[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 30 (Monday, August 2, 1999)]
[Pages 1474-1480]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Cincinnati, Ohio

July 23, 1999

    Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, first, let me say that I 
think in the spirit of candor, I should tell you that the real reason 
that the air-conditioning is not on tonight is that it's part of my 
continuing effort to convince the American people that Al Gore is right 
about global warming. [Laughter] And I hope you will join us now in this 
crusade.
    When Stan gave me this purple shirt, I thought instead of saying, 
``no one more regal,'' I thought he was going to say, ``I'm going to 
give him this purple shirt is because no one is more wounded than him.'' 
[Laughter]
    Joe Andrew, every time he says that line about we're going to win 
everything from President to dog catcher, as if that's a wide gulf, I 
said, plenty of times in the last few years, I thought that was a very 
short distance, those two positions. [Laughter]
    I'd like to begin, if I might, by saying a few thank-yous. I want to 
thank Stan and his whole family, and I want to thank Dick and his 
wonderful family. And to Jim, I want to thank you and all the people 
that are associated with you and have been there for me and for my party 
for all these years. I'm grateful to the people of Ohio who have voted 
for me and for Al Gore twice, under what would normally seem to be 
adverse political conditions, when the Republicans were doing pretty 
well here statewide, and conventional wisdom would have it that we 
wouldn't do so well.
    I want to thank Joe Andrew for agreeing to leave the security of his 
home in Indiana and take on the challenge of the Democratic Party. And 
David Leland, who in '96, had what I thought was the cleverest idea. He 
had a $96 fundraiser for the Democrats, and as I remember, he had 4,000 
people there, which was a pretty impressive turnout, and I knew we were 
going to carry Ohio again.
    I want to thank Jody Richards, my longtime friend, who was the 
Speaker of the House in Kentucky. We were working on education together 
back when I was a young Governor with no gray hair and no reasonable 
prospects of this happy occasion. And I want to say a special word of 
thanks to Tony Hall, who is not only one of the finest Congressmen but 
one of the finest human beings I have ever known in my life, and Ohio 
can be very, very proud of him. And I thank you, sir, for all you've 
done and all you have been

[[Page 1475]]

and the way you have been there for me as a friend as well as an ally.
    And I want to thank my friend Bill Daley for serving in the Cabinet, 
being a brilliant Secretary of Commerce, a great political leader, and I 
think that even though I have to retire in a year and a half, you 
haven't heard the last of him.
    As you know, this has been a highly emotional week for me and for 
Hillary and for Chelsea. We are friends of Senator Kennedy and his 
family. We knew and had the greatest respect for John Kennedy. I had a 
wonderful, long evening with John and Carolyn. We thought the world of 
Jackie Kennedy. And we're Americans, so we went through this last week 
experiencing it both in a personal way and experiencing it just in the 
same way every other citizen did. So I'm not going to give you a whoop-
dee-doo tonight; I'm going to ask you to think about why you're here and 
what you will say tomorrow if someone asks you why you came.
    When Senator Kennedy--and I was just told at the table tonight that 
the eulogy for his nephew is now available on the Internet. It may be 
printed in full in your paper tomorrow. Somehow, you ought to get the 
whole thing and read it.
    The last sentence in the eulogy was this: ``Like his father, he had 
every gift but length of life.'' I say that not to be morbid or even 
sad, because it was actually quite a wonderful service, but to remind us 
all that life is fleeting and fragile; things we don't deserve happen to 
us, both good things and bad things, and our only obligation can be to 
get up every day and try to be children of God and do the best we can 
with the life we have.
    I believe that the work that we have been engaged in, the political 
work of the country, is good work. I believe most people who do it in 
both parties are good people, and personally compassionate, by the way. 
I believe that. I despair that so much of the politics of the last few 
years has been about, you know, personal attacks, because it diverts the 
attention of the public from the life we share in common and the 
obligations we have to each other and to our children and to our 
country.
    And today I left that church, that beautiful old church, thinking 
that all of us, including me, ought to do more every day to remember 
that life is fleeting and fragile, but a great gift; with all of its 
troubles and tears, it's a great gift.
    And so when I think about what I'd like to say to you, it is this, 
that in 1992 when I ran for President--and early on in the race I saw 
John Kennedy, Jr., and his mother at events for me when I didn't know 
them, really, and I was running fifth in the New Hampshire primary--I 
did it because I felt the country needed to change direction. And I 
offered some ideas to the American people based on the premise that we 
ought to be trying to create a country in the new century where every 
responsible citizen has the opportunity to live out his or her dreams, 
and where we're coming closer together as an American community even as 
we grow more diverse in our racial and ethnic and religious 
characteristics, and where we do more to be the world's leading force 
for peace and freedom and prosperity. Now, I am very grateful that those 
ideas, when put into action, turned out to have pretty good results.
    You know what has happened in the economy. We also have a 30-year 
low in welfare and a 26-year low in the crime rate. A lot of our social 
problems, our evading teen pregnancy and drug use, are down. Our test 
scores are beginning to rise after years and years and years in our 
schools; last year in the 4th, 8th, and 12th grade they were all up in 
both reading and math for the first time in a long time. Ninety percent 
of our children immunized against childhood diseases for the first time 
in the history of our country. The air and the water is cleaner; the 
food is safer. We've set aside more land from the Florida Everglades to 
the California redwoods than any administration except those of Franklin 
and Theodore Roosevelt. And I am very, very grateful to have had the 
chance to serve.
    I would like to say, because now that we're in a political season, 
many of those who spent the last 6\1/2\ years telling the American 
people I had no business being President now say, ``Oh, well, Clinton's 
like Michael Jordan; he just jumps higher than the other Democrats now. 
The natural order of things will reassert itself, and we Republicans 
will rule America again.''

[[Page 1476]]

    I want you to understand that I'm glad I had the chance to serve, 
but I could give the best speech in the world and if the ideas were 
wrong or if there were no implementation, we would no have been able to 
turn the country around. And I want you to understand that very little 
of what I did could have been done if I hadn't had the Vice President I 
did, who knew a lot more than I did when we started about a lot of the 
things we had to work on; if I hadn't had people like Bill Daley and his 
great predecessor, Ron Brown, and a lot of other people helping us; if I 
hadn't had allies like Tony Hall in the Congress. And I say that to make 
this point: Tomorrow when they ask you why you were here, I hope you 
will say, ``Because I like the ideas they had and they worked for 
America. And I'm not just supporting Bill Clinton; I'm supporting what 
we all believe.'' And we have the proof now. We no longer have to debate 
these things; we now have evidence.
    The second thing that I'd like you to think about is, we now are in 
a great hazardous period. We human beings are all inherently weak in 
some way or another, and sometimes the worst thing in the world for us 
is the illusion that everything is perfect and can't go bad. And so we 
have all this prosperity now, and I would argue that's a hazardous time, 
because prosperity and security can lead people to arrogance and 
shortsightedness if they're not careful. I used to carry around with me 
when I was a Governor 10 little written rules of politics, and one of 
them was, ``You're always most vulnerable when you think you're 
invulnerable.''
    And so I say to you, we have this huge surplus. We had a $290 
billion deficit when I took office. We've got almost a $100 billion 
surplus this year. We have projected surpluses for a long time to come. 
The big question now is, what are we going to do with our prosperity? 
We've got the country working again; now what are we going to do? And 
there's this big debate going on in Washington. The Republicans 
basically say, ``Okay, we'll agree with the President. We'll save the 
Social Security tax surplus for Social Security, and we'll use that to 
pay the debt down.'' And I want to give them that, and I appreciate the 
fact that they've agreed with me today; they've agreed to pay it down 
some. ``But we want to give the whole rest of the surplus to a tax 
cut.''
    We say, even though we're in an election season already, that's a 
mistake, because if you look at the real, long-term challenges of 
America, you can't honestly say we can afford a tax cut that big. What 
are those challenges? Let me just mention a few. One is the aging of 
America. The number of people over 65 in this country will double in 30 
years; I hope to be one of them.
    Anybody in America who lives to be 65 today has a life expectancy of 
82. A child born in America today has a life expectancy of nearly 77 
years. Within 3 years, we will finish the decoding of the human gene, 
and young mothers who take their babies home from the hospital will have 
a roadmap that will tell them--you have a fine, healthy young boy, but 
his genetic makeup makes him highly likely to develop heart disease in 
his thirties or forties. Therefore, you should do these things. Your 
daughter is beautiful, but she has a gene which predisposes her to 
breast cancer at an early age. Therefore, you should do these things.
    It is not inconceivable that within a decade, the average life 
expectancy of newborns will be over 80--and keep in mind, that takes 
accounts of all the accidents and the diseases and everything that can 
happen to people. It is at our peril, therefore, that we pass up the 
chance to stabilize Social Security and Medicare and to reform Medicare 
so that it fits the needs of modern medicine with a prescription drug 
benefit and getting much more of our seniors to take preventive tests 
for everything from osteoporosis to cancer, because we can avoid a lot 
of the expensive medical bills if we prevent things from happening in 
the first place.
    So I think we ought to not only set aside a substantial amount of 
the surplus for Social Security, but also for Medicare, and that we 
should take the interest reduction when we pay down the debt--that means 
less interest, right? I think we ought to take all the interest savings 
and put it into Social Security so we can run the life of the Social 
Security Trust Fund out for more than 50 years. Right now, Medicare is 
projected to go broke in 2015, Social Security in 2034. Under my plan, 
we

[[Page 1477]]

could take Medicare out for more than 25 years; we could take Social 
Security out for more than 50 years.
    The second thing we have to think about is how to keep the economy 
going. You know, I'm sure you've all noticed, particularly those of you 
in business, the last 2 months, there's been this real debate about 
whether the Federal Reserve should raise interest rates to try to head 
off inflation that is not at all in evidence now, because nobody can 
imagine that we've had this economy growing this long in peacetime at 
this high rate.
    Bill Daley and I kind of like it. It's our job. But people say, 
``Well, you know, you haven't''--they say, ``You know, Clinton may have 
a good team, but they didn't repeal the laws of economics, so I mean, 
don't we have to raise interest rates, slow the economy down to stop 
inflation, because if we have inflation, then we'll have a huge increase 
in interest rates and the thing will crater.'' And you've been seeing 
all this debate.
    So I ask myself all the time: What can we do to keep the economy 
going, to minimize the effect of the next slowdown, to ensure that the 
next pickup will be quicker? And I have two things that I think are 
quite important that are inconsistent with the Republican plan.
    One is, I don't want to just pay down the debt. I want to pay it 
off. And under my plan, we'll be out of debt in 15 years for the first 
time since 1835. Now, why does that matter, and why would the more 
liberal of the two parties be for it? How does that help ordinary 
people? How does it help wealthy people? Why is it worth more to you 
than a tax cut? Why? Because in a global economy where money moves 
around in the flash of an eye all over the world, if we're out of debt, 
what does that mean?
    It means interest rates will be lower for business; it means there 
will be more business investment; it means there will be more people 
hired for jobs; it means there will be more money available for wage 
increases and for ordinary middle class people or people struggling to 
work their way into the middle class; it means the interest rates they 
pay on homes, cars, credit cards, and college loans will be lower. It 
means the next time there are a lot of problems around the world like 
this financial crisis in Asia a couple of years ago, that our friends 
around the world will be able to get the money they need to get back on 
their feet at lower interest rates. It means--God forbid--if we have 
another terrible economic crisis in America sometime in the future and 
we have to go into debt, we'll be able to get lower interest rates, and 
then we'll be able to get out of debt again in a hurry because we won't 
be borrowing money just to pay the bills every week, as we have been 
since 1835--and especially for the 12 years before I took office.
    So this is a huge deal. The other big thing we can do to keep the 
economy growing without inflation is to bring economic opportunity to 
the people in the neighborhoods, the inner-city neighborhoods, the small 
towns, the rural areas, and the Indian reservations that haven't felt a 
lick of prosperity in spite of all we've enjoyed. And that's why I took 
that trip across America to Appalachia, to the Mississippi Delta, to the 
Indian reservation, and to the inner cities to highlight the fact that 
as well as we are doing, there are still places that haven't felt the 
sunlight of our prosperity.
    And I have asked the Congress to pass a tax cut that is affordable, 
that includes giving people in this room who have money the same 
financial incentives through tax credits and Government loan guarantees 
to invest in an Indian reservation or in Appalachia or the Mississippi 
Delta or the inner city that we give you today to invest in the 
Caribbean, in Africa, in Latin America, or in Asia. I don't want to take 
away those incentives. I want to help those people, too. But I think we 
ought to have the same incentive to give poor people in America a chance 
to be part of the economic mainstream. And that's what I think we ought 
to do.
    And let me just mention two other things. We have made great 
improvements in education. With tax cuts already provided, we've given 
tax credits to everybody, practically, for the first 2 years of college 
and, indeed, for the next 2, and for graduate school. But we still don't 
have the best school system in the world for everybody, and until we 
have world-class education for everybody, this country is going to be 
held back. And as we've grown more diverse and more and

[[Page 1478]]

more of our kids have a first language not even English, we're going to 
have to work harder to have a good school system.
    If the Republican plan passes, we will literally have to cut back on 
our present level of support for excellence in education at a time when 
we're trying to hook up all of the classrooms to the Internet, build 
modernized schools, raise standards, end social promotion, but give the 
schools money for summer school and after-school programs. We will have 
to have a huge cut in national support for education if this tax plan 
passes.
    The last thing I'd just like to mention is the crime rate going 
down. I don't know if you remember this, but I had a huge fight with the 
Members of the other party in '94. When Tony and others joined together, 
we passed this crime bill. They said if we put 100,000 police on the 
streets, it wouldn't have any impact on the crime rate. Well, they were 
wrong.
    Now, I've got a plan that would put 50,000 more police on the street 
and target them in the areas that have still real high crime. We 
actually have a chance to make this the safest big country in the world 
in the next 10 years. But if this tax cut passes, we'll have to make big 
cuts in what we're doing now in law enforcement, and the support we have 
in State and local law enforcement, and the work Federal law enforcement 
does.
    So it seems to me--and I could give you lots of other examples--now, 
does that mean we can't have any tax cut? No, I actually presented quite 
a sizeable tax cut to the Congress. I said, but let's do first things 
first. Let's save Social Security and Medicare. Let's pay the debt off. 
Let's make sure we can do what we have to do in education, law 
enforcement, medical research, national defense, the environment. What 
we have to do--not big increases, but what we have to do--and then give 
the rest of it back to the taxpayers. That's the way I did it.
    And there's a substantial tax--[inaudible]--worth hundreds of 
dollars a year to a lot of people for child care, for long-term care, to 
save for retirement. Now, one of my staff members said, ``But you see 
what we're doing, don't you? We haven't saved Social Security. We 
haven't saved Medicare. We haven't secured these other things. What are 
we debating first? Their tax credit.''
    One of the guys that works for me says this is kind of like a family 
sitting down saying, you know, ``Let's take the vacation of our dreams 
to Hawaii, and when we get back, we'll figure out whether we can pay the 
home mortgage and send our kids to college.'' [Laughter] I mean, that's 
what we're doing here. And so I say to you, I think we're right. But why 
are you here? I'm telling you, everybody in this room--just about 
everybody in this room--would be better off--you ought to be at their 
deal, because for the first year, you'd be better off with their deal, 
because I think two-thirds of the benefits of their plan go to the top 2 
percent or something of the economy. You'd be a lot better off in the 
short run with their deal. Why are you here?
    Most of us believe--I think all of us believe--that those of us who 
are fortunate do better in the long run when everybody else does better, 
that we not only have a moral obligation to make sure everybody has a 
chance, but we actually do better. And guess what, we now have evidence.
    I've got a friend in New York who runs one of the biggest companies 
in this country. He's going around to Wall Street, now that all these 
Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates are raising money, and 
all these Wall Street guys are saying, ``You know, you've got to go for 
the Republicans this time.'' And he says, ``I'll tell you what you do: 
If you paid more in taxes after 1993 because of Bill Clinton's deficit 
reduction package than you've made in the stock market, be for the 
Republicans.'' [Laughter] ``But if you haven't, you'd better think about 
it.''
    But this is not a selfish--it is actually true that we all do better 
when we help each other. And so if you think about it--I think the one 
thing that defines the difference between the two parties today is how 
we think of our national community. I think they honestly believe--I 
don't mean this in a critical way--I think they honestly believe that 
they see the national community as people who say they believe the same 
things. We say the national community is everybody who is a responsible 
citizen, working together, trying to help each other reach our full 
potential. And we believe the Government has a role to play

[[Page 1479]]

when there is no other way to do it. They call us the party of 
Government; I've given you the smallest Federal Government since John 
Kennedy was President. I've privatized more programs and eliminated more 
than Presidents Reagan and Bush did.
    The percentage of jobs created in the private sector in the Clinton 
administration is significantly higher than the percentage created in 
the two previous Republican administrations. We don't believe the 
Government can solve all the problems, but we believe in things like 
family leave. We believe that. We believe that's a good thing for 
America. We believe in the Patients' Bill of Rights.
    We think if people are going to go into managed care, they ought to 
know they can see a specialist if the doctor says so. And if they get 
hit in an accident coming out of the concert in Cincinnati tonight, they 
ought not to have to go past two hospitals to get to the emergency room 
just because the first two aren't covered. We believe that. That's what 
we really believe. And I'm willing to pay what the Republicans say it 
would cost, 2 bucks a month on my health insurance, so somebody else can 
see a specialist and go to the nearest emergency room, and I think most 
of you are. And I think we're all better off when people are healthier. 
They're more secure; they feel better at work; they feel better about 
their country. That's the difference.
    I believe we'd all be better off if we could end 100 years of 
oppression of the Native Americans, and they could actually make a 
living on those Indian reservations instead of haggling over a deal made 
over 100 years ago that was a disgrace to the United States. We believe 
that we are bound up together. And I hope that if somebody asks you 
tomorrow why you came here, you'll be able to tell them that.
    I'll close with just these thoughts. I'll tell you three stories 
real quick.
    I was in Iowa a few days ago, and I remembered the first time I went 
to Iowa after I became President--I believe it's the first time--was 
when they had that 500-year flood in the Mississippi River. Do you 
remember that? And the Mississippi just flooded its banks in '93--500-
year flood.
    So I go to Des Moines and I'm going out there, stacking those 
sandbags, feeling good--you know, I'm being a good citizen, doing it and 
trying to set a good example. And I look up and there is this child 
standing there who was then 13 years old, who was about this tall, even 
though she's 13 years old. And the bones in her head were bulging 
through her skin, and her elbows and knees were knobby and her knuckles 
were bony, because she was born with brittle bone disease. She's had 
dozens of bone breaks, all kinds of operations. Every bone in her body 
could have been shattered. And she's there with the people and the 
sandbags.
    And I asked this child, I said, ``What are you doing here?'' I said, 
``Do you live in Des Moines?'' She said, ``No, sir, I'm from 
Wisconsin.'' She said, ``But these people need help.'' And I don't know 
if you've known any children with brittle bone disease; some of them 
never get out of bed. This girl's really relatively strong, but still, 
she could--was in great danger, always.
    And I said, ``Aren't you afraid to be here?'' She said, ``I've got 
to go on living. These people need help. I asked my parents if I could 
come down here, and we came.'' That young woman went to the National 
Institutes of Health, twice a year, every year after that, so I kept in 
touch with her. Her name is Brianne Schwantes.
    Last year I went out to American University in Washington to make a 
speech and I looked up, and there she was, an 18-
year-old freshman, introducing me to all of her roommates. Now, I feel 
better that a child like that could get some of our tax money at the 
National Institutes of Health, and I think this country is better 
because of it.
    I'll tell you another story. When I was in Iowa, I looked out, and 
on the second row of this speech I gave at this school--there were 
hundreds of people there--there is this radiant young African-American 
girl, about 8 years old now, tall, beautiful. Her name is Jimiya Poisel. 
The first time I met her, she was a little baby in her mother's arms in 
1992 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. There was this huge rally there. And so I 
went to the crowd and I was shaking hands the way I always do, and there 
was this very tall white lady holding this African-American baby.

[[Page 1480]]

    So I said, ``Whose baby is that?'' She said, ``This is my baby.'' 
And I said, ``Well, where did you get that baby?'' She said, ``From 
Miami.'' I said, ``Well, why, how?'' She said, ``Well, you see, this 
baby was born with AIDS; so nobody wanted it, and I thought somebody 
ought to give this baby a home.''
    I later found out this woman--that her husband had left her; she had 
two children of her own; she was living in an apartment, barely able to 
make ends meet, but she had enough heart to take this little baby. And a 
couple of times a year, every year between now and then, they came to 
the NIH--this child with AIDS. She is a beautiful child. And once every 
year or so, they'd come by to see me and I'd keep up with her, and when 
I'd go to Iowa she'd always be there. She was there in the audience, 
faithfully, like she always is.
    The lady had a better turn in her life, good things have happened to 
her and her family. I think we're better off that that little girl found 
a home, that she had a woman who had more problems than most of us have 
ever had in her life, but she still had enough room for her, and that 
her Government helped her raise this child. And she got a $500 tax 
credit because of the Balanced Budget Act. That the child will be able 
to go to college, and that, thank goodness, because of medical research, 
she'll probably live to go to college.
    Last thing. When I went to the Indian reservation, I was introduced 
by the chief of the Oglala Sioux; they now call him the President. His 
name is Harold Salway. Before I went to Pine Ridge, Mr. Salway and 18 
other tribal leaders from Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, the 
high plains, came to see me at the White House. And we were sitting 
there, and they all went through all their concerns--you know, about 
education and the economy and everything. And then at the end, Salway 
stands up. And he's not a very tall man, but he's very dignified and he 
stood there like this, and he said, ``I have something I would like to 
say.'' He said, ``We are supporting your position in Kosovo.'' The 
poorest Americans. He said, ``You see, we know something about ethnic 
cleansing.'' [Laughter] But he said--let me finish--he said, ``But this 
is America.'' He said, ``My great-grandfather was massacred at Wounded 
Knee. I had two uncles. One was on the beach at Normandy. The other was 
the first Native American fighter pilot in the history of the military 
in the United States. And here am I, their nephew, with the President of 
the United States.'' He said, ``I have only one son, and he means more 
to me than anything. But I would be honored to have him wear the uniform 
of my country to fight against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.'' Community. 
Humanity.
    Thirty-one years ago Senator Kennedy gave another eulogy for his 
brother, Robert. Those of us who were grown then, many of us have a 
clear memory of it. And I want to close with this. I've thought about it 
a lot today. That man has borne a lot of burden. But after Robert 
Kennedy's campaign for President in 1968, where he'd gone into the coal 
mining areas of Appalachia, where he went to the Indian reservation, 
where he went to places and people that had been forgotten, Ted Kennedy 
said that he and his family hoped that what their brother was to them 
and what he wished for others would someday come to pass for all the 
world. I heard it 31 years ago; I have never forgotten it. That's why 
I'm here tonight, and why I hope you are.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 7:55 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Stanley M. Chesley and Richard D. 
Lawrence; Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, Democratic National 
Committee; James Evans, director, senior vice president, and general 
counsel, American Financial Group; David J. Leland, chair, Ohio State 
Democratic Party; and Jimiya Poisel's mother, Laura. This item was not 
received in time for publication in the appropriate issue.