[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 14 (Monday, April 10, 2000)]
[Pages 704-709]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Reception in 
Palo Alto, California

April 2, 2000

    The President. Thank you very much. I must say, when Dick was 
talking about all those fights we've taken on, and I got to thinking 
about some more--when I helped Mexico. The morning we gave them 
financial aid, there was a poll in the paper that said, by 81 to 15, the 
people thought it was a mistake. So he kept talking about that. I 
thought, Mr. Gephardt is up there describing a fool,

[[Page 705]]

and now I have to get up and speak. [Laughter]
    I want to thank Jim and Bridget for having us here. It is truly 
beautiful, and I always like to have an excuse to come back. And I want 
to thank my daughter for showing up tonight. Those of you--we were just 
talking around the table about newborns. When your children grow up, 
you're always mildly surprised when they want to spend time with you. 
It's actually quite wonderful. [Laughter] So this is quite nice for us.
    I want to thank the Flying Other Brothers. I wonder how many young 
people here are Dead Heads in the crowd. But they were great. And I 
apologize, they caught me by surprise. They invited me to play with 
them, and I thought, well, these poor men don't know that that saxophone 
mouthpiece has no reed on it. And then after he went back up, I realized 
they had actually pickled me some reeds in a jar there. So you guys will 
have to give me a raincheck; I'll do it some other time. We'll have 
another chance to do it.
    Band member. We'll hold you to it. [Laughter]
    The President. I want to tell you how grateful I am to the Members 
who are here, to Patrick Kennedy and Bob Menendez, to my good friend 
Charlie Rangel, and to Zoe Lofgren and Ellen Tauscher, to Nancy Pelosi 
and Anna Eshoo. California has a marvelous combination of women there. 
We also have Martin Frost from Texas here and David Wu from Oregon. 
We're glad to have them.
    And I want to thank--and maybe others--I want to thank Mike Honda 
and Adam Schiff for being willing to run for the House of 
Representatives, and I, too, believe they will win. I want to also thank 
all of you not only for being here but for the work that we have done 
together actually since I started coming out here in 1991. I wanted the 
Democratic Party in the 1992 election to be the party of the future in 
America. And it was quite obvious to me and to anyone who was paying 
attention that we couldn't be the party of the future unless we came to 
those of you who are making the future.
    And I want to thank you for all the things we've worked on--to pass 
a pro-competition Telecommunications Act in 1996, to change some of the 
laws on exports and deal with the visa issues and a whole range of other 
issues. I want to especially thank--there are many people here, but I 
see John Doerr and Eric Schmidt within my line of sight, who have called 
me on your behalf and badgered me at all hours of the day and night to 
move the Government faster. They said, ``We realize that the Government 
is not in the Internet age, but at least we ought to be out of the stone 
age. Please move.''
    I thank them and all the rest of you who have done that over the 
last 7 years. Dick Gephardt's talked about the issues and the stakes, 
and you're well aware of them. But I would like to say just a few things 
to you.
    First of all, there is a huge difference in these two parties. And 
there is no doubt, as Mr. Gephardt said, that the Democrats are in the 
minority in the House of Representatives today because in 1993 and in 
1994 they had the courage to vote alone, without a single Republican 
vote, to bridle the enormous deficit that had quadrupled the American 
debt in 12 years--it was $290 billion a year when I took office, slated 
to be about $400 billion this year. And we just decided we had to do 
something about it--that if we didn't do it, we'd never get interest 
rates down; we'd never get investment up; we'd never get growth going in 
the American economy. We had a little bit of a recovery; we were going 
to slip out of it. We just knew that we had to do it.
    And from the moment I announced our plan in December of '92, things 
really took off. And then we had the vote, and I'll never forget this--
in August of 1993, when all these Members were having to walk the plank 
and go down and vote--and not a single Republican was going in--all the 
Republicans were saying, ``You know, this is going to be a disaster; 
it's going to be horrible; we're not responsible for anything that 
happens after this.'' And they're not. [Laughter] That's what they said, 
and they were right.
    And then we got into the gun business. We passed the Brady bill, and 
we passed the assault weapons ban, which Senator Feinstein was 
especially active in passing. And oh, they said the world was going to 
come to an end. And we lost--I'm telling you, we lost a lot of Members 
of the House of Representatives on the budget bill, because the people

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hadn't felt the benefit of the improving economy by '94, and on the gun 
issue. I'll never forget, when I went back to New Hampshire, which is a 
State like my home State of Arkansas, where more than half the people 
have a hunting license, and I said, ``I want to go into the middle of a 
bunch of hunters''--and I went back in '96, because they beat a 
Congressman up there because he voted for the assault weapons ban and 
the Brady bill. And I told those guys--I remember, there were just all 
these guys in their plaid shirts just looking at me kind of souled up, 
and I said, ``You know, if any of you missed a day, even an hour in the 
deer woods on account of the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban, I 
want you to vote against me, too, because that Congressman lost his job 
because of me. But if you didn't, they lied to you, and you need to get 
even.'' And they did.
    I say that because one of the things that I wanted to do when I ran 
in '92 was to change the whole way people thought about politics in 
Washington. Everything was either/or. You know, there was a liberal 
position and a conservative position. There was a Democratic position 
and there was a Republican position. Everybody was supposed to hunker 
down and fight and get their 15 seconds on the evening news. And as a 
result, not very much got done, and we kept getting deeper and deeper 
and deeper in the ditch. And I believed that you could be, for example, 
pro-business and pro-labor. I thought you could be pro-growth and pro-
environment. I thought you could be pro-work and pro-family. I thought 
we could balance the budget, still invest more in education and 
technology and scientific research. And lo and behold, it worked. And I 
want you to understand this. These people here, who have served with me, 
under the most relentless pressure imagined, have stood up for a 
politics that will both unify this country and move us forward.
    You know, I'm not running for anything this year. And most days, I'm 
okay about it. [Laughter] I do have a mild interest in the Senate race 
in New York that I'm--but I come here tonight as much as President as an 
American citizen who has had a unique vantage point on this last 7\1/2\ 
years. And I will say again, there is a huge difference.
    This party--I want to thank Congressman Gephardt. I know you 
probably all saw the big press he got when he came out for a five- or 
six-point plan directed specifically at our high-tech future, or a 
permanent extension of the research and experimentation tax credit--a 
number of other issues that the Democratic caucus has embraced to move 
us forward. But there is a big difference.
    Now, we're in Washington today fighting for some things that I think 
are important. We believe that we ought to stop giving out education 
money to projects that don't work, and only fund those things which do. 
We believe that there ought to be high standards. We think there ought 
to be an end to social promotion. But we think that every child ought to 
have a chance to learn. Children shouldn't be blamed when the system 
fails.
    I thank Governor Davis for his championing the charter school 
movement, and all of you who have helped that. But we also need to have 
after-school programs and summer school programs in these schools. We 
need to close the digital divide and finish the work of hooking up all 
the classrooms to the Internet. And a lot of you have helped us with 
that, and I thank you for that.
    We need to reform the health care system and add prescription drugs 
to Medicare coverage. We need to save Social Security and take it out 
way beyond the life of the baby boom generation--and we can do that if 
we don't have a tax cut that's too big. And that's going to be a big 
deal when all of us baby boomers retire.
    We need to have a tax cut we can afford, and it ought to be targeted 
toward helping people send their kids to college, care for their parents 
and disabled family members and long-term care, and to help working 
people on modest incomes afford their child care and other expenses.
    We need to carry, I think to a much greater degree than we have, a 
commitment to the notion that we can improve the environment while we 
grow the economy. That's what this whole global warming issue is about. 
All over the world, there are people who just don't believe that you can 
get rich unless you put more stuff in the air that heats up the Earth. 
They think you've got to burn

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more coal and more oil, and in the digital economy that is not true. It 
is not true.
    Pretty soon, we'll all be driving cars that get 80 miles a gallon, 
and if we can crack the last little chemical barrier, we'll be able to 
have biofuels where you can make 8 gallons of ethanol, for example, with 
only 1 gallon of gasoline. And then we'll all be effectively getting 550 
miles a gallon.
    Pretty soon everybody will be building their houses with glass that 
keeps out more heat and cold and lets in more light. We saved $100,000 a 
year on the White House power bills just by changing the lights in one 
place. I've ordered the whole Federal Government to do what we did when 
we greened the White House. It will be the equivalent of taking 1.7 
million cars off the road. And it's just the beginning.
    These are some of the things where we actually differ with the other 
party. And Dick was talking about the gun issue. Somebody asked me what 
I thought about Charlton Heston the other day saying all those mean 
things about me, and I said, I still like his movies. [Laughter] And I 
do. And I actually liked him--he came to the White House, to the Kennedy 
Center Honors a couple of years ago. And I know that that's the way they 
think. But you have to understand the difference between the two 
parties.
    The Republicans who follow the NRA believe that guns are the only 
area of our national life where we should deal with problems only with 
punishment and no prevention. They say, just throw the book at somebody 
if they violate one of these existing laws, but for goodness sakes, 
don't inconvenience anybody else by closing the gun show loophole, by 
requiring child trigger locks, by banning the importation of large 
capacity ammunition clips, which make a mockery of our assault weapons 
ban. This is a big deal because it shows you how they define community.
    How would you feel if I said, ``You know, nearly everybody who goes 
in an airport is a good, honest citizen, 99.9 percent of them are, and 
those metal detectors when it's crowded and you're late for your plane 
are a real pain, you know, especially if you've got a big money clip or 
something that keeps going off. It just drives you crazy. So I want to 
take all of the metal detectors out of the airports, and the next time 
somebody blows up a plane, I'm going to throw the book at them.'' You 
think about it. That is the logic that the other party has in blocking 
this commonsense gun legislation. This is a big deal. And it will carry 
over into other issues. It does carry over into the tobacco issue and 
many others. So there is a huge difference.
    But maybe most important of all, there is a difference about how we 
define our community. We're for the hate crimes legislation. We're for 
the ``Employment Non-Discrimination Act.'' We believe that everybody 
ought to be a part of America if they're willing to obey the law and 
work hard, then everybody ought to have a chance. We think everyone 
matters; we think we all do better when we help each other. That's what 
we believe.
    I think that's even more important than our commitment to high 
technology and scientific research. One of the unbelievable ironies of 
this world in which we live is that we think about now, in the next few 
years, not only these energy advances I mentioned, but just in a couple 
of months, I will be able to announce the sequencing of the human 
genome, that it will be finished. And then before you know it, we'll 
figure out how to block the genes that cause Alzheimer's or Parkinson's.
    Before you know it, we'll be able to find cancers when there are 
just a few cells. There will be unbelievable advances in biochemistry, 
and a lot of you have been a part of that. We'll find out what's in the 
black holes in the universe in the next two or three decades. It's an 
amazing time.
    Now, isn't it interesting, since all of you are in the .com world, 
that for all the wonders of the modern world, the biggest problem people 
face is the oldest problem of human society, the fear of the other, 
people who are different. And therefore, the most dangerous thing in a 
society are people who seek to exploit that fear of the other and that 
difference.
    I just got back from India and Pakistan and Bangladesh. Now, I was 
in a little Indian village--you may have seen it, I was dancing with the 
village women, and they were throwing flowers and everything--a very 
poor village, but they have a computer with

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software sufficient to give the poorest villagers, in Hindi or English, 
or good visuals, if they don't read very well, all of the information 
available from every national and state agency in India in a little 
village, and they have a printer.
    So I watched a woman with a newborn baby come in and get the web 
page for the health department on the line, and she had it on her screen 
and exactly what she was supposed to do in the first few months of her 
baby's life. And then she printed it out, and she took it home, and she 
had information in this remote rural village in India, just as good as 
anybody could get here in northern California.
    I went to Hyderabad, where I met with the chief government minister. 
They have 18 government services on the Internet now. If you're there, 
you can get a car licensed on the Internet. Nobody goes to the revenue 
office anymore. Governor, if you do that, you'll be elected until the 
end of your life. [Laughter] This is an amazing thing.
    If you look at America, there are 750 companies in Silicon Valley, 
alone, headed by Indian-Americans. There are 200 ethnic groups in 
America; Indians and Pakistanis both rank in the top five in per capita 
income and per capita education. And yet, they are sitting there staring 
at each other across the divide of Kashmir with nuclear weapons. And 
they can't let it go, and they can't get beyond it.
    Can you imagine what would happen to the Middle East, in no time, if 
we could actually resolve the remaining differences? It's no accident 
that Ireland has the fastest growing economy in Europe, because they 
finally started to make peace with one another. And yet, everywhere we 
see these demons.
    It's very important that the governing part in Washington believe 
that we can be one America and be committed to the future and a unifying 
vision of the future. I want Al Gore to be President, not just because 
I'm grateful to him for being what everybody knows is the most 
influential Vice President in history, but because he understands the 
future, and he has the ideas, the experience, and the will, the 
strength, to lead us there.
    I want these people to get in the majority, not just because I feel 
terrible that they fell on the sword for me when we had to get this 
economy moving again and we had to take a stand for sensible gun safety 
laws, but because I know they can represent that kind of future. I can 
look at every Member here and imagine some--remember some conversation 
I've had with them over the years that just made me proud that they were 
members of my party.
    I just want to leave you with this thought. Most of you who have 
done real well here are younger than I am. And I never thought--you 
know, the older you get, young is always defined as somebody who's a 
year younger than you are. But I want to tell you a story about this 
moment, because I want you to understand, this is a terribly important 
election. I have worked as hard as I could to turn our country around 
and get us moving in the right direction. We have the lowest 
unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest African-American and Hispanic 
unemployment rate ever recorded, the lowest female unemployment rate in 
40 years. That's the good news. But there's still people in places left 
behind.
    We've got the lowest crime rate in 25 years, but the country's still 
too dangerous. We still haven't stepped up to our environmental 
responsibilities. And there are still a lot of dangers out there in the 
world. One of the reasons that I hope so much that this China MFN bill 
will pass, then getting China into the WTO, is that I think it will 
reduce the tensions across the Taiwan Strait, and I don't want a 
conflict there that will totally set back all of east Asia for a 
generation. I want them to keep moving forward, and I think it's 
important.
    So let me say this. I want you all to listen to this--especially 
those of you who are younger than me. In February we celebrated the 
longest economic expansion in American history. So I got all my little 
team together and we were laughing, probably being a little too self-
congratulatory, because you had as much to do with it as we did. All I 
did was try to create the conditions and give people the tools to make 
the most of their own lives.
    But I asked them, I said, when was the last longest economic 
expansion in history? And it was between 1961 and 1969, when we grew up. 
So let me tell you a story about

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that. And I'm not telling you this to get anybody down. There's no more 
optimistic person in this tent tonight than me. But I want you to listen 
to this--1964, at the high watermark of the last longest economic 
expansion in history, I graduated from high school. Lyndon Johnson was 
President, uniting the country after President Kennedy's tragic 
assassination. We had low unemployment, low inflation, high growth, and 
everybody thought it was just going to go on and on and on.
    We had a civil rights challenge, but everyone thought it was going 
to be handled in the Congress and the courts, not in the streets, 
because we had a President and a Congress who believed in them. No one 
believed that what was then a sort of simmering conflict in Vietnam 
would rip the heart out of America. And so we just rolled along. We 
thought it would go on.
    Then, what happened? Four years later, in 1968, I graduated from 
college--2 days after Robert Kennedy was killed; 2 months after Martin 
Luther King was killed; 9 weeks after Lyndon Johnson said he couldn't 
run for President; a few weeks before Richard Nixon was elected 
President, claiming that he represented the Silent Majority, which means 
that those of us who were on the other side were outcasts. We were in 
the loud minority. And it was the first of many elections where we 
attempted to divide America between ``us'' and ``them.'' And those that 
weren't ``us'' were by definition ``them.'' They weren't our crowd, and 
they didn't have a place at our table. And just a few weeks after that, 
in early 1969, the last longest economic expansion in American history 
came to an end.
    Now, what I want to say to you as a citizen was that I have waited 
for 35 years, since I was a little boy, starting out in life, to see my 
country have a chance to build a future of our dreams for our children. 
We are free of internal crisis. The threats we have in the world, while 
serious, are not paralyzing. You have created a whole new economy that 
hasn't repealed the laws of supply and demand but has made them 
infinitely more elastic with infinitely more possibilities.
    This is the kind of chance that comes along once in a lifetime. 
Don't let this election be about little things, and don't let this 
election be about divisive things. This is a time for building 
tomorrows. It comes along once in a great, long while. You have helped 
to make it so. And you can make sure that we make the most of this 
election.
    These people should be elected because they represent the future, 
and they represent unity, and they believe we can go forward together. 
It is a precious gift. We have fought for it and worked for it and stood 
for it in strong winds. But now, it must be ratified in this election.
    If somebody asked you tomorrow why you came here tonight, tell them 
that. Tell them we've got the chance of a lifetime to build a future of 
our dreams for our children, and you believe that these Democrats can 
give it to you.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 10:10 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to reception hosts Jim and Bridget Jorgensen; State 
Assemblyman Mike Honda, candidate for California's 15th Congressional 
District; State Senator Adam Schiff, candidate for California's 27th 
Congressional District; attorney John Doerr; Eric Schmidt, chairman of 
the board and chief executive officer, Novell, Inc.; Gov. Gray Davis of 
California; and Charlton Heston, president, National Rifle Association.