[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 31 (Monday, August 9, 1999)]
[Pages 1544-1547]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner

August 2, 1999

    Thank you very much. I will be brief, but let me begin by thanking 
John Kerry for having us in his beautiful, beautiful home. He and 
Theresa have been very good for our country and very good for our party, 
and I am delighted to be here. And I want to thank all of you for 
coming.
    Let me ask you to think about what I hope we'll be discussing in the 
following way. When I became President, I was trying to make sure that 
America would begin to function again at an acceptable level of 
performance so that the American people, who are basically out there 
getting up every day, working hard, doing a good job, would find some 
way to be better rewarded, and so that we could maximize these sweeping 
changes going through the world in how we work and how we live and how 
we relate to one another, both within this country and beyond our 
borders.
    And so we set about trying to do that, and the results, I think, 
have been quite satisfactory in a lot of ways. And I'm grateful for 
that. If I could just make one point about it, the President does not do 
these things alone. John Kerry's leadership in the areas that he 
mentioned has been nothing short of brilliant. And without the support 
of the people in Congress who are our allies, none of it could have 
happened. So I'm grateful for that.
    Now, I have a year and a half left on my term, and yet, I'm thinking 
more about the long term than I did even when I got here, for the simple 
reason that we are now in a position to think about the long term and 
about how we can do more than just make the country work but how we can 
secure a framework for opportunity for America, for a greater social 
justice, for a greater good

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at home and around the world than ever before. That's why I think it's 
important that we not blow this surplus we waited 30 years to produce 
until we have fundamentally secured the challenge of the aging of 
America by doing something about Social Security and Medicare. It's why 
I think it's important that we not, while the economy is rocking along 
very well, pass a tax cut that would undermine our ability to meet our 
commitments in education, the environment, biomedical research, and 
other areas. I think that's very important.
    But I also think we need to be thinking about those fundamental 
things in society that have not fully incorporated what most of you have 
done very well doing, which is riding the wave of the information 
revolution. We have, thanks to the Vice President, done our best to have 
good policies, whether it was in the Telecommunications Act or a lot of 
other specific issues, some of which Senator Kerry mentioned, or just 
doing no harm. And we've been able to, far more than ever before, 
maximize the use of information technology and Government, which is why 
we now have the smallest Government we've had since 1963. But if you 
really think about it, we should not be satisfied with where we are. And 
I'll just give you a few examples.
    In education, we finally have test scores turned around, not only in 
mathematics and science but also in reading, which is really quite an 
important achievement, since so many of our children do not have English 
as their first language. But no one seriously believes we have the best 
system of elementary and secondary education in the world. And we have 
all this diversity in our country. How can we use technology to lift the 
level of all education?
    I'll give you another example. We have now, as you all probably have 
seen, I think we have reached the benefit, the limit of the benefits 
that traditional management can bring in moderating inflation and health 
care costs. When I became President, health care was rising at 3 times 
the rate of inflation and people were dropping coverage dramatically. 
Now, unfortunately, that's continued to happen. But one of the reasons 
that there's this intense debate in Washington over the Patients' Bill 
of Rights is that so many people, including a lot of health care 
professionals, believe that we have reached the limit which you can get 
management-related--traditional, management-related savings out of 
health care without eroding the quality of care.
    What can we do to maximize the impact of all the things that we do 
to make the health care system work better and extend coverage to more 
people? I'll give you a third example. Someone told me in Silicon Valley 
one day that people in high tech businesses work 3 to 9 times faster 
than people in normal businesses do, and Government worked 3 to 9 times 
slower, and therefore, the marriage was impossible, which I thought is 
an interesting observation and painfully accurate from time to time.
    What can we do, what still is out there that we should be doing that 
makes Government more responsive, more accessible to people? And then 
the two that I'm particularly interested in: How can we use technology 
to bring economic opportunity to people in places that are not part of 
this recovery in the United States; and how can we use-it--or can we use 
it to help people bridge a whole generation of economic development 
around the world?
    Ron Dozoretz and I have talked a lot about what could be done, for 
example, for the Indian reservations. We were in Appalachia; we were in 
the Mississippi Delta--a lot of the places that are still poor are not 
in inner-city neighborhoods; a lot of places are literally, physically--
[inaudible]--from mainstream American economic life. And I'm convinced 
that if we can't figure out ways to bring opportunity to these places 
now, we will never get around to it because of the high performance of 
our economy generally and because it's really an opportunity for 
investors to go into places where there's a lot of labor, a lot of 
willing labor, and the cost of doing business is modest.
    It seems to me that while what we've done with the empowerment 
zones, under the leadership of the Vice President, and what I propose 
that the Congress adopt, which is essentially to give the same set of 
financial incentives to people who invest in poor areas in America we 
give them to invest in the Caribbean or Latin America or Africa or Asia,

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is a good start. But I think there has got to be, at least for those 
people that are physically isolated, some thought to how technology can 
be used to trigger the infusion of economic opportunity and, therefore, 
the inclusion of those people into the mainstream of American economic 
life.
    And finally, politics, which has already been mentioned by Senator 
Kerry--it seems to me that there is, on the one hand, this sort of 
exponential increase in the cost of running campaigns, because we try 
to--because of the cost of communication. Let's not kid--and if you look 
at the cost of the campaigns as compared with the size of the Federal 
budget, for example, it doesn't look like such a big, carrying cost. But 
it's an enormous burden for people who have to go out and raise the 
money and spend the money. And basically we're communicating with each 
other in traditional ways. Most of the costs of the campaign today comes 
from television and mail, and in some places a lot of money is spent on 
radio and occasionally, depending on what the communications are, on 
newspaper advertising. But most of it's TV and mail.
    Increasingly, we see these breathtaking stories of people just 
opening a web page for a given cause and all of a sudden having 200,000, 
300,000, 400,000 people within a matter of weeks signing on and going 
forward. Is there some way to use the Internet to further democratize 
politics, to energize more people to participate, to energize more 
people to contribute at modest levels, and to lower the relative cost of 
reaching voters or increase the relative impact of voter reach?
    Because if you think about it--like when we run TV ads, there's a 
reason that an ad on the Super Bowl costs so much money. And that is 
that more people are watching it than now watch the evening news on the 
networks combined because they have so many other options. As the 
television audiences become more dispersed, I think you will see more 
sophisticated use of mail to identify, at least, people you think you 
can reach. And that's good, but is there some way we can use this both 
to broaden the base of contributors at modest levels but also to 
increase the relative effectiveness or decrease the relative costs of 
reaching people, so that people feel like they're participating in the 
democracy and so that more people have a chance to participate in ways 
that will make all of us feel better about the way we conduct our 
democracy as we go toward the next century?
    So these are things that I think about a lot. And I think, you know, 
meeting the challenge of the aging of America is a big deal. I think 
meeting the challenge of education is a big deal.
    I'll give you one more example. America's got the lowest crime rate 
in 26 years. I think that's a very good thing. And it's easy to lose 
that when we have these gripping, horrible incidents like we had in 
Atlanta or the horrible thing in Littleton, Colorado. But why shouldn't 
we be the safest big country in the world? I mean, if we have the most 
powerful technology base in the world, we can figure out how to solve 
any other problem. Why can't we think of a way to organize ourselves 
that would make us the safest big country? Why shouldn't that be--why 
shouldn't we have a big goal that is--and bring to bear all these 
things.
    Nothing is--I agree with John, I think that 50, 60, 70 years from 
now, when people look back and write the history of this era, they will 
conclude that this was a bigger deal than the industrial revolution, 
that this sort of had the combined impact of the industrial revolution 
and the printing press, which produced the Gutenberg Bible, and that it 
was just breathtaking. Now, what we who are living through this ought to 
do--in addition to those of you who are good enough to profit from it 
and contribute to our economy and make our society stronger and hire 
people and do all the good things you're doing--we ought to say, if this 
is profoundly changing the way we work and the way we live and the way 
we relate to each other, by definition it ought to be able to be 
effective in helping us meet society's biggest challenges, including 
those I outlined tonight.
    So I'm very interested in it. I thank you for your presence here. 
And I am all ears.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 7:35 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Senator John F. Kerry and his wife,

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Theresa; and Ron Dozoretz, founder, FHC Health Systems.