[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 11 (Monday, March 20, 2000)]
[Pages 539-542]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Chicago, Illinois

March 13, 2000

    Thank you very much. And thank you all for being here. I'm sure the 
fire marshal is nervous. [Laughter] You're all packed in here, and I'm 
very glad to see you.
    I want to thank--Jan, thank you for that wonderful, wonderful 
introduction and for your commitment to handgun safety and to keeping 
guns out of the hands of criminals and children. Thank you, Senator 
Durbin. Thank you, Congressman Blagojevich. Thank you, Mayor Rendell and 
Janice Griffin and Joe Cari.
    I want to thank--I asked Phil and Karen Stefani to come up here 
because we're in their wonderful place. This is the 20th anniversary of 
the opening of their restaurant. So let's give them a big hand, the 
Stefanis. Thank you very much. [Applause] They have been wonderful 
friends to me and to Hillary, and I'm very grateful to them, and I thank 
them again.
    I will be brief, but I want to, first of all, thank you so much for 
being here and for your contributions. I want to thank the people of 
Illinois for being so wonderful to me and to Hillary and the Vice 
President and Tipper, for voting for me overwhelmingly in the '92 
primary, and giving us your electoral votes in '92 and '96. I thank you 
for that.
    You know, I had a lot of advantages, running for President, in 
Illinois. I had Hillary. [Laughter] I had wonderful friends here in 
Chicago. I had David Wilhelm as my campaign chairman. I had served as 
the chairman of the Lower Mississippi Delta Commission, which included 
all the countries in southern Illinois, and I'd spent a lot of time 
there. I was from Arkansas, and there's an enormous number of African-
Americans in Chicago from Arkansas, and that was a big help. Something 
which stunned my opponents in '92, and they found out, only too late.
[Laughter] So I've had a lot of advantages here. And Illinois has been 
so good to me. Chicago has been so good to me. And I have now, Bill 
Daley, who is making a wonderful Secretary of Commerce and doing you 
proud every day.

[[Page 540]]

    But I want to talk to you tonight about where we go from here and 
why you came here. I'm grateful that I've had the chance to serve as 
President, and I'm grateful for those of you who said tonight going 
through the line you wish I could serve a little more. This is the first 
election in decades I haven't been a candidate. Most days I'm okay with 
it. [Laughter] So I come tonight to say to you, as your President, as a 
fellow citizen, as somebody who is profoundly grateful for how good 
you've been to me, we have worked a long time to turn this country 
around, to get the economy growing, to get the poverty rate down, to get 
the welfare rolls down and the crime rate down, to get people coming 
together and moving forward, to make America a respected force for peace 
and freedom around the world--several of you talked about my upcoming 
trip to India and Pakistan tonight.
    And this election gives us a chance to build the future of our 
dreams for our children. It is very important. We have a chance, now, 
because the unemployment rate's at a 30-year low, because we've got 
back-to-back surpluses for the first time in 42 years, to give all our 
children the education they deserve; to provide health insurance for low 
income working children and their parents; to provide the kind of tax 
relief that would enable every family to be able to tell their children 
when they're young, if you stay in school and do your lessons, no matter 
how poor we are, you can still go on to college; to prove that we can 
grow the economy and improve the environment at the same time; to meet 
the big challenges out there.
    We can get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835. 
We can save Social Security before the baby boomers retire. I'm the 
oldest of the baby boomers, and I can tell you that everybody in my 
generation, the people who I grew up with at home, most of whom have 
very modest incomes, they're very worried that when we all retire and 
there are only two people working for every one person on Social 
Security, that we'll impose a burden on our children and their ability 
to raise our grandchildren.
    We can get rid of that burden right now. We can take Social Security 
out beyond the lifespan of the baby boom generation. We can lengthen 
Medicare. We can add a prescription drug benefit, which should have been 
there all along, so that our seniors who can't afford their medicine 
will be able to afford it. We can do these things.
    And we can make America a safer place. You know, it's amazing to me 
that I get in these tussles with the NRA. They've been after me for a 
decade now. [Laughter] You know, I once got a lifetime membership to the 
NRA--I think it's been revoked now--[laughter]--because I worked with 
them when they were trying to educate children to go hunting without 
hurting themselves, when they were trying to help me solve a lot of 
other problems. But now their main mission in life seems to be to stop 
any kind of collective action that will help us to keep guns out of the 
hands of criminals and
children.
    You know, we do this in all kinds of other ways. Most of us are safe 
drivers, but we still don't object to getting a driver's license or 
having to wear our seatbelts. Most of us are not terrorists, but we 
don't object to going through those metal detectors at airports. In 
fact, we kind of like them now because we think they keep us alive. But 
at some inconvenience, especially if you've got something that jangles 
in your pants and you keep--you know, your money clip keeps setting it 
off and you go through four or five--but we do it, right, because it 
makes us a safer
country.
    Now, their position is that guns are the only thing that we should 
impose no inconvenience on the law-abiding majority to protect us from 
the law-breaking minority or the dangerous people.
    They said when we passed the Brady bill, we'd just interfere with 
hunters' rights and wouldn't get any criminals. There hasn't been a 
hunter missed a day in the deer woods, but we kept 500,000 felons, 
fugitives, and stalkers from getting handguns, and a lot of people are 
alive in this country because of that.
    And the same with the assault weapons ban. I really regret that the 
NRA leader--I guess he was frustrated, and sometimes when you don't have 
a defense for your position, the best thing to do is just attack your 
opponent, and that's what he did. But you

[[Page 541]]

know, it's pretty hard for me to take somebody saying I really want a 
certain level of killing in America so I can beat up on the NRA. You can 
say that on television, but I sat with the mother and the stepfather of 
that beautiful little 6-year-old girl that was killed in Michigan, and I 
didn't like that.
    I went and met with the families that lost their children at 
Columbine, out in Springfield, Oregon, and Jonesboro, Arkansas. I didn't 
like that. I've met with a lot of people who died from violence or whose 
loved ones died from violence. I'm just trying to keep more people 
alive. And I'm not interested in fighting with anybody, but I'm 
interested in fighting for this young man's future with his ``No Guns'' 
sign here.
    And I was thinking today, coming into Chicago, one of the most 
meaningful days I ever had here was out in one of your neighborhoods, 
near a rehab unit where we had, I don't know, a half dozen, maybe a 
dozen people who were wounded severely by gun violence. And that day 
there was a Chicago police officer who had done 2 tours in Vietnam and 
survived them without a scratch and had 11 bullets in his body because 
he'd been assaulted doing his job as a law enforcement officer.
    And the police and the gun safety groups gave me a beautiful plaque, 
a very heavy plaque with a model of Abraham Lincoln that was the same 
used for the penny. And it's still in my office in the White House. If 
you came there, you could see it today. And I keep it to remember all 
those young people I saw in wheelchairs, paralyzed for life, who 
shouldn't have been there.
    And I say that because there are big stakes here. And there are big 
differences between what the House and Senate Democrats would do and 
what their Republican counterparts would do. There are big differences 
between what Vice President Gore and Governor Bush would do. And I don't 
feel the need to attack them the way they attack us. I think they 
actually believe what they say. I just think they're wrong.
    And I think that--you know, if we gave the kind of tax cut that the 
Republicans have embraced, starting with their nominee, we couldn't save 
Social Security; we couldn't save Medicare; we couldn't invest in 
education; and we'd start running deficits again. And I think you like 
it when we pay down the debt and these interest rates are low, and you 
can buy cars and homes and keep borrowing money and keep this economy 
going. And we still have the money to invest in schools and education 
and trying to help people work their way out of poverty.
    There are real differences on these gun safety issues. I don't think 
that anybody ought to sell a handgun without a child safety lock on it. 
I don't think that we ought to import these big ammunition clips that 
allow you to convert weapons into assault weapons when we've banned them 
here at home. And I don't think that we ought to require background 
checks if you go buy a handgun in a gun store, and then if you show up 
at a gun show or an urban flea market, you can get out of the background 
checks. And I think Americans ought to be willing to undergo a certain 
amount of inconvenience, if they're law-abiding people buying a gun at a 
gun show or an urban flea market, to wait a day or so until this 
background check is done. And if it has to be 3 days because the records 
aren't there, it's over the weekend, I think that's okay, too. And I 
don't think people ought to be bellyaching about that. If it saves the 
life of one child, it is worth it--it is worth it.
    So what I want you to do is to tell people these things. If they ask 
you, why did you go last night, tell them that ``I went because this 
country is in better shape than it was 7 years ago. They had good ideas, 
and they turned out to be right. I went because, more important, because 
they've got a better plan for the future.''
    And the last thing I want to say is this. A week ago yesterday I had 
one of the great days in my life. I got to go to Selma, Alabama, for the 
35th anniversary of the voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus 
Bridge. And I was thinking--I see all these young people here--I was 
thinking, when I was a young man in college, people were still being 
killed for the right to vote. Whites and blacks marching together in the 
South lost their lives so that everybody could vote--in my adult 
lifetime. And I thought about what a long way we have come since 1965.

[[Page 542]]

    In 1964, when I finished high school, we were sad because President 
Kennedy had been killed, but the country united behind Lyndon Johnson. 
We thought we would have an economy that would go on forever. We thought 
we would solve the civil rights problems through the Congress. We 
thought we would win the cold war without dividing the country. We 
thought things would be just hunky-dory.
    Within a year, people were getting killed at Selma. Within 2 years, 
we had riots in the street. Within 4 years, Martin Luther King and Bobby 
Kennedy were dead, and Lyndon Johnson couldn't run for reelection, and 
the country was split right down the middle over the war. And within a 
few months, we had elected a President on a campaign of ``us'' against 
``them,'' called the Silent Majority. Do you remember that? If you 
weren't in the Silent Majority you were, by definition, in the loud 
minority. That's what I was in. [Laughter] And we've been ``us-ing'' and 
``them-ing'' ourselves to death for 30-something years now. [Laughter]
    And by the way, that's when we had the longest economic expansion in 
history until this one. And soon after that election, expansion 
disappeared. And I say that because it is important that you not let the 
American people, the people of Illinois, the people of Chicago, be 
casual about this election. Because 35 years ago, when we had the same 
sort of economy by those terms in those years, we thought it would just 
go on forever, and we thought everything was going to be hunky-dory, and 
the wheels ran off.
    And I have waited as an American citizen for 35 years to give our 
people the chance to build one America and to build the future of our 
dreams. That's what I've been working for these whole 7 years. I knew we 
could never get it all done in my term of service, but I knew if we 
could turn America around, if we could point America in the right 
direction, if we could keep going and unleash the energies of all of our 
people, we could actually build one country and deal with these big 
challenges.
    Now, that's what this election is about. It is very important. You 
cannot assume any good thing that is happening today is on automatic. 
Martin Luther King said, ``Progress does not roll along on the wheels of 
inevitability. It is brought by people who are willing to work hard, to 
be co-workers with God.''
    You have to work. You have to work. You've got a Presidential 
nominee you can be proud of. You've got a Senator, you've got Members of 
Congress you can be proud of. This is worth fighting for. When people 
ask you tomorrow why you were here--don't even wait for them to ask--
tell them why you came. [Laughter] Tell them the country's better off 
than it was 7 years ago. Tell them we've got better ideas for the 
future. Tell them you have got the chance of a lifetime to build the 
future of our dreams for our children, and you are determined to do it, 
and you know that the best way to do it is to support the Democrats in 
November.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:10 p.m. at Stefani's Restaurant at a 
dinner for the Women's Leadership Forum and the Saxophone Club. In his 
remarks, he referred to Representative Janice D. Schakowsky; Edward G. 
Rendell, general chair, and Joseph A. Cari, Jr., finance chair, 
Democratic National Committee; Janice Griffin, national chair, Women's 
Leadership Forum; dinner hosts Phil and Karen Stefani; Wayne LaPierre, 
executive vice president, National Rifle Association, who appeared March 
12 on ABC's ``This Week''; Veronica and Michael McQueen, mother and 
stepfather of 6-year-old Kayla Rolland, who was shot and mortally 
wounded by a 6-year-old classmate in Mount Morris Township, MI; and Gov. 
George W. Bush of Texas.