[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 33, Number 48 (Monday, December 1, 1997)]
[Pages 1890-1894]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

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

November 22, 1997

    Thank you very much. Governor, I'm very grateful for what you said 
and grateful for what you're doing. It's hard enough to be a Governor; 
even if you've been doing it as long as Roy has--[laughter]--it still 
requires some effort. And to do that and still be willing to travel 
around the country and represent the Democratic Party and deal with the 
challenges we've had to face in this last year takes somebody with a 
heart of gold, and a steel backside to be on the plane all the time, and 
a pretty tough skin to take some of the slings and arrows that they 
fling at you. And I don't think we could have had a better leader for 
our party than Roy Romer in this last year. And I'm very grateful to 
you.
    Thank you, Mrs. Webb, for being here and for what you said. Wilma 
and I had a good talk at lunch about the kind of the afterglow of the 
experience we had in bringing the

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G-8 conference here a few months ago. When I saw Sharon I told her that 
for the rest of my life every time I saw her I would imagine her riding 
into the arena on that beautiful horse. [Laughter] I was almost willing 
to take odds she would have ridden in here on that horse today. It was 
wonderful.
    But it was a great experience for us. And it was a great thing for 
me to be able to show that part of America to the other world leaders 
and to the rather vast retinue that came with them from all over the 
world. And I can tell you, they were just fascinated because--I was kind 
of carping at lunch--I go a lot of places, but very often I might as 
well just be moving around from Federal office building to Federal 
office building in Washington. Sylvia Matthews is hiding her head. You 
know, my staff's idea of a good foreign trip is: I get off the airplane; 
I get in a limousine; I go to a government office building; I talk to 
three people over a cup of coffee; I go get briefed for an hour; I go to 
a dinner; I sleep a little bit and turn around and come home. And it 
doesn't really matter what country I'm in. I'm always ragging them about 
that. [Laughter]
    But you were able to show all these people something really special 
about Colorado, about the West, and about the diversity and texture of 
America. And that's important because we have the same problems in 
dealing with each other around the world as sometimes we do in 
Washington. That is, the harder that you work and the less interpersonal 
time you have, the more likely you are to be driven by whatever the 
difference of the moment is being exaggerated by people who either work 
for you or work for them or write about it in the political press, and 
you wind up drifting apart. And so--and sometimes unnecessarily. So the 
fact that--I mean, you really did further the interest of the United 
States in building a more cooperative, peaceful world simply by letting 
them see real people living real lives in an interesting and, for them, 
a novel context. So I thank you for that.
    Roy said one other thing that I want to reiterate. I want you to 
know that I thank you for being here, and you have to understand that 
there is a significant connection between your presence here and what 
happens in Washington and what has happened in Washington for the last 5 
years. I don't think anyone would dispute the proposition that this 
country is in better shape than it was in 1992. And in 1992 when I ran 
for President, I wanted to take our country in a new direction based on 
our oldest values of work and family and opportunity and responsibility, 
community and world leadership, the things that America has stood for 
throughout this entire century, and most of it for most of our 
existence.
    But it was obvious that we needed, among other things, a different 
notion of Government--that the arguments that I read as a Governor--and 
every Governor I knew, including yours, had the same reaction. We'd read 
in the paper every day, wherever we lived out here in the hinterland, 
about some fight they were having in Washington. And it looked to me 
like they were having a fight about whether the Government should try to 
do everything when we were broke and couldn't, or whether the Government 
should do nothing and just sit on the sidelines because Government was 
the source of all of our ills. Where we lived and worked and the people 
we worked with, we didn't think either one of those things was true.
    So the first thing I did was, I went there with a determination to 
try to get decisionmakers in Washington to rethink the notion of 
Government and the role of Government in moving America forward and in 
bringing America together. And I believe that the role of Government is 
to give people the tools they need and establish the conditions so they 
can make the most of their own lives. And therefore, I think we should 
do those things which promote both opportunity and responsibility among 
citizens. We should do those things which bring us together, across the 
lines that divide us, into one America. And we should do the things that 
are necessary to maintain our leadership for peace and prosperity and 
freedom in the world, because all those things are necessary if we're 
going to have a 21st century which can be, and I believe will be, the 
best time in all of human history for the people of our country and 
hopefully for people around the world.

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    Now, there are differences between the parties. When I became 
President, my economic policy was unanimously opposed by the other party 
in Congress--unanimously. Not a single one of them voted for my economic 
plan in 1993. And they said it would be the ruination of America; it 
would deepen the recession; it would explode the deficit. Well, 5 years 
later that plan has produced $810 billion worth of deficit reduction. 
The deficit is 92 percent smaller than it was when I took office--92 
percent. That is before--it's very important you understand it--that is 
before the bipartisan balanced budget agreement kicks in. One reason we 
were able to have a bipartisan balanced budget and agree on how to do it 
is, it's not so hard once 90 percent of the heavy lifting is behind you. 
[Laughter] And I think it's important to emphasize that.
    The second thing that we were able to do is to develop a national 
crime policy. And again, the leaders of the other party opposed my crime 
policy. I sometimes get tickled when I read in the paper, they talk 
about how the President adopted Republican positions on crime. I said, 
``Hello? Who are these people? Where were they?'' [Laughter] They fought 
bitterly--bitterly.
    Now, it's no secret; I've got a good personal relationship with 
Senator Dole and a fair and a high estimation of him. I awarded him the 
Medal of Freedom. I think he's a remarkable fellow. The angriest I ever 
heard him on the floor of the Senate was when he was unsuccessful in 
filibustering the crime bill. He tried to kill it.
    The NRA was against it, said I was going to take everybody's guns 
away. And they said, ``If you put 100,000 police on the streets it 
wouldn't make a lick of difference--just as sort of a boondoggle.'' They 
attacked us for being for after-school programs for kids and preventive 
programs to keep kids out of trouble in the first place. But our crime 
bill was basically written out of the experience of police officers and 
prosecutors and community leaders who were in communities where they 
were already lowering the crime rate by doing what was in our bill.
    So we passed the bill with 100,000 police officers and with tougher 
punishment where appropriate, but with prevention measures and with the 
assault weapons ban. And 5 years later, we've had 5 years of steeply 
dropping crime, and the murder rate has dropped 22 percent in the last 3 
years in this country.
    Now, you know here in Denver--you've just been through it--the crime 
rate is still too high, and there's still too much violence in this 
country. But we're going in the right direction. And that happened 
because of a political choice the American people made, and they knew 
how to make it in part because they heard the messages of the competing 
candidates. There is a direct connection between your presence here and 
that decision. And we had a huge fight about it.
    In welfare, the same thing is true. I didn't mind letting the States 
set the level of assistance to people on welfare because they had been, 
in effect, doing that for 25 years anyway. Before I ever signed the 
welfare reform law, there was a difference of more than four to one--
more than four to one--between what a family on welfare could get in the 
State where the benefits were the lowest and the State where the 
benefits were the highest--three and half to one. I don't want to over-
exaggerate--[laughter]--three and a half to one. I just redid the math 
in my head.
    And I had no problem in requiring people who are on welfare who are 
able-bodied and able-minded to go to work. I thought that was important, 
because--we were talking around our table--half the welfare caseload was 
becoming people who were just permanently on welfare, almost, and 
sometimes intergenerationally. And that has nothing to do with 
compassion. You are not being compassionate when you leave people in a 
position of dependency when they don't have to be there.
    On the other hand, it's important, it seemed to me, when you require 
people who can work to work, not to ask them to hurt their children in 
doing it. After all, the biggest problem working families have today, 
many working families, is balancing the demand of taking care of their 
kids and taking care of their job. And I hear people even with very 
comfortable income levels, when they're honest, say they feel conflicts 
between their obligations to their children and their obligations at 
work. And I think that

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it's not an exaggeration to say the most important job that any society 
has, ever, is raising good, strong, ethical children. That is society's 
most important job. So why should we expect people on welfare to 
sacrifice the most important job of society to do what is the most 
important job, arguably, in the short run to give them the self-respect 
and the independence they need to contribute to our common welfare?
    So I vetoed two bills because they took away medical care and 
nutrition for kids and they didn't give enough money for child care and 
because I wanted more money to put people to work in high unemployment 
areas. Once we resolved those things, I signed that bill. And I think 
it's a good thing. And the results are clear: We had the biggest drop in 
welfare rolls in history, 3.8 million fewer people on welfare than the 
day I became President. So we're moving in the right direction.
    The environment: The air is cleaner; the water is purer; the food 
supply is safer; and there are fewer toxic waste dumps. And we proved 
you could grow the economy and improve the environment at the same time. 
Now we have to prove we can do that with greenhouse gas emissions to 
deal with the climate change issue. And it will be tougher, but it 
clearly can be done--clearly. There's no question, if you just look at 
the evidence, that we can do it.
    So what I want you to know is that every time you see something like 
that, that's good; that's a product of a choice because we had a fight 
about all those issues. We had an honest debate, a partisan debate about 
these issues. In this last year we passed a balanced budget agreement 
that had overwhelming bipartisan support, but there were elements that 
our side brought to it. We said, okay, we want to balance the budget, 
and we don't mind giving families the tax cut; we don't mind giving 
businesses the tax cut if we invest properly in giving all Americans 
access to college--we want tax breaks for that; we want to spend some 
money to provide health insurance coverage to the children of working 
families who don't have it.
    We've got enough money for 5 million more kids to get health 
insurance in working families with low incomes. That's half the 
uninsured kids in the country. And we got the biggest new investment in 
education since 1965. That was because of choices that we made in 
Washington that the people who were there wouldn't have been able to 
make if you hadn't helped us get there. There's a direct connection 
between your presence here and the things that are in that budget.
    And just this last week--let me just close with this--I had a week--
it was a killer of a week. And what you saw probably in the headlines 
was the work we were doing on Iraq, but let me tell you what else went 
on last week.
    We signed a bill that we worked on for 2 years to overhaul the way 
the Food and Drug Administration regulates medical devices, 
pharmaceuticals, and the foodstuffs they regulate--2 years. It passed by 
voice vote--everybody. But underneath that there were these incredible 
conflicts and rubbing up against--and debates and everything. And the 
way it came out, I believe the public interest is dramatically advanced, 
because if you've got a safe drug or if you've got a safe medical 
device, for goodness sakes, you want it on the market as quick as 
possible. So we had to strike all those balances. Well, the public 
interest side of that--a lot of that work over the last 2 years came 
from people that you helped to elect and from attitudes that you helped 
to advance.
    I signed a bill dramatically overhauling the foster care and 
adoption procedures and clearing away a lot of the obstacles to quicker 
adoption, even for children that have serious health problems. And my 
wife has worked on these subjects for 25 years. I have rarely seen her 
as happy as she was last week. [Laughter]
    And all these advocates from all over the country came in, and I met 
a family that had adopted 20 children, including 3 of them who were 
wheelchair-bound. And to see these people who care about these kids--you 
know, just last year we put in a $5,000 tax credit for adoption. But you 
need to know--we all talk about how we believe in family values--there 
are hundreds of thousands of kids out there that need a home that are 
trapped in a foster care system.
    And one of my staff members after it was over came up to me with 
tears in his eyes--

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the guy has nothing to do with the human services area--he came up to 
me, and he had tears in his eyes and said, ``I just want you to know 
that I spent 9 years of my childhood in one foster home after another. 
And this is going to change entire lives for people.''
    And then I went to Wichita, Kansas, to the Cessna plant and saw what 
that company is doing to take hardcore welfare recipients and put them 
through training programs and guarantee them jobs. And a lot of these 
women have been severely beaten by their spouses or partners, have no 
money, are high school dropouts. Cessna provides housing, a 3-month 
training program, a 3-month pre-job program, and a guaranteed job for 
anybody who can finish. And I saw people speaking--they had two of these 
women speaking. If you'd been told that 6 months ago they were on 
welfare and had less than a high school education, you wouldn't have 
believed it. You would have thought they were members of the Wichita 
City Council. [Laughter] And I expect they both could be if they put 
themselves up for election now. [Laughter]
    We announced--you saw yesterday, we announced that we're going to 
have the first permanent peace talks between North and South Korea, in 
the four-party context we proposed, since the end of the Korean war. 
We're working through a very difficult situation in Iraq, and I think in 
an appropriate way. And I know those things have dominated the news. But 
if you think about what happened in America for Americans this week, 
there were a couple of times when all of us just looked at each other 
and said, ``You know, this is what we got in public life to do. This is 
what makes all the other stuff worth it.''
    And what I want you to understand is, the decisions that are made--
and the way they're made--are made by real human beings who have real 
views and real convictions, in conflict with other real human beings who 
also have honest views.
    You know, I had a long talk with Senator Lott yesterday. I like 
Senator Lott. You know, we lived across the river from each other in our 
former lives, and it's nice having the Senate Majority Leader without an 
accent. [Laughter] We like each other. We understand each other. I had 
to give him 5 pounds of barbecue when Mississippi beat Arkansas in 
football. [Laughter] I like him. And he would tell you the same thing. 
We really look at the world differently. We see things differently. We 
have honest differences of opinion. And what Roy told you is true: 
That's what's kept this country going for 220 years.
    I believe history will record that at this moment in time our views 
were right and that we prepared the world--prepared America for a 
totally new world. But you've got to know that you helped to make it 
possible. And you should never let that sort of fashionable rhetoric 
demeaning the whole act of contributing to your democracy so people who 
believe what you do can hold up their side--that's there's something 
wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that.
    Tonight when you go home, you think about being at this lunch; you 
think about those adopted kids; you think about the people who are going 
to get drugs that will keep them alive; you think about those women that 
can now be going into the work force because their kids do have food and 
medicine and child care; you think about the doors of college being 
opened to everybody for the first time in the history of this country. 
You think about all that and be proud.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 1:42 p.m. in the Mansion at the Lawrence C. 
Phipps Memorial Conference Center-University of Denver.