[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 33, Number 47 (Monday, November 24, 1997)]
[Pages 1830-1835]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in Sacramento

November 15, 1997

    Thank you very much. Eleni, thank you very much for your remarks and 
for the hard work that you have done. Thank you, Angelo and Sophia. 
Congressman Matsui, when he stood up and said that he was speaking on 
behalf of the Tsakapoulous family, I thought we were taking ethnic 
diversity a little far there. [Laughter] But you know me; as far as I'm 
concerned, it should have no limits. So I liked it.
    I want to thank Bob Matsui and Vic Fazio for the wonderful work that 
they do in Congress. I have wished on many days--privately, so I might 
as well say publicly--that a higher percentage of people in both parties 
were more like Bob Matsui and Vic Fazio. They always try to find common 
ground, and they're always willing to stand tough and fight if 
necessary. They get a lot done, and they're always looking to the 
future. And I'm very grateful to them.
    I'm also glad to be back in Sacramento and back here with your 
mayor, who has been a good friend of mine and a good leader. And I thank 
him for that. And Phil Angeledes, good luck to you in your endeavor this 
year. Most people should trust you to handle the money. [Laughter] 
You've had a lot of experience at it. [Applause] Thank you. I'd also 
like to thank my good friend Dan Dutko for coming all the way from 
Washington, DC, to be part of the Democratic Party's efforts today. And 
let me thank all of you.
    Congress has just gone home, and this was a remarkably good year; 
It's a 2-year congressional session; we have a lot to do next year; but 
we did pass the first balanced budget in a generation. We ratified the 
chemical weapons treaty, which will help to protect our children and our 
grandchildren and involves a lot of what is at stake in Iraq today. We 
made progress on expanding NATO in ways that will give us a chance to 
have a 21st century where Europe is a source of peace and prosperity, 
not a cause for war that involves Americans. We passed a wonderful 
adoption bill that I will sign in the next few days to facilitate 
adoptions in many ways in America. We passed a huge increase in medical 
research in all kinds of areas and the best package to help families 
with diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association, since the 
discovery of insulin 70 years ago. So it was a very good year for the 
American people in the Congress.
    What I'd like to talk to you about a little bit today is how that 
year is a part of what we've been doing for the last 5 years and what I 
hope to be doing for the next 3, how it fits in with what we celebrated 
just a few moments ago when I went out, literally, to the wetlands area 
today--[laughter]--to celebrate this joint partnership to try to restore

[[Page 1831]]

wetlands and to preserve some of your precious environmental heritage, 
even as you permit the economy to grow and the uses of water to 
proliferate.
    When I started running for President about 6 years ago, our country 
was not in very good shape. California was in terrible shape 
economically. But times come and go. In every person's life, in every 
country's life, there are times that are better than other times. There 
will never be a period where we have complete, unbounded, uninterrupted 
good news. I used to have a set of rules of public life I kept with me, 
and one of them said, ``You're always most vulnerable when you think 
you're invulnerable. Something is always going to happen. It's endemic 
to the human condition.''
    But what a free people must always have is a vision of where they're 
going, a strategy to get there, and the concentration and discipline to 
pursue the strategy through the tough times. That's what I didn't think 
we had in 1991 and why I ran for President. And my goal as a Democrat 
was basically to take the mainstream values of our party and our country 
and marry them to modern ideas and policies that would move the country 
forward and that would take us into the 21st century with the American 
dream alive for everybody responsible enough to work for it. It would 
help us to create a country where we were coming together, across all 
the lines that divide us, into one America and would keep us strong 
enough to continue to lead the world for peace and freedom and 
prosperity.
    As you see from the events of the last week, I think it is clear 
that at the end of the cold war not all of the dangers of the world have 
gone away. And it is very important that the United States be strong 
enough to do what is necessary to stick up not only for our own 
interests and our own security but for the kind of world we are trying 
to create. And that's what we have been doing for the last 5 years.
    And what I want you to understand that is so often overlooked is 
that there is a direct connection between your presence at this lunch 
here today and what we have been doing and what we will be able to do 
because, in the end, the people who make decisions are those that are 
put there by the American people. They are put there after elections. 
And if you don't have the capacity to communicate your message to be 
heard and to answer the charges against you in this world today, you'll 
be in a lot of trouble.
    So every time you hear--if you've been out here helping us all these 
years--every time you hear of a new breakthrough, a new movement forward 
for the United States, you should feel that you are a part of that. And 
you should be under no illusion that if there were not people like you 
around to help us, that all these ideas, all these policies, and all 
these people would be around anyway; it's not so. I've seen elections 
conducted in an atmosphere of unilateral disarmament, and I wasn't very 
satisfied with the results. It doesn't work very well in politics, and 
it doesn't work very well in other areas of human endeavor. So I'm glad 
you're here.
    What is it that's changed in the last 5 years? Well, the first thing 
we had to do was to make up our mind in Washington what the Government's 
job was. What's the President supposed to do every day when he gets up? 
What's the Congress supposed to do? What is our job? What is the role of 
Government, and what must our priorities be?
    The old debate seemed to me to be a little bit artificial, where 
some people said, ``Well, the Government has to try to do everything 
when there's a problem,'' and others would say, ``The Government is the 
problem and should do nothing, and we hope everybody will come out all 
right.'' Neither one of those was consistent with the way I saw people 
living in my State and my hometown or everything I knew about how you 
build an economy or a society.
    So I tried to reformulate what I believe the mission of Government 
is, and I think it is--and I hope it is--the philosophy of the 
Democratic Party on the edge of a new century. We believe the role of 
Government is not to do everything or to sit on the sidelines but to 
give people the tools and conditions they need to make the most of their 
own lives. If you think about it in that way, it tells you what to do 
and what to stop doing.
    Now, that doesn't answer the question, so what should your economic 
policy be? We believe that there was a false choice put before the 
American people: Should we cut

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taxes and run a huge deficit, or don't cut them and spend a little more 
money and run a slightly smaller deficit? Our country's debt quadrupled 
in the 1980's, and it was wrong. We said, ``We're going to cut the 
deficit. We're going to cut spending, but we're going to spend more on 
education, on technology, on medical research, on the things that are 
key to our future. We're going to make choices.''
    The strategy worked. Before the balanced budget kicks in, the 
economic plan adopted by Democrats only, including the two Members of 
Congress in this room, had reduced the deficit by 92 percent--92 
percent--from where it was the day I took office.
    What was our crime policy? I was amazed when I got to Washington, 
there were people who actually wrote in newspapers and respectable 
journals that, if I talked about crime, I was trying to get a Republican 
issue. And I was not aware that Democrats were pro-crime. [Laughter] Nor 
was I aware that the Republicans had done such a great job, since the 
crime rate was--had gone up quite a lot.
    Now, most anti-crime work is done at the community level--in the 
city of Sacramento, in this county. But it was obvious there were things 
the National Government could do that would make a difference. And I 
went all across the country looking at things that were working, talking 
to people. And I said our crime policy is not going to be caught in the 
old debate, lock them up and throw away the key or hope things get 
better, and when things get better, the crime rate will go down. Neither 
one was, I thought, particularly accurate. I thought we ought to be 
tough and smart and do what works: Put 100,000 more police on the 
street; take assault weapons off the street; keep handguns out of the 
hands of crooks; give kids something to say yes to so they don't get in 
trouble in the first place; and punish people who are really bad. That's 
what I thought our policy ought to be. And the crime rate has dropped 
now for 5 years in a row, and we played a role in it, and I feel good 
about that.
    Our welfare policy--the old policy was encourage people to do 
better, or cut them off, and who cares. That was the old debate. Our 
theory was require people who can go to work to go to work, but don't 
ask them to give up their most important job, which is raising their 
kids. And we started working with States from the day I got there on 
moving people from welfare to work. The Republicans said, when they got 
a majority in Congress, they wanted to pass a welfare reform bill. I 
said, ``Fine, we'll work with you on it.'' They passed two bills that I 
vetoed. Why? Because they were more than happy to be tough in cutting 
people off of welfare, but they did not want to give them the tools they 
needed to get in the work force, and they were willing to hurt their 
kids by taking away the guarantee of food and medical care.
    So I vetoed those two bills; they put the guarantees of food and 
medical care back in, gave me some money for job training and child 
care--we're off to the races. The result? Welfare rolls have dropped by 
3 million people. And it's working; it's working.
    What I want you to understand is there's a direct connection between 
you being here at this lunch and that happening. And I thank you for it. 
We are changing the nature of politics in this country.
    We had a big reaction to a lot of what we did in '93 and '94, and 
the benefits of it weren't apparent. The Republicans won the Congress in 
'94. The American people got to see what they wanted to do in '95 and 
'96. We beat back the contract on America. It didn't happen by accident. 
It was a lot of hard, disciplined work, putting our message out against 
their message. And it's a good thing for the country that we did.
    What we celebrated today at that wetlands project was people who 
want to grow the economy and people who want to preserve the environment 
working together to do something at the grassroots level. That's how we 
ought to be doing this. Their idea on the environment was it was a nice 
thing if you could get it, but it was really an irritant that shouldn't 
get in the way of people going about their daily lives.
    I think that's wrong. I think we have proved conclusively--you have 
cleaner air today, cleaner water, more toxic waste dumps cleaned up, a 
safer food supply, all through major initiatives of this administration, 
and a stronger economy. We have got to do it in the right way. We don't 
want to do things

[[Page 1833]]

that are stupid. We don't want to shoot ourselves in the foot, but we 
know we have got to preserve public health and the environment and grow 
the economy. That is the policy of our party. And we are determined to 
do it, and we are making progress on it, and your presence here today 
contributes to the triumph of that idea. And you should be proud of 
that, and you should talk about it, and you should help us to refine it.
    I don't mean there aren't tough decisions out there. This climate 
change issue, for example, is a very difficult, challenging issue that 
will occupy us for the rest of my term in office. But I know that the 
technology, the know-how, the creativity is out there in the American 
people to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and grow the economy. We've 
already done it in two other areas--you know these chlorofluorocarbons 
and CFC's that were in all the spray cans--they said, ``Oh, they'll do 
terrible damage to the economy if we get rid of them.'' Well, we got rid 
of them, and the American economy is doing just fine. They say we do 
terrible damage to the economy if we took sulfur dioxide out of the 
atmosphere. We found a pro-business, market-oriented way to do it; we're 
getting it out of the atmosphere at less than half the cost I was told 
it would cost, and we're doing just fine.
    And we'll solve this problem, and we'll do just fine if we'll all 
work together and realize that we cannot be forced into a position where 
somebody says, ``If you want to save the environment, you have to tank 
the economy,'' or, ``If you want a good economy, you just have to turn 
your back on the environment.'' That is wrong. And it's one of two big 
choices that I think we can't afford to make.
    The other one, and the last issue I want to emphasize domestically, 
is the choice that I alluded to earlier, welfare. That's the choice 
between work and family. When I signed the family leave law, a lot of 
people said, ``You're going to hurt a lot of small businesses,'' even 
though we exempted people with under 50 employees. For 5 years we've had 
a record number of new small businesses formed in every single year. It 
is a good thing to allow people who go to work every day not to have to 
worry themselves sick about their children at home or at school. It is a 
decent thing to do that.
    I will say again, every society's most important job is raising 
healthy, good, strong children with good values. There is no more 
important work. More than half of the children in this country under the 
age of one have mothers in the work force. And since I have had a wife, 
a mother, and a grandmother in the work force--as long as I have been 
alive, that is what I have known--I do not think that is a bad thing. 
But I think it is a very bad thing when people who are working are 
worried sick about their children.
    And so as we look ahead to the future, our party has to find a way 
to provide more affordable child care. Our party has to find a way to 
provide health insurance for these children, all of them--we're going to 
cover half of them with this balanced budget this year--all these 
children who live in families where their parents are working in lower 
income jobs and they can't afford health insurance. Our party has to 
find a way to help the American people balance the demands of raising 
their kids and going to work every day. And if we have the same approach 
that we've had for the last 5 years, we can do that as well.
    Lastly, let me just say very briefly, because I think you can 
understand that I don't want to talk about this in any detail, we've got 
all kinds of other challenges. We've got to make sure that Medicare and 
Social Security are there for the baby boom generation and for their 
children and their children's children. And we have to do it in a way 
that doesn't--where people my age, of the baby boom generation, don't 
ask the smaller generation of our children to bankrupt themselves and 
not take care of their kids to preserve these institutions. We can do 
all that.
    We also, though, have to have a framework in our mind for what it 
means for America to be secure in the 21st century. National security 
during the cold war was pretty straightforward. We wanted to keep a big 
strong military and plenty of nuclear weapons, and we wanted to have a 
system that existed between ourselves and the Soviet Union so that 
either side thought that, if they launched nuclear weapons, the other 
side would be destroyed, so no one would ever

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do it. And then we'd fight around the edges in various places around the 
world, to try to keep them from getting much of a toehold.
    With the decline of the cold war, with the Russians becoming our 
partners and our soldiers standing side by side in Bosnia, we now know 
that national security has to be defined somewhat in different terms. To 
be sure, there's a lot of problems still with nuclear weapons. We're 
doing our best to continue to work with the Russians to get rid of more 
and more nuclear weapons and actually destroy them and make sure that 
the nuclear materials don't fall into the wrong hands. And we've gotten 
a wonderful amount of support around the world for a comprehensive 
nuclear test ban treaty.
    We're working hard to deal with the aftereffects of these civil 
wars, the worst of which is landmines. And while I do not agree with all 
the terms of the Ottawa convention on landmines, it is encouraging that 
over 100 nations are willing to say that they will never build, buy, or 
use any kind of landmines. The United States has destroyed a million and 
a half such mines; we're going to destroy another million and a half 
while I'm President. And this year we'll spend slightly more than half 
the money spent in the entire world to go get those landmines out of the 
ground so kids don't walk on them and blow their lives away in the years 
ahead. This is a good thing.
    But the most likely problems--there are a couple little babies in 
this audience, or there were today, and some children--the most likely 
problems these children will face when they come of age will be problems 
that cross national borders: terrorism, organized crime and drug 
running, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, chemical and 
biological weapons, and maybe small-scale nuclear weapons--this much 
nuclear cake put in a bomb would do 10 times as much damage as the 
Oklahoma City bomb did--the spread of environmental problems or diseases 
across national lines. We are going to have to, in other words, find 
ways to cooperate, to keep the organized forces of destruction that are 
taking advantage of the Internet, the technological revolution, the 
freedom of travel and the freedom of movement, access to computers, and 
moving money around and all that--there will always be organized forces 
of destruction.
    That is fundamentally what is at stake in the standoff we're having 
in Iraq today. I don't want you to look at this backward through the 
prism of the Gulf war and think it's a replay. I want you to look at it 
forward and think about it in terms of the innocent Japanese people that 
died in the subway when the sarin gas was released; and how important it 
is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that 
can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological 
weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people 
develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in 
briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms.
    And I say this not to frighten you. The world will always have 
challenges. I think the chances are quite good that we can organize 
ourselves for this challenge and deal with it very effectively. I 
personally believe that the next 50 years will be far more peaceful and 
less dangerous for our children and our grandchildren than the last 50 
years were. I also believe they will be the most prosperous and 
interesting time in all of human history but only if we do the right 
things.
    And so I say again to you, this is an exciting time to be alive. 
There have only been maybe four periods like this in American history 
over our 220-year history, where we are really being called upon to 
rethink what we want of our Government, rethink what we want of our 
Nation, meet a whole set of new challenges and, in effect, recreate the 
American dream. It can only happen once every generation, sometimes once 
every two or three generations. You are living in that kind of America. 
In that kind of time, political participation is more important; the 
integrity and validity and strength of your ideas are more important; 
and your passionate willingness to stand up and defend what you believe 
in is more important.
    So I thank you for being here today because I believe that what you 
are doing is helping to build an America that your children and your 
grandchildren will be very proud of and will thank you for.
    Thank you very much.

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Note: The President spoke at 2:15 p.m. at the Sacramento Capital Club. 
In his remarks, he referred to luncheon organizer Eleni Tsakapoulous and 
her parents, Angelo and Sophia; Mayor Joseph Serna, Jr., of Sacramento; 
Phil Angeledes, candidate for State treasurer; and Dan Dutko, chair, 
Victory Fund.