[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 19 (Monday, May 17, 1999)]
[Pages 839-845]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in Houston, Texas

May 7, 1999

    Thank you very much, Ken. I want to thank you for so many things, 
but particularly today for the work you have done on this. And I thank 
Joe Andrew for being willing to leave Indiana, a State no one thought 
could become a Democratic State, that just elected a new Democratic 
Governor and elected Senator Evan Bayh overwhelmingly, thanks in no 
small measure to his leadership there. And I look forward to many years 
of his leadership for the DNC.
    I'd like to thank Molly Beth Malcolm for being here and Steve 
Zimmerman for providing us this modest little room to have lunch in. 
[Laughter] Someone told me that Napoleon was once in this room, but not 
in Texas--[laughter]--and Frederick the Great, and all kinds of other 
people. I don't know if any of them were Democrats, but we are. We may 
have tripled the number of Democrats who have ever been in this room in 
the last 300 years, just today at lunch. [Laughter] But I am delighted 
to be here, and I thank all of you for coming.
    I want to talk a little today--I know several of you said that I 
looked tired, and I don't know whether it's just because I'm not young 
anymore or because I just got back from 2 days meeting with our troops 
and with refugees from Kosovo in Germany. But this is a rather unusual 
moment for our country, I think, because things are in some ways the 
best of times. We just saw today, again last month unemployment rate was 
4.3 percent. We had another 234,000 jobs; we're up to 18,400,000 now in 
the life of this administration. The welfare rolls have been cut nearly 
in half. We've got a 30-year low in the crime rate. The teen pregnancy 
rate is going down. Basically, the social indicators are good. Many of 
the indicators relating to drug use are moving in the right direction.
    And I want to say a special word of thanks, by the way--I think he--
no, he didn't

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leave--to Mayor Brown, who in his previous incarnation was a member of 
our Cabinet and led our Nation's efforts to keep our children away from 
drugs. And I was elated when he was elected mayor, and I hope you'll 
keep him here for a good long time, because I think he'll do a great job 
for you. And thank you, Mayor, for being here today.
    Anyway, you know, we have to feel good about these things. And I do, 
and I feel grateful. But all of us are sobered and saddened by three 
events of the recent days. And I would like to mention--although they 
seem entirely disparate--one is the terrible tornadoes that have claimed 
record numbers of lives in Oklahoma and Kansas and related storms here 
in Texas and over in Tennessee; the second, obviously, is the 
heartbreaking tragedy in Littleton, Colorado--I know we were all glad to 
see the children go back to school this week; and the third is the 
conflict in Kosovo. And I would like to try, if I could, today--it's not 
exactly your typical party-stump speech at a fundraising luncheon--but 
just ask you to think with me about how we're--what lessons we should 
learn from those three events and how it relates to what we're trying to 
do in our administration and with our party.
    And I'd like to go back just for a moment to 1992 and late 1991, 
when I made the decision to seek the Presidency. I was in my fifth term 
as Governor. I was having a wonderful time. Our daughter was doing well 
in school and with her friends. And Hillary and I were having more fun 
with our friends because I was about to get the hang of being Governor, 
having done it for 10 or 11 years. And I really didn't want to do what I 
did in 1992--plus, it seemed like a fool's errand; President Bush was 
at, like, 75 percent approval in the polls when I made the decision to 
run. And I knew I was a relatively young person, and I could wait, and 
that was my kind of personal inclination.
    But I was profoundly disturbed by two things: first, by the 
objective conditions in the United States. There were--unemployment was 
high; inequality was increasing; wages hadn't increased in real terms in 
20 years; and all the social indicators were going in the wrong 
direction.
    But the second thing that bothered me was that the debate in 
Washington seemed so divorced from the world, on the street in Arkansas 
where I lived and from the larger world beyond the borders of the United 
States, that it seemed to me that the parties were caught in a gridlock, 
labeling each other and fighting over turf in Washington that did not 
deal with what I thought were the two great challenges of our age: One 
was preparing for the 21st century by trying to take advantage of all 
the economic changes and the technology and globalization that was going 
on in a way that enabled people to build stronger families and stronger 
communities and left no one behind; and the second was, to find a way to 
deal with the dizzying array of differences in our own society in a way 
that respected those differences but pulled us closer together. And I 
didn't see much coming out that would do that.
    And it seemed to me that there was a way that you could actually 
strengthen the economy, for example, and improve the environment. There 
was a way to reward entrepreneurs and still reach out to people who were 
being left behind and let them go along for the ride in this new 
economy. There should be a way to reduce the deficit and still increase 
investment and education and health care. There should be a way to help 
people succeed at home as parents and succeed at work. There should be a 
way that we could glorify the individual, as we always have in America, 
and recognize that fundamentally we'll all do better if we're one 
community.
    And that's basically what the campaign in '92 was all about, and 
those words that I said, that I wanted a society that had opportunity 
for all and responsibility from all and a community of all Americans. 
And that's why I'm here today. You know, I'm not running for office, and 
some of the people out on the street are apparently elated about it. 
[Laughter] But that's the American way. I'm not running for office. I'm 
here because, while I am grateful for the role I have been able to play 
as President, in the 18 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment 
rate in 29 years and having 90 percent of our kids immunized against 
serious diseases for the

[[Page 841]]

first time in history, opening the doors of college to all Americans 
with the tax credits and the improved student loan program and the 
scholarship programs, and all the other things we've done--the air is 
cleaner; the water is cleaner; we've set aside more land to be protected 
than any administration in history, except those of the two Roosevelts--
I am grateful for all of that.
    But this is not a matter of personality. We had ideas that we turned 
into policies. We changed the role of Government. We have a smaller 
Government. There are fewer people working for the Federal Government 
now than in any time since John Kennedy was President. And yet, it's 
more active. We focus less on telling people what to do and more on 
giving people the tools to solve their own problems and creating the 
conditions in which Americans could thrive in the world. And the ideas 
matter. And the values, the principles of opportunity and responsibility 
and community matter. And the Democratic Party, therefore, matters.
    These ideas have benefited every people in every State. They have 
benefited Republicans and independents as much as they have benefited 
Democrats. They are capable of unifying the country at a time when so 
many continue to seek to divide it. And they also give us a clue about 
what we should do.
    We've still got big challenges out there. It would be a big mistake 
for us not to deal with the challenges of Social Security and saving 
Medicare and to do it in a way that will enable us now to reduce the 
debt of this country over the next 15 years to its lowest point since 
before World War II. Did you ever think you'd hear anybody stand up and 
talk about doing that?
    It would be a great mistake for us not to continue to push for 
education reform, to put more teachers in the classroom with modern 
facilities, to finish the job of hooking all our classrooms up to the 
Internet, to end the practice, nationwide, of social promotion, but not 
to label the kids failures, to give them the after-school programs and 
the summer school programs they need to have higher standards around the 
country. It would be a mistake for us not to continue to do this just 
because times are good here. It would also be a mistake for us not to 
continue to try to give opportunity to people who still don't have it. 
There are still places in Texas, with all the economy booming, that 
haven't felt this recovery.
    Just a few days from now the Vice President is going down to south 
Texas to have our annual empowerment zone conference. And I'm very proud 
of the fact that one of the things that we have worked hard to do in the 
last 6 years is to leave no one behind, to give tax incentives and other 
investments to poor communities to try to induce people to start 
businesses there and put people to work there. And I'm very proud of the 
fact that one of the major initiatives before the Congress this year, my 
so-called new markets initiative, would give people loan guarantees and 
tax credits to invest in the poor neighborhoods of America and urban and 
rural areas--like they can get today to invest in poor neighbors 
overseas.
    I think we ought to give people the same incentives to invest in 
Americans who don't have jobs and opportunity that we give them to 
invest elsewhere. I don't want to take the others away. I just want our 
folks to have the same chance.
    So there's a lot to do. And it would be a mistake, just because of 
our prosperity or because people are already talking about the next 
election, to overlook the fact that we still have a lot of time between 
now and January of 2001, and to put a great country in idle is a great 
mistake.
    The second thing I'd like to say is I think it is a mistake to 
forget about our continuing obligations in the face of the problems of 
the moment. But I think there are lessons in each of these three things 
that I mentioned that we're all very much preoccupied about now.
    What is the lesson of the tornadoes? This maybe belongs more in a 
sermon on Sunday than a political speech, but the lesson is, no matter 
how well America does, a little humility is always in order. We are not 
in full control. And we have to be sensitive about this, especially here 
in this part of the country. We have to do more to try to prepare 
ourselves for these storms, and we have to do more to try to minimize 
their impact when they occur.

[[Page 842]]

    The Governor of Oklahoma said a couple of days ago when I called him 
after the tornado that--we were talking about how Oklahoma and east 
Texas and Arkansas are at the beginning of basically the tornado belt in 
America--and he said, ``You know, the more growth we have, the more 
expansion of our communities, the more construction we're going to have 
in these alleys where tornadoes often hit.'' And we began to talk about 
that, about construction and safety and prevention.
    I say that to point out that there are certain constants that we 
have to deal with in our society that call on us to be humble, call on 
us to be prepared and remember we're not in total control.
    Now, the second thing I'd like to say about Littleton is that the 
lesson here is that no matter how prosperous we are economically--and 
this was terrible for that community; I've talked to school officials 
and local officials there--we have to understand that there are forces 
at work in our society that call on us to make an extra effort to 
protect our children from violence.
    I think it is important not to overly politicize this in the sense 
of fingerpointing. I have said before, and I will say again, I think 
that instead of everyone saying, ``Whose responsibility is that? Whose 
fault is this?''--I mean, instead of saying whose fault this is, we 
should say, ``What can I do to take responsibility for it? What can I do 
to change it? What can I do to make it better?''
    Like you, I don't know any more about what happened there than what 
I can read about it. But I have read voraciously. I have watched the 
television programs. I have listened to the townhall meetings and the 
other interviews that people up there have done. And you may know that 
Hillary and the Vice President and Tipper and I are going to have a big 
meeting at the White House on the 10th, next Monday. We're going to 
bring in people to talk about every aspect of this, including some 
people who have been very active in antiviolence initiatives around the 
country.
    But I would just like to say--I ask you to think about Littleton in 
the following ways. Number one, no society has any job more important 
than raising its children well. It is the number one job of every 
society. And raising our children well depends upon doing our jobs as 
parents but also recognizing, as Hillary said years ago, it does take a 
village, and we need to look at the village and see what the village is 
like now.
    And the following things occur to me, and I don't want to prejudge 
what we will do on Monday, but I think we need to recognize that without 
regard to family income, the speed and pressure of modern life increases 
the chances that children will become isolated and that vulnerable 
children, therefore, will be more likely to drift into something that's 
really bad for them. At any given moment in time there will always be 
children who are vulnerable to problems.
    But if you just think about the speed and pressure and sheer 
movement of modern life, the speed with which people move around and the 
hassles that are associated with that, and the speed with which images 
and news and information of all kinds--positive, negative--is crammed 
into our lives, I think that a lot of what we have to deal with here is 
giving our children some breaks, some protections, and our families some 
breaks and protections about that.
    The second thing I think is important is that we need to honestly 
try to challenge the families of this country not to give up on 
communicating with our kids when they start to drift away from them 
naturally and move into independence. It's still important to maintain 
some kind of knowledge of what's going on in there.
    The third thing I'd like to tell you is I think that there are 
things schools can do which will at least minimize youth violence, over 
and above zero tolerance for guns and other things. I visited a very 
impressive school in Virginia the other day, in Alexandria, that has a 
phenomenally diverse student body. They have a very active peer 
mediation group where the kids try to solve each other's problems. They 
have comprehensive counseling services. They have access to mental 
health services for kids who need it.
    And I think it's very important--Tipper Gore is going to have the 
White House Conference on Mental Health in Washington in the next few 
days, and she had a very courageous article in USA Today, today. If you

[[Page 843]]

haven't read it, I urge you to read it. I was really proud of her, 
talking about the whole issue and how it affected her life and her 
family's. I think that's very important.
    I'll tell you something else this school had; this school had a 1-
800 hotline so that if the children suspected that some other students 
in school were maybe going to do something destructive or wrong, they 
could call the hotline and have certainty that the lead would be 
followed up on but that they wouldn't be outed as somebody who was 
talking about their classmates.
    So I think we have to continue to work with the schools, as the 
Secretary of Education and the Attorney General have done. I think that 
there are challenges for those who influence our culture, including the 
entertainment community. When we trivialize or brutalize relationships 
or trivialize violence or, particularly in the intimacy of the Internet 
and the video games, run the risk that kids who are already isolated 
create a whole alternative reality that at the same time desensitizes 
them to violence, I think that's a problem.
    And I also believe, finally, that there ought to be some more laws 
that will minimize the chances that the kinds of weapons those kids had 
will get into the hands of children who will do bad things with them. 
And I hope we can avoid yet another big fight in Washington between the 
NRA and others. This should not be the culture war we have going on. It 
makes common sense, it seems to me, to reinstitute the waiting period of 
the Brady bill, along with the insta-check. It ought to apply to people 
that buy explosives as well as people who buy handguns.
    We ought to close the loopholes in the assault weapons ban law. We 
have an assault weapons ban, but it's got a couple of loopholes in it 
big enough to drive a truck through. We don't need--if the law is a good 
law, then we ought to make it work. We ought to do background checks at 
gun shows. I've been to gun shows in rural America. I know a lot of 
people that run them think this is going to be a terrible headache. It's 
not. The technology is there. We can fix it, so we can do it.
    But the main thing I want to say is, I do not believe there is any 
one answer here. I believe there is a responsibility in the 
entertainment community. I think there's a responsibility in the 
Internet community. I think there's a responsibility for the gun 
manufacturers and law enforcement. I think there is a responsibility in 
the schools. I think there is a responsibility with the parents. I think 
a lot of us have something to do.
    But what I would like you to think about here, instead of being 
despondent about the magnitude of the problem, is, first of all, look at 
the courage and character of the overwhelming majority of the people in 
Littleton that we have seen manifest in so many different ways under 
such adversity.
    And secondly, look at the example that Americans are capable of 
solving their social problems by grassroots movements. That's really why 
the teen pregnancy rate is dropping, because there's a grassroots 
effort, a comprehensive effort that is sweeping the whole country. 
That's why drunk driving went down--Mothers Against Drunk Driving, 
Students Against Drunk Driving.
    So there is no magic bullet here, and the most important thing is 
having a magic attitude of not taking any solution off the table because 
it would require you to do something, but not falling into the easy trap 
of pointing the finger at someone else. But the lesson here is that if 
we want to be a strong and great nation, we must continue to deal with 
the problems, and they're not all economic problems. And there is 
nothing more important than the quality of our children's childhood.
    Now, let me close with Kosovo. There are some people who may not 
understand why we would be so concerned about what happens in a small 
place a long way away, where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of 
people have been uprooted, had their homes burned, the records of their 
very existence burned, their religious and cultural sites destroyed, 
sometimes people literally wrapped in bundles and burned alive, lots of 
children raped, solely because of their ethnic and religious background. 
And it is a reprise of what happened just a few years ago in Bosnia.
    Why should we care about it? First all of, because it violates our 
most fundamental values. And if we have the capacity to stop something 
like that, we ought to.

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    Secondly, because we have learned the hard way that people, when 
they behave that way, think that that behavior--if they get away with 
it, they think it's rewarded, and other people will follow their lead. 
And all over the world today, at the end of the cold war, when communism 
is gone as a competing ideology, if there is nothing positive to 
organize people and pull them together, then one of the things that is 
most likely to pull them apart are racial, ethnic, and religious 
differences, used to demonize other people, almost exclusively by people 
who don't really believe it as much as they are trying to mobilize 
people to get political power or wealth or both.
    Now, we fought two wars in Europe in the century that's about to 
end. We want Europe to be united, to be free, to be democratic, to be at 
peace. If they are, they'll be our friends. They'll be our partners. 
They'll be better trading partners. They'll also help us solve problems 
in other parts of the world. There are all kinds of practical reasons we 
should do this. There are all kinds of practical reasons.
    But when you get right down to it, if we are going to say we are 
grateful that America has emerged from the cold war as the world's only 
superpower, if we're going to be grateful for the good fortune we have 
enjoyed in the last 6 years, we have to be willing to spend a small 
percentage of our good fortune and a significant percentage of our 
credibility to be good allies with our European friends who asked us to 
come and help, and do this.
    I also believe in a world where religious differences have bedeviled 
the Middle East and Northern Ireland and so many other places, it speaks 
volumes that the United States and our European friends and Canada are 
willing to stand up for people who are overwhelmingly of the Muslim 
faith, and say, they have rights, too; they are people, too; they are 
children of God, too; and they deserve the right to have their life, to 
go home, to be safe, to have the autonomy that they deserve. And that's 
what we're fighting for in Kosovo.
    If you think about--there's one little baby here, or was here a few 
minutes ago--you imagine that the world this baby is going to live in 
when she gets out of college and goes into the world. Do you want it to 
be a world where, frankly, more and more people have a lot of the 
economic prosperity we've enjoyed? I do, because that means we'll do 
even better if we have more partners who are doing better, which is 
characterized by people knowing each other across national lines, 
sharing economic opportunity, sharing educational opportunity, working 
together in common cause to deal with the continuing challenges of the 
world. Or do we want it to be a world where we feel like we're under 
siege all the time because everywhere people are falling victim to their 
most primitive impulses, that they're using modern technology and modern 
computers to figure out how to get modern weapons to kill somebody 
because of some ancient hatred? I don't think it's a close question.
    And one of the things that I have learned as President is that you 
cannot draw an easy dividing line between what is a domestic issue and a 
foreign issue in a world that is getting smaller and smaller and 
smaller. You can't just do that. You can't say, ``Well, it's great that 
international trade helps most of us,'' and forget about those that are 
not helped by trade. You have to give them the education, the skills, 
the training, the opportunity so that no one will be left behind. That's 
a domestic and a foreign issue. And believe me, this is, too.
    The greatest thing this country has got going for it today is that 
we have all different kinds of people that all have their chances. But 
we have to stand against hatred and for harmony. We have to say, 
``Whatever our differences, our fundamental common humanity is more 
important than anything else.''
    I was reading coming down here today that here in the legislature, 
Texas is debating this hate crimes law, named after James Byrd. You 
know, for me as a white southerner, the thought that a man could be 
murdered because of his race in 1999 is heartbreaking. But it is a sober 
reminder that human nature may improve, but we'll always have problems. 
And it is the country's organization, the country's dominant values, the 
country's leadership, the country's direction that matters.
    I hope that law will pass and become law here. I hope that Texas 
will say, ``We don't

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want people to be hurt because of their race, because they're gay, 
because of whatever. And when people are hurt in that way, we stand 
against it.''
    But in a larger sense, I hope that we will become a more effectively 
caring society. I hope we'll find some ways to put on the brakes when 
the speed's too fast for our children's childhood, and they're hurtling 
toward isolation in a destructive way.
    And I think we can do that and still get all the benefits of this 
modern world that's opened up to us. But it will depend upon the right 
ideas and the right values. It is not dependent upon any one person.
    I am so grateful that I have been the instrument, as President, of 
some of the good things that have happened in America. I am more 
grateful than you know. But what matters is that we have the right 
values and the right ideas, and when something works, we do not abandon 
it; we stick with it.
    That's why I'm here. That's why I hope you will continue to support 
our party. Because what we have stood for has made a lot of difference, 
and it will make more difference in the future if you and I do our part.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 3 p.m. in the Le Grand Salon de la Comtesse 
at La Colombe d'Or restaurant. In his remarks, he referred to F. Kenneth 
Bailey, Jr., event chair, and Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, 
Democratic National Committee; Molly Beth Malcolm, State Democratic 
chair; Gov. Frank O'Bannon of Indiana; Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma; 
Mayor Lee Patrick Brown of Houston, TX; and Stephen Zimmerman, owner, La 
Colombe d'Or restaurant.