[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 49 (Monday, December 13, 1999)]
[Pages 2534-2537]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a ``Keep Hope Alive'' Reception

December 7, 1999

    The President. Thank you so much. Mark, thank you for this evening. 
Reverend Meeks, Dennis, all the distinguished business and labor leaders 
in the audience, and my many friends--Berry, Willie, so many others.
    Thank you, Smokey, for being here and for singing for Stevie at the 
Kennedy Center Honors the other night. You were magnificent. Thank you 
so much.
    Reverend, thanks for bringing your whole family here, except for 
those who had to have babies and read books tonight. [Laughter] Santita 
thanks for the music; it was magnificent, as always. And Jackie, thank 
you for being my friend and my inspiration.
    And I want to thank your mother for all the things that Jesse said. 
But I want you to know, I've been in public life, now--well, I started 
running for--I ran for my first office almost 26 years ago. I have 
talked to tens of thousands of people. I've shaken hundreds of 
thousands, maybe over a million hands now. And Grandma, you're the only 
person, ever, who came up and complimented me on quoting Machiavelli in 
a speech, in my whole life, ever. [Laughter] She said, ``Every smart 
politician reads that fellow.''
[Laughter]
    And that brings me to Jesse, because the quote from Machiavelli that 
she likes so well--now a quote that's well over 500 years old--said, 
``There is nothing so difficult in all of human affairs than to change 
the established order of things. For those who will benefit are 
uncertain of their gain, but those who will lose are absolutely certain 
of their loss.'' [Laughter]
    Now, I'm honored to be here with Minyon Moore, my political 
director; Gene Sperling, my National Economic Adviser, just walked in; 
he works with Reverend Jackson--because Jesse Jackson has been my friend 
for many years, long before either one of us could have known we'd be 
standing on this stage together and because he has done that most 
difficult thing in all of human affairs. He has changed the established 
order of things. And America is a better place.
    I think about what he did to help save the Community Reinvestment 
Act and what he's done to help me enforce it. We now have over 95 
percent of all the money ever loaned under that law has been loaned 
since I've been President, thanks in no small measure to him and to you. 
I think about all the wonderful things he's done as my Special Envoy to 
Africa, most recently in Sierra Leone, but in so many other places. I 
think about all those years with the civil rights movement, with 
Rainbow/PUSH, all the voter education drives, all the long campaigns, 
always sticking

[[Page 2535]]

up for issues bigger than himself and for people in difficult 
situations.
    I was thinking tonight when Jesse was talking about a night many, 
many years ago when he gave a speech in Little Rock, and I brought him 
back home to the Governor's Mansion, and we got Hillary to come down to 
the kitchen, and we sat in the kitchen, and we cleaned out the 
refrigerator. [Laughter] We just kept on talking and kept on eating, and 
we kept on talking and kept on eating, until finally Hillary reminded me 
that I had to go to work in the morning and kicked him out of the house. 
[Laughter]
    I was thinking something else, too. In the gripping story of Jesse's 
past--you've got to make allowances for us, you know; I think people 
from the South generally tend to be more obsessed with the past than 
other people, in ways that are beautiful and burdensome and maybe boring 
to other people. But we are. But tonight I want to ask you to just take 
onboard everything Jesse said. And I want to ask you this question: So 
what now?
    If you think about it, almost every major, big thing we have ever 
done in this country, we have done in the throes of difficulty or 
threat. This great country of ours was born out of the pangs of war, by 
people who were smart enough to say all of us are created equal, and 
then to say, but, oh, these slaves count as 60 percent of a person, for 
purposes of the census. And then to say we're all created equal, but you 
can't vote unless you're A, white, B, male, and C, you have to own 
property, which means that if I'd been around back then, I probably 
couldn't have voted either--[laughter]--because I'd have been one of the 
hired hands.
    So, then, we were born in the pangs of a great war. And Mr. Lincoln 
comes along, and we finally got rid of slavery after the bloodiest war 
in all of our history. When we were a much, much smaller country we lost 
more people in the Civil War than any other one, just over the 
proposition that we were going to hang together and free people. It 
happened out of war.
    And then in the industrial revolution we had some real social 
progress in the absence of war, but people were really suffering. I 
mean, little children, 10 years old, were working in factories 70 hours 
a week. Women with little children were working on Saturdays and way up 
into the night. And there was abject human suffering. And then the 
Depression came, and we had our first real comprehensive wave of social 
legislation. And we overcame the war, as Jesse said, and got out of the 
Depression.
    And then we had the great civil rights movement of the sixties 
because of Martin Luther King and all the others, because the Supreme 
Court was visionary and brave, and--let's be honest--because the 
Congress and the country were conscience-stricken after President 
Kennedy was murdered.
    Now, in my lifetime and maybe in the lifetime of this country, we 
have never had so much economic prosperity so broadly shared with the 
lowest unemployment rate in 30 years and the lowest poverty rate in 20 
years and the lowest African-American and Hispanic unemployment rates 
ever recorded and the highest rate of business and homeownership among 
minorities, as well as the majority population, ever recorded; the 
lowest female unemployment in 40 years, so broadly shared, with the 
absence of either an internal threat or an external threat to our 
security. Crime rate is the lowest in 30 years; teen pregnancy rate is 
the lowest in 30 years; welfare rolls are the lowest in 30 years.
    So what I want to ask you is, what now? And I want to ask you, even 
if you're not from the South, not to lose your memory. [Laughter]
    Because I came here tonight not only because I owe Jesse and because 
I love him and because Mark told me I had to--[laughter]--and because I 
want Dennis and Bill to help Hillary. [Laughter] I also came here 
because--I'm not running for anything--[laughter]--I want to spend the 
rest of my life as a good citizen.
    But I'm telling you, in my lifetime--in my lifetime--this country 
has never had--not one time--the same level of economic prosperity, 
social progress, and national self-confidence, in the absence of 
domestic crisis or international threat. Never, not once. And my 
lifetime, unfortunately, is getting longer. I was talking to a 6-year-
old girl over Thanksgiving. She looked up at me, and she said, ``How old 
are you?'' And I said, ``I'm 53.'' She said, ``Oh, that's a lot.'' 
[Laughter]

[[Page 2536]]

    So what are we going to do about it? So what? That's what I want you 
to think about, because we've done real well when we were under the gun 
in this country, you know? We had Abraham Lincoln, and people fought and 
bled and died; finally we got rid of slavery. We had Franklin Roosevelt, 
unemployment was 25 percent, got ourselves in a war; we whipped the 
Depression and won the war. We had Martin Luther King and people in the 
streets, and it took a few riots--and like I said, President Kennedy got 
killed--but we had President Johnson's great record in civil rights, 
which many of you contributed to.
    What are we going to do with this? Because what I want to say to you 
is--the great English writer, Samuel Johnson, said that the prospect of 
a person's own destruction wonderfully concentrates the mind. The flip 
side is true: when you think things are peachy-keen and can't get bad, 
it distracts the mind. It makes people shortsighted. It makes people 
selfish. It makes people distracted.
    And what I want to say is, we've still got some huge challenges out 
there. And we have the opportunity that no generation of Americans has 
ever had: to take our kids out of poverty; to give them all health care; 
to bring genuine economic opportunity to the people and places that have 
been left behind; to bring genuine educational opportunities to all of 
our kids; and to build one America, without regard to race or region or 
income or sexual orientation. We've got this chance, and we'd better not 
blow it.
    If we don't shoulder our responsibility to deal with this, our 
children and our grandchildren will never forgive us, because the 
country has never had this chance before, and believe me, nothing lasts 
forever. That kind of keeps you going in the tough times, but it's well 
to remember in the good times.
    So I say to you, that's the main reason I'm here. Yes, Jesse started 
this Wall Street Project because he wanted to create more empowerment 
for individuals who were talented and just left behind. But we also know 
that there are whole peoples and places--the Indian reservations, 
Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, big neighborhoods in our cities--who 
haven't felt this economic prosperity. If we can't get it to them now, 
we will never get around to it. If we can't bring the benefits of free 
enterprise to the people and places that don't have it now--with the 
lowest unemployment in 30 years and the highest growth rate--we will 
never get around to it. If we can't save Social Security and take it way 
out beyond the baby boom generation and do something about elderly women 
who are too poor compared to the other retirees, elderly women living 
alone--if we don't do that now, when are we going to get around to it? 
If we don't extend the life of Medicare and provide some prescription 
drug coverage to the three-quarters of our seniors that can't afford 
what they need, when will we ever get around to it? If we're not going 
to give all of our kids--since we now know how to turn around failing 
schools; we don't have any excuse anymore; it's not a matter of some 
sort of scientific project--if we're not going to bridge the digital 
divide and make sure all of our kids have access to the Internet world 
of tomorrow--if we're not going to do it now, when will we get around to 
it? If we're not going to shoulder our responsibilities to our friends 
and neighbors, from the Caribbean to Africa to the world's most indebted 
countries, so that they, too, can be our partners and be a part of 
tomorrow, when are we ever going to get around to it?
    Now, you can have your own list. But I'm telling you, one of the 
things I think we've proved is that you can take good social policy and 
good economic policy and prove they go hand-in-hand. The progressives--
we lost a lot of elections because people said, ``Well, those people 
have a good heart but a soft head. And if you put them in they'll spend 
us in the ditch, and tax us until we bleed. And they won't be able to 
run the economy.''
    They can't say that anymore. We have the first back-to-back budget 
surpluses in 42 years. And we cut taxes on millions of working people 
with the earned-income tax credit. We raised the minimum wage, and we 
ought to raise it again. And we passed the Family and Medical Leave Act, 
and we ought to make it broader. We ought to do things to prove that 
good social policy and good economic policy go hand-in-hand, good 
environmental policy and good social policy and good economic policy go 
hand-in-hand.

[[Page 2537]]

    You know, if you go into city after city after city, you will see, 
as my good friend Congressman John Lewis says, that environmental 
justice can be a civil rights issue. How many people do you know in 
urban areas living by toxic waste dumps that we could turn into economic 
goldmines if we cleaned them up? That's what we're trying to do.
    But you make your own list when you go home tonight. Just write down 
the five things that you think are the biggest challenges facing 
America. And then you ask yourself, if we can't do it now, when will we 
ever get around to doing it?
    When I think of Rainbow/PUSH, I think of two things: Rainbow means 
we're all in it together, and we all have a place at the table; PUSH is 
what Jesse does to me when he thinks I'm not doing right. [Laughter] And 
both those things are good. And you know, 14 or 15 months from now, when 
I become a citizen again, then I can be a pusher. We'll all do that.
    But this is a great country. You remember the history of it. 
Remember the stories Jesse told. Think about his mother-in-law. I got my 
pin. [Laughter] Think about his mother-in-law.
    But you think about this whole deal, and I'm telling you--I defy you 
to cite a time in your lifetime which has been like this. And I say it 
not to be self-serving. Look, I'm grateful I got to serve. I'm grateful 
that I got to serve at a time when the challenges of the country fit my 
experience, and what I knew, and what I felt in my heart.
    But it's like turning a big old oceanliner around in the middle of 
the Pacific. You can't do it overnight. So we've turned this country 
around. We're going full steam ahead in the right direction.
    But I am telling you, it's no different from a person, a family, or 
a business. A nation, when things are going well, has to make a 
decision. And we have a responsibility to reach out for all those who 
have been left behind, to create one America, and to build the future of 
our dreams for our children. If not now, we will never get around to it.
    So you go home tonight, and make your list, and keep supporting 
Rainbow/PUSH, and demand that your leaders take this historic 
opportunity to be worthy of the sacrifices that Jesse talked about 
tonight.
    Thank you, and God bless you.
    Wait, wait now. Before you all leave, we're going to do one more 
thing. Jesse and I, we've got a little friend here that I want to sing 
for us. We're going to have one more song.
    Come on, Joshua. Come up here. Come on, Josh.

[At this point, child singer Joshua Watts sang a song, and musician 
Smokey Robinson urged the audience to keep the arts in the school 
system.]

    The President. I know we've all got to go. I just want to say amen 
to this. [Laughter] We had a VH1 concert at the White House the other 
night because John Sykes, the head of VH1, is collecting instruments--
he's collected, I think, almost one million now, around America--to give 
to schools so they could have music programs. But all over the country, 
these music programs, these art programs, have been cancelled out.
    And we know that there are poor children out there who will learn 
better and find ways to express themselves better, stay out of trouble 
and stay in love with education if they have access to these things. 
This is a huge deal, and I want to thank you for saying that. It's a big 
deal.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:30 p.m. in the Washington Room at the 
Hotel Washington. In his remarks, the President referred to Reverend 
Jesse Jackson, president and founder, Mark Allen, deputy field director 
and assistant to Rev. Jackson, Dennis Rivera, cochair, and Rev. James 
Meeks, board member, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition; Berry Gordy, Jr., founder, 
Motown Records; musician Stevie Wonder; Willie Gray, attorney, Gary, 
Williams, Parenti, Finney, Lewis, McManus, Watson, and Sperando law 
firm; former Deputy Mayor Bill Lynch of New York; and Reverend Jackson's 
wife Jacqueline, daughter Santita, and mother-in-law Gertrude Brown.