[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 26 (Monday, July 5, 1999)]
[Pages 1210-1215]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in Westport

June 28, 1999

    Thank you very much. Diane, you can give a speech for me anytime. 
[Laughter] That was really wonderful, congratulations, thank you.
    I want to thank all of you for being here. Let me also join Joe and 
Beth in thanking Fran and Sandra for being so wonderful to us. I thank 
Martha and Ronni and the others who helped to make this a success. I 
also want to say a special word of thanks to Fran and Sandra for being 
so wonderful to Hillary as well, it really means a lot to me, and I 
thank you for that.
    You know, I always love to come back to Connecticut, and only a fool 
would not love to come to Westport. [Laughter] I'm very happy to see 
Barbara Kennelly; and my old classmate Dick Blumenthal, who has been so 
good to me; and Denise, we're very pleased for your success, 
congratulations. And Congressman Gejdenson, thank you for being so brave 
in tough election after tough election. You're always there to do the 
right thing any way, and I admire you so much.
    And Senator Dodd, congratulations on having the good sense to marry 
Jackie; we're proud of you. No matter how much you may like Chris Dodd, 
if you have not gotten to know his wife, your estimation will go way

[[Page 1211]]

up when you do--[laughter]--and we're really happy for you. And Jessye, 
thank you for coming; Cicely, thank you for coming.
    And I would like to say a special thank you to Connecticut for being 
so good to me and to Al Gore through two elections now. I don't feel 
that I'm on a victory lap or a final lap or--you know, I expect people 
to--they're beginning to talk to me as if I'm--there is a sort of ring 
of eulogy about all of this. [Laughter]
    As far as I can tell, I'm reasonably healthy; I still show up. I 
told Fran when--you've got to watch Joe Andrew, you know, as being a 
party chair; he hasn't been a party chair as long as Ed Marcus, but he's 
learned to stretch the truth creatively. He said that I got up earlier 
and went to bed later than anybody else. And I told Fran, I said, ``Now 
the second half of that statement is true.'' [Laughter] ``I do work 
late. I don't always beat everybody to the office.''
    I'd like to tell you, first of all, why I'm here and, secondly, why 
I hope you're here. If anybody wants me to show up at one of these 
events 5 years from now or 10 years from now and my party is still doing 
what I believe is right for America, I'll be there then, too. The fact 
that I was given the opportunity at a pivotal point in our country's 
history to serve as President is important to me, but it is incidental 
to my prior and enduring commitment to the ideas and values that I think 
are necessary to make this country all it ought to be.
    You know, when you think back to the condition the country was in in 
1991 and 1992 when I was running, it's almost unimaginable that we are 
where we are today. This morning, before I left to fly up here, I was 
able to make an announcement that at what is called the midsession 
review--which is when we recalibrate our economic assumptions--we now 
know that our surplus this year will be $20 billion higher than we 
thought; it will be $142 billion next year; it will be $500 billion more 
than we thought it was going to be over 10 years, and $1 trillion more 
over the next 15 years. That's an amazing thing.
    This year--you know, we have something called a unified budget, 
which means that we show a surplus even if we're spending more--like 
income and sales taxes and things--than we're taking in because of the 
Social Security taxes, because we're still taking in more than we're 
paying out. This year we will have a surplus without the Social Security 
revenues.
    What this means is, among other things, is that we really can save 
Social Security by investing a modest amount of it in something other 
than Government bonds. We can do something about elderly women, who are 
more poor than the rest of the elderly population. We can take the 
earnings limit off, because we need elderly people to work more, if they 
choose to do so--not if they're required to, but if they choose to do 
so--as we have relatively fewer young people and relatively more older 
people. And now we can actually pay the debt of the country off and be 
entirely debt free by 2015--in 15 years this country can be out of debt. 
That's unbelievable.
    The debt of the country quadrupled in the 12 years before I took 
office--just 12 years. And there was no end in sight. The deficit was 
$290 billion when I took office. We'll have $142 billion surplus in the 
last year of my Presidency.
    Why should that matter to people? To those of you who are liberals 
and want the Government to spend money, why should you care if we're out 
of debt? Because if we get out of debt in a global economy, it means 
lower interest rates, lower home mortgages, lower business loans, lower 
college loans, lower car payment loans; it means more business 
investment; it means more money for wage increases; it means a more 
stable economy; it means the next time there is a world financial crisis 
like we had in Asia a couple of years ago, we'll be less affected by it; 
and it means there will be more money out there for poor countries to 
borrow at lower interest rates, or be given because we won't be taking 
any of it.
    In the global society, it is the socially responsible thing for the 
wealthy countries to be financially responsible. It is good for our 
people, but it is good for people around the world. And it is good for 
all income groups within our society. So I hope very much that we will 
be able to persuade the Republican majority in Congress to work with us 
to save Social Security, to reform Medicare, and to

[[Page 1212]]

pay this debt off. It is something that no one could have thought 
imaginable just a few years ago.
    Tomorrow I'm going to reveal the details of our plan to strengthen 
Medicare and preserve it for at least another quarter century and add a 
prescription drug benefit which will be affordable, which can be 
managed. But this is a big problem--I told those of you who came to the 
airport to meet me that one of the most stunning facts of life, if 
you're over 65 today and you're on Medicare, is that the average senior 
citizen is now spending a higher percentage of his or her income, out of 
pocket, for health care than they were spending in 1965, before Medicare 
went in. Why? Overwhelmingly, because of prescription drugs.
    So if we can do something that is financially responsible to help 
our seniors deal with this burden, we ought to do so. We can now and we 
should.
    Because of the size of the surplus, we'll be able to pay the debt 
off over the next 15 years, and at the same time create a trust fund for 
children and education of over $150 billion that we can use for after-
school programs, to make sure all our kids have health insurance--for a 
whole host of other things that need to be done.
    Now, let me come back to the general point. I'm here not as a 
candidate, because I think it matters that the ideas and the values that 
we fought for be continued; because it's important to me that Sam and 
Chris and people like them are in the Congress. And it's important to me 
that--we know the Republicans will always have more money than we do. 
Today they'll be saying, ``Well, who cares if we pay the debt off; let's 
have a bigger tax cut that will be skewed to most of you''--most of you 
would be better off in the short run being at a Republican fundraiser. 
[Laughter] You would be, and you know it. [Laughter]
    But on the other hand, if you look at the performance of the stock 
market, if you look at the fact that we've got the lowest unemployment 
rate in 30 years, the longest peacetime expansion in history, the 
highest surplus as a percentage of our economy since 1951--there's 
something to be said for moving us all forward together. And there's 
something to be said for looking to the long run, as well as the short 
run.
    Everyone has to balance doing what is most pleasing to everyone 
today and thinking about what is best for the country over the long run. 
I've tried to take this country into the 21st century with certain basic 
ideas--that we could balance the budget and increase our investment in 
children and education, health care, and the environment; that we could 
grow the economy and continue to improve the environment--and we have. 
The air is cleaner; the water is cleaner; the food is safer; we've got 
90 percent of our children immunized for the first time in history; 
we've set aside more land in preservation than any administration in the 
history of America, except those of the two Roosevelts.
    So because we had good ideas--not because Bill Clinton was 
President, but because our ideas were right--I am glad I was given the 
chance to serve now. If my ability to speak, communicate, work hard, and 
take incoming fire had anything to do with those successes, I'm 
grateful.
    But the most important thing is that what we stand for now, as a 
party, is a new direction, a departure from where either party was in 
the seventies and eighties, and the kind of thing that we ought to 
embrace going into the 21st century. And we have evidence that it works. 
There are lots of issues up there in Washington that we're fighting for 
now. Sometimes we have agreement; we're going to agree on two things 
that I think are great--I'll give the Republicans a little pat on the 
back here--the Congress is going to overwhelmingly vote, apparently, to 
renew the disability on disabled Americans who go in the work force and 
lose their Medicaid coverage. And that can enable us to get hundreds of 
thousands of more workers to grow without inflation.
    There are a lot of disabled people who want to work, but their 
medical bills are $20,000, $30,000 a year, sometimes more, and they're 
paid by the Government. If they make ``X'' salary--anything much above 
poverty--they lose that Government health insurance. And that's bad for 
you, because they won't take the job. And we're still going to pay for 
their health care, as we should. So

[[Page 1213]]

this way we pay for their health care just like we were; but they take a 
job, they earn money, they pay taxes just like you do. And it helps the 
economy go. It's a good thing.
    The other thing that there is apparently unanimous support on--at 
least in the House, and I'm thrilled about it, this is something that 
Hillary cares very much about--is continuing support for children who 
come out of foster care at the age of 18 and today are cut off all 
support--and even though they have no place to go, they have no adopted 
families, they have nothing. This is a huge problem in New York, a 
bigger problem in New York than anyplace else because New York has the 
largest number. But I told someone the other day, the first person 
besides my wife who ever mentioned this to me was my cousin, who runs 
the HUD office in the little town in Arkansas where I was born, 
population 11,000 now. So this is a national problem.
    And here are two things where we agree. I'm hoping that we can get 
more of them to agree with us on some other things that are important. 
If you look at the Patients' Bill of Rights--the Republicans, on 
Medicare, want me to, in effect, force more people on Medicare into 
managed care, but they're against guaranteeing people in managed care 
the guarantees of the Patients' Bill of Rights.
    I'm not against managed care. I've always thought that we ought to 
manage the health system like every other system, as well as we possibly 
can. But every system should be managed to deliver its mission at the 
lowest possible cost, not to compromise the mission. The mission is to 
give people quality health care at the lowest possible cost.
    And if you need to see a specialist and you can't, that's bad. If 
you get hit in an accident in a big city and you have to pass three 
hospitals to get to the hospital with the emergency room that's in the 
plan, that's bad. If you work for a small business and they change their 
health care provider, and your husband is in chemotherapy and it's a 6-
month treatment and you're supposed to change providers in the middle of 
the treatment, that's bad. If the same thing happens, and your wife is 6 
months pregnant and you're supposed to change your ob-gyn because 
there's a different one in your new health care plan, that's bad. All 
these things happen today. Why? If it takes you forever and a day to get 
a decision because of the layers and layers of appeals, so that, 
finally, you get the right decision, but it's too late to save your 
life, that's bad.
    And that's why 200--200 organizations--the doctors, the nurses, 
health consumer groups, everybody, endorsed our Patients' Bill of 
Rights. There's one organization against it, the health insurers. And we 
have the votes to pass this, if the Republican leadership will give us a 
clean vote on it.
    But it's a classic example of the difference in the two parties. 
We're not against managed care. If we said we're against change, and 
they were for change, and they didn't care what happened to people, that 
would be like an old-time debate, old-time--we say, okay, we're for 
managed care. We'd just like to have people protected.
    Same thing on this gun issue. This is a huge issue. Thirteen kids a 
day get shot and killed--13--that's a lot of kids. You say it's a big 
country. Pretty small country if it's one of yours. And we had this 
horrible carnage at Littleton--the whole country up in arms. The Senate 
passes this range of modest gun restraint measures: getting rid of the 
big ammunition clips on assault weapons that come in from other 
countries; saying that if a juvenile commits a serious crime they 
shouldn't be able to own a handgun when they turn 18; closing the gun 
show loophole; putting the child trigger locks on there.
    And on the gun show loophole, which was the most controversial, the 
Vice President broke the tie in the Senate and we roll into the House 
and there is this angst. So what happens? The NRA wants the vote put 
off, so they put off the vote until after the recess; and during the 
recess they wear everybody out, and they come back and deep-six stuff 
that is very modest. And their answer is, well, we should punish these 
boys because they broke the law, these dead boys.
    You know, how would you feel if I gave the following speech: I've 
served as President for 6\1/2\ years. I've done a searching inventory of 
my record, and I have decided that I have been deficient in standing up 
for the constitutional rights of America. In particular, we all have a 
constitutional right to travel,

[[Page 1214]]

and I think it's absolutely terrible that you have to license your cars 
and have a drivers license--[laughter]--and that we regulate travel in 
any way, shape, or form. It is an unconscionable burden, and we're going 
to get rid of all of it. We have 8-year-olds out their driving cars at 
100 miles an hour; that's good, it's their constitutional right to do 
it. [Laughter]
    You're laughing. That's their position, isn't it? I mean, you would 
think--if a politician stood up and said that, you would think they had 
a screw loose. [Laughter] But this is a huge issue. Now, we're not 
talking about confiscating anybody's guns. We're not talking about 
interfering with anybody's hunting rights or sporting rights.
    When we passed the Brady bill--Chris and Sam will remember this--
their argument against the Brady bill was, ``This won't do you any good, 
because no criminal ever goes to a gun store to buy a gun.'' You 
remember that? That was their big argument: ``They're not dumb enough to 
do that.'' Okay? Five years and 400,000 rejected sales later, with a 25-
year low in the crime rate and violent crime down even more than non-
violent crime, they no longer can make that argument.
    But now we say, okay, there are more and more people, since we're 
checking on them, who are buying guns at the gun shows and the flea 
markets. We'll give you that much, so let's go check them. They say, 
``Oh, no, goodness, no, we couldn't do that.'' Or if the--``It's okay if 
it's over-the-counter at a gun show, but not if it's in the parking 
lot.''
    Now, you may have this image that there's a sort of a--maybe a 
convention center in Hartford, where there's a gun show, and it's two 
blocks out to the parking lot and you don't want to make the guy take 
the automatic check--that's not what goes on. Most of these gun shows, 
they're down little country roads, and you turn right and you're in a 
little field. You know, you back up on both sides of the lane and you 
open your trunk, and you get down your pickup. So if you're out in the 
parking lot, it means you're walking around to the front of the car. 
This is--this is just--it just doesn't make any sense.
    But what I want to tell you is, we have--I think the defining 
difference between the two parties today is no longer what they used to 
say about us. We proved we're more fiscally responsible than they are. 
We've got a more fiscally responsible program right here. We have proved 
that we can grow the economy. We've proved that we're for sensible 
defense spending. We've proved that we can do the things that we're 
supposed to do in foreign policy that--it's really almost, the most 
important thing is how we define community and what our mutual 
responsibilities are to one another.
    That's what the Patients' Bill of Rights is about. It's true. We'll 
have to pay out--you know, it'll be a buck or two a month. Our estimate 
is that the Federal health insurance program costs less than a dollar a 
month more, now that we have the protections of the Patients' Bill of 
Rights. So that means that everybody that doesn't ever need the 
Patients' Bill of Rights--who's a Federal employee--is getting socked 
for about $10 a year. I think it's worth it. I think it's worth it as a 
part of our shared responsibility to protect people.
    So if you close this gun show loophole, 90-plus--95 percent, maybe 
more, of those people are honest as the day is long, and they'll have to 
hang around and wait for their background checks to be done. And 
sometimes it'll be a little bit of a pain--to increase the chances of 
saving 13 kids a day? I think it's worth it.
    This is really what's going on. It's no longer--it's not a question 
even about tax cuts. We're for tax cuts. The questions is, how big 
should they be; what are our other responsibilities; how should they be 
structured? And what I want you to understand is that these ideas 
matter. It matters whether we give out all this Federal money in 
education and tell the locals of the States, ``Just do whatever you want 
to with it''; or whether we say, ``We think you ought to end social 
promotion, but have mandatory summer schools for kids who fail.'' We 
shouldn't declare them fit. And we think we ought to have every school 
district that needs an after-school program ought to have one, and we're 
going to give you money to help you. It's our definition of community.
    It's not us telling them how to run the schools. This is what local 
research shows

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works. So when you leave here, I hope you will be able to tell people 
why you came today. And I hope you will be able to tell them why I'm 
doing this, even though I'm not running for reelection. I've spent my 
whole life believing that ideas matter. It really matters what America 
does collectively.
    And I have tried to get my party to change. We now have the smallest 
Federal Government since John Kennedy was President. We are not the 
party of defending every big Government program that was done yesterday. 
We are not the party that believes Government can do everything. We are 
the party that believes the Government has the responsibility to give 
people the tools and to create the conditions so that as a community we 
can go forward and everybody has a fair chance. And every one of these 
issues embodies that.
    So I thank you for being here. And I hope you'll come to more, and I 
hope you will stay with us. I'm grateful that I've had the chance to be 
President. And I'm nowhere near through. I've got a more ambitious 
agenda today, than I did in my first year.
    But the most important thing is to keep this going. The next 
elections matter; the people matter; the ideas matter. This is a better 
country than it was in 1992. We tried it their way. This is a stronger, 
better country. And every time we've had a fight about whose ideas were 
right and whose were wrong--if you measure up to what was the impact of 
our economic plan, our crime bill, the insistence we made in welfare, 
that we not get rid of the guarantees of health care and nutrition for 
our children--all of these things--our approach turned out to be right 
for America. And I want you to go out and tell people that. When they 
ask you why you came, tell them I gave a pretty good talk, but the most 
important thing was we are right for our children and the 21st century.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 1:15 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to luncheon hosts Francine Goldstein and Sandra 
Wagenfeld; event cochairs Ronni Ginott, State chair, Women's Leadership 
Forum, and Martha Aasen, delegate, State Democratic Central Committee; 
First Selectman Diane Goss Farrell of Westport; Joseph J. Andrew, 
national chair, and Beth Dozoretz, national finance chair, Democratic 
National Committee; former Representative Barbara B. Kennelly; State 
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal; State Treasurer Denise L. Nappier; 
Senator Dodd's wife, Jackie Marie Clegg; soprano Jessye Norman; actress 
Cicely Tyson; Edward L. Marcus, chair, Connecticut State Democratic 
Party; and Myra J. Irvin, section 8 rental assistance program manager, 
Hope, AR, Housing Authority.