[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 3 (Monday, January 24, 2000)]
[Pages 111-114]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Gala

January 19, 2000

    Thank you very much. I would like to begin this evening by asking 
you all to give another round of applause to my friend Phoebe Snow and 
her band. I thought they were great here tonight, and I thank them for 
coming. [Applause]
    I want to thank Ed Rendell for agreeing to become the chair of our 
party, for the work we have done as friends and partners in the last 7 
years. I want to thank Joe Andrew, who has really been an indefatigable 
sparkplug. You know, most people think I'm in a good humor most of the 
time, but he makes me look like a sourpuss. [Laughter] I mean, the guy 
is always up. He's like the--and I don't mean this in a demeaning way, 
but he's sort of like our Energizer bunny. He's just always plugging 
away there. He's always there, and I thank him for that.
    I always tell the people that work around me, in good times and bad, 
that reality is composed more or less in equal parts of what happens and 
how you react to it because we can't control everything that happens, 
but we can always control how we react. This guy is always reacting in 
the right way, and I thank you, and we're in good shape today and well 
poised for this millennial election year.
    I want to thank all the other officers of the DNC, the former 
officers who are here, especially the three new co-finance chairs who 
are here: Carol Pensky, Joel Hyatt, and Joe Cari, all long-time friends 
of mine, and I thank you for your willingness to do this.
    I will be brief tonight for two reasons: You've heard me give a 
speech or two before, and secondly, if I'm not careful, I'll blow what 
little I haven't revealed about my State of the Union Address, and I 
don't want to do that. Let me try to just say a few things that I hope 
you will remember and carry with you when you leave tonight and wake up 
tomorrow.
    First of all, I want you to know that I am profoundly grateful for 
the support and the friendship I have received from so many of you in 
this room who have been with me and Hillary and Al and Tipper all along 
the way, in good times and bad. Secondly, I want you to know that I am 
also very grateful for the success America has enjoyed during my tenure 
and the fact that we were able to end the 20th century and begin the 
21st on such a high note. Most of the credit belongs, as it always does, 
to the American people, without regard to party, people who just get up 
every day and dream their own dreams and take care of their own families 
and obey the law and pay their taxes and make this country hum.
    But it really does matter what tools they have to build their dream. 
It really does matter whether the conditions in which they live and 
labor and raise their children help or thwart those dreams. And that is 
why politics matter. That is why ideas matter.
    I was so glad that Mayor Rendell said what he did--I don't know how 
many times I've said that in the last 4 months. I actually find myself 
watching these debates--and I tried to watch the debates, no offense, 
that the other party was having, too, but I think ours are more 
interesting because our guys actually know a lot of things so they have 
something to say in these things. [Laughter] And it really is 
fascinating to me to listen to them talk. I think that's great.
    But underneath all the specifics, the Democratic Party has been 
transformed and in the process has helped the transforming of America 
over the last 7 years. When we celebrated over the millennial new year's 
the great achievements of the 20th century, for the world and for the 
United States and the triumph of freedom, it is easy to forget that

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7 years ago two guys that worked for the Philadelphia Enquirer, in Mayor 
Rendell's hometown, in 1992 wrote a best-selling book, the title of 
which was, ``America: What Went Wrong?'' And it swept the country. I 
read it through twice, underlined it.
    Why was that a best-selling book? Because we had an unusual 
combination of high unemployment, social decline--that is, exploding 
welfare and crime rolls and all the other indicators--political gridlock 
in Washington, and after 12 years of trying, the Republicans had finally 
succeeded in discrediting the Government of this country. They told us 
how sorry it was. It took 12 years, and they just about convinced 
people. So there we were in quite a fix: economic distress, social 
decline, political gridlock, and a discredited government.
    And at least to someone like me, sitting out in the country a long 
way from Washington, it appeared that the debates that were going on 
here were like a broken record. Over and over and over again, you know, 
there was a prescribed Democratic position and a prescribed Republican 
position. There was the prescribed liberal position and a prescribed 
conservative position. And everybody was put in these little boxes, and 
they lobbed their rhetorical artillery across a no-man's land at each 
other. And not much happened, but it was enough to fill the airwaves at 
night. And I thought to myself, you know, if I ran my State like that, 
we'd never get anything done, and we'd just be in a ditch. If people ran 
their businesses like that, we'd have 20 percent unemployment. If people 
ran their families like that, the divorce rate would be 100 percent. It 
was just crazy. It was like we were stuck in this sort of over and over 
and over again way of doing things.
    So I said to the American people, ``I have an idea. I'm a Democrat 
by heritage, instinct, and conviction. But I think we're living in new 
times; we have to have new approaches. We've got to be willing to try 
new ideas. We've got to be willing to break out of old patterns, but we 
ought to be anchored in the fundamental ideas that every American should 
have opportunity, but every American should be a responsible citizen and 
that all of us are part of a community, and whenever the least of us is 
in trouble, the rest of us are lessened. And no one should be shut out 
of this community just because they're not like the rest of us, as long 
as they're willing to show up every day, obey the law, and be good 
citizens. And beyond that, we ought not to rule out anything; we ought 
to be willing to try new ideas.
    ``And the first thing we've got to do is get this country out of 
debt. But we can't pretend that you can do it by calling for a 
constitutional amendment to balance the budget and then never do 
anything about it. You either have got to raise taxes or cut spending or 
do both.'' Somebody said, what was the single new reform I brought to 
Washington? I think it was arithmetic. [Laughter] We brought arithmetic 
back to Washington.
    Anyway, the rest is history. But I want you to understand that this 
idea--we proved, for example, that the progressive party, or the liberal 
party, if you will, could run the first back-to-back surpluses in 42 
years--not the conservative party, the progressive party--and that we 
could do it and still double our investment in education and training 
because we've given you the smallest Government in 37 years; we've 
eliminated hundreds of programs; we've cut out 16,000 pages of Federal 
regulations. We got rid of stuff that nobody ever comes up to me and 
tells me how much they miss. I'll give anybody here $5 if before I walk 
out of here tonight, you can come up and say, ``I really miss this 
regulation,'' and tell me what it was; or, ``I really wish you hadn't 
gotten rid of that program.'' And I got rid of hundreds of them. So just 
come tell me one. Tell me how you yearn for its return. [Laughter]
    So we said, ``Why should we choose between investing in education 
and science and technology and the environment and health care and 
getting rid of the deficit? Let's do both. Why should we choose between 
tougher punishment or better prevention to lower the crime rate? Why 
don't we do both? Why should we choose between improving the environment 
and growing the economy, especially with the present state of 
development of technology and energy? Let's do both.''
    And the results, I think you'll all agree, have been pretty good. 
And it's not just about economics. Twenty million people have been

[[Page 113]]

able to take a little time off from work without losing their jobs when 
there is a sick parent or a baby is born under the family leave law, a 
bill vetoed in the previous administration, vetoed because it was 
supposed to be so bad for business. Almost a half million felons, 
fugitives, and stalkers haven't gotten a handgun because of the Brady 
bill, a bill vetoed in the previous administration because it was 
supposed to undermine our freedom to keep and bear arms. Ninety percent 
of our kids immunized against serious diseases for the first time. And I 
could go on and on.
    Now, the first thing I want you to go out and tell people is--I used 
to say when I was at home, ``When you find a turtle on a fencepost, the 
chances are it didn't get there by accident.'' We have worked hard to 
modernize our party and to modernize our country. And we don't claim 
credit for every good thing that went on in this country, but we did 
establish the conditions and give people the tools to make the most of 
their own lives. And that's what we believe the role of the National 
Government is in the 21st century.
    And the second thing, elections are always about tomorrow. I said on 
New Year's Eve that as long as our dreams outweigh our memories, we can 
be forever young. And that is the destiny of this country. And so what 
Americans have to think about is, in '92 we had economic distress, 
social decline, political gridlock, discredited Government; 2000, we've 
got the strongest economy in history, the social fabric is clearly on 
the mend; we have developed as a nation a new consensus, even though 
sometimes you can't tell it here in Washington, for a progressive 
politics that is fiscally responsible but socially concerned; and the 
credibility of the Government's ability to do its job has been restored. 
And for the first time all these things have happened, and we are not 
paralyzed by an internal crisis or an external threat.
    So the big issue about--if the 20th century was about freedom and 
its triumph, the beginning of the 21st century is about whether we will 
use this wisely. What are we going to do now? And that's what I want you 
to focus on all year long. When you get tired of coming to these things 
and calling somebody else to help our party, when you get weary or some 
little bump in the road occurs in these elections, I want you to 
remember we didn't get here by accident; you brought us here. All those 
times you wrote checks you'd just as soon not have written, all those 
nights you went to those dinners when you had rather stayed home and 
watched a movie, all those times you've showed up at some public event 
because you wanted to be loyal.
    This is about ideas and change, and the people's lives have changed. 
And we are in a position never before existent in my lifetime to write 
the future of our dreams for our children. What I always hoped we could 
do in my tenure as President is turn this country around and get us 
moving in the right direction, so that our children would literally have 
a chance to build the future of their dreams.
    And so the big question for us now is, what are we going to do with 
this magic moment? Are we going to indulge ourselves in it, pretend that 
the elections don't matter, take some sort of short-term benefit that 
may or may not help us get there? Or are we going to say, ``Thank you, 
God, for giving us this moment. Give us the wisdom to use it well and 
try to honestly say, now what are the big opportunities and the big 
problems that are out there staring us in the face, and what in the 
world are we going to do about it?''
    And for the next year I'm going to do my best to finish the 
unfinished business of the last Congress, from the Patients' Bill of 
Rights to sensible gun legislation to hate crimes and employment 
nondiscrimination legislation to trying to extend the life of Medicare 
and get a sensible prescription drug benefit for our seniors--75 percent 
of them don't have it today. I'm going to try to chart the long-term 
direction that I want America to go in. And then I'm going to have as 
ambitious a program for what we can do in the next year as I have ever 
offered the American people in the State of the Union, because I think 
they hired us to show up for work.
    People keep telling me, ``Well, it's election year, you know.'' And 
I say, ``Well, we're all drawing a paycheck, aren't we?'' It's election 
year, and then people who aren't in the election want to use that as an 
excuse not to go

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to work or not to get anything done. I don't understand that. I think we 
ought to get more done this year because we're not running. I don't 
understand that.
    But hear me well, now. As Democrats we have two obligations that you 
must shoulder. We must be competitive in this campaign. We must be 
determined not to be so out-spent we can't be heard, and we must never 
forget that our job, since we are governing, is to do good things for 
the American people, including good things with our friends in the 
Republican Party whenever they're willing to work with us, and if 
they're not, to the best of our ability on our own. So just remember, 
you've got a lot to be proud of; you've got a good story to tell.
    But the American people now have to decide whether they think this 
turtle got on the fencepost by accident and where they want to go with 
this magic moment in the future. And what I really care about is 
thinking that all this stuff we've labored to do the last 7 years can be 
used together to sort of liberate the energy, the imagination, the 
heart, the spirit of America; to be a force for peace and freedom and 
prosperity around the world; to give all the poor people in this country 
who are willing to work a chance to live the American dream; to give 
everybody a world-class education; to bring health insurance to the 
people who can't afford it now; to deal with these big challenges.
    You can make your own list, but just remember the most important 
thing. If you look at where we are now compared to where we were then, 
we got there because we had good ideas, rooted in good values, with a 
real vision. If you look at where we are now, compared to where we can 
go, and you understand that the sky is the limit, you begin to 
appreciate the importance of this election.
    Joe and Ed talk about how I show up at the drop of a hat, even 
though I'm not running for anything. There is a reason. I have never 
forgotten a day I was here, for whom I was working. I have never been 
under the illusion that I was anything other than the hired hand of the 
American people. And it's contract time again. And they're going to give 
a lot of employment contracts this year, from the White House--in Joe's 
terms, from the White House to dogcatcher. Just once in my life I hope I 
meet the Democratic nominee for dogcatcher some day. There have been 
days where there is not much difference in that and the White House. 
[Laughter]
    Anyway, it's contract time again. And if you believe in what we've 
done, if you believe in why you drug yourselves out in good weather and 
bad and when you weren't feeling good and you worked all these dinners 
and receptions, if you believe in why you wrote all those checks and did 
all those things, remember, it's contract time again, and the people 
have to decide again.
    And if we blew this decision, we wouldn't be the first people to 
blow a decision just because things were so good. How many times have 
you made a mistake in your life because things were going along so well, 
you thought there were no consequences to what you did or what you 
decided on any given day? This is a momentous election. The American 
people have been well served by our party. They need to be well served 
by our voices and by our continued service. I'll do my part; you'll do 
yours; we'll have the biggest celebration yet in this millennial year.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:27 p.m. in the North Hall at the Corcoran 
Gallery of Art. In his remarks, he referred to entertainer Phoebe Snow; 
and Edward G. Rendell, general chair, Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, 
and Carol Pensky, Joel Hyatt, and Joe Cari, finance co-chairs, 
Democratic National Committee.