[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 19 (Monday, May 17, 1999)]
[Pages 846-851]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Austin

May 7, 1999

    Thank you very much. You know, when Roy was doing that riff, you 
know, ``Before he came, I didn't know I needed new furniture; I didn't 
know I needed new art work; I didn't know I needed''--Mary kept getting 
redder and redder, and finally she says, ``He may not know he needs 
another place to spend the night tonight.'' [Laughter] I must say this 
is a lot better than the last hovel we spent the night in. [Laughter]
    Let me say to all of you, I've had a wonderful time here tonight, 
seeing so many of my old friends. There are a lot of people here--the 
ones Roy mentioned and also Carlos Truan, Gonzalo Barrientos--a lot of 
other people who were with Roy and Gary and Judy and Nancy and Tom, all 
the rest of us, way back in 1972. And we have remained friends for a 
long time. And during most of that time, with the odd interruption, 
sometimes the odd, wonderful interruption like the reign of Governor 
Richards, the election of Lloyd Doggett, we've been in the minority.
    And I want to talk tonight a little bit about--I want to have kind 
of a serious conversation tonight about why I really came here, because 
what Joe said is right. I'm not running for anything. And I would seize 
any excuse to come here to Austin, because I had some of the happiest 
days of my life here, and I have a very jealous wife who wishes she were 
here today.
    But for the next 2 years, I'm helping the Democratic Party because I 
believe it's the right thing to do for America. I hear a lot of folks on 
the other side kind of licking their lips and saying, ``Well, wait until 
the next election, and we'll have Clinton out of the way. Maybe it will 
be better.''
    What I want to say to you is that I am very grateful that I've had 
the chance to serve you. And I am profoundly grateful that we

[[Page 847]]

have the lowest unemployment in 30 years and the lowest welfare rolls in 
forever and a day--they're half the size they were before--and the 
lowest crime rate in 25 years. Roy was saying that we've got 90 percent 
of our children immunized against serious diseases for the first time in 
history. The doors of college are virtually open to every American now 
because of our HOPE tax credit and the student loan changes we've made. 
We've set aside more land in perpetuity than any administration, except 
for the two Roosevelts, in American history. I'm grateful for all that.
    But what I want you to understand is that I'm grateful because I got 
a chance to implement a set of ideas that now represent the governing 
philosophy of the Democratic Party. And it is very different from the 
driving philosophy of the other party. And if the American people like 
the results that have been achieved, then we need to support those 
people running for the Congress and the White House who believe in these 
ideas.
    In 1991, when the incumbent President was at 75 percent approval and 
I decided to make this race when nobody but my mother and my wife 
thought I could win, I did it because I was worried about my country and 
my Capital. Because it seemed to me that there was nothing particularly 
wrong with America that couldn't be fixed if we would just open our eyes 
and go to work. The unemployment rate was high, inequality was 
increasing, the social problems were worsening, and we had a lot of 
problems around the world that we didn't seem to have any governing idea 
of dealing with. But I felt great about America. I just thought we had 
to change the way Washington worked.
    Just go back in your mind to that period and that long period where 
the other party spent 12 years telling us how terrible the Government 
was, and a lot of our guys were sort of fighting a rearguard action 
defending it. But most of the ideological battles which took place in 
Washington were about yesterday instead of about tomorrow. And so I set 
off on this crazy journey with a lot of you, based on a few simple 
ideas.
    First of all, I asked myself, what is the problem? The problem is 
that we have not thought about how to take full advantage of this 
explosion in technology and the globalization of the economy in society 
and at the same time figure out how not to leave anybody behind and make 
our families and our communities stronger and maintain our push for 
peace and prosperity around the world. We haven't thought about how to 
make the transition in a way that not only provides vast opportunities 
for people like those of us in this beautiful setting tonight, but makes 
America as a nation stronger.
    And it seemed to me that what we had to do is to go back to some 
very basic things: that we had an obligation to try to have opportunity 
for every person who was responsible enough to deserve it; that we had 
to try to build a community made up of every law-abiding citizen without 
regard to what other differences they had; that we had to commit 
ourselves to be more involved in the rest of the world, not less 
involved, because the world is growing smaller and smaller; and that we 
needed a different sort of Government that could be much smaller--and it 
is today, by the way. It's the same size it was in 1962--that's the size 
of your Federal Government today. And I'm proud of that.
    But what you need to know, we made it smaller but more active, 
focused not so much on telling people what to do or maintaining old 
bureaucracies but giving people the tools they need to make the most of 
their own lives. Those were my ideas: opportunity, responsibility, 
community, a Government that gives people the tools to make the most of 
their own lives.
    And I thought to myself, there are a whole lot of things people 
believe that I don't think are true. I believed if we work at it, we 
could reduce the deficit and still increase our spending in education 
and health care if we did it right. Well, 6 years later, we've got a 
huge surplus, and we've nearly doubled spending in education and health 
care.
    I believed we could improve the economy and improve the environment. 
The air is cleaner and the water is cleaner than it was 6 years ago. 
We've reduced chemicals in the atmosphere from chemical plant emissions 
by 90 percent in the last 6 years.
    I believed that we could help people succeed at work and at home. 
And I still think that's one of the biggest problems we've got

[[Page 848]]

in this country, people trying to be good parents and trying to meet 
their obligations at work at the same time.
    I believed that we could promote entrepreneurialism and trade around 
the world and still help people who, because of their education or where 
they live, are at risk of being left behind. Those are the things that I 
believed.
    I believed that we can be a force for peace and recognize that there 
are some times when we have to use our overwhelming military force.
    I believed that in welfare we could reduce the welfare rolls, get 
more people to work, and at the same time help people who were on 
welfare to do a better job of raising their children. That we didn't 
have to hurt people in their responsibilities as parents, to say if 
you're able-bodied you ought to work if you can.
    I didn't believe that--all those choices and all those debates that 
I kept hearing in Washington. And so we set out to do it, and the public 
responded, and the people gave me a chance to serve. And then in '96, 
another chance. And then in '96 and '98 kept returning more of our 
people to the Congress so that we're at the point where we can almost 
reverse the election of '94. I think the election in '94 happened, by 
the way, because we made the tough decisions as a party, all alone, to 
reduce the deficit, without a single vote from the other party, and 
increase our investment in education. We made the tough decision almost 
all alone to pass a crime bill that put 100,000 police on the street, 
banned assault weapons, and required the Brady bill's waiting period. 
And by the election in '94--and we tried to provide more health 
insurance, all alone, and didn't have enough votes to do it. And by '94 
what happened was people knew what we'd done on the economic plan, but 
they didn't feel the economy was getting better; they knew what we'd 
done on the crime bill, but the NRA convinced a bunch of hunters we were 
going to take their rifles. By '96 everybody still had their rifles and 
the crime rate had gone down, the economy had gone up, and we got 
reelected. And the Congress is doing better ever since our elections.
    So now we're poised for this election in 2000. And what I want to 
say to you is, I appreciate what Roy said about me, and it's nice to be 
introduced by your old friends. They'll lie about you a little now and 
then. But the truth is, you must believe this, this administration has 
succeeded because we had the right ideas and the right approach and 
we're grounded in the right values, and it's what represents the heart 
and soul of the Democratic Party today. And that's why I'm here.
    We've got a lot of big decisions to make. And you have to decide who 
is going to make them. We have to deal with the aging crisis--twice as 
many people over 65 by 2030. I hope to live to be one of them. 
[Laughter] I've given the Congress a plan that will save Social 
Security, save Medicare, provide help for people taking care of their 
parents and long-term care, allow middle income people and lower income 
people to save for their own retirement for the first time and do it in 
a way that pays down the national debt by 2015 to the lowest point it 
has been since before World War I. And that's really important to keep 
the economy going, because we'll be less dependent on the vagaries of 
the global financial system.
    I've given the Congress a plan that will improve the quality of 
education by ending social promotion, by providing after-school and 
summer school programs for our kids, by finishing the work of hooking 
all our classrooms up to the Internet, by modernizing a lot of these old 
school buildings and helping the school districts that are having kids 
in house trailers, by supporting better teaching, and by having national 
academic standards, which I hope our whole party will embrace and help 
us in this great battle we're in, because I think you should have local 
control of the school about how to implement national academic 
standards.
    There's an international standard that all of our children need to 
meet if we want them to make a good living. And we're about the only 
advanced country in the world that doesn't have that. As a result, we've 
got the finest system of higher education in the world; no one believes 
that our system of elementary and secondary education is uniformly the 
finest in the world. And yet, it

[[Page 849]]

can be. And all the diversity we have in our schools is a great asset in 
a global society, but every one of those kids deserves a chance at the 
brass ring.
    I was in the Alexandria school system the other day, across the 
river from the Capitol and the White House. There are kids from a 
hundred different racial and ethnic groups there, nearly a hundred 
different native languages. Every one of them can make a contribution to 
America if he or she gets a world-class education. And to pretend that 
it ought to be a local option whether they get it is, I think, obscuring 
what is plainly real here.
    So we Democrats stand for more flexibility about how to do things, 
but for national standards of excellence based on international 
standards of what our children need to know. And I think the American 
people are with us on that.
    I could talk about a lot of other issues. I'd just like to mention 
one or two more. The Vice President is coming down here to south Texas 
in a couple of weeks to our annual empowerment zone conference. Since 
1993, we've been trying to figure out ways to get more investment into 
poor urban neighborhoods and poor rural areas and poor Native American 
reservations, because there are still a lot of people that haven't 
participated in this economic recovery.
    And I worry a lot about how we're going to keep America's growth 
going and our unemployment low without any inflation, especially if we 
have trouble overseas. One way is to make more markets here at home. And 
there are lots of places right here in Texas where unemployment is still 
too high, too many hardworking people still don't have the skills they 
need, and where if we could attract the right investment in the right 
way we could have dramatic growth. So this is going to be a big 
challenge. If we can't get around now to giving poor rural areas and 
urban areas that have been left behind the chances they need, we'll 
never get around to it.
    Let me just mention one or two other things. I am very interested in 
this whole issue of balancing work and family. And I think there's some 
things we ought to do. I think we ought to raise the minimum wage again. 
I think we ought to strengthen the family and medical leave law. I think 
we ought to pass the Patients' Bill of Rights. I think we ought to pass 
our child care plan to help lower income people with their child care 
costs. We have to realize that most parents have to work and every 
parent ought to have the option to do it, but no parent should have to 
sacrifice the most important job any woman or man has, which is to raise 
strong, good kids. There are a lot of things out there we have to do. 
We've got a big job to do in the world. You can see it today with some 
of the problems we have.
    Now, I'd like to close by just asking you to think about three 
things and giving you examples of what my philosophy is, that I think is 
our party's philosophy. These are the best of times for Americans, but 
we're all pretty sobered up right now because of three events of the 
recent days: One, are the terrible tornadoes in Oklahoma and Kansas and, 
to a lesser extent but still sad, in Texas and Tennessee; two, is the 
heartbreaking incident in Littleton, Colorado; and third, is the 
continuing conflict in Kosovo. Now, let me tell you what they mean to 
me.
    First, the tornadoes mean that none of us should get too big for our 
britches. We're not in control. We have to maintain a certain humility 
when thinking about all the problems of the world. But as our hearts go 
out to those people--I'm going up to Oklahoma City tomorrow to tour the 
damage and talk about what we can do to help them put their lives back 
together--I'm thinking about what we can do to try to prepare better for 
the next one. I'm thinking about what we can do if we know we're going 
to grow and expand in areas that have been tornado alleys, what we ought 
to do to build houses that will do a better job of withstanding them or 
have quicker escapes to places that will be safer. In other words, I 
think what we always should be thinking about is: How can we make it 
better? How can we deal with what is going to come?
    In the case of Littleton, on Monday, Hillary and I and Al and Tipper 
Gore are going to sponsor a big meeting at the White House with people 
from the entertainment and Internet communities, people from the gun 
manufacturers, people from the religious communities, people who work in 
schools on problems of violence, students, a lot of other

[[Page 850]]

segments of our society, coming together to talk about how we can start 
a national campaign to reduce the likelihood of violence against our 
children.
    Now, I think it is important that you know how I look at this. I 
think the world's worst thing we can do is to use this awful heartbreak 
to get into a fingerpointing session. Because the truth is that not a 
single soul here knows exactly what triggered those kids. And we all 
know that in any given time there will be people who are more vulnerable 
than others to whatever influences to which they're exposed to. But I do 
think we would all admit, if we sort of take our defenses down, that the 
society in which our children grow up today, number one, throws things 
at them faster; number two, gives them even more opportunities to be 
isolated from their parents and from their peers; number three, exposes 
them at an earlier age and in greater volume and intensity to more 
violence and the coarsening of human relationships; and number four, 
it's way too easy for them get things like Tech-9 assault pistols. And I 
think we can all sort of admit that.
    And what I'm trying to do is to figure out what we should all do 
here to launch a genuine grassroots national campaign where I try to 
pass the laws I should pass; the gun manufacturers come forward and do 
what they ought to do to try to protect our kids; the entertainment 
community makes a contribution; the Internet community makes a 
contribution--they've worked hard, by the way, with the Vice President 
to try to give parents more screening technologies--and the religious 
community comes forward; the mental health community comes forward; the 
schools provide more adequate counseling services and peer mediation for 
the kids, and what some of our schools are doing now, providing a 
hotline so kids who know what's going on in the school can call and tell 
somebody without being subject to abuse.
    There are lots of things to be done here. But there's also something 
to be said here for recognizing the incredible pressures that parents 
and children are under because life is so fast and so crowded. And it is 
easy for all of us, if we're not careful, to wind up being strangers in 
our own homes. And our children need to understand also that no matter 
how solid and rooted they are, childhood is a fragile and difficult 
time. Every school will always have its cliques. Every school will 
always have its groups. But we've got to teach our kids that they can 
enjoy being in their crowd without looking down on the others; because 
people who are constantly subject to ridicule and abuse are going to 
have their lives twisted or distorted in some ways, unless they are 
really superhuman.
    So I'm looking forward to this. And all the cynics who say it can't 
be done, I would remind you that teen pregnancy is now down 5 years in a 
row because of a national grassroots movement, not because of any law we 
passed in Washington. Drunk driving is down because of Mothers and 
Students Against Drunk Driving. We now have 10,000 companies that have 
voluntarily joined an alliance that we organized a couple years ago to 
hire people from welfare to work, and they've hired over 400,000 people 
without a single law being passed. We can do this. And I believe we can 
do it, but only if our political, public life brings us together and not 
drives us apart.
    And the last thing I'd like to say is about Kosovo. I know this is a 
difficult issue. I saw the people with their signs on the way in, saying 
we ought to end the fighting. Nobody wants to do it more than me. I 
think those of you who've known me for 30 years know that the most 
difficult thing that I ever have to do is use a superior position to put 
pressure on somebody else, particularly if it involves the use of 
violence. I'm not that sort of person.
    But let me tell you, since the end of communism, we have seen the 
inevitable rise of national aspirations and ethnic aspirations, 
especially in Central and Eastern Europe. In one place only, the former 
Yugoslavia, we have seen that turned into a credo that says it is all 
right to burn the homes, destroy the records, destroy the churches--the 
mosques, in this case--and the museums, and the libraries, and the very 
lives of families; it's all right to rape the daughters; it's all right 
to shoot the sons; it's all right to do this.
    And for 3 years, we worked, through the United Nations and 
negotiations and everything else, to end the war in Bosnia. And finally, 
we ended the war in Bosnia when

[[Page 851]]

NATO bombed and when the opposition forces started winning some battles 
on the ground. And we've been able to maintain a peace there.
    People don't have to like each other. People may have legitimate 
grievances. But ethnic cleansing and killing people wholesale because of 
their race or religion is wrong. And the United States is in a position 
to stand against it, and we ought to.
    I know there are a lot of people who disagree with me. They say, 
``Well, we don't have any vital national interest.'' I would argue to 
you that we do. It's not only a moral, humanitarian issue. We'll be 
better off if our best allies in the world, in Europe, live in a 
continent that is whole and democratic and at peace and free of this 
sort of thing.
    First of all, they won't be wasting their money tearing each other 
up. Secondly, they'll be better trading partners. Thirdly, they'll be 
better partners in helping us solve problems in other parts of the 
world. And if we can put an end to ethnic cleansing in Europe, then we 
can put an end to it in Africa, and we can put an end to it wherever 
else it rears its ugly head.
    If we can't solve this problem, it's very difficult to understand 
how our children are going to live in peace in a world where every 
radical terrorist group can get on the Internet and figure out how to 
build a bomb or get weapons or do anything else they want to do. We have 
got, at least, to tell people that in the world of the 21st century, it 
is not okay to kill people just because they're of a different race or 
ethnicity or religion.
    That's why I must say, I want to applaud the Senators who are here, 
who are trying to pass that hate crimes act in the legislature, in honor 
of James Byrd. I think it's very important. It makes a statement.
    This is the last thing I'll say about this. I've already talked 
longer than I meant to, but if you don't remember anything else I say, 
remember this: It is one thing to say that we all ought to get along 
together and quite another to do what is necessary for us to do so in 
decency and honor.
    The differences among us are a part of what makes life more 
interesting and makes this country so successful, as long as they are 
contained. When the differences among us are used, as they are in Kosovo 
today, as they were in Bosnia before, as an instrument of human 
destruction, they can quickly make life unbearable.
    Now, we can't force anybody to like anybody else. Maybe not 
everybody in this place tonight likes everybody else. But we live 
according to certain rules, and we do it not only because it is morally 
right but because we do better when other people do well. When we do the 
right thing or, as Hillary says, when we act like we're in a village, we 
all are better off.
    So I ask you to think about this. The Democratic Party has stood for 
community and for opportunity and for citizen responsibility. We have 
refused to accept all these phony choices we were presented with, 
between economic growth and the environment, between accountability and 
help in education, and all the other things. These ideas have led 
America to a better place. That's why I'm here. I'm glad I was 
President. I hope I was the instrument of a lot of the good things that 
have happened in this country. But the most important thing is that we 
continue in this direction, that we stay on this course, that we embrace 
these ideas. And that is why it is important to support this party.
    I'm very grateful to you. Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:38 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to Roy and Mary Spence, dinner hosts; Texas State 
Senators Carlos Truan and Gonzalo Barrientos; Gary Mauro, former Texas 
land commissioner; Judy Trabulsi, Nancy Williams, and Tom Henderson, who 
worked with the President on the 1972 McGovern campaign in Texas; former 
Gov. Ann Richards of Texas; and Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, 
Democratic National Committee. This item was not received in time for 
publication in the appropriate issue.