[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 9 (Monday, March 6, 2000)]
[Pages 408-412]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in West Palm Beach, 
Florida

February 29, 2000

    Thank you very much. First of all, Bren, thank you for your 
wonderful remarks and for opening your home to us today, giving those of 
us who suffered through an unusually long, cold Washington winter a 
chance to gaze out on the Atlantic under different circumstances, and 
for always being there for us.
    I also want to thank you for what you have done for the most 
important U.S. Senate candidate in the country to me. Hillary had a 
wonderful time here, and I thank you and the rest of you who helped her. 
I thank you for that.
    I'd like to join with Joe Andrew in expressing my appreciation to 
all the other officers of the Democratic Party and the Florida officials 
that are here. Congressman Peter Deutsch and Lori flew down with me 
today. We had a good time, and I was glad to be able to ferry them back 
home, for a few hours anyway.
    I'd like to thank Danny Abraham, Cynthia Friedman, the Carters, all 
the others who have done this fine work today, and I'd like to put in a 
special plug for my longtime friend Representative Elaine Bloom who is 
running for Congress here. She was for me in December of 1991, when only 
my mother thought I could be elected President. [Laughter] And I am for 
her in 2000. I'm going to do what I can to help. But I thank you for 
running for Congress. Thank you.
    Let me just say a few words today about this millennial election and 
about why we're where we are. Eight years ago, when I ran for President, 
I did so because I thought Washington had become a place that was almost 
turned in on itself, obsessed with itself, and stuck in the thinking and 
the debate of a time that was long gone. It was obvious then that we 
were moving into a global economy, into a global society, that the whole 
way we work, the way we earn a living, the way we relate to each other 
and the rest of the world was undergoing a profound change. And yet, in 
Washington, we just kept repeating over and over and over again the same 
debates. Each party took the same sides, staked out the same opposite 
position, paralysis occurred, and the results were not particularly 
satisfying to the American people.
    And so I decided that I would ask the American people to give me a 
chance to try a different approach, to try to have a politics that would 
unite and not divide, to try to have a budget policy that would restore 
basic arithmetic to the American budget and to stop pretending that we 
could ever get rid of high interest rates and low investment and slow 
growth until we got rid of the Government deficit, to put the American 
people first in profound ways so that it would no longer be about 
Washington but about how people lived out here.
    And we've been working at it pretty steady now for 7 years and a 
month, and the results have been good. We have the longest expansion in 
history and the lowest unemployment rate and welfare rolls in 30 years, 
the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, lowest crime rates in 25 years. 
Adoptions are up. Ninety percent of our kids are immunized for the first 
time. The college going rate's increased a lot. We've got 150,000 young 
Americans who are doing community service through the AmeriCorps 
program, a thousand colleges with their kids out, going into grade 
schools every week to teach people to read. The country is coming 
together and moving forward. And that is the good news.
    But I think the most interesting thing about this election is, in my 
judgment, that

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the winner will be determined by what the election is about--in the 
President's race, in the Congress races, in the Governors' races. And 
you have to help decide what the election is about. And there's more 
latitude now because things seem to be going well, so we're under the 
illusion that there is more latitude to decide what the election is 
about.
    I always tell people the Presidential election is the world's 
greatest job interview, except that the job interview, unlike most jobs, 
this job interview has two components. First of all, people have got to 
be able to look at you and size up, ``Can I imagine this person having 
this job?'' And then they have to decide what the job is about, and they 
are two different things. If you don't pass the first test, you don't 
get to take the second one.
    Now, I think all four of the candidates that are left passed the 
first test. The American people can look at them and imagine them being 
President. But the winner will be determined by what is the job about, 
what is the election about, what is the charter, what do you want, what 
are we to do with this enormous amount of prosperity, this historic 
moment where we can make peace?
    Very often, democracies mishandle good times, because people are 
under the illusion that it's just sort of an automatic, and it goes on 
forever. And when I gave the State of the Union Address, I asked the 
American people to work with me this year and the Congress to try to 
overcome the partisan divides and to take a long look ahead at the big 
challenges facing America. I asked them to pay the debt off, get America 
out of debt for the first time since 1835. I asked them to deal with the 
aging of America. We're going to double the number of people over 65 in 
the next 30 years.
    I released a Medicare report today that said the fastest growing 
group of seniors are people over 85. They will spend almost a quarter of 
their lives on Medicare. And since 70 percent of our seniors don't have 
access to affordable quality medicine, I'd like to see them get it under 
the Medicare program. But we also have to change the program so it will 
last longer.
    We have to lengthen the life of Social Security. I persuaded this 
Congress to save the Social Security surplus--that is the surplus that 
we get because you pay more in Social Security taxes than we pay out 
now--but I haven't persuaded them to do anything with it. So the good 
news is we're paying down the debt. But the bad news is we haven't saved 
Social Security yet. Because if they would just take the interest 
savings we get from a lower debt and put it into the Social Security 
Trust Fund, we could run it out to 2050, which would take it beyond the 
life expectancy of all but the most fortunate baby boomers. We have to 
deal with this.
    We've got to face the fact that we have the largest and most diverse 
student population in our history, and we no longer have an excuse for 
not making our schools excellent. We now know how to do it. We were 
talking the other night with the Governors, who just left town, in 
Washington; and there were a couple of people, one in my Cabinet, the 
Secretary of Education, and one retiring Governor, the Governor of North 
Carolina, who has the best school improvement record in America. And we 
were laughing about what it was like when we started as young men 
together 22 years ago as Governors. Everybody wanted to make the schools 
better, but we didn't really know how. Now we know. We have mountains 
and mountains and mountains of evidence of what works. And the National 
Government should play a role in that. There's nothing more important 
than giving all our kids a good education. Is that going to be a part of 
this election, or not?
    We've got the crime rate down 7 years in a row. It's the lowest it's 
been in 25 years. But nobody seriously believes this country is as safe 
as it ought to be. We can make America the safest big country in the 
world. Columbine happened a year ago, and I'm still waiting for Congress 
to close the gun show loophole, to stop the importation of these large 
capacity ammunition clips, and to require child safety locks on guns.
    Today in Michigan, in a school, a 6-year-old boy with a gun that his 
brother gave him, shot a 6-year-old girl. And she died. The child was 6 
years old. How did that child get that gun? Why could the child fire the 
gun? If we had the technology today to put in these child safety locks, 
why don't we do it? I don't know what the facts were in this

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case, and I don't want to prejudge it or condemn anyone. But I know 
this: I know that the accidental gun death rate of children--the 
accidental gun death rate of children in America is 9 times higher than 
that in the other 25 biggest countries combined--combined. So we know 
what to do. We just don't have any excuses. Is that going to be a 
subject of this election, or not?
    You have to decide that. And the same is true with health care. The 
same is true with the environment and whether we can grow the 
environment and improve the economy. The same is true with our 
obligations around the world. How do we define America's responsibility 
to fight biological and chemical and nuclear warfare, to fight 
terrorism, to advance the cause of peace, to fight against the racial 
and ethnic and tribal turmoil around the world, to advance the cause of 
peace through expanding trade?
    I strongly believe--and our party's divided about it, I know--but I 
strongly believe we ought to let China in the World Trade Organization. 
Everything I've learned as President and everything I've learned in 53 
years of living is that you get a lot more from people if you give them 
a chance to work with you than you do if you tell them you don't want to 
fool with them any more.
    And we've got a big stake in how China turns out. I don't know how 
they will and neither does anybody else, but I know this: If we put them 
in this trade organization, they'll have to open their markets to us 
just like our markets are open to them. So it's a no-brainer 
economically.
    But politically, it's important, because they will have an incentive 
to make good choices in the future about their role in the world. If we 
keep them out, they'll still keep selling stuff here, they'll relate 
more closely to others, and they'll have no incentives to be responsible 
partners in the world. If we do this, 20 years from now we'll wonder why 
we ever debated it. If we don't do it, 20 years from now we'll be still 
kicking ourselves. That's what I believe. So I'm going to fight for it.
    But these things ought to be the subject of this election, because 
you know the world will grow smaller, not larger. We have the lowest 
unemployment rate in 30 years, much lower than anybody thought we could 
have without exploding inflation. But there are still people and places 
that have been left behind. Should they be the subjects of this 
election?
    There are rural areas, Indian reservations, and inner-city 
neighborhoods where there are still people willing to work; where there 
is no free enterprise, no investment; where we could, by changing our 
tax laws and giving people like you the same incentives to invest in 
poor areas in America you have today to invest in poor areas in Latin 
America, in Africa, in Asia--I'm for that, by the way. I'm trying to get 
America to invest more money overseas, but we ought to have the same 
incentives to invest in poor areas in America.
    Does this matter to you? I think it should. By the way, it's not 
only morally right; it's a good way to keep the economy growing without 
inflation. There are Indian reservations in this country where the 
unemployment rate is still 70 percent. If you cut it to 20 percent, just 
to 20 percent, all those people would become consumers as well as 
workers. It's noninflationary growth.
    I'll just mention one other issue. You have to decide. I have found 
it incredibly ironic that in this most modern of ages, where I meet all 
these young people that have made fortunes in their twenties off .com 
companies--you know, I'm too old to make a living in this flourishing 
sector of our economy; and it is growing like crazy, you know.
    I just was at the business roundtable, and all these heads of these 
Fortune 500 companies were trying to figure out why the Dow was going 
down while the Nasdaq was going up. And we're doing all these incredible 
things. I went in a little African village, and I saw a hookup from an 
American cable company and what they were putting in there so these kids 
could get modern maps to learn geography. I went into a favela in Rio 
with Pele, the great soccer player, and saw what an American company was 
doing there, through technology, to try to get these poor children in 
Rio a chance to have a different life. I have seen all these efforts to 
bridge the digital divide in America, all this neat stuff and a lot of 
more mundane things. I have a cousin in Arkansas who plays chess once a 
week with a guy in Australia. I mean, you know, it's the modern world 
out there.

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    I know in a couple of months, I'll have an announcement that will be 
one of the great honors in my life. I'll be part of--we will announce 
that the human genome has been fully sequenced, and we can now set about 
the business of analyzing the very blueprint of life and why we turn out 
the way we do and how we deal with various things. We may be able to 
block broken genes with gene therapies to stop people from ever 
developing diabetes, to stop people from ever developing Alzheimer's, to 
stop people from ever developing breast cancer, all of these things. 
It's just going to be unbelievable.
    Now, don't you think it's interesting, with all this stuff going on, 
that the biggest problem we face as a society is still the oldest one? 
We're still scared of people who are different from us. And it's easy, 
once you are frightened or uncertain, to turn that into distrust, to 
turn that into dehumanization, to turn that into violence, and then to 
have no conscience about it because they didn't matter anyway.
    I mean, it's interesting--you look around the world, and you see 
tribal wars in Africa where hundreds of thousands of people die in a few 
days. You see continuing religious and ethnic tensions in the Middle 
East, and religious tensions continue in Northern Ireland, where I 
thought we had the door closed, and it got knocked open again. And 
what--this is outrageous--what happened in the Balkans, the problems 
they're having in Russia in Chechnya.
    You just look around the world on any given continent, and in 
America you say, ``Well, look at us. We're the most successful, diverse 
democracy in history.'' That's true, but we had a shooting at a Los 
Angeles Jewish center where Jewish kids were shot at because they were 
Jewish. A Filipino postal worker was killed because he was both Asian 
and a Federal employee, and the guy that killed him thought that was a 
double shot. Matthew Shepard was killed because he was gay. The guy in 
the Middle West killed the former African-American basketball coach at 
Northwestern, killed a Korean Christian walking out of church, and three 
or four other people, and he said he belonged to a church that didn't 
believe in God but did believe in white supremacy. And I could go on. 
You know all these issues.
    What I want to say to you is that times are good, but we should be 
humble about this. We should be grateful, and we should be humble, 
because we have, number one, not repealed all the laws of human nature, 
which means there is still the darkness of the heart to deal with, and 
number two, good times are either made the most of or squandered. And I 
just want to leave you with this. A lot of you here are younger than me, 
but a lot of you are about my age, maybe a little older.
    When we celebrated, earlier this month, the longest economic 
expansion, peace or war, in our history, I was very interested in that, 
because I love economics and I study it every month. I read all the 
numbers and everything and try to keep up with what's going on.
    So I went back and studied the last longest economic expansion in 
our history. Do you know when it was? Nineteen sixty-one to 1969, the 
years of my childhood and youth, when I should have been doing .com 
companies. [Laughter] But let me tell you about them. In 1964, the 
height of the expansion, I graduated from high school. My President had 
been killed a few months before, and the country was heartbroken. But 
contrary to a lot of the Monday morning quarterbacks that look back, it 
was not the beginning of American cynicism. That's not true. We united 
behind President Johnson. He got off to a great start. He was leading us 
toward passing civil rights legislation, legislation to help the poor.
    And in 1964, when I finished high school, there was this enormous 
sense of optimism and confidence in the country that, a, the economic 
good times would go on forever; b, we would resolve, in a lawful way, 
through our Congress, our civil rights challenges; and c, we would 
certainly prevail without controversy in our country in the cold war 
against communism. Those things would happen. Everybody thought so.
    Two years later, we had riots in our streets. The country was 
already divided over Vietnam. Four years after I graduated from high 
school, I was graduating from college 2 days after Robert Kennedy was 
killed, 2 months

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after Martin Luther King was killed, 9 weeks after Lyndon Johnson said 
he wouldn't run for election. And the country was totally divided. And 
there were more riots in the streets, and the National Capital was the 
scene of a riot in which block after block burned to the ground.
    A few months afterward, we had a Presidential election, the first 
Presidential election in modern times fought on the grounds of us versus 
them, where President Nixon, a man of immense talent, I might add, was 
elected on a theme of the silent majority. Now, some of you remember 
that. Now, if there's a silent majority, there must, by definition, be a 
loud minority, right? I was one of them; I know. [Laughter] So it was 
``us'' and ``them.'' A few months after that, the economic expansion was 
over. And we've been having us-and-them politics ever since. And for 7 
years, I have worked to end that, I think with greater success out here 
in the country than in the Capital, but nonetheless, it's been an honor 
to try.
    I'm telling you this as a citizen now, why I'm glad you're here. You 
have to help us define what this election is about. And that's what 
we're going to use your contribution for. But those of you who are 
older, like me, you remember what it was like in the mid-sixties. As a 
citizen, I have waited for 35 years for my country to be in a position 
to build the future of our dreams for our children. That's what this is 
about. It's not just about choosing a person. We have to define the job 
and the direction. Then the choice will take care of itself. You know 
what I think. But just remember how quickly these things can get away 
and what a heavy responsibility we have to make the most of a truly 
magic moment.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 2:10 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to Bren Simon, Danny Abraham, Cynthia Friedman, and 
John and Nancy Carter, luncheon cohosts; Joseph J. Andrew, national 
chair, Democratic National Committee; Lori Deutsch, wife of 
Representative Peter Deutsch; Gov. James B. Hunt, Jr., of North 
Carolina; and former professional soccer player Pele, Minister of 
Extraordinary Sports of Brazil.