[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 29 (Monday, July 20, 1998)]
[Pages 1398-1402]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Jefferson Trust Dinner      
in Chevy Chase, Maryland

July 16, 1998

    The President. Thank you very much, Alan, for all the wonderful work 
you've done. And I thank all the members of the Jefferson Trust. I want 
to thank Steve Grossman and Carol Pensky and Len Barrack. I want to 
especially thank Cynthia Friedman for having us in her beautiful home 
and for--[applause]--and for giving us the opportunity to meet your 
family. Thank you very much.
    I want to thank one of our distinguished former chairmen, Chuck 
Mannet, who also led this party in a very difficult time, for being 
here, and to say to all of you--I kept trying to think what could I say 
to all of you tonight who have had to endure so many of my speeches. 
[Laughter]
    Audience member. We love them! [Laughter]
    The President. I think alternative A is just to do it all over 
again. [Laughter] I once--when I was a younger man, or as Hillary and I 
refer to it, back when we had a life--[laughter]--Tina Turner gave a 
concert in Little Rock one night. And she--you know, Tina Turner went 
into a big decline and disappeared and then made this remarkable 
resurgence and is now still enormously popular around the world. But 
anyway, she came to Little Rock to the place where we had our concerts. 
And I took about six people to the concert. And the guy that normally 
seated me when I was Governor, knowing that it was not prudent for the 
Governor to be on the front row at a rock concert, always put me back 
about 15 rows but gave me good seats. But he knew I was especially fond 
of Tina Turner, and so on this night he put me on the front row.
    And I never will forget this concert. She sang all these new songs, 
and she had all of her new musicians. And then at the end, the band 
began to play ``Proud Mary,'' which was her first hit. And every time 
she walked up to the microphone the crowd would scream. So she'd back 
off and walk up, back off and walk up. Finally she said, ``You know, I 
have been singing this song for 25 years, but it gets better every time 
I do it.'' [Laughter] So I could do that. [Laughter]
    Instead, I think I'd like to just make a couple points tonight about 
this. First, it's almost impossible to remember just what a miserable 
condition we were in as a party after we had won the first two 
Presidential elections back-to-back since Franklin Roosevelt. And there 
was an almost bitter determination to try to bring to an end our ability 
to function, notwithstanding the fact that we had been, as compared with 
others, far more open and up front, helpful, and forthcoming

[[Page 1399]]

in trying to deal with the campaign finance questions which were asked. 
And a number of lionhearted women and men decided that we would not die, 
and we did not. And you know what the announcement was about our debt 
being paid down to $3 million from a staggering sum less than 2 years 
ago.
    So you have done a very great thing, and I hope you will always be 
proud of it. But I think it's important to remember that what you've 
done is basically to give America a chance to keep moving forward. You 
know, I've had a number of interesting experiences in the last few days 
that have really hammered home to me the incredible opportunity the 
American people, with your help, have given me to serve at this pivotal 
moment in our history.
    I had quite a magnificent trip to China. But being given the 
opportunity to debate political liberty and human rights, the role of 
dissent in society, the role of religious freedom in a society, on 
Chinese television, directly to the people of China for the first time 
in history--and I'm not sure I was even aware of the magnitude of it 
until it was all over, because I was concentrating so hard on not 
messing up for you--[laughter]--but it was--when it was over, I thought 
to myself, this is what America can be for people in the 21st century. 
We can help lift people's material conditions but also to change the way 
they think about the nature of life, the nature of their relations with 
their neighbors, and the nature of their relations with the rest of the 
world.
    Today the President of Romania came to see me, and he gave me this 
incredible picture. I was in Romania almost a year ago today--just a 
little more than a year ago--and there were somewhere between 150,000 
and 200,000 people in the streets in Bucharest--this vast sea of people. 
They didn't come to see me. They came to see the United States, what 
they think we can represent to the world and to the future.
    A couple of days ago, Hillary and I kicked off this Millennium 
Project she conceived and is executing--some of you are helping on--to 
save the Star-Spangled Banner. And I--we said the Pledge of Allegiance 
with a class of kids--just one class of about 20 school kids. And there 
were people from at least eight different racial and ethnic backgrounds 
there in this one little class--a real picture of our future.
    Today Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle spoke passionately in favor of 
the Patients' Bill of Rights at a big caucus meeting of the Democrats in 
the Congress, but we invited Republicans to come. And two were brave 
enough to show. [Laughter] One of them, Greg Ganske, is a Congressman 
from Iowa, and I wish he were a member of our caucus. But I want to tell 
you what happened.
    We were talking about the--the Republicans have offered this 
alternative patients' bill of rights which, oh, by the way, doesn't 
cover about 100 million Americans and doesn't give anybody any of the 
substantive guarantees, and if you get shafted by your HMO, you don't 
have any right to appeal to anybody, so the bill doesn't do anything 
really.
    But this doctor--this brave Republican doctor who is in the 
Congress, who's a cosponsor with John Dingell of the House version of 
the bill we're supporting, got up and said--he was introduced by Dick 
Gephardt--and said that when he wasn't an active Member of Congress, he 
gave of his free time to go to Central America, because he was a plastic 
surgeon, to deal with children with cleft palates.
    So Dr.--Congressman Ganske got up there, in a crowd in which he was 
one of only two Republican Congressmen, and he had a staff person 
there--he said, ``I want you to look at this picture.'' And the staff 
member held up this huge picture of this little boy with a horrible, 
unfixed cleft palate. And the crowd gasped. And he said, ``This is not 
an Indian child from Central America; this is an American citizen. And 
this young boy was denied the surgery necessary to fix this cleft palate 
by a company that said it was `cosmetic' and not covered by the 
insurance policy.''
    And then he showed the next picture of a young boy with his face 
fixed anyway. And he was this beautiful, bright-eyed, young boy, smile--
I mean, it was unbelievable. You could not breathe in that room.
     And I say that to make the point that we invited all of the 
Republicans in Congress who wanted to come today because our party is 
trying to advance the cause of America. 

[[Page 1400]]

We belong to a party not so that we can beat up on the other party; we 
belong to a party because we think it offers us the best vehicle to do 
what we think is right for our country. And I was very proud to be there 
with just those two House Members--the other was Congressman Forbes from 
Long Island. But we kept the door open to everybody, and more important, 
we tried to lift the sights of the country.
    Hillary spoke at Saratoga Springs to 20,000 people today on the 
150th anniversary of the dawn of the women's movement, in this 
remarkable tour they've had around the Northeast trying to save our 
national treasures. They went to George Washington's headquarters in the 
Revolutionary War, something which, unbelievably to me, has never been 
adequately protected. It was the first military shrine of America, 
arguably.
    So I say all of this just to give you little pieces of the picture 
that my life is every day with the job that the American people have 
given me. And what I believe so strongly is that our party has always 
had a mission of being the instrument of progress.
    Thomas Jefferson--this is the Jefferson Trust, so I got this little 
quote I thought you might be interested--Thomas Jefferson said, ``The 
ground of liberty must be gained by inches, for it takes time to 
persuade men to do even what is in their own interest.'' And goodness 
knows we've had examples of that in the last 6 years. But what I want 
you to think about on the eve of this '98 election is, since the Civil 
War, it has been unfailingly true that the party of the President loses 
seats in the midterm election if the President is in his second term. In 
the first term it has only failed to happen two or three times. We are 
going to change that if we continue to put progress ahead of 
partisanship, people ahead of politics, unity ahead of division, and we 
have good ideas for America's future.
    Because all over the world there are people who are looking to us, 
and in this country there are people looking to us to have a genuine 
sense of direction. People are smart enough to know that you'll never 
solve all the problems of any country at any time; that endemic to human 
nature is the prospect of 
failure; that times change. What people want to know is, what is the 
direction we are taking? And I'll just remind you that in 1992 we ran a 
campaign that was the most specific, detailed campaign, literally, in 
American history, where a candidate for President said, these are the 
ideas on which I am running; these are the policies I will implement. 
And a distinguished scholar of the Presidency said, as of 1995--and that 
was 3 years ago--we had already kept more of our campaign promises than 
the last five Presidents. And now almost everything we've--almost 
everything--we've pledged to do in '92 has been done.

    And what I want you to do now is to talk to your friends and 
neighbors and to help us to continue to get the message out that, yes, 
we won two elections, and, yes, I helped the President, but we represent 
a certain set of ideas. We believed that you could balance the budget 
and still invest in the people of this country. We believed you can 
protect the environment and still grow the economy. We believed you 
could require able-bodied people on welfare to go to work without 
hurting their children and taking food and medicine away from them, and 
without undermining the ability of people who move from welfare to work 
to be good parents. We believed that you could be tough on people who 
violate the law and should be punished, and still recognize that we'll 
never solve the problem until we keep more kids out of trouble in the 
first place.

    Boston didn't go 2 years without a single kid being killed by a gun 
by jailing all the people who might have done it. They did it by having 
the most aggressive, systematic, people-oriented prevention strategy in 
the United States.

    We had different ideas. We believed that we could pursue America's 
commercial interest in the world in a way that was consistent with both 
our national security and our advancement of human rights and freedom. 
In other words, we believed that a lot of the debates that had dominated 
Washington for the last 20 to 30 years were not relevant to the 21st 
century.

[[Page 1401]]

    In education, we believed that you could be for preserving public 
education and putting more money into programs and still lifting 
standards and having more accountability. We thought all these 
dichotomies that tend to dominate the easy language of politics were 
essentially not relevant to the way people wanted to live and the 
America we wanted to build for the 21st century.
    And the consequences have been indisputable. It was not just that we 
had the right people; we were doing the right things. That's what we 
have to convince the American people of now. If it takes time to 
persuade people to do what is in their own interests, if the ground of 
liberty has to be gained in inches, then it is not enough for my 
leadership to have been ratified in two national elections. We have to 
persuade people not just that we had the right people but that we did 
the right things; that there is a connection between what is happening 
in America and what was done in Washington; that it cannot be by 
accident that we have the lowest crime rate in 25 years and the lowest 
unemployment rate in 28 years and the lowest welfare rolls in 29 years 
and the first balanced budget in 29 years and the lowest inflation rate 
in 32 years and the highest homeownership in history and the fact that 
we've opened the doors to college to everybody now who's willing to work 
for a college education and added 5 million children to the ranks of 
those with health insurance and kept a quarter of a million people with 
criminal backgrounds from getting handguns. And we have cleaner water, 
cleaner air, safer food, and we set aside more land in national trust 
than any administration except those of the two Roosevelts. And we did 
it all while giving people the smallest Government we've had in 35 
years.
    Those things did not occur by accident. The ideas were right. And if 
we can get that message over here, and furthermore, if we can say, look, 
in spite of all this, all we've really done is make America work again, 
now it's time to face the big challenges of the 21st century--fixing 
Social Security and Medicare so the baby boomers have something to 
retire on without bankrupting our children and our grandchildren; 
proving we can meet the challenge of global warming, which now, I take 
almost nobody takes issue with--you look at the way Florida has--Florida 
had the wettest winter, the driest spring, in history. And then June in 
Florida was the hottest month in Florida's history, hotter than any July 
or August in history. The 5 hottest years since 1400 have all been in 
the 1990's; 1997 was the hottest year ever recorded; 1998 is going to be 
hotter unless it changes dramatically. We have to prove that we can come 
to grips with this responsibly, lead other countries to do so, and still 
grow our economy.
    I spoke to the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, not exactly 
a liberal Democratic stronghold, right? [Laughter] The American Chamber 
of Commerce in Shanghai--I got two rounds of applause, spontaneous--one 
of them was when I said, you have got to take a leadership role in 
convincing the Chinese to grow their economy with different energy 
patterns that we used; otherwise, they're going to choke off their 
future and destroy their environment and ruin the health of their people 
and make it impossible for us to meet the challenge of climate change. 
All these conservative business people started applauding. Why? Because 
they know it's true.
    We have to prove that we can bring the spirit of enterprise to the 
urban communities, the rural communities, and the Native American 
reservations that still haven't felt this economic recovery. We've never 
done that--not really. And if we can't do it when we've got the lowest 
unemployment rate in 28 years, we'll never get around to it.
    We have to prove that we're serious about health care reform and 
pass this Patients' Bill of Rights. We have to prove that we're serious 
about making our elementary and secondary education the world's best, 
just as our higher education is now. We have to prove we're serious 
about building one America. And we have to prove that we're serious 
about engaging the rest of the world to take it where we want to go. 
That's why--even though I got all those attacks about going to China, it 
never once crossed my mind to cancel the trip. I didn't care if I only 
had 10 percent support for it, because I knew it was the right thing to 
do for America.
    So we can beat the odds in this congressional election, and we can 
do just fine in

[[Page 1402]]

2000--if we deserve it. And what we have to do is to sort of cut through 
all the continuous fog and incoming fire and all this partisan stuff 
that happens and say, ``We didn't just have the right people; we did the 
right things.'' Our ideas are good--point one. Point two: ``We're not 
tired; we're just getting warmed up. We still have big challenges out 
there, and we want you to join us in facing those challenges.''
    We've got to make your investment good. You saved the Democratic 
Party, and our adversaries thought they were going to destroy it. They 
thought they had a moment in which they could absolutely try to reverse 
the results of the last election, and in the process, destroy the 
Democratic Party, and you said, ``I don't think so.''
    It is a very great thing you have done, and you should be very proud 
of that. But you did not do it for the purpose--as much fun as we're 
having--of being here with me. [Laughter] You did it so we could 
continue to move this country forward.
    So go out there and tell them that: We did the right things. We've 
got good ideas. You now have the evidence; come with us. Secondly, we 
have an agenda for the future: put people over politics, put progress 
over partisanship, put the unity of country over division, think about 
your grandchildren in the 21st century. That is the message of the 
Democratic Party. You've made it possible for us to take it out there. 
Now let's go out and do it.
    Thank you. God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:45 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to Alan D. Solomont, former national finance chair, 
Steve Grossman, national chair, Carol Pensky, treasurer, and Leonard 
Barrack, national finance chair, Democratic National Committee; and 
Cynthia Friedman, national cochair, Women's Leadership Forum.