[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 44 (Monday, November 2, 1998)]
[Pages 2120-2124]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Reception for Congressional Candidate Janice Hahn in Los 
Angeles, California

October 24, 1998

    Thank you very much, Roz. I want to begin, I think, by thanking all 
of you for the raincheck. I'm sorry that I couldn't be here on time, but 
I'm glad the delay had a happy result.
    I want you to see something. See these--normally, when I give a 
speech I do it from notes like this, which I can't even read now that my 
eyes are--[laughter]--and then before I give a speech, they give me 
notes like this. And on the last day of the peace talks in Maryland--or 
however many days it was--until I went to bed last night, I was up for 
39 hours, constantly. I didn't even do that in college. [Laughter] And 
so before I got off the plane, even though I did get a little

[[Page 2121]]

nap before I came out and a decent night's sleep last night, my staff 
gave me these notes and they said, ``Read this side. Read this side. We 
were so afraid you're so sleepy that you won't know what you're saying, 
and you might get up and say something you actually think and get us all 
in trouble.'' [Laughter]
    And I might say, Roz, right before I got out of the car, I had a 
talk with Hillary, and she said to tell you hello, and she's sorry she's 
not here. And she told me to read these notes, too. [Laughter] But I 
don't think I will. [Laughter]
    I want to begin by saying that the main reason I wanted to come here 
today is that Janice Hahn is a very important person. I've known Roz 
Wyman for years, long before I ever even thought of running for 
President. And this is the first time I've ever been invited to this 
house. [Laughter] So I'm delighted to be here. And if I had been here, I 
would have watched ``The Godfather'' the first time. [Laughter] But I 
also might have watched it the second and third time.
    I want to thank Congresswoman Maxine Waters and her husband, 
Ambassador Sidney Williams, for being here; and Kathleen Connell, your 
State controller; and my longtime friend Nate Holden, thank you for 
coming. I want to say a special word of appreciation to Jane Harman for 
doing a great job in Congress. We've had 6 wonderful years together.
    In many of the same ways, we represented what we hoped would be a 
new direction for our country and one that would bring our party to many 
years of majority in America. And she did a magnificent job for her 
congressional district. She destroyed a lot of gender stereotypes by 
becoming one of the great experts on defense in the United States 
Congress. She destroyed a lot of stereotypes about Democrats by proving 
that we could, first of all, reduce the deficit 93 percent without any 
help from the other party and then supporting our efforts which produced 
this marvelous balanced budget and surplus. And in so many other ways, 
she really embodied what I think is the best of public service, and I 
thank her for it very much.
    I also want to thank Janice Hahn for simply making this race. The 
Congress needs more people who have been teachers, who have served the 
public in different ways, who have worked with gang alternative 
programs, and worked with groups like the Boys and Girls Clubs in Watts, 
who know all the faces of America.
    I tell all the time that people in Congress, just because they may 
represent the dominant face at a moment in time, the thing that makes a 
democracy resilient and effective is when all of the faces of America 
are seen and all the voices are heard and all the needs are addressed.
    And so I just appreciate the fact that she was willing to make this 
race. And when I couldn't get her on the phone the day the filing 
closed, I thought, well, there is one of two things going on: she's 
either out doing what it takes to file, or she's hiding from me and all 
the other people that are harassing her to run. [Laughter] And I'm glad 
it was the former.
    I also want to thank her for giving the speech she gave here today 
and reminding you of what this election is all about. And I'd like to 
just take a couple of minutes to put this in some larger context.
    What we saw in the last couple of days in this flowering of this 
peace process under the most difficult circumstances imaginable--the 
heroic periodic intervention by King Hussein, grappling with his own 
serious illness, and reminding Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chairman 
Arafat and all the other people there, including a lot of people who 
have been involved in the wars that the Israelis and the Arab peoples of 
the Middle East have fought with each other--reminding them what the 
purpose of life is all about represents in my view in a larger sense 
what ought to be the mission of America and the mission of public 
service.
    And in 1992, when I ran for President, and California was undergoing 
such great economic turmoil and you'd had the riots in L.A. and all the 
other things that were going on, I think the overriding reason I wanted 
to do it is that it seemed to me that Washington and the politics of 
Washington was nowhere near the politics that we saw unfold over the 
last week at the Middle East peace talks. That it was much more about 
winning victories over opponents than it was winning victories for the 
American people. It was

[[Page 2122]]

much more about rhetoric than reality. It was much more about 
partisanship than progress.
    And for 6 years I have labored to try to create a 21st century 
America in which every person would have an opportunity if he or she 
were willing to work for it, in which we would become reconciled to 
ourselves with all of our diversity as a stronger American community, 
and in which we would reassert after the cold war a positive role in the 
world for peace and freedom and prosperity for others as well as for 
ourselves. And I think we are well down that road.
    I am grateful for the successes of the economy, for the healing of 
the social fabric, for the opportunities I have had to try to do these 
things. I am grateful that in this last session of Congress, because the 
Democrats, though in the minority, stood strong, stood together, we were 
able to win the fight to keep the surplus from being squandered on a tax 
cut and, instead, it will be saved to address the Social Security reform 
we have to make early next year; that we got the funding to put 100,000 
teachers in our schools, which will enable us to bring class sizes in 
the early grades down to an average of 18; that we got funds that 
Senator Boxer fought so hard for for after-school programs for a quarter 
of a million more children in this country, to try to give them 
something good to do after school. I am grateful for all of that.
    I am grateful that we beat off all the most serious assaults on the 
environment and passed our clean water initiative, which is designed to 
address the fact that for all of our progress, 40 percent of our rivers 
and lakes are still not fit for swimming or fishing. I am grateful for 
the fact the we passed our whole community empowerment initiative in 
housing and more empowerment zones, more facilities like the $400-
million Community Development Bank that was established here in Los 
Angeles.
    I am very grateful that in this last year we have been a force for 
peace in Bosnia, with free elections in Kosovo, where I hope--it's too 
soon to say--but I hope we've headed off another Bosnia; the advances in 
Ireland, and, of course, this great breakthrough in the Middle East. 
We're not out of the woods yet. The agreement still has to be 
implemented. And I hope that in Israel the people and the members of his 
political coalition will support Prime Minister Netanyahu, who took 
significant risk, given the nature of his political support, to sign an 
agreement that will clearly increase the security of the people of 
Israel, even as it gives more land and more economic opportunity to the 
Palestinians.
    To me, this is what politics is all about. And in a larger sense, 
that's what this election is all about. This is the 21st century 
Congress you're electing. And the real issue here is whether this 
election will be controlled by agenda or by apathy and financial 
advantage.
    We have the agenda. I believe, in spite of the fact that the last 
Congress wouldn't do it, that most Americans believe we ought to have 
the National Government providing incentives to build or repair 5,000 
schools. We've got more kids than we've ever had in school.
    And you wouldn't believe the number of places I've been. I've been 
to a small town in Florida where one grade school had 12 trailers out 
behind it housing children. I've been in classrooms in magnificent old 
school buildings in our big cities on the East Coast, in Philadelphia, 
where the average school building is 65 years old. That's the bad news. 
The good news is you couldn't begin to afford to build a school like 
most of those schools are today. But it's wrong when the windows are 
broken, whole floors are shut down, spaces have to be boarded up, and 
the light doesn't come in because people can't afford to maintain them 
and repair them. This is a big issue.
    You heard Janice tell her own story about the patient's problems 
with HMO's. I can say, I have what I think is a reasonable position on 
this. I believe when I became President that we need better management 
in the health care system because inflation was going up in health care 
at 3 times the overall rate of inflation. And eventually it was going to 
consume the whole economy, but no management technique can ever be 
permitted to overwhelm the purpose for which the enterprise was 
established in the first place. And I don't care whether you're selling 
food or automobiles or health care or whatever you're selling--
management techniques are designed to enable the most efficient way of

[[Page 2123]]

providing the quality of product or service that you're in business to 
do in the first place.
    And I'm deeply disappointed that the HMO lobby essentially persuaded 
the members of the other party to defeat the Patients' Bill of Rights, 
which would have said, addressing just this, that every person in an HMO 
ought to have a right to have medical decisions made by a doctor, not by 
an accountant; that if your doctor says you should see a specialist, you 
should be able to see one; that if you get hurt, you ought to go to the 
nearest emergency room, not one all across town because it happens to be 
covered by your plan; that medical records ought to be kept private and 
that if your health care provider is changed by your employer while 
you're pregnant or while you're getting chemotherapy or while you're in 
the middle of any other treatment, you ought to be able to complete the 
treatment before you're forced to change your physician.
    These are elemental, basic, fair things. It would be a modest, but a 
very modest, increase in cost in these plans, to give peace of mind and 
dignity and, in many cases, lifesaving care to Americans all across this 
country. I think these things are worth fighting for.
    I think it's worth fighting for saving Social Security for the 21st 
century. The next Congress will have to do two things. It will have to, 
one more time, beat off a raid on the surplus. Just because we saved it 
once doesn't mean we won't have to deal with it again. Then it will have 
to decide how to reform Social Security so that we can still take care 
of the basic social mission. Today, one-half of the seniors in this 
country would be in poverty but for Social Security. And when all of us 
baby boomers retire, most of them won't have the kind of pension I'll 
have.
    Now, most people have sources of income other than Social Security, 
and I'm doing everything I can to try to make it easier for people to 
take out different kinds of retirement plans, do more saving on their 
own, and build up a decent lifestyle. But in the end, we still need that 
bedrock protection so that none of our seniors have to live in abject 
poverty.
    And if we don't deal with it now, we'll have one of two choices. If 
we just sort of put it off, take this golden moment of prosperity where 
we have a surplus and just squander it, then a few years from now we'll 
have a few more economic hard times, there will always be some excuse 
not to do it. If we don't deal with it now, and we wait for the roof to 
cave in, then we'll have one of two choices: Either we will lower the 
standard of living of our seniors in a way that we'll be ashamed of, or 
we will lower the standard of living of our children and their ability 
to raise our grandchildren because it will take a whopping tax increase 
to maintain the system. Now is the time to deal with this.
    So if you think about the great challenges of America--if you think 
about the health care challenge, if you think about the education 
challenge, if you think about the Social Security challenge, if you 
think about the need that this Congress passed up under pressure from 
the tobacco companies to pass legislation to protect our children from 
the dangers of tobacco, still the number one public health problem in 
the country--they passed up a chance to pass the campaign finance 
reform, even though we had a bill that had some Republican supporters as 
well; they've passed up a chance to raise the minimum wage, even though 
you can't raise a family on $5.15 an hour, and we'll never have an 
easier time when the unemployment rate and the inflation rate are both 
so low--there is a lot to do.
    So again I say to you, what do we have to worry about? We have to 
worry about, first of all, getting this message out. That's why your 
presence here is important. Because in the last 2 weeks, according to 
what my staff tells me, our side will be outspent by their side roughly 
three to one, when you account for all the third party ads and the 
interest group ads and all these things that will come out there in all 
the races that are in play.
    The second thing we have to do is to convince people that this 
election is as important as the Presidential election. No one questions 
this assertion. No one questions the fact that our party would do very, 
very well in these elections if it were a Presidential year, because we 
have the issues, because we have the momentum, because the country is 
doing well. Even with a financial disadvantage, we would do well.

[[Page 2124]]

    But in off years, normally a lot of our folks don't vote--working 
women who have to deal with the hassles of child care and a job every 
day, so we vote on a work day still in America, so that's one more thing 
to worry about; minorities and low income people who live in cities that 
may not have adequate transportation, and it's enough trouble to get a 
bus to go to work, and then you've got to figure out how you're going to 
get to the polling place. There are objective reasons why these things 
happen. But if the people you know believe it matters, if they 
understand--I can tell you, every single vote in Congress matters--every 
single seat in the House, every single seat in the Senate. If the people 
know that, then Senator Boxer and Gray Davis and Janice Hahn will be 
elected on November 3rd with strong margins.
    So I just ask you to think about, when you leave here and you ask 
yourself, ``Why did I go there?''--[laughter]--was it worth the money, 
hassling the traffic, whatever else you went through to get here, you 
just think about this: We're still around here after 220 years, as the 
greatest democracy in history, because most of the time most of the 
people make the right decision. So what's at stake in this election is 
your ability to persuade most of the people to show up.
    So thank you for coming here, and thank you for giving your money, 
but you're not off the hook. [Laughter] Because every one of you, you 
have people you work with, people you socialize with, people you worship 
with, people you know, that you if you ask them, will be more likely to 
be there--to be there.
    And so, you were so kind when you stood and clapped when the 
references were made earlier to the work I did in this peace process. I 
don't need any applause. It was my obligation, and it was an honor, and 
it was a joy, even the meanest and toughest parts of it. But what you 
liked about it is what you should feel about public life and political 
work every day. What you liked about it was you knew that we were not 
there struggling so that Netanyahu could win a victory over Arafat, or 
Arafat could win a victory over Netanyahu, or they could win any 
victories over any of the other players there. They were there saying, 
we want to win a victory for the people we represent, for our common 
humanity. That's what that was all about.
    And everybody knows it, which is why we feel elevated when something 
like this happens--that we--it gives us new energy and new hope, and it 
reminds us of what counts. And I'm telling you, it will be just as true 
on election day as it is now.
    And there will be votes that Janice Hahn will count in Congress--
cast in Congress--you will never know about because you just can't keep 
up with all of them. But more often than you can ever imagine, she will 
be called upon to reaffirm not a victory over some opponent, but a 
victory for the people she represents.
    And she deserves, and you need, the voice of every person heard. 
That is true in Senator Boxer's race. It's true in Gray Davis' race. 
California has got to set a standard for America, and the best way to do 
it is with a record turnout on election day.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 5:10 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to reception host Roz Wyman; Nate Holden, Los 
Angeles City Council member; King Hussein I of Jordan; Prime Minister 
Binyamin Netanyahu of Israel; Chairman Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian 
Authority; and California gubernatorial candidate Lt. Gov. Gray Davis. 
Janice Hahn is a candidate for California's 36th Congressional District.