[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).