[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 12 (Monday, March 23, 1998)]
[Pages 469-472]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Dinner

March 19, 1998

    Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to begin by thanking 
all of you, not only for your warm welcome in this magnificent Women's 
Museum, which I always love to visit and which is a real treasure of our 
National Capital, but for being here to support the Senators who are 
here and those whom we hope to add to their ranks.
    I thank Senator Torricelli not only for his friendship and his kind 
words but for his fighting spirit. He has the heart of a lion. And when 
others feel weak, he feels stronger, and we are stronger because of what 
Bob Torricelli has done. And I thank him.
    I thank Senator Kerrey, my longtime friend. We used to be Governors 
together, and we used to lament the condition of our country in the 
eighties, and the escalating deficits and what we saw as the 
irresponsibility of decisionmaking here. Bob Kerrey did cast the 
deciding vote on that budget bill, and I thank him for that. But in a 
real sense, so did all the other Democrats, because we didn't have a 
single Republican vote. And Al Gore even had to vote. And as he says, 
``Whenever I vote, we win.'' [Laughter]
    But imagine how different the last 6 years would have been--5 years 
and 3 months--if we hadn't done that. And I want to thank Senator Kerrey 
for being willing to do this job for 2 years. It's not easy. It's easy 
to give the speeches. You know, he just asked me to show up every now 
and then at these events and smile and take a few pictures, see people I 
enjoy visiting with anyway, and give a talk. But he's had to go across 
the country and do all the work and see all of you and ask you to help. 
And it's often a thankless task. And when he took it, it was certainly a 
thankless task because we were down and our numbers were depleted. But 
he took it on, and I predict a stunning and historically unpredicted 
result in November of 1998. And you will have a lot to do with it, 
Senator Kerrey. We thank you very much.
    Finally, I want to say that it would be impossible for me to do my 
job if it weren't for Tom Daschle. He is a magnificent leader of our 
Democrats in the Senate. Yes, let's stand up for him. [Applause]
    I want to talk very briefly about what I believe to be at stake. 
First, just a little picture on the past. It is wonderful to stand up 
and say that these are good times for America, that we have the lowest 
unemployment rate in 24 years and the lowest crime rate in 24 years and 
the smallest welfare population in 27 years and the lowest inflation in 
30 years and the highest homeownership in history. That's wonderful to 
say. But we forget how hard it was to do.
    Before the Balanced Budget Act ever saved a dollar, the deficit had 
been reduced by 92 percent because of the votes solely of Democratic 
Members of Congress in 1993. The crime rate is down in part because we 
moved beyond the hot rhetoric of tough talk

[[Page 470]]

to put 100,000 more community police officers on the street, to give our 
children something positive to do in their leisure hours, and to take 
assault weapons off the street. And many of our people gave up their 
jobs on those two votes.
    And so I say to you, I am proud to be a member of my party, and I'm 
proud of every Senator and every Congressman who cast those votes. And 
the people who lost their jobs because they did it can at least go to 
sleep tonight knowing that this is a better, stronger, safer country 
because they were in the Democratic caucus, and they did what was right 
when the chips were down. And I'm grateful to them.
    After a year of real, harsh partisan fighting back and forth in 
which the majority party in the Congress today shut the Government down, 
and we didn't shut down--and so the ``Contract With America'' was 
abandoned, and we moved on to bipartisan cooperation.
    We passed a balanced budget bill. That bill did a lot to keep our 
recovery going, and I thank every Republican who supported it. But that 
bill had the biggest increase in child health care since 1965. It will 
add 5 million people--children--to the ranks of those with health 
insurance. It had the largest increase in aid to education since 1965. 
It opened the doors of college to all Americans by giving a $1,500 tax 
credit for the first 2 years of college; further tax credits; education 
IRA's; 300,000 work-study positions; finally, tax deductibility for the 
interest on student loans. Those education provisions and those health 
care provisions--you know who put them in the Balanced Budget Act: the 
Democrats in the United States Senate and in the United States House of 
Representatives. And I thank them for it.
    And more importantly, I ask you to look to the future. We have a lot 
of challenging decisions. Senator Kerrey said we've got an ambitious 
agenda; we do. We now have virtual consensus in Washington that before 
we spend a surplus that hasn't even materialized, we should save Social 
Security for the 21st century and not allow the baby boomers to bankrupt 
their children or to live in abject poverty because we failed to do it. 
It was because of the unanimous support of the Democrats in the Senate 
and in the House for that position that it is now the position of the 
entire United States Government. And that's another thing that the 
future will be able to thank Tom Daschle and all the other members of 
this caucus who are here tonight for, and I thank them for it.
    We also have to save Medicare. We're going to have an election this 
year, and we're going to have a report at the end of the year to deal 
with Medicare changes and Social Security changes. Who do you trust to 
make those changes for the 21st century? Think about that when you think 
about how much support you're going to give Senator Patty Murray, for 
example. I think it's clear what the answer is: the Democratic Party.
    We're in the middle--we have some money now, finally, at long last. 
And I have asked the Congress to put the money primarily into education 
and into research for the 21st century, to medical research and 
scientific research; but in education, to go down to a class size all 
across America that averages 18 kids a class in the first 3 grades, to 
rehabilitate 5,000 schools, and hire 100,000 more teachers.
    In the Senate, the majority party voted to cut $400 million this 
year out of education. We don't agree with that. We think that the 
American people should be heard on that. And we believe they will agree 
with Tom Daschle and the members of the Democratic caucus and the people 
who will be running in the Senate elections this November. That's 
important. We need to stand up for that.
    I could give you the same argument on the environment. You know as 
well as I do that the environment will be a more important issue 10 
years from now than it is today. You know it will be. Who is more likely 
to stand up for responsible action that will permit us to preserve our 
environment, indeed to enhance it, as we continue to grow the economy?
    You just go through these issues. Child care: Most American parents 
are in the work force, and I promise you that hundreds of thousands, 
even millions of them, go to work every day worried sick that their 
children do not have access to quality, affordable child care. We have a 
proposal to address that, to increase the child care tax credit for 
middle class families, to increase the support we give

[[Page 471]]

to lower income working families. That support, today at least, is not 
supported; that program is not supported by the majority party in the 
Senate.
    I believe the American people agree with us, and every single Senate 
election will be a referendum on whether we really believe it when we 
say that parenting is our most important job, and everybody ought to be 
able to succeed at home and at work at the same time.
    Let me close with a story. Beyond all the policies, there really is 
a question of whether we are committed to putting the interests of all 
our people first. Yesterday I went out to Las Vegas to meet with the 
executive committee of the AFL-CIO. But before I did that, I went to 
this wonderful training program that the carpenters union runs out there 
for people who are basically entry-level carpenters, trying to give them 
higher levels of skill. And in addition to the on-site, on-the-job 
training, they also have classroom time in which they try to make sure 
that all the working people understand what their health insurance is 
and how it works, what their retirement plan is and how it works, and 
how it all fits in and how they can manage their own finances better.
    So I met with all these people; most of them I'd say were between 28 
and 35 years old, very young by my standards. And the first question 
was, in this class--this young man said, ``Well, I see I've got a good 
retirement, but have you people in the Government done what you should 
to protect it?'' And I was able to proudly say that in 1994, when we 
were still in the majority, we passed a plan to reform the Pension 
Benefit Guaranty Corporation; we saved 8\1/2\ million pensions that were 
underwater; we stabilized 40 million more. And yes, we had done 
everything we responsibly could to protect the integrity of the pension 
systems of the country.
    Then the next young man said--and this is what made me so proud of 
all these young people and proud to be a member of my party--the next 
young guy said, ``Look up there at all of our fringe benefits, because 
we belong to the union and because we're working here in a State and a 
city with low unemployment and a lot of prosperity.'' He said, ``Do you 
realize there are people who do what we do for a living who don't make 
as much per hour as we get in fringe benefits?'' He said, ``Mr. 
President, how are those people living? I think they ought to have 
health care, too. How are they going to save for their retirement? How 
are they going to educate their children?''
    And all of a sudden, all these other people, all these young people 
started saying, ``Yes, we think in Washington you ought to be looking 
out for those people. You ought to be doing everything you can to make 
sure that anybody that's working as hard as we are, whether they are in 
a union, whether they make the kind of money we make, or not, at least 
have the basic things they need to succeed in raising their children and 
educating them, and having a chance to own a home and succeed and live 
the American dream.'' And I thought to myself, this country is in pretty 
good hands. These people were there, grateful for their prosperity, but 
thinking about others.
    This country has always done best at every time of change and 
challenge when we've tried to do three things. I say this over and over 
again, but I want you to think about this: When you go home tonight, ask 
yourself why you came here, and ``Bob Torricelli made me'' or ``Bob 
Kerrey made me'' is not an acceptable answer. [Laughter] Now, you ought 
to try this; try this on for size: Go home tonight and before you go to 
bed--I'm dead serious--I'm dead serious--go home tonight and ask 
yourself, why did I go to that dinner tonight? And get out a piece of 
paper and a pen and write down an answer. Imagine you went home and one 
of your children asked you, ``Why did you go there,'' and you had to 
give an answer.
    This country has met every challenge of the last 220 years because 
at every time of challenge and change we've done three things: We have 
widened the circle of opportunity; we have deepened the meaning of 
freedom and extended it to more people; and we have strengthened the 
bonds of our Union.
    We are moving into an age where the volume of knowledge is doubling 
every 5 years, a global society where we're drawing closer to people 
around the world and where all of our neighbors are more than ever 
likely

[[Page 472]]

to be from all around the world. We have to learn to live in ways that 
we never imagined, with people we couldn't have possibly understood just 
a few years ago. But what we have to do is what we've always had to do, 
widen the circle of opportunity, deepen the meaning of freedom, 
strengthen the bonds of our Union.
    And when you go home tonight, you think about that. And you ask 
yourself, which party is more likely to do that. I rest my case.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:48 p.m. at the National Museum of Women 
in the Arts. In his remarks, he referred to Senator J. Robert Kerrey, 
chair, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.