[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 13 (Monday, April 3, 2000)]
[Pages 667-673]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in New York City

March 30, 2000

    The President. Thank you. Well, thank you, Denise. If I come here 
one more time--[laughter]--we should allocate part of the property tax 
assessment to me. I love coming here to this beautiful, beautiful place. 
I want to thank you, and I want to thank all the people who served us 
today and provided this wonderful meal. I want to thank the WLF, Laura, 
Betsy, Sharon, Susan, and Agnes, particularly. I want to thank Judith 
Hope, who has proved that someone from Arkansas can make it in New 
York--[laughter]--which is becoming an increasingly important precedent 
in my mind. [Laughter]
    Thank you, Mayor Rendell, and thank you Carol Pensky. I was trying 
to think of what I could possibly say, since most of you have heard me 
give this speech 100 times. And I was remembering, oh, 12-13 years ago, 
maybe a little longer--Tina Turner came to Little Rock when she--you 
know, she went away for a long time, and she was abused in her marriage, 
and she had a lot of really tough times. And then she made an album 
after many years of being silent, called ``Private Dancer,'' which made 
her a big international star again. So she was taking and making her 
tours around, and so she came to Arkansas, to this place where we always 
had concerts. And the guy who ran the place knew that I just loved her. 
So Hillary was out of town, I remember, and he gave me like eight 
tickets on the front row, and I took all my pals and sat on the front 
row.
    So she sings all her new songs; everybody goes nuts. At the end, she 
starts to--the band starts to play ``Proud Mary,'' which was her first 
hit. So she comes up to the microphone, and everybody cheers--she backs 
away. And she comes up again, everybody cheers again, and she said, 
``You know, I've been singing this song for 25 years, but it gets better 
every time I do it.'' [Laughter] Anyway--I've got to do it. Very 
instructive, I'll never forget it.

[[Page 668]]

    I want to tell you, we're in this beautiful surrounding--I want you 
to know where I was last night. Last night, I was in the Bishop John 
Adams Hall of Allen University, an African Methodist Episcopal college, 
an AME college in Columbia, South Carolina. That's where I was last 
night--at a dinner, sponsored by the State Democratic Party, with the 
new Democratic Governor there; Inez Tenenbaum--some of you may know her; 
she's the Commissioner of Education now for South Carolina--longtime 
active in American Jewish colleges, a friend of mine for many, many 
years, and many others, in honor of the African-American Congressman Jim 
Clyburn from that district. It was a real picture of a new South, a 
different place than we have been treated to for the last several years 
in national politics. It was fascinating.
    And I was talking to them about going to Selma a few weeks ago for 
the 35th anniversary of Bloody Sunday and walking over the Edmund Pettus 
Bridge with John Lewis and Hosea Williams and Dick Gregory and Coretta 
Scott King and Jesse Jackson, all the people that were in Selma 35 years 
ago. And this whole issue of the Confederate flag being on a flagpole in 
South Carolina was there. And I said, ``I can't say anything better to 
you than when the waving symbol of one American's pride is the shameful 
symbol of another American's pain, we still have another bridge to 
cross.'' And the crowd exploded, and said, ``We're going to take that 
flag off the flagpole.'' And it really made me feel proud to be an 
American, proud to be a Democrat, and proud to be a Southerner.
    And to see that the old--what we know now about South Carolina, most 
Americans who aren't from there, is that President Bush went to Bob 
Jones--I mean, Governor Bush went to Bob Jones University. President 
Bush went there, too. And President Reagan went there, too. Bob Dole 
went there, too--and I let him get away with it because I didn't know 
it. [Laughter] If I had known it, I wouldn't have.
    You can't imagine what a big deal this was to a Southerner. Anybody 
that went through the civil rights revolution was more offended by that, 
I think, than anything else--because--it's okay. I'm sure there are a 
lot of--you know, there are good people everywhere. But if you're going 
to go there, you should say, ``I don't agree with your racial and 
religious policies.''
    But what I want you to know is, there's a whole other group of 
people down there. And they're involved in a struggle, mano a mano, with 
the Republicans for defining the future of that State, and how they 
define it might have a lot to do with what America looks like in the 
future. And this is the struggle that's going on throughout the country.
    I would also tell you that the second-biggest hand that anything got 
in the evening was when the Congressman said that he certainly hoped 
Hillary would be elected to the Senate from New York. And that South 
Carolina crowd erupted.
    I say that to tell you that the reason I love being a member of this 
party and the reason that I am so grateful that I have had this chance 
to serve our country, is that we really are, now, the only available 
national vehicle for the common aspirations of all Americans, people who 
can come to a wonderful lunch like this; people who serve the lunch that 
could never afford to come to one, all kinds of people in-between.
    And I just want to say, tell you very briefly--because I'm not on 
the ballot. I'm not running for anything. Most days I'm okay with it. 
[Laughter] Some days I'm not so sure. [Laughter] But what I thought I 
would do today is to try to just give you a little ammunition in an 
organized fashion, based on what's now going on in Washington right now 
and what certainly will be at issue in this election, about what the 
differences are, the practical differences and what the evidence is in 
terms of what works. And I'll start with an interesting thing, 
particularly--it always amazes me at these events. You could all be at 
one of their events and get a bigger tax cut. So let's start with their 
tax policy.
    What's our tax policy? Our tax policy is: We've got a surplus; we 
can afford a modest tax cut as long as it doesn't interfere with our 
ability to balance the budget, keep paying down the debt, and save 
Social Security and Medicare, and have enough money to invest in 
education, health care, and the environment, science and technology, and 
medical research. And if we've got any--but we can

[[Page 669]]

have one. But we think it ought to be concentrated on increasing the 
earned-income tax credit, which is what low income working families get 
so they can support their kids. We think we need a much bigger child 
care tax credit, and it ought to be refundable, because paying child 
care costs is still one of the biggest challenges that working families 
face.
    With more and more people living longer, the number of people over 
65 slated to double in the next 30 years, and I hope to be one of them--
[laughter]--more and more families making the loving but expensive 
choice to care for their relatives, we want a $3,000 a year tax credit 
for long-term care.
    We want a tax deduction that will extend all the way to upper middle 
class people for up to $10,000 for the costs of college tuition. We have 
made with our tax credits, effectively, we've made 2 years of college, 
at least at the community college level, universal in America, one of 
the major achievements of the Clinton-Gore administration. If this 
passes, we'll make 4 years of college access universal. It's very 
important.
    So those are the kinds of tax cuts we want. We want to give people 
who have money big tax breaks if they will invest in the poor areas in 
America that are not part of our prosperity yet. I believe that you 
ought to have the same tax incentive to invest in inner-city 
neighborhoods in New York or Chicago or the Mississippi Delta or 
Appalachia or the Rio Grande Valley or the Native American reservations 
where unemployment rates still run as high as 70 percent on some of 
them--you ought to have the same tax incentives to invest in those areas 
that we will give you today to invest in Latin America or Africa or 
Asia--not that I want to take the others away. I just want the same 
incentives here in our country.
    Their tax program, under the guise of marriage penalty relief, is to 
get rid of the estate tax entirely and have other things that are 
concentrated overwhelmingly toward upper income people. There's a 
difference, a real difference. And it says a lot about most of you that 
you're here, because most of you would benefit more in the short run if 
you were there with them.
    So what does that tell you about the Democrats? When I ran in '92, I 
said that I had a vision of 21st century America in which every 
responsible citizen had an opportunity, in which we would be a community 
of all people and in which we would continue to lead the world for peace 
and freedom. And I think that we think that way because, basically, we 
believe everybody counts, that everybody should have a chance, that 
everybody should have a role to play, and we all do better when we work 
together. That's what we really believe.
    And it matters. You should know, there's a huge, gaping difference 
on tax policy. Now, am I right or are they right? We've had a lot of tax 
cuts since I've been President: HOPE scholarship tax credit; we've 
doubled the earned-income tax credit; we gave a $500-per-child tax 
credit; and there was a survey that came out the last day of my trip 
when I was gone that said that on ordinary Americans, the income tax 
burden in America, the percentage of income going to income tax--now, 
that's not Social Security or Medicare, but just income tax--is the 
lowest it's been in 40 years.
    So I think we're right. And I'm not running--I can't make that case. 
But you can and you must. What about the budget? What's our budget 
policy? I want us to pay down the debt for the first time since 1835. 
and I think it's a liberal thing to do, not a conservative thing to do. 
Why? Because if we do that in a global economy, interest rates will stay 
down and ordinary people will be able to make their money go further. 
They'll be able to buy cars. They'll be able to take college loans. 
They'll be able to buy homes. And we'll have more money available for 
businesses to borrow at lower interest rates, because the Government 
won't be doing it, which means more jobs will be created. I think it's 
the right thing to do.
    And I want to also save enough money so that when the baby boomers 
all retire, we'll be able to preserve Social Security and Medicare, and 
we'll have enough money to invest in education. We've got--this 
administration has done more work in more areas in education, I think, 
than anyone in history. And I've got a big program up there now, 
designed to help school districts turn around

[[Page 670]]

failing schools or shut them down, to provide after-school programs and 
other remediation programs to every kid in every troubled school in 
America, to finish our work of hooking all the schools up to the 
Internet, to repair 5,000 schools a year for the next 5 years, and to 
build 6,000 new ones. And this is important.
    Now, what's their program? Their program is--their nominee, just as 
recently as last week, has reaffirmed that he supports a tax cut even 
bigger than the one I vetoed last year. And I can tell you what will 
happen if it passed. Here's what will happen. If it passes, we will go 
back to either running Government deficits, or there will be vast cuts 
in education, where Governor Bush says a lot of things, virtually 
endorsed our program in education, to only give out Federal money to the 
schools if they support what works. The problem is, he can't keep his 
commitments, because he's for a tax cut that will mean they'll have to 
cut education. And not just a little bit; I'm talking a lot. They won't 
have any money to help Social Security and Medicare when the baby 
boomers retire, but that's okay with them, because they want to 
privatize both of them. And I think it's a mistake.
    They can't support our plan to provide a prescription drug benefit 
with Medicare, which 60 percent of the people on Medicare need, by the 
way, not just poor people on Medicare. There are a lot of people who 
have middle class incomes, who have huge medical bills, that are 
severely distressed by them. And they cannot get affordable coverage for 
medicine when they get older.
    They can't support our program to let the parents of poor children 
that are in our children's health program buy into health insurance 
because they don't have the money, because they're going to give it all 
away in a tax cut. And we'll still have a deficit. Now, there's a big 
difference there.
    And it's not like we don't have any evidence here. Our economic 
policies--we have doubled our investment in education; we've got the 
first back-to-back surpluses in 42 years. And I think the economic 
performance speaks for itself, the longest expansion in history and 21 
million new jobs. So why are we even having this argument? Because we 
really have honest differences here.
    If you look at other issues--I could just mention two or three more. 
Our view of the world--I got tickled the other day. I just got back from 
India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, and I stopped in Switzerland to try 
to make another effort on the Middle East peace. And I noticed a member 
of the other party in the Senate was criticizing me for going to India 
and Pakistan, because I didn't, quote, ``get anything for it.'' That is, 
they didn't agree to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, or to the 
other efforts that I'm making to try to stop them from building up 
nuclear weapons.
    Well, they didn't. What he didn't point out is that I lost all the 
leverage I had when the Republican Senate defeated the ratification of 
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. I thought, that is real gall. Man, 
for a guy--[laughter]--to stand up and say that, that requires a lot of 
moxie, you know. [Laughter] One of their great strengths is, by the way, 
they have no guilt and no shame. I mean, they'll say anything. 
[Laughter] You know, you'll never see them blink about it.
    But I want to say, there are differences in that. And we do have 
some things in common. I compliment the Republicans that are trying to 
help me help Colombia to reduce the drug flow into America and to shore 
up a brave democratic government's fight there. And the people who are 
criticizing this, saying it's another Vietnam, are just wrong. We're not 
sending soldiers there. All we're doing is supporting the police and 
other efforts to build a civil society and give those farmers some 
reason to stop growing coca and grow something else. I support--I thank 
the Republicans who have helped me with the China agreement, because I 
think it's very important to bring China into the World Trade 
Organization.
    But we have big differences. You know, I want to support the U.N. 
more; most of them want to support it less. I think we were right to go 
into Kosovo and save the lives and the livelihoods of a million Muslims. 
Most of them thought it wasn't worth the trouble, not all of them but 
most of them.
    And so there are real differences here. And the Comprehensive Test 
Ban Treaty is the

[[Page 671]]

most stunning one. I mean, I cannot imagine a reason for the United 
States not to sign on to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty unless you 
believe that we will be more secure because you think we can always win 
any arms race, so it's okay if everybody else starts to get in the 
nuclear business as well. These are differences.
    I'll just give you two or three others of these things we're 
fighting: The Patients' Bill of Rights, about 190 million Americans in 
these managed care plans. I believe they ought to have access to a 
Patients' Bill of Rights that's really strong and enforceable. And we're 
still fighting that. We may get it, but we're not there yet.
    I think we ought to raise the minimum wage a buck over 2 years. You 
know, the last time I did it, they said it would wreck the economy. 
Since then, the economy's grown even faster than it did before we raised 
the minimum wage. [Laughter] It's not like there's an argument here that 
has any evidence behind it.
    The gun safety legislation--you all know about that. I mean, they 
asked me in my press conference yesterday what I thought about all these 
terrible things Charlton Heston is saying about me, and I said, ``I 
still like his movies, and I watch them every chance I get.'' [Laughter]
    But if you look at it--forget about the NRA, here. If you look at 
this view--should we close the gun show loophole and doing background 
checks. Well, when I signed the Brady Bill, they all said, ``Oh, it was 
the end of the world as we knew it. The hunters would be bereft, because 
they would be--their lives would be messed up.'' Nobody's missed an hour 
in the deer woods yet, and a half a million people who were felons, 
fugitives, or stalkers haven't gotten handguns. And gun crime is at a 
30-year low in America because of that.
    But a lot of them still pick up these guns at urban flea markets and 
at these gun shows. And the technology is there to do the background 
check. You know, people thought the assault weapons ban was terrible. 
But frankly, it's not as effective as it ought to be, because you can 
still import large capacity ammunition clips and then adapt the guns. 
And we ought to ban them.
    We ought to have child trigger locks. We ought to be investing in 
safe gun technology so if somebody buys a handgun, you can equip it in a 
way that you have to show your fingerprints on the gun before it will 
fire. These things are worth doing. And the difference I have--and the 
Republicans say, ``Well, but you just ought to enforce the existing laws 
more.''
    And a lot of you have heard me say this, but I want to hammer this 
home. It's a big issue. We have enforced the gun laws more than they 
were before. Prosecutions are up. I've asked for another 1,000 
prosecutors and more investigators to enforce the existing gun laws, to 
get--the surprising number of guns used in crimes come out of just a few 
dealers. There's something to that. But their position is that guns are 
the only area of our national life where there should be no prevention.
    I said this in the press conference the other day, but I want to say 
it again: If I gave you the following speech, you would think I was 
crazy. If I said, ``You know, I've been flying on airplanes all my life, 
and most people who fly on airplanes are really good people. And it's a 
real pain, especially when you're late and airports are crowded, to have 
to go through these airport metal detectors. And if you've got a big old 
buckle or a highly metallic money clip, you may have to go through two 
or three times. You empty your pockets and everything. And 99.99 percent 
of the people in those airports are good, honest people. Let's just rip 
those metal detectors out there, and the next times somebody blows up an 
airplane, we'll throw the book at them.'' Now, you think about that. 
That's the argument, right? But most people believe that you should 
prevent as many bad things from happening as possible in life. And it's 
far better to prevent bad things from happening, and then if something 
does happen bad, then you do what's appropriate.
    But these are huge differences. The choice issue is going to be 
huge. The next President will appoint somewhere between two and four 
justices in the Supreme Court. And their nominees have said repeatedly 
that Roe v. Wade was a bad decision; he'd like to see it repealed; he'd 
like to see it changed. And I can tell you, I've seen those guys work up

[[Page 672]]

there. This is--I'll put in a little plug for Hillary--[laughter]--no 
matter whether a Republican Senator says he's pro-choice or not, they 
will make their lives miserable, should they win the White House if they 
don't back the White House.
    And if you can't imagine--I have seen them dance----

[At this point, a luncheon participant excused herself and said good-bye 
to the President.]

    The President. Good-bye.
    I have seen these things happen where I've had these Republicans 
come up to me in virtual tears and apologize for the way they were 
voting on first one thing and then another and just say they had to do 
it because they didn't want to lose their committee position or they 
didn't want to lose this, that, or the other thing that was being done.
    Now, I don't think we're going to have a Republican President. I 
think Al Gore's going to be elected. But if you care about this issue, 
you should work harder for Al Gore and for people in the Senate that 
would support that position.
    Now--and I'll just give you one other example--Ed Rendell was 
talking about the log cabin Republicans. I know that there have been a 
lot of people in America who won't support me because of the position I 
have taken on gay rights. But I have to tell you, I just don't see how 
you can run a democracy if you say that certain people, no matter how 
law-abiding they are, no matter how honorable they are, no matter how 
talented they are, ought to be discriminated against. I just think it's 
wrong.
    I don't think it's really complicated, and I think we ought to pass 
the ``Employment Non-Discrimination Act'' and the hate crimes bill. And 
I stood on the tarmac--let me just say this--I stood on the tarmac in 
Austin, Texas, at the airport and embraced the weeping daughter of James 
Byrd--who was dragged to death in Texas--who came all the way back from 
Hawaii to lobby for the hate crimes bill, pleading with the Governor to 
meet with her. He refused. Finally, he did, because it was a pretty hard 
case to make, why he wouldn't meet with her. And all he had to do was 
lift his hand, and they would have had a hate crimes bill. And it did 
not pass because they did not want it to pass, because they did not 
believe that gays and lesbians should be protected by hate crimes 
legislation.
    Now these are facts. And the American people can simply make up 
their own mind But what you need to know is: When it comes to taxes, 
when it comes to the budget, when it comes to these other specific 
issues, there are huge differences.
    And I don't have to condemn them and engage in the kind of politics 
of personal destruction that others find so helpful. I think most of 
them are good people who really just disagree with us. I don't think 
that somebody with a different political view is an evil person. I think 
our country's really been hurt by all this sort of attempt to believe if 
you don't destroy your opponent, there's something wrong with you.
    I don't believe, by the way, that John McCain is against breast 
cancer research, either, which was the main thing I heard about in the 
New York primary. And I might tell you, that program was supported by 
me. It was in the defense budget. But that was a total misrepresentation 
of what was going on. It was completely unfair. And that's the most 
charitable word I can think of to characterize it.
    But you need to understand here, I'm not running for anything, but I 
care a lot about what happens to my country. Yes, I want Al Gore to be 
President, because he's been the best Vice President in history and 
because I love him but also, more important, because he understands the 
future, and he's strong enough and experienced enough and smart enough, 
and he cares enough about the policy issues, to lead us there.
    I'll just leave you with this thought: when we celebrated in 
February the longest economic expansion in American history, and all my 
economic advisers came in and said that, and they were all jumping up 
and down. I said, ``Well, when was the last longest expansion in 
American history?'' For a long time, it had been the longest peacetime 
expansion in history. I said, ``When was the longest expansion of any 
kind in American history?'' You know when it was? Nineteen sixty-one to 
1969.

[[Page 673]]

    Now, here's what I want to tell you about this. A few of you are 
around my age, anyway. I graduated from high school in 1964. John 
Kennedy had just been assassinated. But the country had united behind 
President Johnson, and I was very proud of him. You know, he was from my 
neighboring State, passionately committed to civil rights.
    And when I finished, in 1964, in high school, every kid my age was 
full of optimism. Unemployment was low, inflation was low, growth was 
high. We believed that all the civil rights problems would be solved by 
the Congress and in the courts, peacefully. We believed we would win the 
cold war because of America's values. And no one thought that there 
would ever be any trauma coming out of Vietnam. In other words, we were 
pretty relaxed about being, then, at the high point of the longest 
economic expansion in American history. We thought things were just 
going to take care of themselves.
    Now, a year later there was Bloody Sunday in Selma. Two years later, 
there were riots in the streets. Four years later, when I graduated from 
college, it was 2 days after Robert Kennedy was killed, 2 months after 
Martin Luther King was killed, 9 weeks after Lyndon Johnson couldn't run 
for reelection because the country was split right down the middle.
    And a few months later, Richard Nixon was elected President on the 
first of what became a whole series of what I called ``us'' and ``them'' 
campaigns. You remember what his slogan was? He represented the Silent 
Majority. You remember that? Which meant that those of us who weren't 
for him were in the loud minority. And it was a very clever slogan for 
the time.
    But this point is: it was ``us'' versus ``them.'' And we've been 
``us-ing'' and ``them-ing'' for a long time ever since. And I have done 
my best to end that, here and around the world, because I think it is 
dumb, counterproductive, wrong, and I haven't yet met a person who was 
genuinely happy demonizing other people.
    But I'm telling you this to make this point: I have waited 35 years 
for my country to be in the position that we now enjoy today. Where we 
can literally build the future of our dreams for our children, where we 
can be a force for good around the world, where we can take on all these 
challenges.
    But what I want you to know is; I have lived long enough to know 
that the worst thing we can do is take all this for granted, to believe 
that no matter what we could do, that there are no consequences to this 
election, there are no consequences to how we behave in our lives and in 
our communities, that this thing is somehow on automatic, and 
everything's just going to be hunky-dory. That's what I thought in 1964, 
and I have waited 35 years for my country to be in this position again.
    So if somebody asks you why you came here today, you tell them what 
I told you and you tell them we don't want to blow this chance. We have 
fewer crises abroad, fewer crises at home, and a greater opportunity to 
do right. And we're Democrats, and we need to do it.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 1:27 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to Denise Rich, Laura Ross, Betsy Cohn, Sharon 
Patrick, luncheon co-hosts; Susan Patricof, member, national board of 
directors, Women's Leadership Forum; Agnes Varis, president, Agvar 
Chemicals, Inc.; Judith Hope, chair, New York State Democratic Party; 
Edward G. Rendell, general chair, and Carol Pensky, national finance 
cochair, Democratic National Committee; Representative John Lewis; civil 
rights activists Hosea Williams and Dick Gregory; Coretta Scott King, 
widow of Martin Luther King, Jr.; civil rights leader Rev. Jesse 
Jackson; Charlton Heston, president, National Rifle Association; and 
Renee Mullins, daughter of murder victim James Byrd, Jr.