[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 50 (Monday, December 20, 1999)]
[Pages 2602-2607]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Unity Reception in Coral Gables, Florida

December 11, 1999

    Thank you very much. Thank you, Gene. Thank you, ladies and 
gentlemen. I hope you'll forgive me if I'm a little hoarse, I've been 
battling a big cold today. I've had an amazing few days. A couple of 
days ago we announced that we were going to start the peace talks again, 
after 4 years of hiatus, between Israel and Syria. And it's been a 
wonderful thing. And then I had a very sad duty to go up to Worcester, 
Massachusetts, to the funeral of those firemen--you may have seen. And 
then I went home to Arkansas yesterday. So somewhere along the way I 
caught a cold, and my voice is not the best. And I thank you for 
indulging me.
    I'm always glad to be back here. I love this hotel. [Laughter] I 
love the golf course. [Laughter] I love the people. And Gene Prescott 
has been very good to me and to many members of my family, and I thank 
him for that. And I thank all of you for coming.
    I know there were Members of the Senate and the House who were here 
earlier, and they've gone to the next event. I do want to recognize 
State Representative Elaine Bloom, who is running for Congress and who 
is going to be a Member of Congress if she gets adequate financial 
support to help her win. And so thank you very much for coming.
    Let me say to all of you, this has been a pretty emotional day for 
me in Florida, because it was 8 years ago this week that I came

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to Florida to the Democratic Convention when they were having straw 
poll. And this straw poll had been mightily hyped because it was going 
to be the first vote of any kind in the 1992 Presidential season. At the 
time, as I remember, I was running fifth in New Hampshire in the polls.
    And I had been to the Florida Democratic Convention already by 1991, 
three previous times in the eighties, thanks to Bob Graham and Lawton 
Chiles. I had been in '81, '83, and '87, and had a wonderful time. But 
on this special day, we had worked very hard, and the Florida Democrats 
worked me very hard. They made me go to all of these little caucuses and 
answer all these questions. I must have answered a thousand questions. I 
was so exhausted by the time I finished visiting more than a dozen of 
these caucuses, answering hundreds of questions, I got to where I 
wondered what I was doing in this business. But we won over 50 percent 
of the vote in the Florida straw poll, at a time when we were running 
fifth in the national polls. And a lot of you in this room were a part 
of that endeavor. I thank you for that.
    And I came back today to go up to Orlando to the Democratic 
Convention just to thank those people who gave me my start on the road 
to the Presidency; and also to thank Florida for voting for me and for 
Al Gore in 1996, which is the first time in 20 years this State had 
voted for a Democratic ticket.
    Gene has already said a lot of what he might say about the record. I 
just wanted to make a couple of points. In 1991, when I decided to run 
for President, I did so not because I had anything personal against 
President Bush. I actually like him quite well, and I had often worked 
as the representative of the Governors, both the Republicans and the 
Democrats, with the White House, for years and years. I did it because 
our country was at a time of economic distress, social decline, 
political division, and the whole enterprise of government was 
discredited. And I had worked for more than a decade as a Governor to 
try to bring people together instead of driving them apart and to try to 
figure out what makes the economy tick in the modern world.
    And so I asked the American people to give me a chance to create a 
society where there was opportunity for every responsible citizen, and 
where we had a community of all, where everybody could participate. And 
Gene mentioned a little of this, but you know, I think the interesting 
thing is--it is true that in February we will have the longest economic 
expansion in history. We already have the longest peacetime economic 
expansion in history, but, you know, in wartime, you're fully mobilized, 
so they tend to last longer. We're going to outdo all the wartime 
expansions if we keep on plugging until February. And that's a great 
tribute to the American people.
    But it also happened because we made some tough decisions. We got 
rid of this deficit; we turned it into a surplus. We got the interest 
rates down. We stopped taking money away from you that you might need to 
borrow to expand a business or to start a new one or to make a home loan 
payment or a car payment or a college loan payment. And the strategy has 
worked.
    But I think it's important to point out that we don't just have the 
lowest unemployment rate--the actual figure is 30 years, the lowest 
female unemployment rate in 40 years--but our society is coming 
together. We have the lowest single-parent household poverty rate in 46 
years, the lowest Hispanic poverty rate in 25 years, and the lowest 
African-American poverty rate ever recorded and the lowest Hispanic and 
African-American unemployment rates ever recorded--we've been keeping 
statistics for about 30 years, now. So we're coming together as a 
society.
    And we're also beginning to look at things that have been long 
ignored. We have 90 percent of our little children immunized against 
serious diseases for the first time in the history of the country. Two 
million more kids have health insurance now than they did in 1997. Seven 
million young people have gone to college under the HOPE scholarship, a 
$1,500 a year tax credit that, in effect, opens the first 2 years of 
college to all Americans. Ten million got an increase in the minimum 
wage. More than 20 million took advantage of the Family and Medical 
Leave Act. These things are important.
    In the last legislative session of Congress, we got 100,000 teachers 
to get the class size down in the early grades. We got 50,000

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more police to keep driving the crime rate down. We got 60,000 vouchers 
to give to people on welfare so they can move from welfare to work and 
find a place to live where they work. We are moving this country in the 
right direction.
    But I want to tell you why I'm glad you're here tonight, because I'm 
not much on looking back, except as it's evidence of where we're going. 
All elections are about tomorrow. I never will forget when I ran for 
Governor for the fifth time. I went out to the State Fair, before I'd 
announced--and I used to have Governor's Day at the State Fair. And I'd 
just sit there at this little booth, you know, a fair booth, and anybody 
that wanted to come up and talk, could.
    This old boy in overalls, who was about 70 years old, came up to me 
and he said, ``Bill, are you going to run again?'' I said, ``I don't 
know. If I do, will you vote for me?'' He said, ``Yeah, I guess so. I 
always have.'' I said, ``Well, aren't you sick of me?'' He said, ``No, 
but everybody else I know is.'' [Laughter] And I got kind of puffed up, 
and I said, ``Well, don't you think I've done a good job?'' He said, 
``Well, sure you've done a good job, but you drew a paycheck every 2 
weeks, didn't you?'' It's very interesting--``that's what we hired you 
to do. We hired you to do a good job.'' So what I want to say to you is, 
I hope you will go out and share this record. These statistics are 
stunning. But they are evidence of the direction we need to take.
    It's been an honor to serve. And nobody's entitled, none of us--not 
even the Vice President--none of us are entitled to a vote because we 
did a good job. And I'm not running for anything. But it is evidence of 
the job that will be done if we stay going in this direction.
    It is not about whether we will change, but what kind of change 
we'll have. And I want you to know I could not have done anything if I 
hadn't had the support of like minded Democrats in Congress, people who 
wanted to change the Democratic Party and change the country. Elaine 
Bloom is one of those people. She was out here for me in 1991. I'd like 
to see her have a chance to serve. I think she could make a big 
difference. And that's why you're here; this is important.
    This is the last thing I'm going to say. Tomorrow morning or next 
week or next month, somebody might ask you why you ponied up the money 
and came to this thing. And I hope you'll be able to give an answer, and 
I hope your answer is, number one, there's not much argument about 
whether these people delivered. They've had 7 great years for our 
country. The ideas they brought, the direction they changed was right. 
Number two, the next election should be about America meeting the big 
new challenges of the 21st century, not about short-term, divisive, 
narrowminded politics.
    And let me just say, in my lifetime--I had a bunch of kids up to the 
house at Camp David Thanksgiving weekend, and this little 6-year-old 
girl who is the daughter of a friend of mine said, ``Now, how old are 
you again?'' And I said, ``I'm 53.'' And this 6-year-old girl, her eyes 
got big and she said, ``Oh, that's a lot.'' [Laughter] And I have to 
admit she was right. [Laughter] But what I want to tell you is, in these 
lot of years that I've had the privilege of being on this Earth, never 
before in my lifetime has our country had this combination of economic 
success, social solidarity, national self-confidence, with the absence 
of an internal crisis or an external threat. It had never happened to me 
before in my lifetime. And what I have learned in these 53 years is that 
no set of conditions last forever. This is a time of rapid change. We 
will never forgive ourselves if we do not use this moment to shape the 
future of our dreams for our children.
    We've got to deal with Social Security and Medicare, the aging of 
America, take Social Security out beyond the baby boomers' lives, 
lengthen Medicare, add a prescription drug benefit so the 75 percent of 
the seniors who can't afford the medicine they need can get it.
    We've got to deal with the education of the largest and most diverse 
group of schoolchildren in history, and we've got to do it in a very 
serious and disciplined way. We have to help people do more to balance 
work and family. Nearly every parent is working now. We need more 
investments in child care and health care for children and equal

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pay for women. We need to broaden the reach of the Family and Medical 
Leave Act. We need to do these things.
    We need to continue to protect the environment while we grow the 
economy. I'm convinced, folks that this--I'm not running for anything, 
and I'm convinced this climate change problem is real. And you could 
have in five or six decades a substantial part of the Everglades under 
water if we don't aggressively move to try to reverse this. And what I 
want to tell you is we can grow the economy even quicker if we do the 
right things environmentally than if we don't. You don't have to give it 
up anymore.
    Just two other things that I hope you will say. There are still 
people in places that this economy has left behind--Appalachia, the 
Mississippi Delta, the Indian reservations, a lot of inner-city 
neighborhoods. But we have a strategy to try to bring free enterprise--
not government jobs, free enterprise--to those places. And keep in mind, 
that's one way to keep growing this economy and keep this expansion 
going without inflation. If you invest in a new area, you create new 
businesses, new jobs, and new consumers. You're not adding to 
inflationary pressures.
    And I will over simplify. Essentially, what we want to do is to give 
people who can come to political fundraisers the same incentive to 
invest in poor areas in America we give them today to invest in poor 
areas in Latin America or Asia or Africa. I'm for that, too, by the way. 
But I think if we can't give people the incentives to put free 
enterprise in America in places that are left behind, if we can't do 
this now, we're never going to get around to it.
    You know, the national unemployment rate is 4.1 percent. Do you know 
what the unemployment rate on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is in 
South Dakota, the home of the Lakota Sioux, the tribe of Crazy Horse? 
Seventy-three percent. I've been there now. There are plenty of 
intelligent people there. There are a lot of yearning young children who 
want a good education. There's plenty of things we could do there. And 
there's 120 years of history that explains why this is so, and I won't 
bore you with it. But I'm just telling you, I hope that you will say, I 
came there and I'm still--I'm glad I went, and I'm glad I wrote the 
check, because they've got a good record, and because they want to take 
on the big questions of the 21st century--the aging of America; the most 
diverse group of kids we've ever had; the balancing of work and family; 
the balancing of the environment and the economy; bringing economic 
opportunity to poor people. And the last thing I'd say is, creating 
truly one America.
    We had a fascinating time the other night. Hillary had these two 
guys come to the White House for one of these Millennium Evenings she 
has that we put out on the Internet all over the world. So this one man, 
Vint Cerf, was one of the men who created the architecture of the 
Internet, and he mailed the first E-mail 18 years ago to his profoundly 
deaf wife, who was so deaf she could not hear with the aid of even the 
most powerful hearing aids, and he wanted to talk to her when he was at 
work. That's how the E-mail started.
    And the other guy was Professor Lander from Harvard, who's one of 
the scholars of the human genome, this rapid thing we're doing to--you 
may have seen, we found 33 million components of one of the chromosomes. 
Did you see that last week? I mean, we're basically trying to map the 
whole genetic structure of the human body. So Dr. Lander knows about 
this.
    Well, a lot of what they were talking about was how you couldn't do 
the science without the computer technology. And how the computer 
technology was going to amplify the science. For example, last year I 
was really happy that we transplanted nerves from the legs to the spine 
of a laboratory animal for the first time and got movement in the lower 
limbs. They now believe that a quicker answer to the problems of people 
who have spinal cord injuries, that maybe the development of microchips 
that are programmed to reflect an individual mapping of every person's 
injury, and to send out electrical impulses that replicate what the 
nerves do.
    They believe that in 3 or 4 years, every young mother will come home 
with a baby and a genetic map. That'll be kind of scary; they'll tell 
you all the things that might happen to your baby, but they'll also tell 
you all the things you can do to minimize the

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chances that they'll happen. And most of my friends in the field believe 
that some time fairly early in the next century, the average child will 
live to be 100 years old--have a 100-year life expectancy.
    A lot of my friends who are interested in space say that we may find 
out what's in those black holes in the universe. And everybody knows 
that we're going to start having a lot more E-commerce and Internet 
connections, in ways we couldn't have imagined. I'll give you just one 
little example. You know--did you all ever buy anything on eBay? It's a 
trading site on the web. There are now over 20,000 people that make a 
living on eBay. They don't work for eBay; they make a living buying and 
selling on eBay. And a number of them used to be on welfare. So if you 
can get Internet access to be as dense in America as telephone access, a 
lot of these poor people that worked their way out of poverty, they'll 
figure out how to do it.
    So this is, anyway, to put it mildly, a very exciting time to be 
alive. And I think it is quite interesting that, with all this modern 
stuff going on, the biggest problem we've got is the oldest problem of 
human society--with all this racial and religious and ethnic hatred, and 
hatred of gays. You know, it's just like, okay, so we're living in a 
modern world, but we can't let any of this stuff go. There are people 
and groups that don't think they count unless they've got somebody to 
look down on.
    And if you look at what's taking my time as your President around 
the world--the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Bosnia, tribal 
wars in Africa, and a lot of things that are indirectly related to 
that--it's the biggest problem in the world.
    One of the worst things you read about--crime rate keeps going down 
in America, but you've got all these hate crimes: black basketball coach 
in Illinois, Korean Christian coming out of his church, both killed by a 
guy who belonged to a church that said they don't believe in God; they 
believe in white supremacy. An angry guy up in L.A. shoots all these 
Jewish kids going to their synagogue schools and then goes and kills a 
Filipino postman. Matthew Shepard, James Byrd.
    Did you see the pictures in the paper yesterday of the two soldiers, 
one 18 and one 21? The 18-year-old beat the one that was 21 to death 
with a baseball bat because he was gay. I've said this a lot, but my 
heart broke for both of them.
    People have to be taught this kind of stuff. And I'm very proud of 
the fact that I belong to a political party that believes everybody has 
a place at the table, everybody ought to have a chance, and we ought to 
take a little extra trouble to help bring people in that need a helping 
hand.
    I believe that, and I think now you've had 7 years--and I hope 
you'll think about this when Mr. Connerly comes down here and puts his 
anti-affirmative action initiative on the ballot--we've now had 7 years 
to prove that our way works better. America's better off when you help 
everybody to participate, not worse off.
    And if I could have one wish, it would be--just one; if somebody 
came, you know, one of those little angels came to me at night and said, 
``I'm sorry, Mr. President, you have to check out tomorrow morning. You 
can't stay 14 months, but we'll give you one wish. What would you 
like?'' As much as I want to do something about the aging challenge and 
the children and all these other things, I would say, I'd like to leave 
America united across the lines that divide us--not just tolerating our 
differences, but celebrating them; and reaffirming the fact that our 
common humanity is more important than all these interesting 
differences.
    There's no country in the world as well-positioned as we are for the 
next 50 years of what's going to happen. But we have to be willing to 
deal with these long-term challenges. If this election is about that 
question--what are we going to do with this unique moment in our 
history?--then our side will win.
    And I hope that when people ask you, why are you doing this, you'll 
tell them about the last 7 years, but you'll also talk about your dreams 
for the next 20.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 8:45 p.m. in the Altamira Room at the 
Biltmore Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Gene Prescott, president, 
Biltmore Hotel; Ward Connerly, chairman, California Civil Rights 
Initiative; and Eric Lander,

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director, Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research.