[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 23 (Monday, June 14, 1999)]
[Pages 1077-1080]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]
<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Dinner
June 10, 1999
The President. Thank you very much. Charlie, wait a minute. Before
Chairman Rangel sits down--you know, Dick Gephardt got up there and
said, ``You know, the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee is as
powerful as the President.'' [Laughter] Bob Johnson said, ``That's a
scary thought.'' [Laughter] And I said, ``No, no, he's more powerful
than the President.'' [Laughter]
You should know that among all the things we have to be grateful for
tonight and to celebrate, tomorrow is Charlie Rangel's birthday. So I
think we should sing ``Happy Birthday'' to him.
[At this point, the participants sang ``Happy Birthday.'']
Representative Charles Rangel. My only response is, save Social
Security now! [Laughter]
The President. That's just like we rehearsed it. [Laughter]
Let me say to Congressman Rangel, and in his absence, Chairman
Clyburn, Eleanor Holmes Norton, all the members of the caucus who are
still here and those who have come and gone, to the members of the
Cabinet that are here--I saw Secretary Slater and Secretary Riley, there
may be others here--and my former Cabinet member Jesse Brown, former
Secretary of Veterans Affairs back there, I'm glad to see you. My
wonderful friend from Chicago and fellow Arkansan, John Stroger and all
the others who did so much to make this night a possibility. I thank the
chairman of the DNC, Joe Andrew, for being here; and Lottie Shackelford,
others from the DNC who are here.
I want to say--I have so many friends here, but there's one young
couple here that I'm particularly pleased about being here, because
they're new Washingtonians, the newly acquired new quarterback for the
Washington Redskins, Rodney Peete, and his wonderful wife, Holly
Robinson Peete. You all stand up there and say hello. [Applause] They
are a big addition to this community and wonderful people, and I'm glad
to have them.
I want to say a few things rather briefly tonight. First of all,
Congressman Rangel, my wife said to tell you hello, and once again,
thank you for your friendship. [Laughter] Secondly, I want you to know
when we had the New York Yankees at the White House today to celebrate
their championship last year, I called them the Bronx Bombers, and I
emphasized ``Bronx,'' and I said I was doing it at your behest.
[Laughter]
Finally, let me say I was looking at Dick Gephardt standing up here,
and I have known him for many years, and I thought he was a good man and
an able man when I first met him. But I have watched him grow in his
responsibility, in the depth of his understanding and his spirit. He
should be the Speaker of the House. He should be the Speaker of the
House.
The last thing I want to say by way of introduction is, I'm
delighted to see Lionel Hampton again. We had--John Conyers and I had a
90th birthday party for him at the White House last year, almost a year
ago, and they actually let me play with the band. And I hadn't played in
months, and it was really one of the nicest nights I've had in the White
House, and I'm very grateful for that. And I'm grateful for him. If I
look half
[[Page 1078]]
as good at 60 as he does at 90--[laughter]--if I can hear to play my
horn as well as he can hear to play his vibe, I will be a happy fellow.
I apologize for being late here tonight. I think all of you know
why. I addressed the people of the United States tonight about the end
of the conflict in Kosovo. I want to say a couple of things about that
and what it has to do with all of the things that have already been
mentioned and all the issues we don't have time to mention tonight.
The unimaginable horrors that were inflicted on those people, which
led to an unprecedented indictment of a head of state, Mr. Milosevic,
for war crimes and crimes against humanity, came to them solely because
of their ethnicity and their religious faith. And it is, indeed, ironic
that here we are on the edge of a new century and a new millennium, with
the world growing closer together, with technology literally exploding
opportunities for all of us, with America becoming more and more diverse
by the day, that the world is most bedeviled by the oldest problem of
human society: people are scared of people who don't look like them and
who worship God in a different way than they do and who basically come
from a different tribe.
We have learned, in ways good and bad, that our differences make us
stronger; they make life more interesting; they make life more fun. But
if that curious balance that exists inside all of us gets out of whack
and our fears overcome our hopes, we can go quickly from fearing people
to hating them, to dehumanizing them, to justifying all manner of
repression and abuse of them.
What the conflict in Kosovo was about at bottom is whether or not,
after all we have learned from what happened in World War II to the
Jewish people and others in Nazi repression and all we have seen since,
would or would not provoke the world, especially after the agonizing
experience we had in
Bosnia and the awful experience we had in Rwanda, when everyone was
caught flat-
footed, with no mechanism to deal with it--whether we would say, ``Okay,
from now on we don't expect everybody to get along. We don't think we
can abolish all war. But if innocent civilians are going to be
slaughtered and uprooted and have their lives destroyed and their
families wrecked only because of their racial or ethnic background, or
their religious faith--if we can stop it, we intend to stop it.''
The United States did not go there for any territorial gain or
economic gain. We went there because we want there to be peace and
harmony, first in Europe and, wherever possible, in the rest of the
world. We went there with an Army that looks like America; an Air Force
that looks like America. We landed a Marine expeditionary unit in Greece
today, going into Kosovo to help those folks come home, that looks like
America.
There are people from every conceivable racial and ethnic group and
all different religious backgrounds, bound together by what they have in
common being more important than the interesting things that divide
them.
I say that because I am grateful for what they have achieved with
our Allies. But I know, as I look toward the future, when I am long gone
from this job, and the world grows closer and closer--but we will still
have struggles between those who are left out and those who are included
in the bounty of the world. We will still have to deal with terrorism
and weapons of mass destruction and international criminal gangs and
all, and people will always be trying to feed on the differences, to
switch the balance from hope to fear. And it will be very important that
the United States of our children and grandchildren be a force for
bringing people together, not tearing them apart. And we will not be
able to do that, over the long run, to do good around the world, unless
we first are good at home.
That is why--that's why I've worked as hard as I can on all the
issues involving race, why I know we've got to get rid of this racial
profiling, why I know we've got to do more to deal with the threat of
violence to our children, why I have asked everybody from the
entertainment community to the gun community, to the schools, the people
that provide counseling and mental health services, to the parents, to
do something--all of us to do something to give our children their
childhood back.
That is why I have asked the Congress to invest more in education,
to adopt this new
[[Page 1079]]
market initiative. I like the fact that we will give you tax breaks, tax
credits, and loan guarantees to invest in poor countries around the
world. I don't want to take them away. I just want you to have exactly
the same incentives to invest in poor neighborhoods, in inner-city
America and Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta and Native American
reservations and all those other places.
So I ask you to think about this. This is a night you can be proud
of your country. This is a night you can be grateful for the economic
prosperity that we have enjoyed, that we have the lowest African-
American and Hispanic unemployment rates we have ever recorded, that
wages are rising for people in all income groups. We can be grateful for
that. And you have expressed your gratitude by coming here and giving
these funds, for which I am grateful.
But I want you to support our party not just so that Dick Gephardt
can be Speaker and Charlie Rangel can be chairman, we can have 3 or 4
chairmen and 19 subcommittee chairs, but for what Mr. Gephardt said:
because if we are in these positions of responsibility, we will show up
for work every day. And we will not be interested simply in accumulating
power but in using the fleeting power we have been given by the American
people to advance the cause, the future, and the hopes of ordinary
citizens from all walks of life.
I believe--it's not fashionable to say, I guess, but politics and
public service are noble endeavors if they are informed by a high
purpose. I have never thought that I was going to be President for life,
and I have never thought one bit of power I exercised really belonged to
me. It was something that was loaned to me for a little while by the
American people, thanks to the remarkable Constitution under which we
live.
And so if you give us this kind of responsibility, we will ask the
American people to search their consciousness--and to serve their--
search their consciences, to think and to feel what we still must do to
deepen the meaning of freedom and widen the circle of opportunity and
strengthen the bonds of community. That's what a lot of our fights are
about. That's what the Patients' Bill of Rights is about. If I get sick
tonight, I'm going to be fine. Unless God gets ready to take me home,
I'll have the best health care in the world. I don't need it, and
neither do most of you.
That's why we're trying to have America join the mainstream and stop
being the only country in the world that doesn't even have sensible,
commonsense regulation of these handguns, to keep them out of the hands
of criminals and kids, and to keep the assault weapons away from the
children. The Secret Service is taking care of me; I don't need that.
And if anything happened to me, besides, I've already had more life than
99 percent of the people who ever lived. [Laughter] I don't have any
gripe.
But all those kids--Dick Gephardt reminded us, 13 kids get killed
every day, get shot and die and don't have the life that I have had or
the life that you have had that has brought you to this point. And I
have been so moved by the people at Littleton and how they have
responded and the courage and dignity with which they have borne their
awful fate, and the way they have asked us not to let their children die
in vain.
But every day, for years, 13 kids die in ones and twos, on the mean
streets and the tough alleys in which they live. We want to do something
about that, and we can. It's why we've tried to make college affordable
for everybody and put a computer in every child's schoolroom. Our kids--
we don't need that; our kids can have their computers.
I say that not to make you feel better than our political
adversaries, either. I say that to make this simple point. The same
thing that makes us believe that people are better off getting along
than they are fighting over their racial or religious differences makes
us believe that we ought to have universal excellence in education,
universal quality in health care, a strong economy that includes
everyone. But because we know down deep inside that that's being smart
selfish, we know that we'll be better off and our children will be
better off and our country will be stronger if we're not just sailing
along alone.
If you ask me what the single most significant difference between
the two parties is today and why it is so important that you're here and
why we had the historic victory we had in 1998, even though we were
outspent
[[Page 1080]]
by $100 million, it is because we believe, truly, that we are all God's
children, that none of us inherently is better than any other, and that
we don't believe, even if we are in the elite, in just the elite and
their welfare. And this is not about class warfare, either. This is
about whether you believe that individuals and families and businesses
are better off when they're part of a fabric of a strong community,
where everybody's trying to give everybody else a hand up. And if we
ever do it right, there will be no more handouts. If we had enough hand
ups, there would be no more handouts.
So I want you to leave here being proud of what you did tonight, but
I don't want you to quit. It's a long road between now and 2000. And
we're not getting much encouragement from most of our friends on the
other side of the aisle in campaign finance reform, because they figured
if they outdid us by $100 million in '98, maybe they can have a $200
million advantage in 2000.
But one thing we showed them in 1998, partly thanks to a record
African-American turnout, one thing we showed them, it doesn't matter if
they have more money than you do if you have enough to be heard. If you
have enough to be heard, if you have enough to make those telephone
calls and to get those doors knocked on and to send those letters out
and to put those ads on and to be heard if you stand for something, if
the power is not an end in itself but to be used as a gift, given for a
limited period of time by the people to strengthen the common life of
our country, we've proved that great things can happen.
You have done a good thing tonight for your country. I want you to
think about it and continue to speak for it. And when people ask you why
you were here tonight, I hope some of the words that we have said will
give you an answer, because you want us to go forward together.
Thank you, and God bless you.
Note: The President spoke at 9:12 p.m. at the National Museum for Women
in the Arts. In his remarks, he referred to Robert L. Johnson, chairman
and chief executive officer, BET Holdings, Inc.; musician Lionel
Hampton; John Stroger, president, Cook County Board of Commissioners,
Chicago, IL; Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, and Lottie Shackelford,
vice chair, Democratic National Committee; and President Slobodan
Milosevic of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro).