[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 33, Number 41 (Monday, October 13, 1997)]
[Pages 1539-1543]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner

October 9, 1997

    Thank you. Only a fool would speak after both a Baptist minister and 
a rabbi. [Laughter] Thank you, Steve. And I thank Vernon and Ann for 
having us here. Hillary and I and Chelsea, we've been here a lot over 
the last several years. This has often been a home away from home and on 
occasion, in difficult times, a real refuge for us. This is the largest 
crowd with whom I have ever dined in this room, with the fewest number 
of people related to Vernon and Ann. [Laughter] But we're all family in 
a way here, and I thank you for being here.
    I thought what might be good to do tonight is maybe I would just 
talk a couple of minutes and follow up on something that Vernon and 
Steve talked about, and then see if any of you had any questions or 
comments you wanted to make or anything you wanted to say.
    Let me begin by thanking you for helping tonight and, for many of 
you, over many years. I've been feeling rather nostalgic lately, as you 
might imagine. Last week was the sixth anniversary of the date I 
declared for President. And we just took Chelsea off to school. A couple 
of days from now is my 22d wedding anniversary. I'm not feeling so young 
anymore. And almost five-eighths of my Presidency is over, which I have 
a difficult time believing.
    Let me tell you why I think what we're doing is important. I never 
will forget when I was trying to make up my mind whether to run for 
President in 1991. I didn't especially feel compelled to do it. I was 
having the most wonderful time of my life as a Governor, enjoying 
enormous success, great approval from our people; our family, our 
friends, everything was going great. I was very concerned then that our 
country seemed to be sort of lurching toward this new century and this 
incredible new era without any real strategy for how to proceed.
    And I was also concerned, very frankly, about the quality of the 
political debate in Washington in both parties. It seemed to me kind of 
stale and not very helpful. There was a lot of emphasis on what I 
thought of as

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``old think,'' you know--liberal-conservative, left-right, in 
yesterday's terms--and a whole lot of emphasis on the politics of 
personal destruction which, regrettably, I have not quite succeeded in 
eliminating from Washington. It may be part of human nature.
    I read a great biography of General Grant the other day, pointing 
out that his commander in the Union Army, even though he kept winning 
and his men loved him and everybody thought he was great, was trying to 
replace him until finally he won at Vicksburg and no one could question 
whether he was the lead dog in the hunt--whereupon the guy immediately 
rushed to Lincoln and started talking about how great he was. So maybe 
this is just part of this town and the way it works.
    But I didn't like it very much, because it seemed to me then--it 
seems to me now--that we have all these incredible opportunities, but we 
have to be thinking about them in the right way. There is a great role 
and a need for two parties in this country, but they need to be having a 
principled debate about the future, not yesterday's debate about things 
that don't really matter anymore.
    And so, I set about doing what wound up winning the campaign in '92, 
saying that we had to focus on keeping the American dream alive, 
reasserting America's leadership in the world, and rebuilding America's 
community at home, and that we needed to focus on the future, not the 
past; on change, not the status quo; on unity, not division; on policies 
that helped everybody, not just a few. And I think it's fair to say it's 
worked pretty well, because not only is the economy doing well but crime 
has dropped for 5 years in a row. We have the biggest drop in welfare 
rolls in history now--3.6 million people tonight are living in families 
with payrolls who were living in families with welfare checks 4 years 
ago. That's something our country can be proud of. We have advanced the 
cause of the environment and public health. The country is better off.
    But if I look ahead to the future, I will say again, the reason this 
is important, why you're here tonight, and the reason it's important 
that we continue to be active in the political process and not be 
apologetic or believe there's anything wrong with it, is that we still 
have these huge decisions to make and we desperately need a principled 
debate about the future. That's what we owe our children. That's what we 
owe this country.
    Now, let me just give you a few. The major challenges confronting 
America for the remainder of this century and for the foreseeable future 
will be those posed by the globalization of the economy and the society, 
and the changing nature of the way we work and live as a result of the 
information and technology revolution. Among other things, one big 
challenge will be how do you maintain individual opportunity and give 
everybody who is willing to work a chance with all this dynamism in the 
economy, number one. Number two, how do you make sure that we have the 
requisite set of policies--and maybe most important--to keep this 
economy going and competitive? That's what I think the fast-track issue 
is about. Number three, since we have a higher percentage of Americans 
than ever before in the workplace, how do we help people balance better 
the demands of work and family, since the most important job anyone ever 
has is still raising children properly? Nothing else compares to that. 
If we fail at that, we can all work like crazy, and then when we're 
gone, the whole thing will crater.
    On the other hand, people shouldn't be asked to choose and face not 
succeeding as a parent because they can't balance these demands. That's 
why I worked so hard for the family leave act and the Kennedy-Kassebaum 
health care bill and the part of the balanced budget that will enable us 
to provide health insurance for 5 million more kids and working families 
who don't have it, because we have to find a way for people to succeed 
at rebuilding childhood in America and strong families and still keep 
growing this economy like crazy.
    The third thing that I want to say--or the fourth one, on 
globalization--we also, it seems to me, as Americans, have to put our 
minds more to bringing the strategies that have brought so many of us so 
much prosperity into the areas that have not been affected one way or 
the other by the good things that are happening. And I think we 
shouldn't miss that. There are areas that have not been af

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fected one way or the other, that just are still static, and they are a 
great market for America. They're a great growth potential. They're a 
great potential strength for our future. So, there's that set of 
challenges.
    Then I think we have a set of generational challenges. I think we 
have to not only preserve Medicare and Social Security for future 
generations but we have to do it in a way that frees us up to focus on 
the fact that an enormous number of our children are still born into and 
reared in poverty and are, therefore, relatively disadvantaged compared 
to those of us who are not young. And we pay a big price for that.
    The next big challenge I think we have is how do we deal with the 
very real and, I'm convinced, quite profound environmental challenges 
that will be presented to the world if China, India, and other countries 
grow quite wealthy, if they all get rich the same way we did? The 
President of China is about to come visit me, and we once had an 
interesting conversation in New York, when he said, ``Sometimes I think 
the United States is trying to contain us. And we don't want to be a 
threat to you, and we don't want you to think we are.'' And I said, 
``The only threat you propose to us right now is I'm afraid you want to 
get rich the same way we did, because if you do it in exactly the same 
way we did, all your cities will be clogged with pollution and will be 
heating up the atmosphere so fast that nothing I do will turn it 
around.'' And I could tell he'd never thought about it in those terms.
    This climate change issue I think is a very real issue. It's only 
one of many environmental challenges we have to face, but we have to 
prove that we can do it in a way that permits us to continue to grow the 
economy and doesn't make us look like we're trying to hold down people 
in countries that at long last are beginning to come into their own and 
give their kids a better future. It's a huge challenge. Science and 
technology--how are we going to deal with the potentials of it? Are 
there ethical dilemmas? I think there are. I've talked about them in 
some cases. But the United States has to maintain its leadership in 
these areas.
    Just two more that I think are very important. The world we're 
living in now with no cold war and no clear divisions gives us both an 
enormous opportunity to advance peace and freedom and democracy and our 
own security and prosperity, but it also presents us with a whole lot of 
new challenges that cross national lines. I don't know how many of you 
saw the article that was in our local paper within the last 2 weeks 
about how the South American drug cartels are linking up with the 
Russian mafia gangs who are far more diversified in their operations. 
So, they're becoming a cash cow for people who don't have as much money 
but have more connections in more different illegal and violent 
activities. That's just one little example of what happens.
    If you break down all these barriers to information, to movement, to 
money--all the things that are making it possible for many of you to do 
so well in the world--organized forces of destruction can equally take 
advantage of those declining barriers to cause us new and different 
problems. So you will have--in our lifetime, we'll have to face problems 
of terrorism, organized crime and drugs, and ethnic and racial and 
religious hatreds, spawning wars; not to mention the fact that diseases 
will travel across international borders more quickly, especially if 
there are compounding environmental problems.
    These are new challenges. We have to be thinking about them. We 
cannot afford to be mired in a debate that either makes us smaller than 
we are, keeps us torn up and upset all the time, or distracts us away 
from the real challenges of our people. And I have to say, you know, 
you've all heard me say this in the beginning, but I think the two most 
important things that we can really do for our own people are make sure 
that we give genuine excellence of education to every child and give 
everybody in America the opportunity to go to college who is willing to 
go and work for it, and find a way to make a strength rather than a 
weakness of our diversity.
    I can't tell you--I don't want to embarrass him, but I had a 
wonderful talk with Dr. Wong at dinner, whom I admire so much, and he 
was telling me that he and the President of China graduated from the 
same university from the same department a few years

[[Page 1542]]

apart. So we have an American, who has done a great thing in our 
country, who can be a part of our attempts to have a peaceful future 
with China.
    We also have people from India, from Pakistan, from every country in 
Latin America, from every country in Europe, from every country in 
Africa. This is an incredible gift, and we should not blow it. And a lot 
of people think I talk about this more than I should, but it's great. If 
you saw what I saw and the way I see it, how much time I have to spend 
getting people around the world to stop killing each other and 
essentially stop behaving on primitive or childish impulses, whether 
it's in Bosnia or the Middle East, or Rwanda and Burundi, or Northern 
Ireland, and you realize that these people--oftentimes they go along for 
years and they do just fine, and then something snaps, they're poorly 
led, and they disintegrate into destructive behavior. We need to be able 
to be a model to the world that will stand as a stern rebuke to that 
kind of conduct so that we can spread it around.
    Now, these are the kinds of things that political debates ought to 
be about. We will always have a difference with our friends in the 
Republican Party, but it's not yesterday's difference. Fundamentally, I 
believe that what we stand for is--if I could just sort of ad lib with 
the quote that Steve gave about relationships--what we believe is that 
our individual lives are more fulfilled when we work together through 
strong units--families, communities, businesses--and that Government is 
one of those, and that there are some things we have to do together that 
we can only do through Government, that we can't do in other ways.
    And I say that as the man who downsized the Government more than 
President Reagan did, gave more authority to State and local 
governments, and privatized more operations than President Reagan did, 
but stood strongly for doing more in education and health care and 
research, in science and technology, in environmental action than 
Presidents of the other party and Members of Congress of the other 
party.
    I think this is what we're about. And we have to be--we have to 
imagine the future and then try to define it. And we should welcome a 
principled debate on the other side. We should welcome debates within 
our party. I noticed there has been a lot of publicity lately about the 
debates within the Republican Party about whether they should just keep 
on their Government-hating tirade or whether they should have a more 
sophisticated view, and they're debating that. I think that's a healthy 
thing for them. And it will be a good thing for the country.
    We need this. And that's what you're contributing to. I'm telling 
you, if we find a way to really provide opportunity for everybody, if we 
find a way to resolve our intergenerational responsibilities, if we can 
find a way to grow the economy and preserve the environment and even 
improve it, if we can keep America ahead of the curves and live together 
as one country, and finally, if I or my successors can persuade a heavy 
majority of the American people that we have to lead in this world that 
we no longer dominate--the most frustrating thing for me in terms of 
communication is, no matter how many talks I give or how many times I 
give this speech, most Americans, I think, still don't--they may trust 
me to do it, but they still don't necessarily agree that it's in our 
interest to be involved in an aggressive way with other countries and 
their future. But if we can do these things, the best days of this 
country are still out there.
    And that is what your contribution is about. It's about giving us a 
chance to do that, and I hope you'll be very proud of it. You ought to 
be happy with the results today, but the main results will come when 
most of us aren't around anymore. And that's just as it should be.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:35 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to Steve Grossman, national chair, Democratic 
National Committee; dinner hosts Vernon Jordan and his wife, Ann; 
President Jiang Zemin of China; and dinner guest Dr. C.J. Wong.

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