[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 38 (Monday, September 27, 1999)]
[Pages 1804-1811]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Fall Meeting of the Democratic National Committee

September 24, 1999

    Thank you. Well, I'm glad to see you. And I seemed to have recovered 
enough of my voice to get through this, so I'll try to do that.
    Governor Romer, Representative Sanchez, Mayor Archer, Joe Andrew, 
Andy Tobias and Beth Dozoretz, and all of our team. I wanted to begin by 
saying a simple thank-you to all the members of the DNC and to the 
leaders. I want to say a special word of thanks to the finance staff, 
with whom I have been dealing a lot lately; we've been working hard. And 
they've done a very good job, and we've done a good job under pretty 
difficult circumstances, raising the funds that our candidates and our 
party needs. And I want to thank them for their work.
    I want to congratulate the convention team that was announced, 
Governor Romer, Lydia Camarillo, Don Foley, all the others; thank you 
for your determination to make Los Angeles a great success. And I want 
to thank my friend of many, many years, Roy Romer, for the work that he 
has done for our party.
    I will recommend to the DNC tomorrow that, as Governor Romer moves 
on to this new responsibility, we elect Mayor Rendell of Philadelphia to 
the position of general chair. For those of you who know him, he has 
provided an absolutely astonishing leadership for us there. We've not 
had a Governor in Pennsylvania since I've been President. In the last 
election we carried the greater Philadelphia area by 370,000 votes, I 
think, about 20,000 votes more than our margin in the State of 
Pennsylvania. And in the city of Philadelphia, in 1996, for the first 
time the Vice President and I had the same victory margin that President 
Kennedy did in 1960, when there were 400,000 more people there. I say 
that to tell you I think our party has been well led and will be well 
led.
    I just want to mention one thing that Roy Romer will always have on 
his resume. In 1998, when we gained five seats in the midterm elections, 
though we were outspent by $100 million--$100 million--and all the 
pundits said--I want you to remember this, as you're treated to more 
punditocracy over the next year--[laughter]--all the pundits said we 
were going to be wiped out. They were on all these shows, ``I believe 
they'll lose 20 seats.'' ``No, I think they're going to lose 30 seats.'' 
[Laughter] ``No, I believe they might lose more.'' ``And they're 
certainly going to lose five or six in the Senate. They'll never be able 
to stop anything there.'' I heard it for a year.
    It was a terrible Senate election for us in terms of who was up, who 
was not. We lost no Senate seats. We gained five House seats, and it was 
the first time since 1822 that the party of the President had won seats 
in the midterm of a second term. [Applause] Thank you.
    So for all of you that were part of that, I thank you. I thank you. 
And I want to just take a few moments to try to talk about where we are 
in this moment as a country, as a party, by referring briefly to the 
recent past and by looking at the present and the future.
    When I first announced for President--it's amazing how much quicker 
things are happening now. You know, I did not even announce for 
President until October of 1991. It's September; I feel like I've been 
going through this campaign all my life. [Laughter] And I'm not even 
running. [Laughter]
    But anyway, back to the subject at hand. In 1991, when I announced, 
I asked for change in our party, in our national leadership, and in our 
country. I asked America to embrace the new challenges that we faced 
with new ideas based on old-fashioned values of opportunity for all, 
responsibility from all, and a community of all Americans.
    I asked that we have a new role, a clearly defined role, for our 
National Government, that didn't say we could solve all the problems, 
but didn't say we could walk away from them either. I asked us to stop 
demonizing Government, on the one hand, but to stop

[[Page 1805]]

defending everything Government did, on the other, and instead to focus 
on what we could do to give the American people the tools to meet their 
challenges, to solve their problems.
    And then I asked the Vice President to join the ticket. We put out 
our economic plan, and we asked the American people to give us a chance 
to put people first. People gave us a chance in '92. We made a lot of 
very tough decisions. We passed an economic plan, I would remind you, 
with not a single Republican vote, with the Vice President breaking the 
tie in the Senate. And they told everybody in America we'd raise their 
taxes--even though, for most people, we hadn't--and that it would be a 
disaster and that a recession was on the way.
    Then we passed a crime bill to put 100,000 police on the street, to 
ban assault weapons. We passed the Brady bill. They told everybody in 
America we were going to come take their guns away. [Laughter] Didn't 
they? And in 1994, they put out their ``Contract With America,'' and 
they thumped us good--they beat us good--because the voters had not felt 
the benefits of the economic plan. We had just passed the crime bill a 
couple of months before, and for all they knew, some Government 
bureaucrat was going to knock on their door and take their guns away. 
Probably--that alone probably cost us the House of Representatives. And 
everybody said--same crowd said, ``Oh, these guys can't win, they're 
history.'' Remember that? All their, ``It's over.''
    I always believed if we got up every day and thought about the 
American people, the kind of people I met in New Hampshire that were 
being evicted from their homes, and we just thought about the people 
that nobody else in Washington seems to think about and we kept asking 
ourselves, what is the right thing to do for them, that we could marry 
good politics and good policy, and it would work out all right.
    Well, 1996 came around. And the economy was cooking, and the country 
was pulling back together. And I went to New Hampshire, where they beat 
a Congressman who voted for the crime bill with the assault weapons ban 
in it. And I never will forget this. I went in '96 to New Hampshire--you 
know I have a special feeling about the place. [Laughter] They voted for 
me twice, and they normally don't vote for Democrats.
    And I got all these people there, and a bunch of them were kind of 
big, old rural guys in their plaid shirts, obviously hunters. And I 
stood up before this crowd in New Hampshire, and I said, ``You know, in 
1992 you voted for me to give me a chance. Then in 1994, you beat a 
Congressman who voted for my crime bill--I caused him to get beat--
because they told you that we were going to take your guns away. And I 
feel terrible about it. So here's what I want you to do. If any one of 
you suffered any inconvenience at all at hunting season since we passed 
that bill, I want you to vote against me, too. But if you didn't, they 
lied to you, and you need to get even.'' [Laughter]
    And so a majority of the voters in New Hampshire, a State where both 
independents and Republicans outnumbered registered Democrats, agreed. 
Then in 1998, as I said, under the leadership of our team, we ratified 
the course the country was on.
    I think it is very important--a lot of you, almost all of you come 
from somewhere else. You actually live in America, with real people. 
[Laughter] And you go about your business every day. And it seems that a 
huge part of our job every year is to make sure that people can think 
for themselves and follow their own instincts and see the world as they 
experience it and not be swayed too much either by the financial 
advantage of other side or the conventional wisdom that emanates out of 
Washington. So I want you to be of good cheer and proud, because America 
is a better place than it was in 1992.
    You know, I saw a survey the other day that said that times had been 
so good for so long, the American people couldn't remember when it was 
bad and tended to give everybody good ratings on the economy--Bush, 
Hoover, the whole crowd. [Laughter] It's been good a long time. 
[Laughter]
    So let's take just a little walk down memory lane here, shall we? 
[Laughter] In the 12 years before I become President, the 
administrations told the American people the Government was the problem, 
and they railed against the Government. But under them the Government 
got bigger, not small; and the

[[Page 1806]]

deficits got bigger. They said that supply side economics would overcome 
the laws of arithmetic--[laughter]--that if you cut taxes and increased 
spending, it would somehow balance the budget. And boy, we stuck with 
that theory for a long time. We just kept doing the same thing over and 
over again. And after 12 years, we had quadrupled the debt of the United 
States of America. We had very high interest rates.
    And it actually did work in the short run. My retired senior 
Senator, Dale Bumpers, used to say, ``If you let me write a couple 
billion dollars' worth of hot checks, I'll show you a good time, too.'' 
[Laughter] So, you know, it worked for a while; I mean, you know, we had 
all this money, and who knew where it came from? They just kept throwing 
this old money out there at us.
    And so we got out of the early recession and got through '84 and got 
through '88. Then, lo and behold--but we never could get a recovery 
really going. We kept falling back, kept falling back. And lo and 
behold, after the '88 election, we found ourselves in the worst 
recession since the Great Depression. And wages were stagnant, and 
unemployment was high. And unlike previous recessions, we couldn't 
exactly go into deficit spending, because that's what got us there in 
the first place.
    So the Vice President and I went to the American people, and we 
said, ``Look, we're going to have to get rid of this thing, and here's 
our plan to cut it in half, and after we do that, we'll go on and get 
rid of it. We've got to do it because otherwise, for the people who care 
about the business economy; we're never going to get interest rates 
down; we're not going to be competitive in the global economy. And for 
our liberals that want the Government to have money to invest in social 
programs and education, we're never going to do it because the budget's 
paralyzed by the deficit.'' And we'd gotten to the point where we were 
spending about 15 cents of every dollar you pay in taxes just to pay 
interest on the debt.
    So we said, ``We'll find a way to do it. It won't be easy, and we'll 
make a lot of people mad. We might have to get rid of a bunch of stuff. 
But if you vote for us, we'll go after the deficit. We'll continue to 
invest in the education of our children, science and technology, and 
helping the environment. But we'll get rid of a bunch of stuff, too. And 
we'll give you a new Government that's smaller, but more active in the 
ways it needs to be.''
    And the people gave us a chance. And it was an argument when we were 
elected; that is, we made an argument to the American people. And in 
'94, in their lives it was still an argument. And we won the argument in 
'92; we lost the argument in '94. But the reason we won it in '96 and 
'98 is, it wasn't an argument anymore. There were facts out there in 
people's lives. So the debate took on a whole different turn when 
people's lives, real people's lives, had been changed.
    And now we have the longest peacetime expansion in our history, 
instead of the worst recession since the Great Depression. We have over 
19 million jobs, instead of a handful. We have rising wages instead of 
stagnant wages. We've got the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the 
lowest welfare rolls--rates in 32 years, and the lowest crime rate in 26 
years. Folks, this is not an argument anymore. It's a fact, and you 
should be proud of it. [Applause] Thank you.
    Instead of a $290 billion deficit, we've got a $99 billion surplus, 
and projected surpluses into the future for years. The air is cleaner. 
The water is cleaner. The food is safer. We've cleaned up 3 times as 
many toxic waste dumps as they did in 12 years. Ninety percent of our 
kids are immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time 
in the history of this country. Nearly everybody now can afford to go to 
college because of the HOPE scholarship and the other college aid we've 
provided.
    The strategy has been validated. You can get rid of the deficit and 
still invest in the things you have to invest in. We've eliminated 
hundreds of programs but nearly doubled investment in education, while 
getting rid of the deficit. You can expand trade in ways that help 
ordinary people. You can balance the environment and the economy, and 
you can balance work and family.
    And I think this is very, very important for the American people to 
make the decisions now about where we go from now to 2000, because, you 
know, a lot of political

[[Page 1807]]

rhetoric, since people always want to change--and that's a good thing, 
not a bad thing, by the way. But a lot of political rhetoric is premised 
on the fact that we were all born yesterday; the older I get, the more I 
wish that was true. [Laughter] It would be nice for individuals like me 
but very bad for a country. So we can't allow a collective amnesia here.
    There is a history here. There was a clash of ideas. Then there was 
a test of ours, just like there was a test of theirs. So the question is 
not whether we're going to change but how are we going to keep changing.
    Here, now, what are we going to do with this surplus? I vetoed their 
tax bill yesterday; you all know that. But, you know, I will say again, 
I still believe there is the opportunity for us to work together. This 
is not an election yet. I mean, the election may be going on in the 
newspapers every day, but here, in the minds of the American people, 
they still think we should be drawing a paycheck to work for them. Where 
you live, for most people, the election is not going on. If you live in 
Iowa or New Hampshire, it's already going on. If you live in Arkansas, 
you're still worried about the price of cattle, you know?
    So we got hired to show up for work, and we still get a paycheck 
here every 2 weeks--all these guys in Congress and me--we still get 
paid. And I believe that it is imperative--the reason I vetoed the tax 
bill is it would make it impossible for America to meet our long-term 
challenges, and we can do a lot of that now, before the next election.
    What are they? Number one, the aging of America. We're going to 
double the number of people over 65 in 30 years. I hope to be one of 
them. [Laughter] The aging of America; that's a big problem not only for 
those of us in the baby boom who are going to age but for our children 
and grandchildren. Why? Because we're the biggest generation in American 
history until the kids that are now in school. They're bigger than we 
are, but it took that long.
    So now that we have the funds, I believe we ought to save Social 
Security. By that I mean I think we ought to--[applause]--thank you. By 
that I believe we ought to do some special things. Most importantly, we 
ought to run the life of that Trust Fund out at least 50 years. That 
will take you through the life span of the baby boomers when the 
generational balance will tend to right itself.
    I think we ought to do something for elderly women who are retired. 
They're the fastest group of seniors, and they tend to be poorer than 
the rest of our seniors and living on their own. And I personally would 
like to see the earnings limitation lifted, because I think we ought to 
encourage our seniors who want to work--who want to work--to work, and 
not penalize them for doing so.
    I think we ought to do something about Medicare. It's supposed to go 
broke in 15 years. And as all of you know if you deal with health care 
at all, in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, as we feared, the one thing 
that hasn't worked out very well is, it's clear to me that the cuts in 
Medicare, in terms of teaching hospitals, rural hospitals, therapeutic 
services, nursing homes, that the cuts were too severe. And we have to 
put some more money back in it.
    So we've give the Congress a plan that would lengthen the life of 
the Medicare Trust Fund to 2027, and that's the longest it's been alive, 
believe me, the Trust Fund, in--[inaudible]--who knows when. And it 
would provide for a modest, affordable, but significant prescription 
drug coverage.
    Now, this is a big deal. If you were designing a Medicare program--
if there were no Medicare and we were creating it today, we would 
absolutely have a drug benefit in it, because a lot of people can stay 
out of the hospital; a lot of people can stay alive longer; a lot of 
people can stay healthy longer. We would never consider having such a 
program without covering prescription drugs. And because we don't, about 
75 percent of our seniors don't have affordable, adequate coverage.
    And we can do this now. And we can do it without breaking the bank, 
because there are also some structural changes we can make which will 
save a lot of money over the next few years.
    I believe--that's the first thing. I think we need to meet the 
challenge of our children's education. We have the largest and most 
diverse group of children in the history of America. Every one of them 
needs a world-class education--every one of them. If we--

[[Page 1808]]

if I had allowed this tax bill to become law, we would have had to have 
huge cuts in education or spend one-half of the surplus attributable to 
Social Security taxes, which would have really put us in a pickle, with 
the seniors about to retire, the baby boomers about to retire.
    So I gave the Congress a plan that would save Social Security and 
Medicare, continue to invest in education and defense and the other 
things that are important, and do it in a way that over the next 15 
years would pay down the debt so that in 15 years, for the first time 
since Andy Jackson was President, we'd be out of debt as a country--debt 
free.
    Now, they think that's a bad idea on the other side, and they're 
supposed to be the conservative party. Why should the progressive party 
be for getting us out of debt? Why should the Democrats be for--I mean, 
we're supposed to be more liberal than them. We want to help poor 
people. Why in the wide world should we be for that? I'll tell you why. 
We live in a global economy where interest rates are set globally.
    You saw what happened to Asia a couple of years ago, when everybody, 
all of a sudden, overnight, decided it wasn't such a good place to 
invest, and all of a sudden, all of these countries that thought they 
were doing a good job woke up with a severe headache.
    And we've seen this sort of thing happen. No, the decisions aren't 
always rational or fair. But we know that money is an international 
commodity, and interest rates, therefore, are globally set, although we 
can all influence them. Obviously, the Federal Reserve can influence 
them; others can.
    If we could take ourselves out of debt, publicly held debt, which is 
what I propose, for the first time since 1835, here's what would happen. 
For the next generation, even if we had a recession and we had to borrow 
some money then later to keep things going, interest rates would be much 
lower, because the Government wouldn't be competing with you for the 
money. That means all the working people, people like those who work in 
this hotel here, their credit card bills would be lower. Their monthly 
car payments would be lower. Your home mortgage payment would be lower. 
Your college loan payment would be lower. All the people we represent 
would be better off if we could have long-term low interest rates and 
lower inflation. And that's why we ought to be for this.
    Now, people that have lots of money and don't have to work very 
hard--I hope I'll be one of them one day, too; I doubt it--[laughter]--
you know, they're okay with high interest rates. They just move their 
money around and make more money. But we should be for this conservative 
position, because we have a progressive conscience and heart.
    And so this is a plan that the Vice President and I and our 
administration have asked Congress to adopt. There are plenty of things 
that we can work together with the Republicans on, to work this out, but 
we ought to save Social Security and Medicare, keep investing in 
education, and get this country out of debt.
    And if we could make an agreement--I might say, there's another 
reason the Republicans ought to be for it. So if we could make this 
agreement and keep the thing going on, then all their campaign speeches 
for the 2000 elections would make more sense. [Laughter] Because right 
now, every one of their Presidential candidates is out there telling us 
that they want to spend more money on defense or pay our service men and 
women more; you know, they don't want to stop investing in education or 
whatever it is they're saying out there. And every one of them are for 
this tax bill that I vetoed. And if it became law, they'd all be stuck. 
Every one of their campaign speeches would be bogus, because there would 
be no money to pay for all these things they're out there promising the 
voters. So they ought to be for what I'm doing, too. I'm saving them a 
red face in 2000. [Laughter] Everybody ought to be for it.
    But just think of this: Think of how proud we can feel if we were to 
lift the burden not only off the baby boomers but off our children and 
grandchildren of the baby boom retirement by saving Social Security and 
Medicare, if we were to guarantee a generation of lower interest rates 
and greater investment and more jobs and higher incomes by getting this 
country out of debt; if we really committed ourselves to a world-class 
education for every child in this country, without regard to their race 
or their background or

[[Page 1809]]

where they lived. These are big things, and we have to lay the 
foundation now.
    And as you look ahead, just remember there really are differences 
between these two parties that are honest and heart-felt. You know, we 
want to save Social Security, not privatize it and leave individual 
seniors to the luck of their own investments. We want to save Medicare, 
not force seniors, by pricing systems, into managed care plans. And the 
people that want to do that don't even want to vote for a Patients' Bill 
of Rights. We want a real, enforceable Patients' Bill of Rights, and 
their leadership and a lot of their folks are still trying to find a way 
not to do that.
    Keep in mind, this is the party that opposed family and medical 
leave before. Now they're against the Patients' Bill of Rights. Remember 
how they told us family and medical leave is going to bankrupt the 
country; it's a terrible thing. Millions of people--millions of people 
have taken time off now--millions--because of a baby being born or a 
parent being sick--millions of people. And every year, we've set a new 
record for new small businesses formed. They were wrong, and we were 
right about that.
    We want to close the gun show loophole in the Brady bill. Why? Why? 
We want to do that because now 400,000 people who have criminal 
backgrounds or were otherwise unfit to get a handgun have been blocked 
by the Brady bill, but as they know that, more and more people are going 
to use the gun shows or the urban flea markets. So we want to close the 
loophole and do background checks.
    It's the same old thing, you know, and the same old crowd's against 
it. And it's so interesting, it's funny to me--when they were against 
the Brady bill, they told us that crooks didn't buy guns in gun shops 
anyway, so the Brady bill was a total waste. It was just a burden on 
poor gun shop owners and poor gun buyers because no crooks--the guns--
the crooks, they said, they all get their guns at the gun shows and the 
flea markets. [Laughter] That's what they said then.
    So now, I say, ``Okay, let's do the background checks,'' and they 
say, ``Oh, we can't do that. It's too burdensome.'' And when we asked 
the leadership of the other party to do it, when we asked the candidates 
running for President to do it, they flew like a covey of quails back to 
the nest of the NRA. There are differences between the two parties.
    And again, in '92, it was an argument, because this issue of what is 
a sensible way to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children 
had not been seriously debated for 30 years, since--or then, 24 years, 
since Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. And we 
had a brief, all-too-brief burst of focus on this, thanks to the 
leadership of President Johnson, who, like me, came out of a hunting 
culture and, like me, understood what was true about what the other side 
was saying and what was not. As a result, they don't like either one of 
us very much. [Laughter]
    But I'm telling you, folks, this is a big deal going forward. This 
is a big deal. We have given you the lowest crime rate in 26 years by 
doing what law enforcement people and community leaders say makes sense. 
But this country's still too dangerous. There are still too many people 
getting killed, with people that have mental health problems walking 
around with guns.
    A lot of these horrible killings we're seeing here, we need to do 
more to help these people; we need people identifying these people and 
getting them help quicker and doing things. You're trying to stop some 
of this stuff from going on. But you know, we can create a country in 
which everybody that wants to go hunting, can go hunting, everybody that 
wants to be a sport shooter can do it, and we can still stop putting 
weapons into the hands of children, criminals, and people who are 
unstable. We can do that.
    We got the crime rate down to a 26-year low, but it's too high. We 
can make this the safest big country in the world. And the American 
people will make that decision in the next election by the decision they 
make. There are honest differences between us.
    And what I want to say to you is, thank you. Let's get as much done 
as we can. People still, where you live, most of them don't think we're 
in a Presidential election. That's something that happens after the 
conventions. They think that they're paying good taxes to pay our 
salary, and they'd like us to work a while longer. And so let's do that.

[[Page 1810]]

    And as you go into the next election, don't fight with people when 
they say we need a change. Tell them we certainly do; we always need a 
change. The question is not whether we're going to change but what kind 
of change we're going to make. And are we going to change based on all 
the good things that are going on in America now? Or would we instead 
take a U-turn and go back to the stuff that got us in so much trouble 
before the Vice President and I came here and got the help of the fine 
Members of Congress and others who have worked with us? That is the 
issue. And you don't have to argue so much anymore. You've got evidence.
    Now, we'll be at a financial disadvantage, of course. One of the 
interesting consequences of the recovery of our administration, the 
economic recovery we sparked, is we've given all those Republicans a lot 
more money to spend on politics. [Laughter] You know, every time I see 
the total amount of money they're spending, I think, there's one more 
statistic for our economic plan. [Laughter] And some more evidence that 
some folks never learn. So we'll do that.
    The last thing I want to tell you is, be of good cheer. Let me tell 
you something. I come to this hotel and give a lot of speeches, as you 
might imagine. And today I came in, and they had six working people from 
the hotel in their uniforms to greet me, not the executives, not the 
management, people that work here. And they gave me my very own employee 
ID card. [Laughter]
    They're the people we're fighting for. You just imagine you had an 
employee ID card every day when we fight for the minimum wage and we 
fight to save and reform Medicare and Social Security and we fight for 
the education of our children, when we fight to let disabled people keep 
their Medicaid when they go to work, so they can go into the work force. 
We fight for all these things. When we fight for one America across all 
the lines that divide us, when we fight for the ``Employment Non-
Discrimination Act,'' when we fight for the hate crimes legislation, 
when we fight for these things, it's because we identify with each 
other.
    It's a long time between now and November of 2000. In June of 1992, 
you know where I was in the polls? Not behind, third--third. [Laughter] 
This is not a horse race. You don't collect any money if you show. 
[Laughter] But you know what I thought? I'll never forget, June 2, 1992: 
We win the California primary, and we win in New Jersey, and we win in 
Ohio, and we have enough votes to be nominated on the first ballot. And 
the story the next day is, ``Oh, but we did exit polls in California, 
and what they really want is Mr. Perot, and not Governor Clinton.'' And 
you know, I got that probably because I'd had such wonderful national 
press during the entire nominating process. [Laughter]
    But then, what happened? Then the election started for the real 
people. Then it wasn't--they weren't, you know, sort of saying, ``Well, 
this is what I've heard,'' and this is sort of this vaguely--thing; then 
it became real. And people began to look and listen. And they opened not 
just their minds but their hearts, and they get--feel about these 
things, you know. And the American people nearly always get it right. 
That's why we're still around here after all this time. That's why we're 
still around here. It's the longest lasting great democracy in history. 
They nearly always get it right.
    But you have to help them make sure that they hear every element of 
our side. A lot of times, young people come to me and ask me for advice 
on running for office. And I say, I always had one rule: I wanted to 
make sure that by election day, everybody that voted against me knew 
exactly what they were doing. [Laughter] You think about that. In a 
democracy, that's what you want. That's what you want.
    Our party has been revitalized. People all over the world now are 
trying to do their versions of what we have done, to marry fiscal 
responsibility and a strong national posture involved in the rest of the 
world with compassionate policies at home that bring people together and 
lift people up. And it's working.
    You think about having your own employee ID card. And let's not ever 
forget who we're here for, why we belong to our party, and why we did 
all this. And let's just work like crazy, keeping a good frame of mind. 
And I'll bet you anything, it will come out all right.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

[[Page 1811]]

Note: The President spoke at 11:50 a.m. in the Jefferson Ballroom at the 
Washington Hilton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Gov. Roy Romer 
of Colorado, general chair, Representative Loretta Sanchez and Mayor 
Dennis W. Archer of Detroit, general cochairs, Joseph J. Andrew, 
national chair, Andrew Tobias, treasurer, and Beth E. Dozoretz, national 
finance chair, Democratic National Committee; Lydia Camarillo, chief 
executive officer, and Donald J. Foley, chief operating officer, 2000 
Democratic National Convention; and Mayor Edward Rendell of 
Philadelphia.