    [Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 4 (Monday, January 31, 2000)]
    [Pages 134-139]
    [Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

    <R04>
    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in Los Angeles,
    California

    January 22, 2000

        Thank you very much. I am, first of all, delighted to be here. I
    want to thank Irwin and Lynne for putting this luncheon together on
    short notice, and I thank all of you for coming. I thank Gray and Sharon
    Davis for being here to share this moment with us and for their longtime
    friendship not only to the Deutchs but to Hillary and me.
        The first person who told me that Gray Davis was the most underrated
    politician in America was my wife. [Laughter] She's got a pretty good
    feel for those things. And I congratulate you on your success, and even
    more on the substance of what you have fought for and achieved. It's one
    thing to win elections and be popular; it's another thing to do the
    right things. You're doing the right things now. I admire you, and I
    thank you for it. It's very important.
        I thank Joel Hyatt for becoming one of our co-finance chairs. A lot
    of you don't know him as well as I do because he hasn't been in
    California very long. But he founded a remarkable company called Hyatt
    Legal Services, which swept the Northeast, and provided affordable legal
    services for real people, many of whom could never afford to come to an
    event like this, and made him a famous character because he was on
    television all the time. And he was also prominent in Ohio, democratic
    politics, where his father-in-law, Howard Metzenbaum, was our United
    States Senator. And he is a wonderful guy. So he's out here now, and I
    want you to take care of him. Make him look good by helping him raise
    money for the Democratic Party.
        I want to thank Jane Harman for being willing to serve in Congress
    again and for being there before. Our economic plan in 1993, which
    passed by a single vote in both Houses--or, as the Vice President says,
    ``Whenever I vote, we win''--[laughter]--but it passed by a single vote
    in both Houses, really sparked this astonishing economic recovery we've
    had. And so there's a real sense in which Jane Harman can say, ``If it
    hadn't been for me it wouldn't have happened.'' [Laughter] And I think
    she is one of the ablest people that I have served with, with the
    Congress, and one who most embodies the philosophy that I have tried to
    get our party and our country to embrace. So thank you, Jane Harman, for
    being willing to do this.
        And of course, I want to thank the Women's Leadership Forum for this
    and for all the countless events we've had around the country,
    mobilizing a whole group of people, many of whom never have been
    involved in national political affairs before. So thank you, and thank
    all of you for coming.
        Now, I want to just make a couple of points about what has
    previously been said by Janice and Mayor Rendell, who we're very lucky
    to have, because he was a fabulous mayor of Philadelphia and always made
    sure the Clinton-Gore ticket carried Pennsylvania, which is a not
    inconsiderably important thing in the business we're in. [Laughter]
        Number one, I am very grateful for the chance that Hillary and I and
    the Vice President and Mrs. Gore have had to serve these last 7 years. I
    celebrated my seventh anniversary as President the day before yesterday,
    and I'm very grateful for that and for the progress that our country has
    made. I am grateful that it's about more than economics. Our country is
    beginning to come together more. We have the lowest female unemployment
    rate in 40 years; the lowest minority unemployment rate ever recorded;
    the lowest single-parent household poverty rate in 46 years; the lowest
    overall poverty rate in more than 20 years; the highest homeownership in
    history; cleaner air, cleaner water,

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    safer food; we tripled the number of toxic waste sites we cleaned up
    from the previous 12 years; we set aside more land--a lot of you
    mentioned that to me today--we set aside more land in perpetuity to
    protect, in the continental United States, than any administration in
    our history except those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt.
        Over 20 million people have taken advantage of the family and
    medical leave law, take a little time off from work without losing their
    jobs to take care of a newborn or a sick parent. About 5 million people
    have now claimed the HOPE scholarship tax credit that's designed to open
    the doors of college to all Americans for at least 2 years. We've had
    about half a million people haven't been able to buy handguns because
    they have criminal backgrounds, because of the Brady bill. A lot of
    people are alive because of that. And I could go on--90 percent of our
    kids were immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first
    time in the history of the United States. And our country has been a
    force for peace and freedom around the world, from Bosnia and Kosovo to
    Northern Ireland to the Middle East to our efforts to try to help
    African nations resolve their difficulties. And I could just go on and
    on. I am very grateful for where we are now, especially when I remember
    where we were in 1992. And I hope that's one of the reasons you're here
    today.
        But the second thing I would like to say is that, in my lifetime--
    which, thankfully, continues to lengthen--even though I don't like it--
    [laughter]--I tell this story all the time. A 6-year-old girl was one of
    the--a friend of ours spent some time with us over Thanksgiving weekend.
    He brought his kids up there. They've got four little kids. And the
    second youngest is a 6-year-old girl. And she looked up at me and she
    says, ``Well, how old are you, anyway?'' [Laughter] And I said, ``Well,
    I'm 53.'' And she said, ``Oh, that's a lot.'' [Laughter] The kid should
    be in the movies. [Laughter]
        And it is, but it gives you the benefit of memory. In February, next
    month, in just a few days, this will become the longest economic
    expansion in the history of the United States, including those which,
    for example, embraced the Second World War, when we had to be fully
    mobilized. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Part of it is the
    explosion in information technology, much of which came out of
    California. Part of it is our success in exporting our culture and ideas
    around the world, a lot of which comes out of California. But part of it
    is the environment and conditions and tools we established when we
    changed the whole direction of the country and got us out of debt, and
    still continued to invest more in education and in making our streets
    safer and our air cleaner and our children healthier.
        Now, in my lifetime we have never had the following conditions all
    in the same place at the same time. We have never had so much economic
    progress, social progress, political self-confidence as a nation--I say
    ``political,'' as citizens we're pretty confident--with the absence of
    an overwhelming or paralyzing domestic crisis or foreign threat. We'll
    always have security threats, but there is nothing--this is not the cold
    war; this is not the Vietnam war. This never happened. The last time we
    had an economy that in the terms of that age was about this good was in
    the early sixties, and it came apart with riots in the streets and the
    paying for the Vietnam war, paying for it in cash and paying for it in
    blood and politics. We have never had a time like this.
        One of my friends said to me this morning when we were talking, he
    said, ``You know, the problem is, things are going along so well, nobody
    wants to talk about this; people aren't really obsessed with this
    election.'' And I guess what I want to say to you is, you should be;
    because there is an enormous opportunity here and, therefore, an
    enormous responsibility to make the most of what is truly a magic moment
    that coincidentally fits with the changing of the century and the
    millennium. But I'm just telling you that a time like this doesn't come
    along very often, where all the social indicators are getting better;
    the economy is booming and becoming more widely shared; we are not
    paralyzed by a domestic crisis or a foreign threat; we have the ability
    to chart the future of our dreams for our children. That's what this
    election is all about.
        If the whole 20th century could be fairly characterized as the
    triumph of freedom over

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    depression and want, over nazism and fascism, over communism, then the
    question for the 20th century would be whether that freedom is wisely
    used. For the first time in all history, more than half the people of
    the world live under governments of their own choosing. But over a
    billion people in this old world live on less than $2 a day. There are a
    lot of challenges out there.
        So I say to you, you know, I'm not running for anything. The reason
    I'm here is because I worked like crazy to turn this country around, to
    make sure people believed America could work, just so we would be in
    this position, and it would be an era of colossal proportions. If we
    treated this like an ordinary election, a ho-hum deal--how many times--
    everybody in this room who is over 30 can cite at least one time in your
    life when you got in trouble and made big mistakes because you thought
    things were going so well that you didn't have to think about tomorrow;
    you didn't have to make any tough decisions; you could be sort of self-
    indulgent; you could get distracted because everything is going so well,
    nothing could go wrong. If you live long enough, that will happen to
    you; that's human nature. [Laughter] It's just a question of whether you
    live long enough. Sooner or later everybody makes that mistake in some
    way or another.
        Well, countries are no different from individuals and families and
    businesses. So the test is whether freedom will be wisely used, what
    will we make of this magic moment? Gray said we've taken some issues off
    the table for the Republicans. I think there is a reason for that. Until
    1992, the political debate was always an either/or proposition in
    Washington. There was a Democratic proposition, a Republican
    proposition--a liberal proposition, a conservative proposition. And
    everybody got put in their little boxes, and they lobbed their verbal
    bombshells across the great divide at each other. Nothing ever happened,
    but at least we could understand who the players were. The only problem
    was, nobody lived like that, the way Washington talked.
        And so we said, the Vice President and I did, ``Look, give us a
    chance, and we won't say Government is the problem or the solution.
    We'll say the Government should be the partner of the American people,
    if the role of Government is to establish the conditions and give people
    the tools to make the most of their own lives. We won't say that
    Government can guarantee opportunity to everybody, but we'll say
    Government should provide opportunity to every responsible citizen, that
    you have to do your part. And we will say that we should have a
    community of all Americans.'' And it's worked. So that's the first point
    I want to make. It's worked.
        But all it's done is to bring us to the point now where we can face
    these big challenges. I'll just mention a few of them. We're going to
    double the number of people over 65 in the next 30 years. I hope to be
    one of them. [Laughter] At present retirement rates, there will only be
    two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. Are we
    going to save Social Security and Medicare and add a prescription drug
    benefit for the 75 percent of the seniors who can't afford it
    themselves, or not? Big question. And how are we going to do it to make
    sure that when the baby boomers retire we don't bankrupt our kids and
    their ability to raise our grandkids? Huge question.
        Example number two. We have the largest number--Los Angeles knows
    this--we have the largest number of school children in our history and
    the most diverse. The good news is that in an increasingly globalized
    society it means America is the best positioned big country in the world
    for tomorrow. This diversity is our meal ticket to tomorrow. But only if
    we can figure out how to make sure these ever more diverse kids all get
    a world-class education. No one has ever done it before; no other
    society has ever had to do it before. Universal educational opportunity
    for people, without regard to race or income in this kind of
    environment. No one has ever tried to do anything of this dimension
    before.
        Example number three. We've got the lowest crime rate in 30 years,
    and that's good. But anybody who believes America is safe enough, please
    stand. Just the accidental death rate of children by guns in this
    country--just the accidental death rate of children by guns--I want you
    all to listen to this--is 9 times higher than the accidental gun death
    rate of the next 25 largest industrial economies combined.

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        So I say, we now know--you know, in '92 a lot of people didn't
    believe the crime rate would ever go down again. So we got a lower crime
    rate. We know we can do this: Sensible gun legislation, preventive
    things, get the kids involved in positive things, put enough police on
    the street--do the things that work. I think as a nation we ought to set
    a goal that America is going to be the safest big country in the world
    in the next 10 years, and we're going to keep going until we do it so
    that every child can feel safe again. We can do this. You don't have to
    doubt it anymore.
        Now, those are just three examples. And I could give you lots more.
    I'll give you just one or two more, just so you can think about it.
    America grew rich in an industrial economy and is now becoming even
    wealthier in a post-industrial, information-technology economy. The
    industrial economy was powered by energy, translated into electricity,
    primarily, and into gasoline. It made factories work, moved cars and
    trucks around, made trains run, with the help of coal--coal and oil--
    turned into these things.
        Now, in the industrial economy, in order to get richer you had to
    burn more energy. And if the energy you burned was based on oil and
    coal, you put into the air more greenhouse gases. That's what causes
    global warming--a big issue in the world today and huge for your
    children and grandchildren. I believe America is in a position to prove
    that for the first time in history a country can grow rich and build a
    middle class and actually improve the environment and put fewer
    greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, because the economy has changed,
    the technology has changed. And that's very important for your kids. Do
    you know why? Because until climate change came along, every
    environmental problem was reversible.
        So, for example, a lot of us who used to go to Japan, 20, 25 years
    ago, can remember when workers in Japan would wear masks, surgical masks
    to work, riding their bicycles. And now the air is cleaner than it is in
    many American cities, in Tokyo. That's just one example. Every
    environmental problem was reversible. A lot of you remember when you
    could strike a match on a Great Lake in America and start a fire--
    [laughter]--and a lot of them are very clean now, though we've got a new
    initiative to do even more. The climate change, it's reversible, but not
    for a long time. Once that stuff gets in the air, it hangs around and
    continues to warm the climate for 100 years.
        So we've got to figure out how to prove, not only to Americans but
    to people all over the world, that I'm right--[laughter]--you can grow
    the economy, get rich, and improve the environment. The Detroit auto
    show this year has four-seater cars that will be commercially available
    very soon, get 70 and 80 miles a gallon. There is a modest income
    housing project in the Inland Empire, not far from here, built in
    cooperation with HUD, the Energy Department, and the Home Builders a
    couple years ago. I went out there for the announcement, and we told
    these lower income working people if they moved into this housing
    project, because we had new lighting that was more efficient, new
    insulation that was more efficient, and glass that let in more heat,
    that kept out more heat and cold and let in more light, that their power
    bills would go down an average of 40 percent. They've gone down an
    average of 65 percent.
        If you've been following the Presidential campaign, you know in Iowa
    there is a lot of talk about ethanol. And that's because people grow
    corn. But let me tell you what the big issue is. The big issue is, today
    you can make ethanol efficiently but not real efficiently. It just takes
    about 7 gallons of gasoline to make about 8 gallons of ethanol. That's
    why there's a fight about it. But scientists, in projects funded by us,
    are on the verge of breaking the chemical barriers to the efficient
    transformation of not just corn but all kinds of biomass--rice hulls,
    field grasses into fuel. When that happens, it will have the same impact
    that turning crude oil into gasoline had 100 years ago. And you will be
    able to make 8 gallons of biomass fuel with one gallon of gasoline.
    Which means that, in effect, when you get the next generation of cars,
    if they run on ethanol, you'll be getting the equivalent of 500 miles a
    gallon.
        This is going to happen within your lifetime. Within just a few
    years, young mothers

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    will bring home their babies from the hospital with genetic maps that
    will tell them all the possible things that can go right and wrong in
    their lives and how to plan to lengthen and strengthen their children's
    lives. And most of my friends in the medical field that study this
    believe that early in the new century young mothers will bring home
    babies with a life expectancy of 100 years. In America today, people
    over 65 have a life expectancy, on average, of 83. So this is an
    exciting time. But you can see, we've got all these new challenges. And
    I'll just mention one last one.
        I know you all maybe get tired of me talking about this, but I think
    it is the supreme irony of our age that we're talking about unlocking
    the mysteries of the human gene and finding out what's in the black
    holes in the universe and driving cars that get 100 miles a gallon. But
    the biggest problem of human nature is the oldest problem of human
    society: People's fear of people who are different from them. You think
    about it. What have we done with the end of the cold war? What has it
    wrought? It's like it took this big old lid, this metal lid off all
    these long-simmering, festering fears and hatreds all around the world.
    So you've got Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, trouble again brewing in Burundi
    and Africa. You've got, obviously, the Middle East and Northern Ireland.
    You've got less well known ethnic and religious conflicts in western
    China--a long way from CNN coverage--all over the world.
        And here in America you have this upsurge of hate crimes: James Byrd
    in Texas, Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, the Jewish community school here
    in Los Angeles, and then the Filipino postal worker who was murdered.
    And then the guy who went on a rampage who said he belonged to a church
    in the Middle West that believed not in God but did believe in white
    supremacy--so he kills an African-American basketball coach, a young
    Korean Christian coming out of school, and a bunch of other people, just
    because they were the wrong ethnic or racial or religious group.
        And it's very interesting, isn't it, that all these really ugly,
    primitive things and the dominant problems are the world's inability to
    get rid of things come from the fact that we have a tendency, first of
    all, to be afraid of people who are different from us, then we distrust
    them. And then it's not a big step to dehumanize them, and then once you
    do that, you can justify killing them. It's a sort of a slippery slope.
    And this trust thing is such a problem. I don't know how many times
    we've been right up to the edge in a lot of these peace processes I've
    worked in the last 7 years, and then some hangnail will develop. And
    when you strip away all the rhetoric, it is: I just don't know; I don't
    know if I can hold hands with this person and jump off this diving
    board. [Laughter]
        And I want you to think about that. Because I believe building one
    America, whether it's in specific things like passing the ``Employment
    and Non-Discrimination Act'' or the ``Hate Crimes Act'' or just
    demonstrating that we can work together across the lines that divide us,
    in some ways is more important than all the other stuff that I've worked
    on. The American people nearly always get it right. This is a great
    country with a bunch of brainpower and a bunch of energy and a bunch of
    wealth. And the truth is, if we can get this right, if we can figure out
    how to let go of all of our accumulated resentments, we're going to do
    just fine.
        So, number one, the country is better than it was 7 years ago. And
    it's not an accident. And it has something to do with the fact that we
    did the right things. Number two, we should be thinking about the big
    challenges before us--and they are significant--and not be dumb enough
    to think we can relax and sleep our way through this election season.
        And the last point I want to make is this, not in any hateful way.
    There is a significant difference between the two parties and the two
    candidates, which will manifest itself in all kinds of ways. The next
    President--I appointed two members to the Supreme Court; in all
    probability, the next President will appoint more. And you saw the
    headline Mayor Rendell held up. There is absolutely no question in my
    mind that whether Roe v. Wade is preserved or scrapped depends on what
    happens in the Presidential race. And to pretend otherwise is naive in
    the extreme. It's not whether your compassion is good or bad; it's what
    you believe. And we ought to tell

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    the American people what we really believe and let them decide.
        And I appreciate Governor Bush being candid enough to say he didn't
    believe in Roe v. Wade. In another article a couple weeks ago he said
    the two Justices on the Supreme Court he most admired were Justices
    Scalia and Clarence Thomas. I think this is good. [Laughter] No, no,
    this is a good thing. People should say what they think. And we
    shouldn't be hateful about it; we shouldn't be mean; we don't have to
    get in the--but we should make sure that everybody knows where everybody
    else is coming from in this deal. And it's not helpful to go around with
    your head in the sand and pretend that there are no consequences here.
        I believe we ought to get this country out of debt for the first
    time since 1835. I think one of the reasons we're cooking right along
    here is that we've gone from running up debt to paying debt off. We've
    even paid some of our debt off early this year, for the first time in
    history, ever. And that keeps interest rates down lower for the rest of
    you and enables us to have more broadly shared access to capital and to
    keep things going. So even though I am a Democrat, I'm going to
    recommend at the State of the Union we spend more money on education and
    health care, the environment. I want to keep running some surpluses and
    keep paying this debt down and not fool with the Social Security portion
    of the surplus so we can get out of debt for the first time.
        If we adopt the tax cut that the leading candidate in the other
    party has proposed, it won't happen. And all of us will get money out of
    it. I mean, you'll all be happy for a month or 2. But it's a bad deal.
    We won't have the money we need to continue to improve education, and we
    will not be able to manage this economic situation, and we will never
    get this country out of debt over the next 10 to 15 years. So there are
    real consequences here.
        So again I say, I'm glad you're here. But when you leave here, I
    want you to leave with a renewed sense of citizen activism. I want it to
    be beyond writing checks. And if somebody asks you how come you were
    there, I want you to be able to tell them: number one, it's better than
    it was 7 years ago, and they had specific ideas, and they implemented
    them, and it worked. Number two, we've got to think about what the big
    challenges of the future are. And number three, there is a real
    difference between the two parties. And we don't have to be badmouthing
    each other and throwing rocks at each other and saying terrible things
    about each other--we can just have an honest discussion about that.
    That's one thing I do hope our new self-confidence will allow us to
    have, a less acrimonious, less hateful election, but it should be no
    less intense. So I ask you all of that.
        You know, most of us have been blessed or we wouldn't be here today.
    Our grandchildren's generation should never forgive us if we walk away
    from our responsibility to do what is necessary in this millennial
    election, so that they will be living the future of their dreams.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:35 a.m. in the Grille Room at the
    Regency Club. In his remarks, he referred to brunch hosts Irwin and
    Lynne Deutch; Gov. Gray Davis of California and his wife, Sharon; Joel
    Hyatt, finance cochair, and Edward G. Rendell, general chair, Democratic
    National Committee; Janice Griffin, national chair, Women's Leadership
    Forum; and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas. A portion of these remarks
    could not be verified because the tape was incomplete.