[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 12 (Monday, March 29, 1999)]
[Pages 506-511]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner

March 23, 1998

    The President. Thank you so much. I want to thank, first of all, Joe 
Andrew and Beth Dozoretz, and all the people with the Democratic Party 
for their work. But especially I want to thank Tom and Chris for having 
us here tonight. When I drove up in the backyard and I was walking up 
through the kitchen, which is bigger than my first house--[laughter]--
Tom and I have been friends a long time, and I saw Tom, I said, ``Tom, I 
have one question.'' I said ``You really want to do something great for 
the Democrats?'' He said, ``Sure.'' I said, ``Don't let any incumbent 
Member of Congress come to your house. They'll all quit.'' [Laughter] He 
wouldn't give me that commitment. [Laughter]
    It's a beautiful home. It's a warm atmosphere, and I know that we 
all thank Tom and Chris for having us here. I'd also like to thank the 
people who prepared and served our food, and the wonderful musicians who 
entertained us before. Their songs were better than mine will be. But 
they're out there. Thank you very much for the music. You were great. 
Thank you. [Applause]
    I want to thank you for your contributions, for your support for our 
party tonight. I would like to begin with a brief retrospective. In 1992 
I ran for President because I wanted to change the direction of national 
politics, because I felt that there was a lot of rhetoric and not very 
much action being generated in Washington. And I thought the two parties 
were like locked gears, locked into sort of a rhetorical argument that 
just kept repeating itself over and over and over again, without 
allowing us ever to actually deal with something like the debts that 
are--deal with what national policy on education ought to be or deal 
with what national environmental policy ought to be or deal with what 
national health care policy ought to be.
    And the people were kind enough to elect me President in '92. And 
then in '94, when we got beat in the congressional races, I thought they 
were saying they really didn't mean it, after all. [Laughter] Part of 
the reason we took such a licking is that we tried to break the mold. We 
tried to pass a deficit reduction plan which raised taxes on 1\1/2\ 
percent of the people that had the highest incomes--cut taxes, as Tom 
said, through the earned-income tax credit on the 15 percent of the 
people with the lowest incomes who were working for a living, so we 
could say nobody who works 40 hours a week and has a child in the house 
would be in poverty. And we cut a lot of spending.
    And the economy had not turned around enough. And the Republicans 
offered their Contract With America. By 1996, thanks to the recovery of 
the economy, the passage of the crime bill, the family leave law, the 
Brady bill, a lot of the other things that were done, and a lot of the 
other initiatives in the administration, the efforts we made for peace 
from the Middle East to Bosnia to Northern Ireland, the country felt 
pretty good about itself, and we were given another term.
    In 1998, under circumstances which appeared on the surface to be 
exceedingly difficult, in an election in which our party was

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outspent by more than $100 million, our party's candidates for the House 
of Representatives picked up seats in the sixth year of a President's 
term for the first time since 1822. And we had no losses in the Senate 
when, just 3 weeks before, most experts thought we would lose between 
four and six seats.
    Now, what I would like to say is--about that is, I believe that 
selection in 1998 came out the way it did and the one in '96 came out 
the way it did and the one in '92 came out the way it did, because we 
ran on Democratic values and new ideas, because we ran on our 
willingness to be held accountable for results, and because we tried to 
build new coalitions and asked people to think about the future and not 
the past.
    And what I want to say to you tonight is, I--first of all, I am 
profoundly grateful for your generosity and your support. But I also ask 
you to bring to the Vice President and me and our administration, to Joe 
Andrew and Roy Romer and Beth, and all the members of the Democratic 
Party the benefit of whatever you know that you think would help us do a 
better job serving America, because we'll win more elections if people 
think we're standing for the right things and they think we deliver.
    I told any number of people that I was convinced that the real 
reason we won in '98 was not so much a reaction against the Republicans; 
it was that there was a reaction, coupled with the fact that we said, 
``Hey, vote for us; our policies are working; and if you vote for us, we 
will keep the economy going, save Social Security and Medicare before we 
squander the surplus, pass a Patients' Bill of Rights, and modernize our 
schools and give you smaller classes.'' We had an agenda. People could 
remember what we stood for, and it resonated out there. And it was not 
the same things that people had been saying year-in and year-out.
    Therefore, I say to you tonight, the reason I ask for your help and 
your ideas is I think it is quite important that we make every effort to 
produce. I try--the closer I get to the end of my term, the less time I 
try to spend talking about what we have done and the more time I try to 
spend talking about what we ought to do. We still have about 25 percent 
of the time that this administration has been given by the American 
people, almost half of a full Presidential term. And I think it is 
absolutely imperative that we take advantage of this enormous prosperity 
that we have been blessed with, with the first surplus we've had in 30 
years now 2 years in a row and say, ``Hey, we're a year from a new 
century and a new millennium, and we're living and working and relating 
to each other in a very different way now. We need to deal with the 
great unmet challenges that are before us.''
    And there are many. And I won't--I don't want to give you a policy 
speech tonight, but I just would say this. I think we owe it to the 
American people to make the reforms necessary to save Social Security 
and Medicare for the 21st century. I think we also owe it to the 
American people to set aside a significant portion of the surplus, about 
three-quarters of it, to fund those programs along with the reforms and 
to pay down the debt at the same time.
    Now, a lot of you have followed this Social Security and Medicare 
debate. Let me just say this: There is not a single expert I have talked 
to who seriously believes that we can reform Medicare and keep it going 
without putting more money in it, because we're living longer and older 
people use more medicine. The only way to fix Social Security when there 
are only two people working for every one person drawing, you either 
have to cut benefits, put more money in the program, or raise the rate 
of return on the money you've got in the program.
    To do everything we want to do, we might have to have an amalgam of 
that. But first and foremost, before we raise the payroll tax, which is 
already too high, I think we ought to take some of this surplus, pay 
down the debt, and do it in a way that obligates that money as it 
repeats itself to go into--to pay for Social Security obligations in the 
out-years. We still have to make some changes. It's important.
    Let me also say to you, if we use the money--if we set it aside for 
Social Security and Medicare and pay down the debt, we can, in 15 years, 
have the lowest debt we've had since World War I, since the beginning of 
World War I. Now, a lot of you are in international business. I'm doing 
my best to

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fix the international financial system. I'm going to do my best to do 
whatever I can to bring the Asian countries back, to help Russia restart 
its economy, to keep Latin America from being totally afflicted by what 
happened in Asia. I'm going to do my best.
    But whatever happens, we need to make America as strong as possible. 
If we were to pay down the debt over the next 15 years, if we would go 
from spending 13 cents of every tax dollar you spend on debt service 
down to 2 cents, we would have lower interest rates, higher investment, 
more jobs, lower car payments, lower college loan payments, lower home 
mortgage payments, lower credit card payments, higher incomes. 
Simultaneously, we would be freeing up that money to be borrowed by 
others in other parts of the world, at lower interest rates. And they 
need the money. And their incomes would rise in a way that would permit 
them to buy more of what we have to sell.
    And I cannot tell you how important I think it is for the Democratic 
Party that gave the people of this country Social Security, that gave 
the people of this country Medicare, and now has brought this country 
back to fiscal sanity, to say, ``Hey, we can fix Social Security and 
Medicare for the 21st century and do it in a way that dramatically 
increases the prosperity of the American people for the next 20 years.'' 
And we have no excuse for not doing it, unless our friends in the other 
party stop us. We should be focused on getting these big things done. 
And I want you to help us.
    I also believe we have a very ambitious education agenda, that I 
think also goes beyond another choice. People--I used to hear this 
debate all the time. Every time I'd come to Washington, my friends in 
the Democratic Party back in the eighties would always want to help me 
with more Federal aid to education. And then the Republicans that I knew 
would always say they would want to be for higher standards, back then; 
they've abandoned that now, unfortunately. I hate that, but they have if 
you look at the debates.
    But anyway, they were for higher standards back then. But they would 
say it's not a money problem. And as I've said many times, one of 
Clinton's laws of politics is whenever you hear somebody stand up and 
tell you it's not a money problem, they're talking about somebody else's 
problem. [Laughter] That's a lecture we like to give to other people; we 
never look in the mirror and say it's not a money problem.
    And our approach is to increase our investment in education. We 
nearly doubled the investment of the Federal Government in education in 
the 5 years that we were balancing the budget. We were cutting other 
things enough to dramatically increase it. So we should have smaller 
classes. We ought to hire 100,000 teachers. We ought to have modernized 
school buildings. We ought to have Internet access for every classroom 
in the country. But we also ought to stop giving money away without 
saying, ``Look, here are basic standards that we know work every place 
they've been tried. End social promotion, but don't brand the children 
failures----

[At this point, a cell phone rang in the audience.]

    The President. ----and don't give every kid a cell phone.'' 
[Laughter] Don't be--I'm just glad it didn't happen to me. [Laughter] 
This is--I was just really trying to see if you all were paying 
attention. [Laughter]
    This is a big deal. The United States Government has never been for 
both approaches. We have never done both at the same time. We've had 
periods where we really thought we were coming out for education reform. 
Then we've had periods where we knew we had real needs, and we provided 
funds. We've never been serious about saying, ``We're going to raise the 
standards. We're going to judge results. We expect children to learn. 
We're tried of patronizing poor kids and saying they can't learn, but 
we're not going to brand them failures. We're going to have more after-
school programs. We're going to have more mentoring programs. We're 
going to have more summer school programs. We're going to give them the 
chances they need.''
    This is a huge deal. No serious person believes that America has an 
adequate system of elementary and secondary education for every child in 
this country. And as we get more and more diverse, it will become more 
and more important that we do that. Every

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one of you know about the additions to economic value that all people 
have when they have a better education.
    So this is a big issue. We've got the best system of higher 
education in the world. It's open. We've now made it pretty much 
affordable for everybody, with the tax credits, the HOPE scholarships, 
the student loans, the work-study programs, the AmeriCorps program. Now 
we've got to spend 2 years really doing some things. And I'm telling 
you, it won't be popular. There are people who are going to scream to 
high heaven when I--we've got to reauthorize the $15 billion we're 
spending on schools. And they'll say, ``Okay, we'll give it to you again 
next year, but we would like you to show some results to keep getting it 
or at least get caught trying.'' And I don't mean to denigrate--most 
people do a good job. But the people that do a good job don't need it 
one way or the other. What we want to do is to make sure we take what 
works and replicate it throughout the country.
    Any person who's ever spent any serious time working on education 
reform will tell you two things. One is that every challenge in American 
education has been met superbly by somebody somewhere. Two is, we are 
not very good at replicating what works. Most of you who have been in 
entrepreneurial, competitive environments would quickly go broke if 
somebody did what you were doing better and you didn't figure out how to 
at least meet the competition. We do not do that. And we have to find a 
way to do it. And I think I've given some good ideas here.
    Let me just mention one last issue. I think that we have convinced 
the American people that we can bring the benefits of free enterprise to 
people who have not previously enjoyed it. You have poverty rates going 
down. You have the lowest unemployment rates among minorities ever 
recorded in this country. We finally have wages going up.
    But we should be under no illusion that everybody in America has 
participated in this recovery. It is simply not true. In almost every 
big city in the country, there are huge census tracts--big blocks of 
areas where there has been no new investment. There are rural areas 
where the unemployment rates are still quite high. And because of the 
financial crisis overseas and a few other factors, our farmers are 
facing the worst financial crisis they've had in 20 years, at a time 
when we've got this record low unemployment.
    And I have asked the Congress to pass a series of tax credits and 
loan guarantees which would give incentives to people like a lot of you 
in this room, like take Mr. Titelman here from Philadelphia, to go to 
the--let's say there's a big section of Philadelphia that hasn't had any 
new investment in a long time and if it can qualify--kind of like the 
empowerment zone program that the Vice President is already doing such a 
good job of running the last several years. But let's suppose you could 
get a $300 million investment in a place like that. If this bill passes 
there would be a 25 percent tax credit on the first $100 million for the 
investment. And the next two-thirds of the investment would be subject 
to getting a loan guarantee, just like American investment in designated 
foreign countries is today. It just seems to me that it is elemental 
good sense to set up the same sort of financial incentive structure for 
people to invest in underdeveloped markets and people in the United 
States that we give our American investors to invest overseas.
    And I hope this has great appeal to the Republicans, because it 
gives us a real chance. You just think about it. Think about how many 
places in this country you could say, ``If we raise $300 million and we 
invest it in place X in a viable-going concern that meets all the 
criteria for getting credit, we only have $75 million at risk.'' That's 
not a bad deal. That's not a bad deal.
    If we can't take a few chances to develop the rest of America now, 
when will we ever get around to it? The unemployment rate in New York 
City is still too high--the unemployment rate in a lot of rural 
communities, not just out in the South and the Mississippi Delta or in 
Appalachia but in the Mid-Atlantic States, in New England, other places. 
We need to do these kinds of things, face the big challenges, get them 
right.
    The last point I want to make is this--I don't want to talk about 
Kosovo tonight, for obvious reasons--I made the best argument I could 
today when I spoke to the AFSCME group, and they, I understand,

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showed extensive coverage of it on the media. But I will say this. I 
want to make two points only.
    One is, I talked until I was blue in the face when I ran for 
President in 1992 about the fact that we can no longer make a clear 
distinction between domestic and foreign policy. We live in not just a 
global economy, a global society. We are being drawn closer together in 
ways that are good, in ways that are uncomfortable or potentially 
dangerous. And we have got to stop as a people putting this little box 
over here and calling it ``foreign policy'' and having a big box over 
here and calling it ``domestic policy'' and every now and then say, 
``Oh, I've got to go pick up this other box.'' We have to see it 
together.
    What does that mean for the Democrats? It means, number one, I've 
got a responsibility to do everything I can to modernize the financial 
architecture of the world so we don't have another crisis like the one 
we had in Asia. It means, number two, we have got to find a consensus on 
trade, because a big part of our growth has come from selling more 
things overseas. We've got 4 percent of the population and 22 percent of 
the wealth. It's not rocket science to figure out, if that's where you 
are, you've got to sell something to somebody else.
    But on the other hand, we have been caught in the vice where some 
Members of Congress, representing a lot of people in America, are 
worried about the dislocations of trade, and other Members, many in the 
other party, see the benefits of trade but don't worry about the 
dislocation. So we wind up, well, are you going to get the benefits and 
say too bad about these people, or are you going to protect these people 
but slow down the economic prospects of the country? This is a dumb 
thing to do. It is very wrong to make either one of these decisions.
    We need to build an American consensus in which we say ``We're going 
to reach out. We're going to lead the world. We're going to open up our 
borders.'' We've got a lower unemployment rate than any other advanced 
country, for the first time in decades, even lower than Japan. But we 
ought to say, we also--``We're the party that believes in preserving the 
environment. We're the party that believes in the dignity of labor and 
elemental labor standards, and we're going to create a global economy 
where we lift people up instead of hold them down.'' And we just ought 
to do it and quit wringing our hands about it. It's very important.
    And the last thing that I would say about that is, I think it is 
terribly important that we recognize that economics cannot exist in a 
global context in the absence of security and peace and freedom. So that 
if you really believe that our future depends on that and that Europe is 
a big trade and investment partner of ours, we have to ask ourselves, 
don't we have a responsibility when our friends in Europe ask us, 
through a group that we all belong to, NATO, to help end the kind of 
chaos we see that we had first in Bosnia and now that we have a chance 
to prevent the most severe manifestations of in Kosovo--isn't that more 
than just a foreign policy issue? Even though I think there's a huge 
moral component there, it will have direct personal benefits to 
Americans if we have a stable, free, united Europe.
    The last point I want to make is this--and then I'll stop. Both at 
home and abroad, there are two great dynamics going on in the world 
today. One are the forces of integration that you see most positively in 
the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web and everybody sharing 
information and everybody knowing--you know, pulling us together. 
Secondly, there are great forces of decentralization, when they're 
positive, and disintegration when they're negative. And you see that in 
the decentralization of all kinds of operations.
    When I ran for President in 1992, 3 million people were making a 
living primarily out of their own home. When I ran for reelection in 
1996, 12 million people were. In 1998, by the mid-term elections, 20 
million people were. Rising exponential--decentralization, that's all 
the flexible work rules, and all the stuff you know about. And all 
ethnic groups, you know, recovering their heritage in a happy way, 
having festivals. And you know, Hillary's from Chicago. I love to go to 
Chicago every year, when they have the ethnic festival, because I can 
eat for 3 miles--[laughter]--and never have the same thing twice. 
[Laughter]

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    You know, decentralization--you have all these little companies 
coming up, fitting certain niches in the market, all these specialty 
magazines, everything--and you see it all over the world. That's the 
good news. The bad news is, decentralization when you see the ethnic 
fights in the Balkans, or people unable to get along. They want to be 
apart.
    The American idea, modernized for the 21st century, is that out of 
many, one. E pluribus unum. Believe me, the Founding Fathers never had a 
clue what they were talking about. They could never have--I don't mean 
that in a pejorative way. They weren't thinking about the Fairfax County 
school system in Virginia, right across the river from me, that has 
children from 180 different racial and ethnic groups, speaking 100 
different native languages. They never--they didn't have a clue about 
that. That's not what they were thinking about. You had to be a white 
male property-owner to vote when they started. But they had the right 
idea. And we've been struggling for over 200 years, now, to cram the new 
facts and our new perceptions and our true values, into that idea.
    And so that's the last thing I want to say to you. I think that--if 
somebody asked me why I was a Democrat now, in 1999, I would say, 
because I really believe everybody who's responsible enough to work for 
it ought to have the opportunity to live out his or her dreams, and 
because I really believe in the idea of community, of belonging, of 
mutual responsibility. I do not believe that my life or my child's life 
will be as good as it would otherwise be, unless everybody else has a 
chance to fulfill themselves.
    I believe we can do more together than we can apart. I like the fact 
that we all look different from each other, but I think what we have in 
common is more important than even all the interesting things that we 
have that are different about us.
    And believe me, the big threat the world faces today is the marriage 
of modern, integrating technologies, with the negative, disintegrating 
forces of people with primitive notions that their lives only matter 
when they've got somebody they can look down on, somebody they can put 
their foot down on their neck on, somebody they can--lift themselves up 
by pushing somebody else down, whether it's in Northern Ireland, the 
Middle East, Bosnia, the tribal wars in Africa, or you name it.
    You plug all that negative stuff into access to how to make 
missiles, how to make chemical weapons, how to make biological weapons, 
how to jam records, computer records and banks, or powerplants, or all 
these sort of--you know, what may seem like fictional scenarios. That is 
the threat our children will face, the combination of primitive 
disintegration with modern, integrating technology.
    And we, America, we have to say, ``Hey, the people that started us 
were right.'' We have--out of many, we must be one. And we've got to be 
willing to carry our load in the world. And today, I can tell you that 
the Democratic Party, by far, is more likely to bring that kind of 
approach to the world, and home to every American community. And in the 
end it counts more than everything else.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 10:27 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, Beth Dozoretz, 
national finance chair, and former Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado, general 
chair, Democratic National Committee; Tom and Chris Downey, dinner 
hosts; and William Titelman, executive vice president, managed care and 
government affairs, Rite Aid Corp.