importance of our passing the Chemical Weapons Convention this year, 
which is absolutely imperative. The United States cannot afford not to 
be in the forefront of banishing chemical weapons from the Earth. We are 
trying to do something to restrict severely and eventually ban 
landmines. We are working hard on that. We hope to have some progress to 
report on that this year.
    You know what we've been doing on the Middle East peace. The only 
thing I can tell you is the one thing I've learned about those folks is, 
don't give up. Don't give up on it. No matter how bad the headlines are, 
don't give up. And we've got some very good ideas; we're working on 
that.
    I believe the Vice President had an extremely successful trip to 
China. He was able to spend some high-level time that we had not spent--
our country had not been able to spend since our differences over 
Tiananmen Square--just making sure they understood how we looked at the 
world and we understood how they looked at the world and charting the 
areas where we could work together, particularly in the areas of nuclear 
proliferation where the Chinese supported us with the Comprehensive 
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty last year and dealing with the problems on the 
Korean Peninsula, in trying to resolve some of our economic disputes. 
And he also gave a very powerful human rights speech while he was there, 
of which I was very proud. I think it was a very good trip.
    And I believe that by the end of the year, you will see with that, 
the expansion of NATO, the other things that are going on, we will be a 
lot closer to a world which has more democracy, more free market 
economics, more cooperation, and where we're mak

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ing progress in trying to beat back the new security threats of our 
time.
    In short, this really is an age of great possibility, and it 
requires us to work together. But in the kind of country we have where 
the public sector is limited and the private sector is large, which I 
like, you have to play a role in public decisions, and it's good 
citizenship. And that's what you're doing. And again, let me say I'm 
proud of you. I appreciate what you've done, and I hope that you will 
continue to make your voices heard on the things that we are doing.
    We have a lot of other decisions I haven't even gone into tonight. 
Secretary Slater's here; we're going to redo the transportation bill 
this year. Secretary Pena has got a lot of our most important research 
going on in the Department of Energy. We've got a lot going on. We want 
you to be a part of it. But we want you to be proud of the fact that 
what you have done has made America a better place. In 4 more years, 
it'll be a much better place, indeed.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:28 p.m. at the Sheraton Carlton Hotel. In 
his remarks, he referred to Carol Pensky, treasurer, Alan Solomont, 
national finance chair, Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado, general chair, Steve 
Grossman, national chair, Democratic National Committee; Secretary of 
Energy Federico Pena's wife, Ellen Hart Pena; and Secretary of 
Transportation Rodney Slater's wife, Cassandra Wilkins Slater.