[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 16 (Monday, April 24, 2000)]
[Pages 851-855]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in Beverly Hills, 
California

April 15, 2000

    The President.  Thank you very much. Well, first of all, let me say 
that this is an easier speech for me to give than the one the Vice 
President just gave, because I'm not running for anything. [Laughter] So 
I was thinking, well, what should I say? And I asked Al, I said, ``Is 
there anything special you want me to say?'' He said, ``Nothing special; 
just get up there and say, `Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, 
Gore.' '' [Laughter]
    I actually--and I will proceed to tell you why I actually think 
that's not an unrealistic litany there.
    Let me also say that the----
    The Vice President.  Note the amendment that I came back to you.
    The President.  He said, ``Oh yeah, put Clinton in there 
somewhere.'' [Laughter] Actually, you know, I've gotten so gray, I tried

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to get Jay Leno to come in and give the speech tonight, but he turned me 
down. [Laughter]
    I wanted to say to you that--I really, our friends over here in the 
media, they do a good job of covering this Presidential campaign. But 
they are obsessively interested to find even the slightest difference of 
opinion between the Vice President and me. And I discovered another one 
just tonight, when he was up here bragging on ``American Beauty.'' Now, 
I loved ``American Beauty.'' I love Kevin Spacey. I actually liked 
``Howard the Duck.'' [Laughter] And I just, you know, in the spirit of 
full disclosure, I thought I ought to make it. [Laughter]
    I want to thank David and Steven and Jeffery and Marilyn, Andy, and 
all the DreamWorks folks and all of you who are here tonight. I talked 
to Hillary right before I came in here, and she said to tell you all 
hello. And many of you have helped her, and I thank you, those of you 
who have done that, for doing so.
    I want to thank you for helping me and Al and Tipper before, and in 
this election. And I want to be brief, because I know you want to hear 
Sarah sing, and I do, too. But there are a couple of things that I can 
say that I think are meaningful.
    It seems impossible to me that it's just 2 weeks away from--or 6 
weeks away, excuse me--from 8 years ago, from June 2d, 1992, when I won 
the primary in California, and knew I would be the Democratic nominee. 
And then it's 12 weeks away from the time when Al and Tipper and Hillary 
and I were in New York, 8 years ago, and we started this long odyssey 
together, got on a bus and started one of our bus tours.
    Today I got up at 5:15 and went into the Sequoia National Forest to 
make the Grand Sequoia National Monument, to protect the remaining 34 
groves of sequoia trees for all time to come. Now, that sort of thing I 
got to do today because Al's running, and I have more time to do those 
things. [Laughter] But it's the sort of thing we have done.
    We have now set aside more land under national monuments, the 
Clinton/Gore administration has, than anyone. I just loved it. So I want 
to say, first of all, thank you for giving us the opportunity to serve, 
to make a difference. Because if it hadn't been for our friends in 
California, and particularly for a lot of people in this room, I am not 
sure we could have done it.
    I thank you for the support you are giving to the Vice President and 
Tipper tonight and for our party. I'm very grateful for all the leaders, 
present and past, of the National Democratic Party who are here. And I 
just want you to think about three or four things real briefly.
    First of all, when Al and Tipper and Hillary and I moved to 
Washington to the White House, to the Vice President's residence, we 
really did have a different idea about the way the country ought to 
work. We had a vision of an America in which every responsible citizen 
had opportunity without regard to their income or background, in which 
every law-abiding citizen was part of one American community in a 21st 
century world growing closer together, not further apart, where America 
was the central force for peace and freedom and prosperity. That's what 
we believed we had to do.
    And to get there, we thought we needed a unifying and forward-
looking set of initiatives. Now, Al talked about that. The record speaks 
for itself. What I want to say to you is--notwithstanding the fact that 
I'm not running, and, therefore, more prone to look backward than 
forward--that is, after all, what you hired us to do. When you hire a 
President and a Vice President, you hire them to win for America.
    And America is always about tomorrow. And I want you to know that 
even though I am not on the ballot, in many ways the election of 2000 is 
more important than the elections of 1992 and 1996. Why do I say that? 
Because we have worked so hard to turn this country around and get it 
going in the right direction. And we are now at a point where as a 
people we could literally make the future of our dreams for our 
children--the stuff that the Vice President was talking about.
    We could finally prove forever we could grow the economy and make 
the environment better. We could have universal preschool, universal 
access to college, and 21st century schools in between. We could really 
help people to balance work and family in

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ways that are not possible today. We could do more than we could 
possibly imagine today to make globalization and high technology work 
for ordinary people, not just the people that are paying to be here 
tonight but the people that served our meal as well.
    And it all turns on this election. And the truth is, this election 
ought not to be close. And the only reason it is, is that elections are 
about more than records, qualifications, and issues, and because people 
sometimes lose their concentration when times are good.
    I like the way things are going in this country now, but I'm telling 
you, things could be a lot better. Things could be a lot better, but 
only if we build on the platform that we're standing on right now. 
That's the first thing I ought to say. In the 2000 election, if you like 
the fact that the country's been turned around, you have to believe that 
the 2000 election is just as important, if not more important, than the 
two that preceded it.
    The second thing I want to say is--the Vice President can't say all 
the things he ought to say about himself. But in the entire history of 
the United States, no one who has ever served in that position has had 
remotely as much positive impact on America, as Vice President, as Al 
Gore has. Not even close.
    And I was thinking about--he talked about all the hard decisions. I 
can still remember every conversation we ever had at our weekly lunch 
where he would say, ``You know, I don't know how you're going to make 
these decisions, but I'm quite sure that decisionmaking involves some 
sort of mental and emotional muscle. It's just like working out. And the 
more hard decisions you make, the easier they'll get. So you've just got 
to jump off the board, decide what's right and do it.''
    And when we made the decision to take on the budget deficit and we 
knew we could risk political destruction for it--because everybody in 
the other party opposed us--he was right there early. We made the 
decision to take on the gun lobby in a systematic way for the first time 
in history, to take on the tobacco lobby, to take on the unpopular 
issues of Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. He was there, always there, always 
early.
    Yesterday the Russian Duma ratified START II, the nuclear arms 
reduction treaty, which will now enable us both to dramatically reduce 
our nuclear arsenals, in no small measure because he has managed a major 
part of our relations with Russia for 8 years now. And we just recently 
saw the announcement coming out of Detroit that we're going to have cars 
before you know it making 70 or 80 miles a gallon, running on dual-fuel 
cells. He has managed our partnership for new generation vehicles for 
almost 7 years now.
    We have the smallest Federal Government in 40 years because he ran 
our reinventing Government program. I'm going to have this conference on 
the digital divide, starting in East Palo Alto, Monday. When we became 
President and Vice President, only about 3 percent of our classrooms 
were connected to the Internet. Today, over two-thirds are, thanks to 
the fact that he has led our effort to connect the schools and to give 
rates that the schools could afford, even the poorer schools.
    So we are friends, and I am biased. But what I just gave you are not 
my opinions but facts. So, number one, it's an important election. 
Number two, I'm worried because people sometimes lose their 
concentration when times are good. Number three, he is the most 
qualified person in my lifetime to seek this job, I believe.
    And the final thing I want to tell you is this: There are big 
differences. You know what they are. But if someone were to ask me to go 
back over the last 8 years and to look ahead to the next 8 years and 
say, ``Well, what is the most important thing of all?'' I would say, the 
most important thing of all is for us to keep striving to be one 
America. That's why I have worked so hard to try to help end the racial 
and religious and ethnic and tribal wars of the world, that the United 
States has tried to be a force for peace all over the world. That is why 
we have worked so hard for the hate crimes bill, the ``Employment Non-
Discrimination Act,'' an end to racism, equal pay for women, all those 
things--because the American people are really smart. And if they can be 
free of the demons that bedevil people all over the world, we are going 
to do just fine.
    I was in Atlanta the other night to celebrate John Lewis--
Congressman John

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Lewis' sixtieth birthday. We were reliving the 35th anniversary of the 
march at Selma. And I was talking about John and how the most important 
thing that he did was not just to win the passage of the civil rights 
laws but to lead a movement to forgive everybody that had oppressed him, 
and in so doing, to liberate us.
    You know, we are all--all of us--are guilty from time to time of 
defining our importance in life with some negative reference to somebody 
else--``I had a bad day, but at least I'm not them. On my worst day, I 
would never do that and be like them.'' Not a person hasn't done that. 
But at least we've never made a political program of it in our party, 
and I'm proud of that. And I'm proud of being a Democrat.
    So you've got the best qualified person. You heard him go through 
the issues, and you agree with him on the issues. We've got great people 
running for the House and Senate, one of whom I have a particular 
interest in. [Laughter] But you have to believe in the larger issue. 
You've got the chance to build the future of your dreams for your 
children and your grandchildren, because of the conditions that exist in 
this country today. Therefore, this election is as important, maybe more 
important than the two that came before it.
    And I'll leave you with this story. Al talked about it a little in 
his remarks. When we celebrated, in February, the longest economic 
expansion in American history, we got the economic team in. Everybody is 
patting themselves on the back, you know, and we were all feeling like 
we were smarter than we probably are. And I said, ``Well, when was the 
last longest economic expansion in history?'' You know when it was? 
Nineteen sixty-one to 1969, when we were young people.
    I graduated from high school in 1964. President Kennedy had been 
killed. The country united behind Lyndon Johnson. Inflation was low; 
unemployment was low; growth was high; productivity was booming. 
Optimism was rampant. Lyndon Johnson was clearly going to be reelected. 
And even though there was a serious civil rights challenge, we--
basically, most people I knew felt it would be solved in the Congress 
and the courts with peaceful demonstrations. Even though we were sort of 
involved in Vietnam, no one I knew at that time thought it would tear 
the country to shreds. And everybody was just pretty casual about where 
we were, and we just took our prosperity for granted, and we thought we 
could get rid of poverty and everything else without a great deal of 
effort and concentration.
    Four years later I graduated from college in Washington, DC, 2 days 
after Robert Kennedy was murdered, 2 months after Martin Luther King was 
murdered, 9 weeks after Lyndon Johnson said he couldn't run for 
President again because the country was ripped right down the middle 
over Vietnam. We had riots in the streets, and within just a few months 
after the 1968 election, the longest economic expansion in history was 
history.
    I say that not to be a downer, because I am probably the most 
optimistic person, congenitally, maybe even naively, and more optimistic 
than I was the day I became President. But I say that to remind you. We 
dare not break our concentration or relax our commitment just because 
times are good.
    And forget about being President, I say this to you as a citizen. I 
have waited for 35 years for my country once again to be in the position 
it was in when I was young, to build the future of our dreams for our 
children.
    That's what this election is about. That's why he should be 
President. You will never get a chance in your lifetime to vote for 
someone as well qualified again. I certainly wasn't when I ran. You will 
never get a chance in your lifetime to ratify a direction and to 
accelerate the pace of change that is clearly working.
    If you really think about it, you are not ever going to have any 
clearer choices. But when you think it doesn't matter, when you get 
tired, when you wish somebody wouldn't call you again between now and 
November, you remember the story I told you about the last longest 
economic expansion in American history, and take a deep breath and bear 
down, because the best is still ahead of us.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

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 Note:  The President spoke at approximately 10:15 p.m. on the terrace 
at Historic Greystone Mansion. In his remarks, he referred to ``Tonight 
Show'' host Jay Leno; actor Kevin Spacey; founders Steven Spielberg, 
Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, and Chief of Corporate Affairs 
Andy Spahn, DreamWorks SKG Studios; Mr. Katzenberg's wife, Marilyn; and 
musician Sarah McLachlan. The transcript released by the Office of the 
Press Secretary also included the remarks of Vice President Gore.