[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 17 (Monday, May 1, 2000)]
[Pages 916-920]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

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

April 24, 2000

    Thank you very much. I think she's about to get the hang of it, 
don't you? [Laughter] Wow!
    The Vice President, Tipper, Hillary, Chairman Rendell, ladies and 
gentlemen. I would like to begin with a heart full of gratitude by 
saying some thank you's.
    I thank Ed Rendell and Joe Andrew and all the people at the 
Democratic Party for the work they have done. I thank all of you at 
these tables who helped to chair this event and did the work so that we 
could all be here tonight. I want to thank Jon Stewart for making us 
laugh. I wish he would move to Washington. If we laughed a little more 
there, we might get twice as much done. [Laughter]
    I want to thank my dear friend Tony Bennett for performing again so 
beautifully. You know, people always marvel--Tony's a year or two older 
than I am, and people always marvel at how great an artist he is. And I 
was telling people earlier tonight, the thing that is so amazing is that 
he still has perfect pitch. I lost my perfect pitch 10 years ago. And he 
has perfect pitch in more ways that one. I'm glad he's here.
    I thank the people of New York, the Democratic Party of New York, 
and my special supporters in this room who have been with me and Al and 
Hillary and Tipper all these years. I want to thank those of you who are 
helping Hillary in this Senate campaign. I have no doubt of one thing, 
that if you elect her, she will be a worthy successor to Robert Kennedy 
and Pat Moynihan, and will make a terrific difference to the people of 
this State

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and this Nation. And after I heard her speaking, I have no doubt she's 
going to win if you stay with her, so I feel good about that. Thank you.
    I want to thank Tipper Gore for 8 marvelous years. I was looking at 
her tonight, thinking to myself--I've watched her raise her children; 
I've watched her deal with sick members of her family; I've watched her 
deal with all kinds of pressures and keep laughing. The thing I 
appreciate most about her is that she believes that people who are 
fragile and people who are broken, whether they are homeless or 
suffering from mental illness, are part of our common humanity and still 
have something to live for, still have something to give, and ought to 
be given a better chance. And our country would be a better place if 
more people felt the way she did. I hope that more people will.
    Let me say also that I am profoundly grateful tonight for the chance 
you gave me to serve. We were talking around our table tonight about--
one of the chances that I've had as President is to learn a lot about 
the Presidencies of people you don't know much about. I thought I knew a 
lot about American history when I became President, but I've spent a lot 
of time studying periods of time when most Americans are not--that most 
Americans aren't too conversive with--the Presidency of Franklin Pierce 
or Rutherford Hayes. And I tried to do it so that I could see the whole 
history of this country in a seamless web.
    One of the things that strikes me as strange is that some people who 
have been in this position--even people I very much admire--talk about 
what a terrible burden it is, and how the White House is the crown jewel 
of the Federal penal system, and how they can't wait to get out of 
there, and what a terrible pain it is. Frankly, most of those guys 
didn't have a tougher time than I've had there--[laughter]--and I don't 
know what in the heck they're talking about. [Laughter]
    One of my friends from home called me a couple of years ago when 
things weren't going so well for me, and he said, ``Just remember, Bill, 
a couple of runs of bad luck and you'd be home doing $25 divorces and 
deeds. Don't feel sorry for yourself. You asked for this job. And that's 
the way I feel.''
    Every day has been a joy and an opportunity and still is, and I 
thank you for it. But I want you to know, sometimes people say, ``Well, 
what keeps you going?'' And tonight we were sitting around our table, 
and I looked at Bob Rose, and I said, ``Isn't this the place where we 
had that fundraiser in February of '92, right before the New Hampshire 
primaries, when I was dropping like a rock in the polls, and everybody 
said I was deader than a doornail? He said, ``Yes, this is it.''
    So I started telling people around the table, I said, you know, I 
met a guy here that night walking through the kitchen. This is a true 
story. I said, I met a guy there that night walking through the kitchen. 
He was working here. And he came up to me, and he said, ``Governor, 
Governor,'' he said, ``my boy is in school. He's in the fifth grade. He 
studies this election, and he studies the candidates and the issues, and 
he says I should vote for you.'' And he said, ``But I want to ask you a 
question first. If I do what my boy wants and I vote for you, I want you 
to help me.'' He said, ``You see, I came here as an immigrant, and in my 
home country I was very poor, and here I have more money and a better 
job. But in my home country, I was free. ''
    He said, ``Here, my boy, he can't go across the street to the park 
and play unless I go with him because he'll be in danger. He can't walk 
down the street to school by himself because he could get hurt.'' So he 
said, ``If I do what my boy wants and I vote for you, will you make my 
boy free?''
    And as I was telling this story, that man, Dimitri Theopoulos, came 
up to me and embraced me tonight. He doesn't even work here anymore, but 
he came here tonight to work this banquet, and I want to thank him. His 
son is now a student at St. John's University in New York City, and he 
is doing well.
    Now, what's the point of all this? When Al Gore and I came to 
Washington, it was to help people like Dimitri and his son, people who 
serve these banquets but can't afford the price of the tickets; people 
who need the minimum wage and access to health care, whose kids ought to 
be able to go to college and ought to be able to get a good education on 
the way; people who maybe have been

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homeless at some point in their lives or stuck on welfare and want jobs. 
And after 7 years and a few months, over 21 million of them have jobs 
that didn't 8 years ago.
    Over 21 million have taken advantage of family and medical leave. 
Over 5 million have taken advantage of the HOPE scholarship to go on to 
college. There are 500,000 people who couldn't get handguns because of 
the Brady bill. And gun crime in this country, down 35 percent since 
1993, the homicide rate at a 31-year low, 2 million kids out of poverty; 
more than 2 million kids with health insurance; students borrowing money 
through our new loan program, saving $8 billion, to help them go on and 
go to college--real stories of real lives of real people. That's what 
this is all about.
    I never, ever, for all the wonderful joy and love of the Presidency 
and my love of politics--and Lord knows, I have loved it--I always 
thought that it was wrong to seek power without purpose; that in the 
end, it was a hollow victory to have it and to exercise it to hurt other 
people with the painful disappointment in life that they never give you 
what you want. The only thing that really matters is knowing that people 
who otherwise wouldn't have done as well have a little better chance 
because of your endeavors.
    And what I want you to know tonight, as I bring the Vice President 
up here, is that we have worked very hard to turn this country around 
and to get it going in the right direction. But the theme song of this 
election year ought to be the first song Tony Bennett sang, ``The Best 
Is Yet To Come,'' because we are now in a position to take on the big 
challenges of this country that would have been unthinkable 8 years ago. 
We can get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 and 
give a generation of Americans a chance at a strong economy. We can deal 
with the challenges of the aging of America, the children of America, 
and all the things that--I'll leave it to Al to talk about.
    But we've got a chance to do that. But you have to understand that 
this election is every bit as important, if not more important, than the 
ones in '92 and '96. I want you to know a couple of things about Al Gore 
that he wouldn't say himself. And I'm amazed that so many Americans, 
even a lot of our supporters, don't know.
    First of all, as you might have noticed, we've had to make a few 
tough decisions over the last 8 years. He was at the fore of the process 
that produced every difficult decision we ever made, every controversial 
one, every one that could have wrecked both our careers and kept him 
from being here tonight as the nominee of our party.
    He wanted us to take that tough stand against the deficit in 1993 
that required him to break the tie in the United States Senate. He 
wanted us to become the first administration in history to seriously 
take on in a systematic way the problems of gun violence in this country 
and to try to have systematic, sensible measures to protect our children 
from its dangers. He wanted to be the first administration in history 
that took on big tobacco to try to give our children their lives back.
    He was out there early with me on Kosovo, on Bosnia, on Haiti, on 
all the tough, controversial foreign policy issues, when all the experts 
in Washington were saying these were little places unworthy of America's 
great interests, and besides that, there was lots of downside and no 
upside--who cares if a lot of innocent people are just dying like flies?
    He was there every time, in private, getting no credit, when a 
difficult decision had to be made. And the Presidency is defined, and 
the country goes forward, based on the hard decisions. The easy ones 
anybody can make.
    The second thing I want you to know is that he has had more 
responsibility than any person who ever held this job. And he has 
performed in an absolutely stunning manner. And I just want to run 
through--yes, you can clap for that. [Applause]
    I want to give you a few examples. He led our effort to give America 
a genuinely competitive and humane telecommunications policy, which 
meant--what did that mean? You look at all the companies in New York 
State alone that did not even exist in 1996 when we signed the 
Telecommunications Act. Hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Plus we got 
the E-rate to guarantee that our schools, our poorest schools and 
libraries and

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hospitals would be able to access the Internet.
    He led our efforts to hook all of our schools and classrooms up to 
the Internet. When we started in 1994, under Al's leadership, 3 percent 
of the classrooms in America were hooked up to the Internet. Today, 65 
percent are, 11 percent of the schools. Today, 95 percent of the schools 
in this country have an Internet connection.
    He led our efforts to bring economic opportunity to people and 
places left behind, in the empowerment zones and the enterprise 
communities. He led our efforts in the environment, which--things like 
our partnership for the next generation of vehicles with Detroit, with 
the automakers and the auto companies, the autoworkers and the auto 
companies. Now you'll be able to buy cars, decent size cars, actually 
getting 70-80 miles a gallon in the next year or 2.
    He had a big part of our foreign policy when it came to arms 
control, or dealing with Russia or South Africa or the Middle East. He 
led our efforts to reinvent the Federal Government which meant, as I 
think all of you, even our adversaries would admit, we have been 
slightly more active than previous Presidents in the last several years, 
and we did it while shrinking the Government to its smallest size in 40 
years--all because of Al Gore's leadership.
    But what I want you to know is more important than all that. I had 
lunch with this guy once a week, before he got something better to do 
here a few months ago. [Laughter] From the day I took office until the 
onset of the Presidential campaign, I probably know more about him than 
anybody but Tipper. I know what he likes and what he can't stand. I know 
what he loves. I know when he's having a bad day and how he deals with 
it. And, by the way, he knows the same about me.
    And all I can tell you is, I feel absolutely comfortable putting the 
future of my daughter, and the grandchildren I hope she will give us, in 
his hands. He is the most accomplished and effective Vice President in 
the history of the country. That is not a matter of dispute; that's a 
statement of fact. He is the most well-qualified candidate we have had 
in my lifetime. I wish I'd had half his experience coming into office in 
'93 that he will bring in, in 2001.
    But the most important thing of all is, he understands the future, 
and he knows how to take us there. There are big challenges out there. 
We have not done all this work to turn this country around, to fritter 
away the chance of a lifetime to deal with the big issues--and there are 
huge differences between our parties and our candidates that will have 
dramatic, immediate, practical impact on the lives of the American 
people--not just those of us who came here tonight but, keep in mind, 
those of us who served us here tonight.
    So for all my gratitude to all of you, for all my gratitude to the 
American people, for the chance to serve in a job I love, the most 
important thing is always, for our country, what are we going to do 
today and tomorrow? All I have done for 7 years and 3 months was to try 
to get the country I love in the position to build the future of our 
dreams for our children. Now it's up to you to decide whether we do 
that.
    And believe me, for the rest of the lives of everybody in this 
audience, I will be very surprised if you ever get a chance to vote for 
anyone for President again who has done so much, who is such a fine 
human being, and who so clearly understands the future that is unfolding 
at such a rapid pace. We owe it--we owe it to ourselves, to the labors 
of the last 8 years, and more importantly, we owe it to our children and 
the dreams we have for them, to make sure that the next President of the 
United States is Al Gore.
    Thank you very much.

 Note:  The President spoke at approximately 8:50 p.m. in the Imperial 
Ballroom at the New York Sheraton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to 
Edward G. Rendell, general chair, and Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, 
Democratic National Committee; actor Jon Stewart; singer Tony Bennett; 
and investor Bob Rose. The transcript released by the Office of the 
Press Secretary also included the remarks of the Vice President, Tipper 
Gore, and the First Lady.

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