[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 23 (Monday, June 8, 1998)]
[Pages 1021-1024]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Dallas, Texas

June 2, 1998

    Thank you very much. Thank you. First of all, Ray--can you hear me? 
I feel rather pathetic even needing a microphone after the last 
demonstration of music we had. [Laughter] Let me begin by saying that I 
know I speak for all of us when I say a profound word of thanks to Ray 
for welcoming us into his home and for bringing his art into this tent 
and bringing the wonderful music here. This has been a magnificent 
night, and I have loved it. I love the time you and your daughters took 
to show me through your home to see your art.
    Once many years ago, before I ever could have known I would be here 
and you would be here, we would be doing this, I visited you in your 
office, and you showed me some of your wonderful artwork. And I thank 
you for being a great citizen and for helping us by having us all here 
tonight. Thank you so much.
    I'd like to thank my good friend of many, many years, Roy Romer, for 
being here. He is not only the senior Governor in the United States but 
most people believe the best one. And it is our great good fortune to 
have him as our chair of the Democratic Party. I thank Len Barrack, who 
has come all the way from Philadelphia to be here, our finance chairman, 
tonight; Congressman Martin Frost; my friend of more than 25 years, 
Garry Mauro; Bill White; and all the cochairs. I thank you. And I'd like 
to say a special word of thanks to all the people who performed tonight. 
They were magnificent. And to you, my friend Denise Graves, thank you 
for being here. I wish I could stay in Fort Worth and hear your concert.
    You know, Ray was talking about the support that Hillary and I have 
tried to give to the arts. Tomorrow night I'm going back to Washington 
to have the annual PBS ``In Performance'' night at the White House. 
We've had all different kinds of music there. We've had jazz and blues 
and classical music. One year, we had women in country. Tomorrow night--
you can see this on educational television--tomorrow night we're having 
a gospel fest. And tomorrow night, unlike all the others, I actually 
picked some of the performers and some of the music. So if you don't 
like it, you can partially blame me as well.
    But I was thinking--and I saw all those wonderful performers who 
came from little towns in America, as they were introduced--I don't know 
if that wonderful man really did come from a town called Resume Speed, 
South Dakota, but it's a great story. [Laughter] And I intend to tell it 
as if it were true for the rest of the year. [Laughter]
    But anyway, I was thinking about what Ray said, about the support 
that Hillary and I have tried to give the arts. We're celebrating the 
millennium in 2000. It will be the last year of my Presidency. We have 
devised this great national endeavor called ``Honoring the Past and 
Imagining the Future,'' and among the things we're trying to do are to 
preserve the great treasures of our natural and national heritage, like 
the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence. 
We're trying to get record amounts of research into biomedical and other 
critical areas of research. And we're trying to preserve and elevate the 
role of the arts in our lives at the very time when many leaders in the 
other party still seem determined to de-fund the National Endowment for 
the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
    But I don't really want to talk about the funding issue tonight. I 
want to talk about what lies behind all this. Why do we get a thrill out 
of seeing some young man or woman stand up and sing as they sang 
tonight? What is it that moves us when we look at this art, when we walk 
out there among the magnificent pieces of sculpture? Why do we like it 
better when we feel elevated and when we feel sort of united by a common

[[Page 1022]]

bond of humanity that we feel coming back to us from a piece of artistic 
genius? Because we know that we feel more alive and we feel better about 
ourselves, better about other people, and better about life in general 
when we're feeling and being and reaching big, rather than when we're 
feeling and being and digging small.
    And if you think about a lot of what I have to do as President, a 
lot of what I try to do, what I really tried to do when I got here was 
to clean away a lot of the underbrush that was holding America back and 
to try to create the conditions and give people the tools to make the 
most of their own lives and to build good families and strong 
communities and make our Nation stronger and reach out to the rest of 
the world, so that we could be our better selves.
    And it may sound kind of corny and old-fashioned and Pollyanna, but 
I really believe that that's the secret of America's success, that we 
try to capture every day in some way in all the work we do and the way 
we live our lives, the way those performers made us feel tonight. And 
whenever we don't, we sort of disappoint ourselves, and we disappoint 
the rest of the world.
    So, to me, I'm very grateful that I had the chance to serve in these 
last 6 years. I'm grateful that we have the lowest unemployment rate in 
28 years and the lowest welfare rolls in 27 years and the lowest crime 
rate in 25 years, and we're going to have the first balanced budget and 
surplus in 29 years. And we've got the highest homeownership in history. 
I'm grateful for all that. But you've got to understand why I'm grateful 
for all that. I'm grateful for that because all that means, when you 
strip it all away, is that people are freer, and they have more capacity 
to live big lives instead of small ones, to be happy and to give 
happiness and to find fulfillment, instead of just clawing out a 
miserable existence in conflict with their fellow human beings.
    And that really, I think, is what our party has come to represent. 
All the things they used to say about us, ``Well, you can't trust the 
Democrats to run the economy or handle the welfare system or get the 
crime rate down or manage trade or foreign policy or national defense'' 
and all that--all that is gone now. And I'm grateful for that.
    But your presence here tonight will help us to take a message into 
this election season in 1998 about where we're going into the 21st 
century: What should our agenda be; what is the unfinished business of 
America; and maybe more important than anything else, what will be the 
dominant spirit that pervades the Nation's Capital and the Nation's 
public business?
    If you think about where we are and where we still have to go, we've 
still got a lot to do. Shoot, we haven't balanced the books in 30 years, 
and I've already got folks up there in Congress trying to spend money we 
don't have yet. I don't think we ought to spend a nickel of that surplus 
until we secure the Social Security system well into the 21st century so 
us baby boomers don't bankrupt our kids and our grandchildren. That's an 
important thing about the future that will enable us to be big. We're 
not going to feel very big when all the baby boomers retire and our kids 
have to pay money they can't afford to support us because we allowed the 
Social Security system to go bankrupt. So that's a big issue that will 
enable us to keep going in the right direction.
    I think we ought to keep working until we have not only the best 
system of college education in the world, which we already have, but the 
best system of elementary and high school education in the world. That's 
why I'm working for all the smaller classes and the higher standards and 
the computers for all the kids, and all those things--because the world 
we live in imposes a heavy penalty on people who cannot learn for a 
lifetime and gives a rich reward for those who can.
    Those of you in Texas have had a very personal experience in the 
last few weeks with all the residue from the fires in Mexico coming over 
the skies here. Believe me, it is just a sign of more to come unless we 
face the fact that the 5 warmest years since 1400 have occurred in the 
1990's. All those people that tell you global warming and climate change 
is some big ruse are not right. We are putting more greenhouse gases 
into the atmosphere than it can absorb without heating up the planet. 
We're going to have more extreme events which will manifest itself and 
more

[[Page 1023]]

extreme weather conditions, heat and cold and rain and sleet and snow, 
and more fires in places where they're vulnerable.
    We've got to find a way to use American ingenuity and technological 
advances to prove we can live in closer harmony with the environment and 
still keep growing the economy. I know we can do that. I believe in the 
possibility of America, but it's a big part of our challenge. As I said 
in Houston earlier today, parenthetically, it's also good for people who 
are in the natural gas business in Texas. But I say it when I'm other 
places as well. We have to prove we can do this.
    We have to prove that we can maintain the world's best health system 
and make it available to everybody, and not let managed care be more 
than it should be, which is managing care. We shouldn't take the care 
out of managed care. That's why we're for this Patients' Bill of Rights. 
That's why I think people that lose their health insurance who are older 
ought to be able to buy into Medicare.
    But all these things--all the specifics are not as important to me 
as the big issue. I'm just trying to do what I think is necessary to 
take this country into the 21st century with the American dream alive 
for everybody, with our leadership in the world for peace and freedom 
and prosperity unquestioned, and with the country coming together 
instead of being divided.
    Look at the foreign policy issues, for example, that it's been my 
responsibility to deal with as your President in the last few days. Let 
me just give you a few of them, just in the last 30 days. I went to 
Geneva, Switzerland, to talk about the trading system we need for the 
21st century. Some of my fellow Democrats think we don't need to expand 
trade anymore. I think we need to expand it faster. There are 4 percent 
of the population in America with 20 percent of the income. You don't 
have to be a genius to figure out we've got to sell something to the 
other 96 percent of the people if we're going to maintain our standard 
of living. But we have to do it in a way that helps other people with 
their lives as well.
    Then I went to Birmingham, where we worried about the economic 
crisis in Indonesia and the political crisis there, and we've been 
working on the economic challenges that Russia is facing.
    I recently came back from Africa, where I went to Rwanda, and we're 
trying to help them deal with the aftermath of 800,000 people killed in 
tribal murders, and building up the good things that are going on in 
Africa at the same time.
    And of course, the number one problem--and I could mention many 
others--I've been for the last month heavily involved in trying to get 
the Middle East peace talks back on track. We were involved happily in a 
success in Ireland, where the people voted for peace there, which I'm 
very proud of. And for the last couple of weeks, I've spent more time 
than anything else on the tensions between India and Pakistan that were 
manifested in the nuclear testing by both countries.
    But if you back away from all the specifics again and you look at 
the general problem, what is it? Why did these nuclear tests occur? 
Because, two things: One, the two nations felt insecure as compared with 
each other, and for India against China, there wasn't enough trust 
there; and secondly, they felt they had to define themselves as big in a 
way that I think is fundamentally negative. I don't think they're more 
secure now than they were when they set off those nuclear tests. And I 
think whenever we try to define ourselves as big in a way that's 
negative, by putting somebody else down or separating ourselves from 
others, we inevitably pay a price.
    One of the reasons I've worked so hard for the last year on this One 
America Race Initiative, to try to get people together across all the 
lines that divide us, is I actually believe the increasing diversity of 
America is in a fundamental way our meal ticket to the future in a world 
that's smaller and smaller and smaller, where there are--I don't know--
more than a million people a day being added to the Internet, all these 
home pages coming on now at rapid rates, a hundred million users now. It 
will be 200 million by the end of the year around the world. There were 
only 50 Web sites 6 years ago when I became President--only 50.
    In a world that's coming together like that, a country that is both 
free and economically successful, that has people from everywhere living 
there, from all walks of life and all

[[Page 1024]]

kinds of religious and ethnic and racial backgrounds, where things 
aren't perfect, but where we get along and we're driven by values that 
say we're going to be big, not little; we're going to be united, not 
divided; we're going to try to let people's spirits flow and unleash 
them; and we're not going to be small and mean and petty; and we're not 
going to be caught in the same trap with the people we're trying to help 
by dividing our power by negative ways, or defining our power in 
negative ways. That is very important.
    And if you really look at all of it, if you go back to the point Ray 
made, the position we've taken on the role of arts in American life, the 
importance of pursuing and preserving the National Endowment for Arts 
and the National Endowment for the Humanities is nothing more than a 
metaphor for the differences in the two parties approach to national 
politics today.
    Our approach to the future is optimistic. It's united, and it's big. 
It believes the heart is as important as the mind and that it's 
important that we go forward together. And we believe that America can 
only lead the world toward peace and freedom and prosperity if we are a 
worthy example.
    So I'm grateful that the approach we started back in '93 has worked 
as well as it has. I'm grateful for all the support all of you have 
given to me and to our party, and I'm grateful for your presence here 
tonight. But in some ways, the biggest battles are yet to be fought, 
because sometimes when people enjoy a great deal of success, it makes 
them downright dumb. How many of us--haven't all of you been--had at 
least a moment of being downright dumb when you were really successful? 
Is there a person who is here who can say with a straight face you never 
had one moment of stupidity in the aftermath of some success you enjoy? 
Nobody can say that.
    So what are we going to do with our success? Are we going to get 
bigger and bolder and better? I want us to feel as a country the way we 
felt in this wonderful setting tonight when those great American young 
people were singing. America should be singing. We've got a lot to be 
grateful for and a lot to do. And thanks to you, our party has more than 
an average chance now to be successful in doing our part.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:30 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to dinner host Ray Nasher; and Gov. Roy Romer of 
Colorado, general chair, and Leonard Barrack, national finance chair, 
Democratic National Committee. A tape was not available for verification 
of the content of these remarks.