[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 6 (Monday, February 14, 2000)]
[Pages 256-261]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in McAllen

February 9, 2000

    Thank you very much. I want to say, first of all, how very grateful 
I am to Jesus and Elvia for having us in their beautiful home;

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to Alonzo Cantu and, of course, to my good friend Congressman Hinojosa.
    I thought it was interesting that he quoted that line from 
``Casablanca''--[laughter]--my second favorite movie of all time. I like 
you very much, but I must say I've never thought of you in the same 
breath as Ingrid Bergman before. [Laughter] I'll have to think about 
that one.
    Let me say to all of you, I--Ben talked about how I have been here, 
now I guess three times since I've been President. It isn't a hard sell. 
If it were up to me, I'd come once a month. If you've been following the 
weather between Washington and New York, where I'm spending most of my 
time now, you know that it's a little better down here. I saw the first 
golf course without snow on it I've seen in 3 weeks, today coming in 
from the airport.
    I will be brief because I want to get around and visit with all of 
you and then speak about what you wish to speak about, but I would like 
to make a couple of general points. First of all, I came to the valley 
and to McAllen on the last night of my campaign in 1992; some of you 
were there. We had a marvelous 24-hour affair. We stopped in nine 
different communities, and I really wanted to come here. And I said then 
I wanted the American people to give me a chance to put the people of 
this country first again over the politics of Washington, which was, I 
thought, entirely too divisive and too mired in the past. And we brought 
a new philosophy to try to bring the people together, to try to change 
the way Government works to empower people to solve their own problems, 
to try to bring opportunity to every responsible citizen, and to make a 
genuine attempt to build a community of all Americans, and our country 
is growing increasingly diverse with every passing day. In just a 
decade, for example, there will be no majority race in the entire State 
of California, our biggest State.
    So all these things are important. We talked about how we sent 
people from the Government down here to try to help. I think that's 
important. I think if we're going to have one America, we can't pretend 
that we're building one if we only go to the largest places or to the 
wealthiest places or to the places with the most influence or even to 
the places where I won the electoral votes. We have to try to bring 
everybody into the family of America and go forward.
    In 1992, when I stopped here, we had high unemployment. Today, we 
have the longest economic expansion in history and the lowest 
unemployment rate in 30 years, and the lowest Hispanic- and African-
American unemployment rates ever recorded.
    We had a great deal of social division in terms of race and income 
and other ways, and a lot of social problems. Today, we have the lowest 
welfare rolls in 30 years, almost 7 million fewer people on welfare, 2 
million-plus children lifted out of poverty, the lowest crime rates in 
30 years, the lowest poverty rates in over 20 years. The college-going 
rate is up by about 10 percent. And we've put empowerment zones all 
across America, including one in south Texas, to try to give people a 
better chance to be a part of this new enterprise economy.
    So the country, in general, is in the best shape perhaps it's ever 
been. And the great question in this election season, which I think I 
can comment on because for the first time in over two decades I'm not on 
a ballot anywhere, is after we have done all this work to turn our 
country around, to get it moving in the right direction, what are we 
going to do with this opportunity?
    And all of you can remember times in your own life--at least all of 
you that are over 30--when you made a mistake because you thought things 
were going so well there were no consequences to breaking your 
concentration, to not thinking ahead, to putting off the tough decisions 
that you knew were out there. That's the great challenge to America 
today: How are we going to make the most of what is truly a magic moment 
in our Nation's history?
    And as I argued a little more than a week ago in the State of the 
Union Address, I think the only thing to do is to keep pushing ahead, to 
bear down, to keep changing along the lines that have brought us this 
far; to ask ourselves what are the big challenges still out there, and 
do our best to meet them. And I just want to emphasize, if I might very 
briefly, six of those that I think have particular impact on the people 
of the Rio Grande Valley.

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    First of all, the number of people over 65 will double in the next 
30 years, and we have to be prepared for that. That means we have to 
save Social Security; we have to strengthen Medicare; and we ought to 
add a prescription drug benefit that our seniors can buy at a price they 
can afford, because over 60 percent of the seniors in America today 
cannot afford the prescription drugs they need to lengthen and improve 
the quality of their lives.
    Secondly, we have to realize that only in one respect has our social 
fabric been more strained since 1993: There are more people without 
health insurance today than there were in 1993. I remember when all the 
interest groups were arrayed against me and the First Lady when we tried 
to provide health care coverage for all. They told all those Congressmen 
that if they voted for my health care plan, the number of uninsured 
people would go up. Well, every Congressman who voted for it can say 
``That's right. I voted for Clinton's plan. It didn't pass, and the 
number of uninsured people went up.''
    So I'm trying to do something about that. In 1997 we passed the 
Children's Health Insurance Program. And we got it off the ground, and 
it was a little slow starting. But last year we doubled the number of 
people in CHIP, and there are now 2 million children who have health 
insurance. But there are 3 million more who are eligible, and what I 
want you to understand--a lot of them are in the Rio Grande Valley--and 
the thing I want to emphasize is, we appropriated the money, the money 
is there, and we have to get these children enrolled.
    And I also asked the Congress this year to cover the parents of 
these children, almost all of them working people but on very limited 
incomes. Cover them. If we covered the parents and children that are 
income-eligible for the health insurance program for children, we could 
literally cover 25 percent of all the uninsured people in the United 
States, and they're the 25 percent that need the coverage the worst. So 
I ask you to help me pass that.
    In addition to that--and I'll bet there are a lot of these people in 
the valley, as well--the fastest growing group of people without health 
insurance are people between the ages of 55 and 65 who take early 
retirement or change jobs, and their new job doesn't have health 
insurance for people their age, or they take early retirement, and they 
don't have any health insurance until they're old enough to get on 
Medicare.
    I have proposed to let them buy into Medicare and to give them a tax 
credit to make it affordable. This will not in any way weaken Medicare. 
If anything, it will strengthen Medicare, because we're not taking money 
out of the Medicare Trust Fund. But if you think about the hundreds and 
hundreds of thousands of people out there today who are, because they're 
in an age group that I'm rapidly approaching, are not exactly attractive 
for insurance but are, on average, healthier than people over 65, we 
need to provide some way for them to get health care and for the health 
care providers to be reimbursed if they give them health care. And the 
simplest, easiest thing is to let them buy into the Medicare program.
    Let me say a word about education. In the country as a whole, test 
scores are up; high school graduation rates are up; college-going rates 
are up. That's the good news. The bad news is there is still a 
differential in the high school dropout rate that is breathtaking 
between Hispanic-Americans and the rest of America. And the dropout rate 
from college, once people go, is very high.
    So I have proposed a budget that puts a billion dollars more into 
Head Start, the biggest increase in a generation, that would provide 
after-school programs and summer school programs in every troubled 
school in America where there's a high dropout rate, and we know that 
makes a big difference. And we passed in '97 the HOPE scholarship, which 
gives a $1,500 tax credit for people for the first 2 years of college, 
and further tax relief for later years, which has effectively opened the 
doors of college to all Americans, at least to community college.
    I have asked the Congress to add to that a tax deduction for up to 
$10,000 of college tuition and to make it at the 28 percent rate, even 
for people in the 15 percent income tax bracket. That would effectively 
open the doors of 4 years of college to every person in this country. It 
could change the future

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of the Rio Grande Valley. And I hope you will help me pass that in this 
coming session.
    I also have made proposals that would enable us to have the funds to 
help prepare 5,000 schools every year and to do major repairs or build 
6,000 more schools. We have a lot of kids that are in overcrowded 
classrooms, a lot of kids that are in classrooms so broken down they 
can't even be wired for the Internet. So I hope you will support the 
education agenda.
    In the area of families, I believe that one of the biggest 
unresolved problems we have today, or just daily challenges, is the 
challenge that families face when they have to work, particularly when 
both parents work or when there's a single-parent household and they 
have children, school-aged children, or even preschool children.
    So I recommended an expansion in the child care tax credit. I 
recommended making it refundable for low income people who sometimes 
spend as much as 25 percent of their income on child care. I recommended 
a $3,000 tax credit--that's $3,000 off your tax bill--to pay for the 
long-term care costs of people who are caring for elderly or disabled 
relatives. I think that is a very important thing, and I hope the 
Congress will finally agree to go on and raise the minimum wage.
    The last point I want to make on families and health care is what I 
made today--we have finally gotten a conference to begin tomorrow on the 
Patients' Bill of Rights, which I think is very important, to guarantee 
people the right to see a specialist, the right not to lose their health 
care coverage, or to be required to change doctors in the middle of a 
treatment, a pregnancy or a cancer treatment, for example. And I think 
it's important that we pass that.
    The last economic point I want to make is that we now have an 
opportunity that we didn't have in '92, and that is to focus even more 
sharply on the people and the communities who are still mired in poverty 
and a high unemployment rate, the people who have not fully participated 
in this economic recovery.
    Now, the empowerment zone program, which is very well known in south 
Texas because of the leadership of the Vice President--we've had our 
big, national empowerment zone conference down here in the valley not 
very long ago last year. But I think it's time to both increase the 
number of these zones and increase the financial incentives to invest in 
them. I know you want to get high-tech business in here.
    You know, if there is some extra risk or some extra cost by going 
further away, we ought to help to defray that, because we will never 
have a better opportunity--ever--to prove what I believe: that we can 
bring free enterprise to people and places that have been left behind 
and that this is a way not only to help the people in those categories, 
the high unemployment areas in south Texas, this is a way to keep the 
American economic expansion going with no inflation, because we'll be 
adding new businesses, new workers, new taxpayers, and new consumers all 
at the same time.
    I'm also, as I'm sure you've noticed from the emphasis I've given it 
for the last year or so, trying to get Congress to pass sweeping 
legislation that would cover every area of high unemployment in the 
country, to give people the same incentives to invest to bring new 
businesses to these areas we now give people to invest to bring new 
businesses to South America or Asia or Africa. I'm not against helping 
poor countries overseas. I just think we ought to have the same 
incentives to invest in poor areas here at home in America. I hope 
you'll help me pass that new markets legislation.
    One big part of that that I'm going to emphasize in a couple of 
months is closing the so-called digital divide, which would really be 
helped if you were able to recruit some high-tech companies down here 
and train people to work in them. Because one thing we know is that when 
people have access to computers, not just children in the schools but 
their parents at home or in a community center, and I've proposed 
establishing a thousand of them across America to give all adults access 
to the Internet, we know that innovative people find new ways to improve 
their lot in life.
    For example, probably some of you here have bought or sold something 
on the website eBay, which is a great trading center. There are now over 
20,000 Americans, many

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of whom were once on welfare, who are now actually making a living--it's 
their full-time job trading on eBay. No one would have ever thought of 
this as a possible opportunity for poor people, as a way to create small 
businesses.
    I've established all these community development financial 
institutions around the country since I've been President. We're making 
a lot of microcredit loans. Think about that. Think about being able to 
loan somebody enough money just to buy a computer with good capacity. 
They could be fully connected to the Internet, and they figure out how 
to make their own living. There are all kinds of options out there, and 
we ought to leave no stone unturned in trying to get at the heart of 
this poverty problem and empower every person who has not yet been a 
part of this prosperity to do well.
    Now, here's the last point I want to make. If you were to ask me to 
put in a sentence what has been behind the change I tried to bring to 
America the last 7 years, what is behind the philosophy that governs 
everything I do, it is my belief that everyone counts and everyone ought 
to have a chance, and we all do better when we help each other, that we 
really have to build one America, and that the Government isn't the 
source or the solution to all the problems but is an absolutely 
imperative partner. We have to create conditions and empower people to 
make the most of their own lives.
    And in that connection, I have to tell you that one of the things 
that continues to bother me in my efforts to build one America is the 
problem that I continue to have in the United States Senate in getting 
judges confirmed--you want to talk to me about judges--particularly 
judges who come from diverse backgrounds. And there's always a political 
element in the appointment of judges, and sometimes when the President 
is of one party and the Senate is of another party, they don't confirm 
as many of the President's appointees. But there has never been an 
example like what we've seen of the deliberate slow walk and refusal to 
have hearings, refusal to vote up or down on judges.
    I appointed an El Paso lawyer named Enrique Moreno to serve on the 
fifth circuit. He graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law School. He'd 
come a long way from El Paso. The American Bar Association said he was 
well-qualified to be a judge. I had the highest percentage of judges 
recommended well-qualified by the ABA of any President since they've 
been doing the ratings, even though I've appointed more Hispanic, more 
African-Americans, more female, and a more diverse judiciary in history. 
And everybody concedes they're less political than my two predecessors. 
They just show up for work, by and large, and do their job. And I cannot 
even get a hearing because your Senators won't support it.
    I have appointed--I nominated a judge named Julio Fuentes for the 
third circuit and Richard Paez in California. They're supposed to give 
me a vote on him in March, but that's another thing I wish you would 
communicate, particularly if you're not a lawyer. You could have more 
influence in a way if you're not a lawyer. Tell your Senators that when 
the President appoints a person who worked himself all the way through 
Harvard Law School out of El Paso, and the ABA says he's well-qualified, 
and Texas needs the judge, give the man a hearing, and give him a vote. 
And if they're not for him, have the courage to vote against him. Don't 
keep killing these things.
    I keep telling people in Washington, ``We can do our business. We 
can show up for work. We can make progress, and we can still have 
elections. There will still be things we honestly disagree about. But we 
owe it to the American people, without regard to our party or our 
philosophy, to believe that everybody counts, everybody ought to have a 
chance, and we'll all do better when we help each other.''
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 12:05 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to Jesus and Elvia Saenz, luncheon hosts; and 
Alonzo Cantu, member, board of directors, Congressional Hispanic Caucus 
Institute.

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