[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 32 (Monday, August 16, 1999)]
[Pages 1577-1582]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the Arkansas Broadcasters Association's 50th Anniversary 
Dinner in Little Rock, Arkansas

August 6, 1999

    Thank you very much. Congratulations on your 50th anniversary. And 
thank you for honoring my friend and my partner James Lee Witt.
    You know, Bobby--I was wondering what Bobby would say. I thought he 
would say, ``You know, I knew I could guilt Bill Clinton into coming to 
this dinner once I found out he was going to be in Arkansas and I 
reminded him how many early-morning radio interviews I'd given him over 
the last 20 years.'' And I want to thank Bobby Caldwell, who is my 
longtime friend, and all of you for the work that you do, as well as for 
honoring a wonderful man tonight.
    I am honored to be joined by Rodney Slater, and I know there are 
others here in our administration--Kay Goss, Buddy

[[Page 1578]]

Young, and people who were in our administration in Arkansas, like Bill 
and Judy Gaddy, are here, and many others that I haven't had a chance to 
see. I thank the members of the legislature who are here--Steve Faris 
and Don House; and Bud Harper, who has the job that James Lee used to 
have and, like James Lee, used to be a county judge, and therefore, was 
prepared for it.
    And I want to acknowledge my good friend John Paul Katz, who served 
as Speaker of the House when I was Governor. And also, James Lee's 
family--James Lee and Lea Ellen have done a great job, and you know 
they're building a political dynasty in Yell County. And if your last 
name is not Witt, you can't be county judge in Yell County anymore. 
[Laughter] Not ever.
    Let me say that--I know most of this has been said, but I want to 
say a few things about James Lee and what he represents in terms of what 
I've tried to do as your President. This is one of the best times in 
American history, but when it comes to weather, it's been one of the 
worst. Since 1993, we've had the worst flood of the century in the 
Midwest; the worst earthquake in Northridge, California; weather 
disasters in places they weren't supposed to happen. We've had tornadoes 
in Minnesota, ice storms in Florida. And now the farm crops are burning 
up, not in the South, but in the East and the Northeast, where today we 
acknowledged the worst drought ever for the farmers from Maryland to New 
Jersey to Rhode Island.
    We have had in total more than 250 natural disasters in all 50 
States and territories. And many of them have cost a lot of human lives.
    Well, the old saying that God doesn't send you anything you can't 
handle was made true from the point of view of my administration and 
millions of Americans because James Lee Witt agreed to be head of the 
Federal Emergency Management Agency.
    I got this idea, I have to tell you, when I went to Florida as a 
candidate for President and I saw the enormous anxiety that people felt 
in the aftermath of the terrible hurricane, where their whole lives had 
been wrecked. And I talked to Senator Pryor about this--I remember this 
very clearly--that people kept saying the Federal Government is not 
working; they're not helping; I don't know what they're doing; they're 
taking too long; they act bureaucratic. You know, just one thing after 
another.
    And I realized what the problem was. And that is that for decades, 
through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, the Federal 
Emergency Management Agency was treated like a political appointment. 
And normally the person who got it was somebody who wanted something 
else, who was a big supporter of the President, but couldn't quite 
become an Ambassador to a European country or couldn't quite get a 
position in the Cabinet. I took care of that by putting FEMA in the 
Cabinet.
    And all these people that had this job were good people. They were 
not bad people; they were good people. And there were all these 
dedicated professionals who were working day in and day out. But there 
was no one at the helm who wanted the job and who had experience in what 
the job was and who could put every fiber of his being into dealing with 
people in the most difficult times imaginable.
    And, you know, when I was Governor and James Lee was head of the 
office of emergency services here, we had horrible floods; we had 
tornadoes that leveled little towns. I remember going over to west 
Memphis when the whole place was decked and the glass had been shattered 
at the dog track and glass was flying through the air over there at more 
than 100 miles an hour. Just a miracle that we didn't have lots of 
people killed by something that was just like a hail of bullets.
    And I knew that he cared what happened to people when they were 
running tight, and I knew he knew that people were frustrated, they were 
angry, they were disoriented, when they'd lost everything in the world. 
And we needed somebody who actually had that kind of experience and that 
kind of ability doing this job.
    You know, when everything is going along all right, most people 
think of the Cabinet of the President as the Secretary of State, 
Secretary of Defense, and the Attorney General, and maybe if you're from 
Arkansas, you think about the Secretary of Agriculture. But

[[Page 1579]]

when your house is blown away and when your community is buried in 
water, the most important person in the Federal Government is the person 
that heads the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
    And because of all the things we've been through as a nation in 
natural disasters in the last 6 years, James Lee Witt has very often 
been the most important person in the Federal Government to tens of 
millions of Americans.
    I kid him every time we have a disaster someplace, 3 weeks later 
there's another State he could be elected to State office in. When we 
went through all this terrible thing in southern California with that 
earthquake--they think of themselves as a big, modern place, and a lot 
of them, actually, are from places like Arkansas, but they forget it 
from time to time. And he gave them a whole new take on what it was to 
have a grassroots sense of common sense and compassion.
    So I can just tell you that I think we're going to have more of 
these difficult natural problems, and I think we're going to have a lot 
of challenges to meet. But it will be a long, long time before any 
Federal official ever has this position who can remotely equal James Lee 
for his experience, his knowledge, his ability, and his compassion. He 
has served America well, and he has done Arkansas proud.
    I'd just like to take advantage of the fact that you gave me this 
podium to give you a brief report on a couple of other things, by using, 
if I might, James Lee. The way he runs FEMA and the way he conducts his 
business is the way I believe the Federal Government as a whole should 
be run, that we should basically put people ahead of politics and power.
    Now, all you've got to do is read the paper every day or listen to 
the news to know that that's not the way Washington works and that's not 
the way some people who report about Washington want it to work, because 
they think it would be immensely boring if it did, I think. But James 
Lee is exhibit A of the kind of Government we've tried to bring to 
Washington. So is Rodney, I might add.
    You have these two Arkansans serving with great distinction, by the 
way, who are quite popular with both Republicans and Democrats in the 
United States Congress, both of them, because they treat people 
decently; they give them a quick answer; they shoot straight. They don't 
say yes when the answer is no, but they try to say yes whenever they 
can. And they are very well thought of. And they don't become the kind 
of lightning rods that normally just titillate the day-to-day coverage 
of politics in Washington.
    I believe, out here in the country there is a national consensus 
around a vital center for America moving forward. It crosses party lines 
on nearly everything. I believe it exists nearly everywhere--except in 
Washington.
    I'll just give you one example, this debate we're having over the 
Patients' Bill of Rights. I have supported health maintenance 
organizations. I have supported managed care as a way of holding down 
the costs of health care. Let's not forget, in 1993 when I took office, 
health care costs for several years had been going up at 3 times the 
rate of inflation. And they threatened to absolutely engulf the budgets 
of businesses and of families. But I also believe that you can't manage 
a system if you forget what the primary mission of the system is. In 
this case, it is to improve the health care of the American people.
    Now, I believe if you went out to anyplace in Arkansas--I think if 
you took an exhaustive survey, if you polled 20,000 people here in 
Pulaski County, or in any part of our State, and you divided them 
properly among the parties, you would find overwhelming support for the 
idea that every American in an HMO ought to have the right to see a 
specialist if their doctor tells them they need to see a specialist.
    And in a lot of big cities, believe it or not, when people have 
accidents--when the ambulance picks them up, they have to go by two or 
three emergency rooms until they get to one in a hospital that's 
covered. Well, if it's you in the back of that ambulance, you want to go 
to the first emergency room you come to. You don't want to have to bump 
two or three until you get to one that just happens to be in a plan.

[[Page 1580]]

    And a lot of you run small businesses. And small businesses that do 
provide health insurance for their employees often have to change 
providers, and they have to look around, from time to time, for the most 
cost-effective provider. But if there's an employee in that business 
who's in the sixth month of a difficult pregnancy, or in the middle of a 
chemotherapy treatment, I think that those people ought to be able to 
keep their doctors until the treatment is finished. These are just 
basic, simple things. And I think 70 percent of the American people 
agree.
    Now, there is a glimmer of good news. About 20 Republicans in the 
House of Representatives--including all of their doctors, about a half 
dozen of them--have said they want to help us pass this. And I hope we 
can get it done. But the fact that we've been fighting for it for nearly 
2 years is an example--we'd never have a 2-year fight over this in the 
Arkansas legislature. We just wouldn't do it, because it would be such a 
clear, human, basic thing that we'd figure out how to get it done 
without imposing undue burdens on the businesses involved.
    And that's what we have to do in Washington. If you take the debate 
we're having over the surplus today--I know it may just seem like 
politics to you, but believe me, it is not to me. It's about everything 
I've tried to stand for and do since I went up there. Just remember, 
when I went to Washington, we'd been running on a balanced budget down 
here for 12 years and they had quadrupled the debt in 12 years. And we 
had--the deficit was $290 billion and projected to be $390 billion this 
year. And we were able to turn it around by arithmetic, which meant we 
have to make hard and controversial decisions, and a lot of Members of 
my party lost their seats in Congress in the '94 election because they 
voted to reduce the deficit.
    But just today, before I came down here, we announced that we have 
gone over 19 million new jobs since January of 1993--19 million; the 
longest peacetime expansion in history; the highest homeownership in 
history; the lowest minority unemployment ever recorded; a million and a 
half fewer children in poverty. Record numbers of new small businesses 
have started in every single year. The air is cleaner; the water is 
cleaner; the food is safer; there are fewer toxic waste dumps. We've got 
90 percent of our kids immunized against serious childhood illnesses for 
the first time in the history of the United States.
    We've set aside more land to be preserved forever than any 
administration, except those of the two Roosevelts. We've got 100,000 
young people that have served their country in AmeriCorps in their 
communities, earned money for college. The HOPE scholarship essentially 
guarantees that everybody can have at least 2 years of college--and 
already, 15 million people have taken advantage of it; 12.5 million 
people have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law.
    This country is a stronger country because we have looked to the 
future and tried to put people first, tried to keep thinking about 
what's best for tomorrow. And that's what this whole debate is about. 
But I just want to give you my take on it. And it's exactly the same 
attitude I'd have if I were still Governor sitting here watching it go 
on.
    This country quadrupled our debt in the 12 years before I took 
office. We have turned that around, but we're looking toward a 21st 
century in which, among other things, the following will happen. I'll 
just give you two things. Number one, the number of people over 65 is 
going to double in 30 years when the baby boomers all get into the 
retirement age. Right now Medicare is supposed to go broke in 15 years; 
Social Security is supposed to go broke in 33 years, 34 years. We are 
not prepared for the aging of America.
    Number two, we've got the largest number of children in our school 
system we have ever had--bigger than the baby boom generation, and we 
have the largest percentage of them who come from all different kinds of 
backgrounds.
    I saw an article in the Christian Science Monitor the other day that 
said Arkansas was one of the two States in the country with the fastest 
growing Hispanic populations. And nobody really believes seriously that 
we're giving every one of our children a world-class education. But our 
future as a nation, and those of us who are baby boomers, the security 
of our retirement depends upon our ability to educate all of our 
children.

[[Page 1581]]

    Now, here's what I think about this surplus. First of all, it's only 
going to materialize if we have a good economic policy. And secondly, 
only if we have a good economic policy will any tax cut be worth a plug 
nickel to anybody. So what I think we ought to do is meet the big 
challenges of the country. And I'll just mention three.
    Number one, we ought to save Social Security and strengthen Medicare 
and provide a modest prescription drug benefit to the three-quarters of 
the seniors in this country that don't have access to it. Two, we ought 
to decide how much money we have to invest in our future, in everything 
from education to national defense, the environment, to things that are 
important in Arkansas--veterans' health care. We have to put some more 
money into the university teaching hospitals. Everybody agrees with this 
up there. And we've got to do something about the farm problem. It's 
about time that we admitted that '95 farm bill, as I said when I signed 
it, reluctantly, had no safety net and will not work in bad economic 
times. It doesn't work, and we ought to fix that. But it costs money. So 
we need to figure out how many other things we have to invest in.
    And then the third thing we ought to do, in my opinion, is to save 
enough of this surplus for Social Security and Medicare that we actually 
pay this country's debt off. We can be out of debt, in 15 years, for the 
first time since 1835. And if we do that, that means in every community 
represented in this room, lower interest rates for businesses, for home 
mortgages, for college loans, for credit cards, for car payments. It 
means that the children in this room will grow up into an economy that 
is much stronger than it otherwise would have been.
    Now, can you imagine what people would have said and thought of me 
if I had gone out in 1992 and said, ``Now, I want you to vote for me, 
and 7 years later I'll come back and we'll have a little talk about what 
to do with the surplus and getting America out of debt.'' They would 
have said, ``You know, that young fellow from Arkansas is a nice young 
man, but he's deluded and we need to send him home.'' [Laughter] But 
that's where we are today, because people like David Pryor put their 
political necks on the line and stood up and did the right thing.
    And I'm just telling you--I see this now in the broad history of our 
country. A generation gets a chance like this maybe once in a lifetime. 
The World War II generation, they did for us by getting us through the 
Depression and winning the war and saving the world for freedom. And now 
what we're being asked to do is to look down the road and think of the 
long-term interest of America, and the strength of our country in good 
times and bad, and do what's right for our children.
    If you save Social Security and Medicare, when those of us in the 
baby boom retire, we won't have to burden our children with our 
retirement and undermine their ability to invest in our grandchildren. 
If you invest in education, we'll have a stronger economy. And if you 
pay the debt off, we'll sure have a stronger economy, by far, than we 
otherwise would have.
    So here's my simple idea. I know this sounds simple, but why don't 
we figure out what we've got to do for Social Security and Medicare? Why 
don't we figure out what--even the Republicans, they're up there 
spending all the money--what they want to spend on everything from 
education to agriculture and veterans, and what it takes to pay the debt 
off? There will be some money left, and give it back to the America 
people in a tax cut.
    But this debate, it's all backwards, you know. They're up there 
giving the money away--with no Medicare plan, nothing to extend the life 
of the Social Security Trust Fund, ignoring the commitments that they 
want to make in everything from defense to veterans to agriculture, with 
no prospect of paying the debt off.
    It is--one of the young men that works for me said this is kind of 
like a family sitting down at dinner and talking about what they're 
going to do for the summer and deciding they're going to have the 
vacation of their lifetimes; they're going to just blow it out. And when 
they get home from this month-long vacation, they'll see if they can pay 
the home mortgage and send the kids to college. That's exactly what is 
going on here.

[[Page 1582]]

    And it is not partisan, from my point of view. I'm not running for 
anything. But when I come home here, and we put that library up down on 
the river, and I'm looking at the next generation of young people and 
trying to bring people from all over the world here to see our State and 
to talk about what we did and what we still need to do in our country 
and in our world--I want to go to bed every night knowing that we did 
everything we could to give the children in this room the 21st century 
they deserve.
    So I ask all of you, as you watch this debate unfold--we can't even 
have this argument about how big the tax cut should be until we have met 
our fundamental obligations to you and to our future. I will work with 
the Republicans--keep in mind, we passed the Balanced Budget Act in '97; 
we passed welfare reform in 1996, in the teeth of the election. And I 
would remind you that we have now cut the welfare rolls in half; they're 
the lowest they've been in 32 years.
    So we are capable of working together up there across party lines. 
But we can't forget about common sense and basic arithmetic. And we need 
to maintain the spirit of kindness and concern and humility that James 
Lee Witt has brought to that FEMA office every day he's been there. And 
I hope that, in whatever way you can, you will get that message out to 
the people who listen to you--because a lot of people do, and we've got 
an awful lot riding on it.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:16 p.m. in the Ambassador's Ballroom at 
the Embassy Suites Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Bobby Caldwell, 
member, board of directors, Arkansas Broadcasters Association; William 
Gaddy, former director, Arkansas Employment Security Division, and his 
wife, Judy Gaddy, former special assistant to the Governor; State 
Representatives Steve Faris and Don R. House; and W.R. (Bud) Harper, 
director, Arkansas Office of Emergency Services. This item was not 
received in time for publication in the appropriate issue.