[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 31 (Monday, August 9, 1999)]
[Pages 1561-1564]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic Unity Event

August 5, 1999

    Thank you so much. First, let me thank Senator Daschle and Leader 
Gephardt for their outstanding, passionate eloquence today and their 
consistent leadership for the best interests of all the American people. 
And I think that all of us on this stage feel that way. And I just wish 
every American could know them as we do, could see how hard they've 
worked, how consistently they've worked, and how steadfast they have 
been. Nothing that I have been able to achieve as President would have 
been possible without their leadership and without the men and women on 
this platform today. And I thank them so much.
    They have already spoken about what we need to do. What I want to 
say to you is that I want to echo something Mr. Gephardt said. We are 
here united as a party, but we want to work with the members of the 
Republican caucus to do things that are good for America.
    Let's remember that in the past years, when we have done that, we 
have been successful. Last year, in the teeth of the election process, 
they eventually did join us to put a downpayment on hiring 100,000 
teachers, to do more to clean up toxic waste, to increase our 
investments in science and technology, to set aside a part of the 
surplus for Social Security, which they have continued to agree to do. 
And we made real progress with our agenda, even though we weren't the 
majority party.
    Now, what was the result? Because we made real progress and because, 
in 1998, we said, ``Here's our future agenda: Save Social Security; keep 
the economy going; pass a Patients' Bill of Rights; continue to invest 
in our children's education,'' the public responded. And we moved closer 
to being a majority in that historic election in 1998. And now, thanks 
to Mr. Forbes, we're quite a bit closer still, and I want to thank him.
    I would like to use him to illustrate the point I really wish to 
make today about our position. We are held together by unity of 
conviction, and we don't agree on everything. You ought to hear some of 
the arguments these folks have among each other. You don't have to agree 
on everything to be a member of our party, but we have certain core 
commitments.
    I have letters in my files that Mike Forbes wrote me when he was a 
member of the Republican caucus about the importance of our education 
agenda to the children that he represented. And I have numerous accounts 
of his passionate commitment to a Patients' Bill of Rights and how 
frustrated he was with over 200 organizations, all the doctors, all the 
nurses' groups, all the consumer groups pleading for the protections of 
people in HMO's to be able to see a specialist and go to the nearest 
emergency room and keep their doctor during treatment and enforce those 
rights--how frustrated he was that the leaders of his party would not 
permit that

[[Page 1562]]

sort of bill to become law. So we are united by what we believe is best 
for the vast mass of the American people.
    And I think it is important to remember that that is the source of 
our strength. In 1776 Thomas Paine said, ``It is not in numbers but in 
unity that our greatest strength lies.'' But our unity must be rooted in 
conviction. We think we ought to keep the commitments we made in 1998 to 
modernize 6,000 schools and put teachers out there, 100,000 of them, so 
the class sizes will be small in the early grades. We think we ought to 
have that strong, enforceable Patients' Bill of Rights. We think we 
ought to reform campaign finance, and we think we ought to raise the 
minimum wage for the people who are out there working who should not be 
in poverty because they're willing to go to work.
    We believe that we ought to make commonsense efforts to keep guns 
out of the hands of criminals and children, and we have lots of evidence 
that we have work to do. So I urge the conferees in both parties to stay 
here during the recess and do whatever is necessary to get us a good 
juvenile justice bill to protect our children.
    And we believe it's right to stay with the economic strategy of 
fiscal discipline and investment in our people that we started in 1993. 
You know, we Democrats have a lot of fun reading those quotes that Dick 
and Tom read about what the Republicans said about our economic plan in 
'93. But, to be fair to them, at the time they could argue that it 
wouldn't work. It violated all of their sort of ideological 
inclinations, and they could argue.
    But now there is no argument. And that's why this discussion we're 
having is so important. We don't have to debate this anymore. Now we 
have 6\1/2\ years of evidence. We have the longest peacetime expansion 
in history. We turned the biggest deficit into the biggest surplus. 
We've got 19 million new jobs, the highest homeownership in history, the 
lowest minority unemployment in history, a 30-year low in the welfare 
rolls. There is nothing more to argue about. This economic strategy 
works, and we should not abandon it in this moment. [Applause] Thank 
you.
    You know, this is a moment of testing for the generation of leaders 
represented on this platform, and those in the other party as well. I 
think generations, as well as individuals, have certain moments in their 
life where they can make a decision that will have profound consequences 
that go far beyond the moment. And this is such a moment.
    A lot of you who are here were in the World War II generation. I had 
the great honor to go to Normandy, to represent the United States at the 
50th anniversary of 
D-day, and say, when they were young this generation saved the world. 
Well, there have been a lot of disparaging remarks made about the baby 
boom generation over the last 30 years, how we were self-indulgent, and 
all the things you've heard. Well, we are about to be tested, because we 
have the opportunity of a lifetime.
    If I'd come to you 7 years ago and I said, ``Vote for me, and vote 
for them; 7 years later we'll come back, and we'll talk about how to 
spend the surplus''--[laughter]--after the debt of this country had been 
quadrupled in 12 years--just think about it--I'd be home doing deeds and 
things in a law office in Arkansas. If I had run on that platform, 
``Vote for me; 7 years from now, we'll come back and talk about how to 
spend the surplus,'' you'd say, ``You know, he seems like a nice young 
fellow, but he's totally out of touch.'' [Laughter]
    But here we are. Why? Because these people said, ``We are not going 
to let America go down the drain. We're going to stop this deficit 
spending. We're going to get interest rates down. We're going to get the 
economy going again. And we're going to do it in a way that does not 
require us to walk away from our obligations to our seniors, to our 
children, to the environment, to the defense. We can do it.'' And we 
have done it.
    Now we have, perhaps, an even bigger test. You know, when times are 
tough, sometimes people don't have many options, so they just take a 
deep breath and go on and do the hard thing. When times are easy, we are 
vulnerable to making our biggest mistakes. And that is what this 
decision before us is about. Now we have this projected surplus, about 
two-thirds of it coming from Social Security taxes, about a third of it 
coming from the other revenues paid by the American people. What are we 
going to do with

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it? What we do with it will determine the shape of America for decades 
to come. What we say is, ``Deal with the big challenges first; deal with 
the aging of America; save Social Security; save Medicare; add a 
prescription drug benefit; add the preventive tests; and get America out 
of debt for the first time since 1835, so our children can have a good 
economy, too.''
    Now, what they have said is, ``Let's pass this big tax cut first; 
make everybody happy tomorrow; and then we'll talk about these long-term 
challenges.'' And normally, that's better politics. Normally, that's 
better politics. Everybody knows we've got a surplus; let's give a lot 
of it back. The distributional problems are enormous, as Senator Daschle 
pointed out. But that's what they say.
    Here's the problem. There will be twice as many people over 65, 30 
years from now, as there are today. The Medicare Trust Fund goes broke 
in 2015; Social Security Trust Fund runs out of money in 2034. Now, 
those of us who have lived a little know that 15 years passes in the 
flash of an eye. I was talking to somebody yesterday about something I 
did 15 years ago--seemed like it was yesterday. And we are the stewards 
of this country's future. We must respond to that. We cannot let this 
opportunity go. This is a chance of a lifetime. We've got to take care 
of Medicare now. We've got to extend the life of the Social Security 
Trust Fund now.
    You all know, also, that Medicare benefits have not kept up with 
medical science. Today there are preventive tests that can catch 
diseases like cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis early and save lives 
and keep people healthy. Medicare will pay for you if you get cancer, 
osteoporosis, or heart disease and go to the hospital. But we don't pay 
for these preventive tests that will save huge amounts of money but, 
more importantly, save lives and save the quality of life and make the 
later years better. So we say, ``Let's do something to make it more 
accessible for people. We want more people to take these preventive 
tests.''
    Every day, millions of seniors pull out their plastic pillboxes, 
each pill with today's ration of medicine, don't they--medication today 
that was unknown 35 years ago when Medicare was created, that keeps you 
healthy, that keeps you out of the hospital, that lengthens life and 
improves the quality of life. But today, three out of four of our 
seniors lack dependable, affordable prescription drug coverage. And the 
percentage with good coverage goes down as the price of the prescription 
drug goes up. Medigap coverage, for example, gets more expensive for 
people as they get older and have less money to spend on it.
    So I say we have a chance now, because of our economic good fortune 
and our surplus, to extend the life of the Medicare Trust Fund, to 
provide a modest prescription drug benefit so that we can keep more 
people healthy and out of the hospital and improving their quality of 
life, and to make much more aggressive use of these preventive tests. 
And we ought to do it. The drug benefit is totally voluntary. It is 
affordable, and it will help a lot of people.
    Now, rather than respond to the Medicare plan, I was hoping that the 
Republicans in Congress would say, ``Well, Mr. President, this is your 
plan. This is our plan. There are differences. Let's work it out.'' 
Rather than do that, they said, ``Before we spend a penny to extend the 
life of the Medicare Trust Fund, we want to pass this tax cut that's so 
big, so bloated, and so weighted towards special interest and upper-
income people that there won't be any money to extend the life of the 
Medicare Trust Fund''--not a penny to extend it a year under their plan.
    Now, they've decided to vote on this plan today, but for some reason 
they don't want to send it to my desk. [Laughter] Now, I say again, we 
should not be doing this until we figure out how we're going to save 
Medicare, save Social Security, and pay the debt off. We ought to figure 
out, what is it we have to spend to educate these kids here; to provide 
for the national defense; to invest in medical research; to do the basic 
things. Then we ought to ask ourselves, how much is left? And whatever 
it is, we ought to give it back to the American people in a tax cut. 
That's the way we ought to do it.
    Next month, the Senate Finance Committee has promised to take up 
Medicare. And I hope they do. I hope that they will give me their idea 
of a plan that will extend the life of the Trust Fund and deal with the

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challenge of prescription medicine and preventive tests and say how 
they're going to pay for it.
    But you know--let me just say what's going on here. On the one hand, 
the Congress passes large tax cuts. On the other hand, they say they 
want to spend more money--for veterans, to deal with problems that a lot 
of our teaching hospitals are having with Medicare, to deal with the 
legitimate problems that our farmers are having--which is not just a 
one-year thing, it needs to be dealt with on a longer-term basis--but 
they want to have this big tax cut.
    Their plan does nothing to extend the life of the Social Security 
Trust Fund, nothing to extend the life of the Medicare Trust Fund. It 
will not pay off the debt. And if we do both things, one of two things 
is going to happen: We're going to do nothing about Medicare; we're not 
going to pay off the debt; we're going to have huge cuts in the things 
they say they're spending more money on--or we're going to totally erode 
this surplus; and we're going to squander the opportunity of a 
generation.
    One of the young men who works for me said the other day that their 
approach is sort of like a family that sits down at dinner tonight, 
around the table and says, you know, ``Let's take the vacation of our 
lifetime. Let's blow it out. Let's take the vacation of our dreams, and 
when we get home, we'll figure out whether we can make the mortgage 
payment and send the kids to college.'' [Laughter]
    Now, you wouldn't do it. You didn't do it. And we shouldn't do it. 
So I will say again, this is a remarkable moment in history. We can't 
take advantage of it if we don't work with the Republicans. They have to 
work with us. We are here to say, ``We can't support this tax plan 
because it squanders the opportunity of a lifetime, but we have worked 
with you before, and we will again.''
    President Johnson, who signed Medicare, said, ``There are no 
problems we cannot solve together and few we can solve by ourselves.'' 
We need an American solution here. But we say, ``First things first; 
meet the challenge of the aging of America; save Social Security; save 
Medicare; add that prescription drug benefit; meet the challenge of our 
children's generation by getting us out of debt for the first time since 
1835, so we'll have low interest rates, high investment, more jobs, and 
people will be able to afford to live better; invest in our education, 
do the things that we have to do. Figure out what it costs and then give 
the rest of it back to the American people. But do first things first.''
    We will be judged, 20, 30, 50 years from now by whether we use this 
historic opportunity to think of the twilight years of Americans, to 
think of the morning years of Americans, to think of how we can bring 
our country together. It is the opportunity of a lifetime, and we, those 
of us on this stage, intend to use it.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:12 a.m. in the Russell Caucus Room at 
the Russell Senate Office Building.