[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 8 (Monday, March 1, 1999)]
[Pages 278-283]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the Democratic Governors' Association Dinner

February 22, 1999

    Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the warm 
welcome. I

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thank Governor O'Bannon for his kind introduction. I thank him and 
Governor Patton for their leadership of the Democratic Governors. I am 
delighted that all of them are here tonight, and I want to pay a special 
compliment to Tom Carper for his leadership for the National Governors' 
Association this year. And I might add, a special compliment to all the 
Democratic Governors who showed up here in Washington with an agenda for 
the NGA to put the children of this country first and put education on 
the front burner and not let it get mired in the partisan politics. They 
deserve an enormous amount of credit, and I thank them.
    I want to thank Katie Whelan, Jennifer Rokala, Mark Weiner for their 
work for the DGA. And I'd like to thank the leaders of our national 
party who are here tonight: Governor Romer, Mayor Archer, Congresswoman 
Sanchez, and Joe Andrew--whom we stole from Indiana, thank you very 
much. I thank the Members of Congress who are here: Senator Akaka, 
Senator Bayh, Senator Dodd, Congresswoman Mink, Congressman Hoyer, and 
goodness knows who else is here; former Democratic Chairman Don Fowler 
and all the former Governors who are here: Governor Waihee, Governor 
Miller of Nevada, Governor Bayh--a two-for.
    Let me also say one other thing by way of introduction. I am 
profoundly grateful to the NGA for putting together, courtesy of my good 
friend Frank Greer, that magnificent film on Lawton Chiles, one of the 
best, ablest people I ever knew, and I thank you for that.
    When Rutherford B. Hayes became Governor of Ohio, he described his 
position in this way: ``Not too much hard work, plenty of time to read, 
good society, et cetera.'' Hasn't changed much, has it? [Laughter] After 
he became President he said, ``I am heartily tired of this life of 
bondage, responsibility, and toil.'' Well, I don't think he was right 
about either job. And I'm proud of the work you do and grateful for the 
role that all of you played in giving me a chance to serve you as 
President. It is not bondage or toil, although it is responsibility.
    Nearly everybody who has had this job has written something like 
that. And it makes you wonder if they complain about it so much why they 
work so hard to get it. There is no place on Earth, I think, as 
President Kennedy once said, where a person is called upon to reach deep 
into what you believe and what you think should be done, and then given 
the opportunity to marshal the resources of the country to move forward. 
But I think it is clear to all of you who have worked with me in the 
past that much of the success that this country has enjoyed, that we 
were a part of--and I certainly don't claim responsibility for all of 
it--but whatever success we have been able to enjoy in this 
administration is in no small measure the result of the fact that I had 
a chance to serve as a Governor for a dozen years. And I thank the 
people of my State for giving me that chance and all the Governors who 
worked with me.
    In 1992 we said that we were bringing a new Democratic philosophy to 
the country. All it really meant was that we were going to bring 
Democratic ideals of opportunity for all, and a community of all 
Americans, and the Governors way of work--putting new ideas over old 
ideology and putting people over old-fashioned Washington politics. It 
turned out to be a pretty good theory.
    All of you know that we've gone from a record deficit to a record 
surplus, that we have the longest peacetime expansion in history, the 
lowest peacetime unemployment rate since 1957, now the lowest 
unemployment rate of any industrial country in the entire world. We have 
opened the doors of college to all Americans who are willing to work for 
it, provided immunizations for over 90 percent of our children for the 
first time in history. We're in the process, with your help, of 
providing health insurance to 5 million of the 10 million children in 
America who don't have it. Our country is working again and for that, 
and for the role all of you have played in it--not only the Governors 
and their staffs who are here but all the others who are here, from the 
labor organizations and the education groups and the business groups--I 
am profoundly grateful.
    What I would like to just take a couple of minutes to talk to you 
about tonight is the urgency of the Governors being involved in dealing 
now with the great long-term challenges of this country. The easiest 
thing to do when things are going well is to say, ``We

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worked hard to get here; let's take a break.'' I might say that every 
time our country has done this--you go back through the whole history of 
America--every time we have done this, it has gotten us into trouble. 
And we can ill afford to do it now when the world is changing so fast 
and when even amidst our own prosperity, as all of you know, there is a 
lot of trouble around the world. Virtually all of Asia is in recession. 
Our neighbors in Latin America, our fastest-growing markets, all have 
had their economic growth dramatically reduced because of the global 
financial trouble. There are a lot of threats to our security lurking 
out there in nooks and crannies of discord the world over.
    And I asked the American people in the State of the Union, and I ask 
the Governors here tonight, to join me in making the most of this 
opportunity that we have, because of our prosperity and equally because 
of our national confidence, to look at the long-term challenges of the 
21st century. We have a chance to guarantee for the next several decades 
that these challenges we know about now can at least be met. No one can 
foresee for sure what will happen 10 or 20 or 30 years from now, but we 
know that if we deal with the problems that we know are out there now, 
if we seize the challenges we know are out there now, that our 
successors will have an easier path and our country will do a better job 
with more of its children.
    We have to deal with the aging of America. There will be twice as 
many people over 65 in 2030 as there are now, and I hope I'm still one 
of them. You know, a lot of people go around wringing their hands about 
the problems with Social Security and Medicare. This is a high-class 
problem. We have this problem because we're living longer and staying 
healthier. The fastest growing group of Americans in percentage terms 
are people over 80. So I have asked the Congress to set aside 77 percent 
of this projected surplus for 15 years to save Social Security and 
Medicare and to improve them.
    If we do that, we will also be able to pay down the national debt so 
that in 15 years, instead of half our annual income, which is what it 
was when I took office, it will be 7 percent of our annual income. 
That's the smallest percentage it has been since 1917, before this 
country entered World War I. Instead of spending 14 cents on your tax 
dollar to pay interest on the debt, which is what we were paying in 
1993, we'll be spending 2 cents. And if future Congresses have the 
discipline to stay on this track, we could actually be a debt-free 
nation in 19 years. Just think of it and what it would mean for our 
children.
    We can save Social Security. We can do something about the 
inordinate rate of women on Social Security who are still living in 
poverty. We can lift the earnings limit that now is imposed on people on 
Social Security, which I think is a mistake, since we have more and more 
older people who are healthy, who are strong, and who want to work. We 
can add 20 years to the life of Medicare and add a prescription drug 
benefit with some significant, but doable, reforms if we will have the 
discipline to set aside 77 percent of this surplus. That leaves us 
plenty of money to have tax cuts. I think we should have them dedicated 
to helping middle class people save for their own retirement, to have 
more investment in education, and to pay for our military needs. We can 
do all of that.
    Now, the easy thing to do--we'll say, ``Well, we've got this 
surplus, we waited 30 years for it, let's just give it away. It will be 
popular.'' There are a lot of Americans who could use all the money now. 
But it would be a mistake. And believe me, if you look at all this 
turmoil around the world--and the Governors that are going on the trade 
missions, that are seeking foreign investment, that want to do more 
business, you understand this. I don't know--and I'll say more about 
this in a minute--I don't know whether the United States can rectify a 
lot of these problems in the global economy in the next couple of years; 
I'm going to do everything I can to get that done. But I know this: If 
we have the debt going down, we'll keep interest rates down and 
investment high; if things go wrong overseas, they will be better than 
they otherwise would have been; and if things turn around overseas, our 
boom will be greater than it otherwise would have been if we have the 
discipline to do this. And I implore you to help me.
    The Governors--Democrat and Republican alike--complained for years 
and years

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that everybody in Washington talked about balancing the budget, and no 
one ever did anything about it. And after I got here and I saw all the 
blood that was on the floor after the '93 economic plan, I understood 
why nobody did anything about it. Dick Riley, my Education Secretary, 
another of our former colleagues, used to always tell me after that, 
when I'd be moping around, he'd say, ``Just remember my old saying: 
`let's change; you go first.' '' [Laughter] But we're here now, and we 
don't want to turn around. We want to keep going.
    You know we have to do something about the children and families in 
21st century America. We have more kids in our schools--they have more 
diverse backgrounds; more of them come from parents who don't speak 
English, or whose first language is not English--than ever before. A lot 
of them are going to school in trailers, or in school buildings so old 
they can't even be hooked up to the Internet. I thank you for your 
support of our agenda to help you hire more teachers, to help you build 
or modernize schools. I ask you to continue to support our efforts to 
raise the standards. Governor Carper had the right slogan for this 
year's Governors' meeting: raising student achievement. We ought to end 
social promotion, but help the kids with after-school programs and 
summer school programs. We ought to turn around the failing schools. We 
ought to give the parents the report cards. We ought to do what it takes 
for educational excellence.
    We also ought to do more to help working families afford quality 
child care. One of the great ironies is when we fought very hard for 
welfare reform--the Democratic Governors stood with me in insisting that 
we get billions of dollars in that welfare reform bill for child care--
that we keep the guarantee of medical care and nutrition for the kids. 
The welfare rolls have dropped by nearly 50 percent. The people that are 
left are harder to place. We can't just let them be thrown into the 
streets. So a lot of you are using your surplus funds to put more money 
into child care and more money into training. It is an irony that a lot 
of people who have never been on welfare, but who have young children, 
cannot afford their child care needs.
    In our balanced budget this year, we have a comprehensive program 
that will allow millions of children to have comprehensive child care 
while their parents go to work. And succeeding at home and work ought to 
be America's family mission for the 21st century. I ask you for your 
support for that. And for our efforts to expand the family leave law, to 
raise the minimum wage, to pass the Patients' Bill of Rights, to do more 
to support equal pay for equal work--a bigger and bigger issue among 
working husbands, as well as working women--all these things need to be 
done if we are going to have the proper balance between work and family, 
so that our parents can do their job if our schools do theirs.
    We have to build the right quality of life for the 21st century. We 
talked a lot at the Governors' meeting today about the livability agenda 
that I put forward with the leadership of the Vice President, Carol 
Browner, Rodney Slater, Dan Glickman, to try to help our communities 
manage their traffic problems, their toxic problems, their need for more 
green space with no Federal mandates, and a lot of empowerment. I hope 
you will help me pass that.
    And finally, as the Governors get more and more and more involved in 
the global economy--and you've been leading us that way for 25 years 
now--I hope you will help me in my continuing effort to convince the 
Congress and the country that there is no longer a clear dividing line 
between our interest beyond our borders and our interest within our 
borders. I'll just give you one example.
    I want to keep this economic expansion going. I am convinced that to 
do it we have to have more economic growth at home and more economic 
growth abroad. Governor Patton invited me to Kentucky's Appalachian 
region to push my America new markets initiative--tax credits and loan 
guarantees to get people to invest in the high unemployment areas of 
America. Mayor Archer here, in Detroit, got one of our first enterprise 
zones, and the unemployment rate in Detroit is now one-half of what it 
was in 1993. Detroit's unemployment rate is about at the national 
average. We can do that in rural areas and urban communities all over 
America.

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    And then we have to reach out beyond our borders to create a 
financial system and a trading system that works for ordinary people in 
the 21st century; to have labor standards, environmental standards and 
more open markets; to make it possible for money to go into places, but 
to make honest loans and open loans and protect against these wild 
fluctuations that have not only hurt overseas countries, but have hurt 
American farmers, have hurt our companies like Boeing and have been a 
killer for the steel industry. We have got to put a human face on the 
global economy, but we cannot run away from it. The Governors know that.
    And I ask you to help to build a national consensus for that 
approach--not for running away, but not for saying, ``Well, we'll just 
open things up and forget about how it affects ordinary people.'' In the 
end, the test of all of our efforts as Democrats is, are people out 
there in the country who never come to a fundraiser, but get up every 
day and work their hearts out and raise their kids and do everything 
they're supposed to do, are they going to be better off if this policy 
prevails? That is the heart and soul of what drives our party. And if we 
can deal with the aging of 21st century America, the challenges of 
children and family in 21st century America, the challenges of our 
environment in 21st century America, the security challenges of 21st 
century America, we're going to do just fine.
    We can only do that if we deal with one last challenge, which I 
believe today more than any other thing, is the distinguishing 
difference between the two parties. And that is, we believe that 21st 
century America must be one America, united, indivisible, with liberty 
and justice for all.
    Every night for the last several nights, I have made a call to the 
Secretary of State, who is over in France trying to broker a peace 
agreement in Kosovo, trying to avoid another horrible ethnic slaughter 
in a country right next door to Bosnia. And you know what we went 
through there. Every week I try a little harder to use the time I have 
remaining to get a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. In the 
last several weeks, I have exerted what efforts I could, so far without 
success, to avoid a brutal, murderous conflict between Ethiopia and 
Eritrea, to minimize the other tribal wars in Africa.
    Now, after years of work, we've hit another snag in the peace 
process in Northern Ireland, and we are doing our best to try to get by 
this last, tough thing. All you have to do is to read the papers to know 
that there are continuing tensions between India and Pakistan, between 
Greece and Turkey, that have old, deep, ethnic, and religious roots. All 
over the world, in the so-called modern world, ancient animosities are 
driving people to the point of war, and are keeping people down, 
ordinary people, in other countries--the kind of folks we try to 
represent here--cannot build a normal life because their leaders are 
determined to continue conflicts based on racial, religious, or ethnic 
lines.
    And it's why we have to guard so hard against that sort of thing 
here at home. We think we're doing great now, and we can indulge 
ourselves in conflicts that we know better than to pursue, that is 
wrong. And we have to honestly say the great test of our democracy, in 
the end, is whether in good times and bad, America not only tries to do 
good abroad but to be good at home. In the end, we will be judged by 
that. We have to be a country where we all serve together, which is why 
I've worked so hard for AmeriCorps. We have to be a country where we're 
pushing back constantly the frontiers of discrimination, which is why I 
have supported so strongly the ``Employment Non-Discrimination Act.''
    And we have to be a country that relishes our racial, our ethnic, 
our cultural diversity, and says we celebrate all this, but we know that 
underneath what God gave us all in common--in spite of all of our 
differences--is more important; that the framers of our Constitution so 
long ago were pretty smart when they talked about the inalienable rights 
given to every human being. And if we recognize that, then we ought to 
be able to find a way to live together.
    I have done everything I know to do for 6 years to move us toward 
that one America. Should we have differences; should we have arguments; 
should we have elections; should we have discussions? Of course we 
should. But when you leave here tonight, if you don't

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remember another thing I said, you just remember this: No country throws 
away its common values and common humanity, even for an instant, without 
paying a price. And every night--every night--I thank God that we have 
the chance to be a force for peace from Northern Ireland to the Middle 
East to Kosovo to Africa. I ask for the opportunity every night to make 
one stab to work out the problems between Greece and Turkey on Cyprus, 
to try to bring India and Pakistan closer together. And I thank God 
every night that we have not been cut apart by those things.
    But America is growing more and more diverse. One of our new 
Governors here, Governor Davis, while he is Governor--while he is 
Governor--may preside over a State that has no majority race. Now, this 
is a good thing in the world of the 21st century if--but only if--
America not only preaches our doctrine to people abroad but lives by it 
at home. The Democratic Party in the 1990's has constantly been for 
opportunity, for change, and for community.
    I like to joke that at the end of the 20th century, looking back on 
over 200 years of American history, our party leaves this century and 
enters the next as not only the party of Jefferson and Jackson and 
Franklin Roosevelt but also now the party of Abraham Lincoln and 
Theodore Roosevelt. And I am very proud of it. I want you to stay proud 
of it. And I want us to live by it.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 8:58 p.m. at the National Building Museum. 
In his remarks, he referred to Governors Frank O'Bannon of Indiana, DGA 
chair, Paul E. Patton of Kentucky, DGA vice chair, Tom Carper of 
Delaware, Gray Davis of California; former Governors John Waihee of 
Hawaii, Bob Miller of Nevada, Evan Bayh of Indiana, and Roy Romer of 
Colorado, general chair, Democratic National Committee; Katie Whelan, 
executive director, Jennifer Rokala, national finance director, and Mark 
Weiner, treasurer, Democratic Governors' Association; Mayor Dennis W. 
Archer of Detroit, MI; Joseph J. Andrew, national chair-designate, and 
Donald L. Fowler, former national chair, Democratic National Committee; 
and media consultant Frank Greer.