[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 48 (Monday, December 6, 1999)]
[Pages 2469-2472]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Luncheon in San 
Francisco

November 30, 1999

    Thank you very much. Thank you, Bill; thank you, Sally; thank you, 
Leader Gephardt; and thank you, Nancy Pelosi, for always being so 
wonderful to take all of your various charges from the D-triple-C to the 
DNC to your President into San Francisco and find your friends and help 
us.
    It's good to be back here. I was here, as Bill said, a couple years 
ago. And we had a beautiful dinner here, and I love this place. But it's 
even more beautiful in the daylight. And I want to thank all the Members 
for coming. Chairman Torres, thank you for being here. And I want to 
thank the mayor for coming.
    I am so indebted to California, and particularly to San Francisco, 
for being so good to me and Hillary and the Vice President and Mrs. 
Gore. And I've also learned so much. Every time I come to northern 
California I learn something new, so I'm less technologically 
challenged. [Laughter]
    And I've learned a lot from Willie Brown. I've learned how to dress 
better. [Laughter] I never thought I would live long enough to see him 
in a race where somebody was running to the left of him; this is a 
great, great day. [Laughter] I don't know how there is any oxygen left 
over there. [Laughter] I'm still learning from you, and I thank you, Mr. 
Mayor.
    Let me say also, this is the first opportunity I've had in public to 
thank Dick Gephardt

[[Page 2470]]

and all the others who are here in our caucus, and Senator Boxer, for 
their stalwart strength in fighting for our budget priorities. I just 
signed yesterday the first budget of the 21st century. And I think it's 
worth mentioning that because, and only because, they stayed with me, we 
got our continuing commitment to 100,000 teachers; we doubled, more than 
doubled, the funds allocated to after-school and summer school programs 
for children, something that Senator Boxer has fought for a long time; 
we've, for the first time ever, got funds to States that will agree to 
target failing schools and give them money to either shut them down or 
turn them around.
    This was a remarkable thing. We got 50,000 more police for our 
neighborhoods with the highest crime rates. We passed the remarkable 
bill called the Kennedy-Jeffords bill, which will enable disabled people 
to go into the workplace and keep their Medicaid health insurance so 
that they can work and become taxpaying citizens. They would be totally 
uninsurable otherwise. We even got some money to pay for people who are 
not disabled yet but who are uninsurable--people with HIV, people with 
Parkinson's who can't be legally declared disabled--because they stuck 
with me. And we got for the first time a big chunk of money for the so-
called lands legacy initiative that the Vice President fought so hard 
for, to set-aside funds. And a lot of other things.
    We also left a lot of things undone. We didn't pass the Patients' 
Bill of Rights yet; we didn't pass the minimum wage increase yet; we 
didn't pass the hate crimes legislation yet or the ``Employment and Non-
Discrimination Act'' yet; and we haven't yet taken the strong action I 
would like to see to extend Social Security beyond the life of the baby 
boom generation and to reform and modernize Medicare and add a 
prescription drug benefit.
    We beat a huge and irresponsible tax cut, which enables us to 
continue to pay down the deficit, and we are now on the track to make 
America debt-free for the first time since 1835, which means that all 
these entrepreneurs in northern California will be able to get money at 
lower interest rates for another generation and to get us a whole 
generation of prosperity.
    But what I want you to understand is it happened only because they 
were willing to stick with me. Otherwise, there would have been no 
100,000 teachers, no 50,000 police, no disability employment bill. It 
would not have happened. We wouldn't have gotten the lands legacy money. 
All the environmental riders would have been attached to the legislation 
that we beat back. All of that would have happened. They stayed.
    Now I want to put that in the larger perspective of where we've 
been, very briefly, for the last 7 years and where we're going, because, 
you know, people sometimes look at me and say, ``What are you doing 
here? You're not running for anything.'' And I am, too--I'm running for 
what Mr. Gephardt said; I want to be a good citizen. And I'm here 
because I believe in Dick Gephardt's leadership, Nancy Pelosi's 
leadership, and the potential of our party.
    One of you when you went through the line said to me, ``Do you have 
any regrets?'' And I said, ``Just a few;'' and I'm here trying to 
rectify one of them. I regret that we lost the congressional majority in 
1994. And it happened because, frankly, because I pushed the country and 
the Congress to deal with some major challenges simultaneously: to deal 
with this awful budget deficit, without giving up on our commitment to 
invest more in the health care, in the education, in the environment of 
our country; to take on the issue of guns, which no administration, no 
Congress had taken on since Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were 
assassinated; and to deal with the health care crisis.
    One of Dick's colleagues said to me the other day--he slapped me on 
the back and said, ``You know, they told me if I voted for your health 
care program, health care would become more bureaucratic and fewer 
people would be insured at work. And I voted for it and, sure enough, 
that's what happened''--[laughter]--``health care has become more 
bureaucratic and fewer people are insured at work, because it didn't 
pass.'' [Laughter]
    So I say to you, look at the record that these people have helped us 
to establish. In 1992--just remember what California was

[[Page 2471]]

like and the country was like: economic distress, social division, 
political drift, Government discredited. Don't let anybody forget that 
as we come into this session. Just ask them to remember what it was like 
in '91 and '92: economic distress, social division, political drift, 
Government discredited.
    And you gave Al Gore and I a chance to work with them. And we said 
we want a country where there is opportunity for all, responsibility 
from all, and a community of all Americans, where everybody can be a 
part. And we had all these ideas. But you just bought an argument. Well, 
7 years later, there is not an argument. There is evidence. And I think 
that it's worth repeating, because--I know I'm preaching to the choir 
here, but you need to go out and share this--in February we'll have the 
longest, not peacetime, the longest expansion of any kind in our 
history; we have 19.8 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment rate in 
30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest poverty rates 
in 20 years, the highest homeownership in history.
    In addition to that, the society is healing. We have the lowest 
crime rates in 25 years, the lowest teen pregnancy rates in 30 years. We 
have the lowest female unemployment rates in 40 years and the lowest 
poverty rate among single-parent households in 40 years. And we've set 
aside more land than any administration except those of Franklin and 
Theodore Roosevelt, including 40 million roadless acres in the national 
forests. The land is safer; the water is cleaner; the air is cleaner. 
We've cleaned up three times as many toxic waste dumps as the previous 
two administrations. We have 90 percent of our kids immunized for the 
first time in history; 20 million people have taken advantage of the 
family and medical leave law, which was vetoed by the previous 
administration. Four hundred thousand people who shouldn't get guns have 
not been able to buy handguns because of the Brady bill, which was 
vetoed by the previous administration.
    So I say to you this is not an argument anymore. There is evidence, 
and I want you to remember those numbers. And when you talk to the 
skeptics and you talk to the doubters, you need to go out and tell 
people what the evidence is. And if you look ahead, the real issue is--
and Dick talked about this--you know I want them to be in the majority 
because of the issue of education, because there is still a lot more to 
be done. I want them to be in the majority because I do believe they 
will help to conduct their business in a way that will promote the one 
America that I believe is so important.
    I am very proud of the fact that the United States has played a 
major role in trying to reconcile warring and hating factions from 
Northern Ireland to the Middle East to the Balkans to Africa. But I want 
us to do that at home, too, which is why I want this hate crimes 
legislation to pass. You only have to look at what happened at the 
Jewish school in Los Angeles or to the Filipino postman who was murdered 
there or what happened in the rampage in the Middle West, where 
everybody from the former African-American basketball coach at 
Northwestern to a Korean Christian walking out of his church--these 
people were killed--James Byrd dragged to death, Matthew Shepard 
stretched out on a rack. There is still a lot of that in us.
    And what I would like to just ask you to think about and what I 
think about all the time is, okay, we've had all these good things 
happen to us, and our country now, thanks to a lot of you and 
technology--I should have mentioned when I became--when we started 
NetDay here in 1994, 15 percent of our schools were connected to the 
Internet; 89 percent are now, thanks to a lot of you and the E-rate. I 
could just go on and on. You need to remember these things and talk to 
people about them.
    But the big question is, what are we going to do now? What will we 
do with a moment of prosperity that is, in my lifetime unprecedented. 
Never in my life have we had this much economic strength, this much 
social progress, this kind of opportunity free of external threat or 
internal crisis to shape the future for our children. What are we going 
to do about it?
    And there will be all kinds of siren songs in the election season to 
kind of distract people from that or to get us to lower our sights or be 
more selfish or be more shortsighted. And the truth is, I bet you every 
one of you can cite some point in your personal life, your

[[Page 2472]]

family life, or your business life when you got in trouble because 
things were going well and you broke your concentration. You relaxed; 
you got diverted; you got divided; you got indulgent.
    Well, the country is no different. We have to realize this is a 
truly precious moment. In my lifetime, it has never happened. And the 
reason I want Dick Gephardt to be the Speaker is I think that we ought 
to--yes, we made a lot of advances in education, but we don't have a 
world-class education for all our children, and we shouldn't stop until 
we do. Yes, we continue to pay down the debt at record rates, and we've 
got the first back-to-back balanced budgets in 42 years. But we haven't 
extended Social Security beyond the life of the baby boom generation; we 
haven't extended Medicare and added that prescription drug benefit when 
75 percent of the seniors in this country can't afford the medicine 
they're supposed to take. So we haven't dealt with the challenge of the 
aging of America as much as we should.
    We haven't done everything we should do to make this the safest big 
country in the world. We ought to close the gun show loophole in the 
Brady bill. We ought to pass the child trigger lock legislation. It's 
not just crimes that are the problem. We have the biggest accidental 
death rate by guns in the world. And to give you an idea of how bad it 
is, the American death rate, accidental death rate from guns, is 9 times 
the rate of the next 25 biggest industrial economies combined. So I 
think it's worth a little extra to have those child trigger locks.
    We've still got serious challenges in health care. We ought to pass 
the Patients' Bill of Rights. We ought to let people over 55 who don't 
have health insurance anymore buy into Medicare. We ought to continue 
our work to help children, enroll children in our health insurance 
program and cover other people who don't have it.
    We've got a chance to do something serious about poverty for the 
first time in a generation. One of the things that I'm most encouraged 
about on our side in the Presidential debate is there is an almost 
complete consensus that part of our bounty ought to be used to 
drastically cut child poverty in this country. And that's good. We also 
have an opportunity that we have not had in my lifetime to bring free 
enterprise and investment into the most distressed areas of the country. 
And I have been going around the country trying to highlight these 
things.
    I consider this a big opportunity. And as all of you who live on the 
Internet know, technology gives us a chance to bring economic 
opportunity to people and places that were hitherto too isolated to take 
advantage of it.
    Now these are just some of the big challenges that are out there. 
And I promise you, I fought through this last budget. I've been through 
this thing now from can 'til can't for 6 years. I'm here because I do 
not believe my country will realize its full potential unless they are 
in the majority and unless he is the Speaker. And I think if he is, they 
will.
    So I ask you, tell people what was in the budget and why. Tell 
people what's happened in the last 7 years and why. And most important, 
tell people what we can do in the future if we have the right people 
representing you, and help them win. It is profoundly important.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 1:45 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to dinner hosts Bill and Sally Hembrecht; Art 
Torres, chair, State Democratic Party; and Mayor Willie L. Brown, Jr., 
of San Francisco.