[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 17 (Monday, May 1, 2000)]
[Pages 913-916]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Luncheon for Representative Michael P. Forbes in New York 
City

April 24, 2000

    Thank you very much. Well, first, I want to thank Bill and Nancy for 
having us in their beautiful apartment. I must say, they've been so 
wonderful to Hillary and me. I'm going to forgive them because they 
stripped me of one of my important legacies today.
    I felt a little awkward standing up here on these beautiful stairs. 
And now people will never be able to say what one man came up to me and 
said when I was out in the West recently. He said, ``I'll tell you one 
thing, Bill, they will never say that when you were President you looked 
down on the American people.'' [Laughter]
    But I actually enjoyed it up there. I could see everyone's face. I 
was thinking how proud I am to be here and to be here with you.
    I want to thank Congressmen Nadler, Towns, and Ackerman for being 
here. And, Gary, thank you for rounding out the funds race today. That 
was a--[laughter]. Gary Ackerman just went to India with me. I heard how 
many people lived in India--over 900 million people. Do you know every 
third person I met knew who Gary Ackerman was? [Laughter] It was very 
disorienting. It was utterly amazing.
    Let me say, these three people have really represented not only New 
York but the United States very well. And you can be proud of them. 
Jerry Nadler is everyone's conscience, including mine when he thinks I'm 
straying too far. Ed Towns was with me in 1991, when only my mother 
thought I could be elected President. [Laughter] So I really like them 
very, very much.
    I want to welcome again Mike and Barbara and Abby--who is going to 
be a teacher, by the way. She's a senior at the University of Virginia, 
and she's going to be a teacher. We ought to give her a hand. [Applause]

[[Page 914]]

    And I want to be brief but fairly pointed here. I believe that Mike 
Forbes became a Democrat because of his convictions on education, the 
environment, the Patients' Bill of Rights, campaign finance reform, 
prescription drugs for seniors, continuing the economic path the country 
is on, doing more for the poor, and being even more aggressive in 
education. That's why I think he did it. I don't think it's very 
complicated.
    In a larger sense, I think he did it because we have been able to 
prove in the last 7 years that our party can be for economic growth and 
for improving the environment, that we can be pro-business and pro-
labor, that we can be pro-work and pro-family. And divisive politics, 
which have served the other party rather well from election to election, 
are no way to run a country, particularly a country in a global economy, 
an increasingly globalized society, where diversity and the power of the 
mind is becoming more important every day.
    What I want to say to you is that there will be an attempt in this 
election to blur the distinctions between the parties in the hope that 
the traditional advantage that our friends in the Republican Party have 
enjoyed among large voting blocks around the country will be there and 
that they will basically make people sort of feel like it's okay if they 
win, things are going so well, and there are no consequences.
    What I want you to understand is there are sharp consequences to 
whether we hold the White House and whether we win the House and whether 
we pick up seats in the Senate--sharp, dramatic consequences that will 
make a significant difference in the lives of the American people. And 
I'll just give you a few, but I think it's important. You need to tell 
people that if they want to vote for person X or person Y, there are 
consequences.
    Number one, on the economy: Our position is we ought to keep paying 
down the debt; save Social Security and Medicare; provide a prescription 
drug benefit for seniors; make substantial investments in education, 
health care, and the environment, science and technology; and then we 
can afford a tax cut, but it's a modest one designed to help people who 
need help most to educate their kids, to provide child care for them, to 
provide for health care; and that we ought to give people like those of 
you in this room who can afford to be here a tax cut if you help us 
solve some of our biggest problems.
    I want to give you the same tax benefits to invest in poor areas in 
America we give you to invest in poor areas overseas. I want to give you 
tax incentives to produce or to purchase energy-efficient products that 
will help us deal with climate change and other things that are 
investment oriented. We had an investment strategy to get this economy 
going again, and it worked, and we ought not to abandon it.
    Their strategy is to pass a tax cut even bigger than the one I 
vetoed before. And they'll do it. You have to assume they're honorable 
people. [Laughter] People normally mean what they say in elections. 
There have been a lot of studies done on politicians and--even though 
I'm proud to say that one said that I had kept a higher percentage of my 
campaign promises than the last 5 Presidents, even though I made more, 
in more detail. By and large, people who run for President do what they 
say they're going to do when they get in. So you have to assume that 
when they run for President and for Congress, based on a tax cut even 
bigger than the one I vetoed--which will certainly take us back to 
deficits and higher interest rates and slower growth--that they mean it.
    And now, the second thing is, there will be enormous consequences 
for our other objectives. I think we ought to meet the challenge of the 
aging of America. I'm the oldest baby boomer. And when we retire, all of 
us, there will only be two people working for every one person retired. 
And I do not want our retirement to bankrupt our children and their 
ability to raise our grandchildren.
    So we're for taking the interest savings we're getting from paying 
down the debt, put it in the Social Security Trust Fund, because they 
can't--we're paying it down because of Social Security taxes--so we take 
this Social Security Trust Fund out to 2054, beyond the life of the baby 
boomers. And they're not for it. We're for a prescription drug program 
for seniors to benefit all the seniors that need prescription drugs. 
Their program primarily

[[Page 915]]

benefits the people that are producing the drugs.
    There are significant differences. If you look at the children--and 
Mike and his whole family's passion for education--no matter what they 
say they're for, they're not going to have the money to invest in 
education after they pass their tax cut and their defense increases.
    Somebody asked me the other day what the principal economic reform I 
brought to the United States when I became President was, and I said, 
arithmetic. [Laughter] That was the dramatic, new idea in the 
information age we reintroduced into budgeting--arithmetic. All of a 
sudden, the numbers added up again. The money won't be there. We say we 
ought to give a tax deduction to people for up to $10,000 for the cost 
of college tuition. Their leader says that we don't need any more help 
to help people go to college. I think everybody needs to be able to go 
to college. We've tried to open the doors of college to all Americans 
because of the world we're living in. These are significant differences.
    On work and family, we favor raising the minimum wage, and they 
don't. We favor increasing tax relief for child care coverage, and they 
don't. We favor expanding health care coverage to people who could never 
afford to come to this fundraiser, but they all work, and they all pay 
taxes. People between the ages of 55 and 65 who lose their jobs and, 
therefore, don't have health insurance and are not old enough for 
Medicare; low income families who can get their kids insured today, but 
they can't get insured. We're for that. We think we ought to do that and 
give them health care coverage, and they don't.
    On the environment, I don't even think I need to say anything about 
that. Ever since the Republicans got the majority in Congress, with a 
few notable exceptions, like Mr. Forbes, I have waged a relentless 
battle to try to prevent an assault on our efforts to improve the 
quality of our air, our water, and our land, and to set aside precious 
spaces both in the vast unpopulated areas of America and green spaces 
within our own neighborhoods. I don't think--there may be no issue on 
which the record is clearer--particularly given the decisions of the 
Republicans in the nominating process.
    Now, these are significant. My belief that we all belong in America 
and that we've all got to get along as long as we're law abiding--we're 
for hate crimes legislation and the ``Employment Non-Discrimination 
Act,'' and they're against it. I could go on and on. But those are just 
six things. There will be significant consequences to the American 
people from the outcome of the elections in the House and the Senate and 
the Presidential election.
    You should know what those consequences are. And you don't have to 
say a bad word about our opponents to understand that. I don't like all 
the politics of personal destruction. Most people who do that do it 
because they're more interested in power than people. And they think 
voters are ultimately not very smart, and so if they can make their 
opponents look bad enough, they can get some votes.
    The truth is, this is not about all of us who run for office, and 
besides that, I'm not running for anything. I'm telling you this as a 
citizen. But I've worked very hard for over 7 years now to turn this 
country around, to move us in the right direction, and to pull us 
together. And I promise you, everything I have learned in my entire 
public life tells me that these differences are real, that we mean what 
we say, and they mean what they say. Now, they will attempt to paper 
over all this between now and November, in the hope that basically a 
satisfied, almost somnambulant electorate, will give them the reins of 
power.
    So I want you to leave here--and if they ask you how come you showed 
up at Mike Forbes fundraiser, tell them it's because you'd like to see 
the economy grow. Tell them it's because you want to see more people 
brought into the mainstream of American life. Tell them it's because you 
want to see investments made in education and the environment and health 
care. Tell them it's because you think we ought to go forward together 
instead of being divided. These are significant consequences. This is 
very important.
    I know the country was in trouble in '92, and it looks like we're 
doing great today. But

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believe me, this election is every bit as important as the elections we 
had in '92 and '96 because we are going to decide whether to ratify the 
direction of change we have embraced or abandon it. And there will be 
substantial consequences, positive or negative, to that decision. If you 
go out and tell the people that you know in New York and in other States 
around this country that, we'll be all right. And if you tell the people 
you know that can vote in Mike Forbes' congressional district, he will 
be overwhelmingly reelected.
    Thank you very much.

 Note:  The President spoke at 2:06 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to luncheon hosts Bill and Nancy Rollnick; and 
Representative Forbes' wife, Barbara, and their daughter Abby.