[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 19 (Monday, May 15, 2000)]
[Pages 1032-1036]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Reception for Representative Baron P. Hill 
in Bethesda, Maryland

May 8, 2000

    Thank you. Well, I want to thank, first of all, Joe and Anne, for 
having us in their beautiful home on this beautiful spring night. And I 
want to thank Baron's colleagues Charlie Stenholm from Texas and Stenny 
Hoyer from Maryland for coming. They represent, I think, the future of 
the Democratic Party and where we have to go, and they've proved that 
you can get elected in places where sometimes we don't get elected. I 
also want to thank your predecessor, Lee Hamilton, for being here. He's 
one of the greatest House Members in my lifetime, and I thank him for 
what he is doing. And I want to thank, in his absence, Senator Bayh.
    Evan met me at the door, and he said Susan was out of town, and he 
had two choices: He could stay and hear me give this speech, or he could 
go home and tuck his kids in bed. And I said, ``You've heard the 
speech''--[laughter]--``and you'll never regret a minute you stay with 
your children.'' My daughter is about to be a senior in college, and I 
can still remember all the nights I tucked her in bed, and she can 
remember anything she ever did that I missed. [Laughter] Even though she 
can count them on one hand and have fingers left over, at 20 years old 
she can still remember. So he went home, as he should have. And since 
he's not here, I won't be embarrassing him when I tell you that I hope 
and expect some day I'll be voting for Evan Bayh for President of the 
United States.
    I want to say just a few things, and I won't keep you long. I want 
to get out and say hello to the people I haven't seen yet. The country 
is in good shape, and I'm grateful for that.

[[Page 1033]]

And I'm grateful for the time I've had to serve and the opportunities 
we've had. And certainly not in my lifetime, and maybe never in the 
history of America, have we had at the same time such a strong economy 
with benefits more evenly distributed. We have inequality coming down in 
the last 2 years for the first time in over 20 years, the lowest 
African-American and Hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded, the 
lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years, the lowest single-parent 
poverty rate in 46 years.
    We've got--the crime rate, we just said yesterday, has come down now 
8 years in a row. We've got the lowest crime rate in over a quarter 
century, the lowest murder rate in 30 years. We have almost--the welfare 
rolls are about half the size they were when I took office. Things are 
moving in the right direction. Ninety percent of our children immunized 
against serious childhood diseases for the first time.
    I thank you for the applause you gave when Baron talked about the 
economy and our role in it. But what I would like to say is--people come 
up to me all the time and they say, ``Well, thank you, and I wish you 
could run again.'' Half the country is probably elated that I can't, but 
it's nice when the people that say it, say it.
    But here's what I want to say to you. A President is important. It's 
important to be able to articulate what you believe. It's important to 
be able to touch people where they live. It's important for people to 
think that the person in the Oval Office cares about them. It's 
important that you fight hard for the things you believe in.
    But if you don't believe in the right things, you still won't get 
good results. That's why I'm here tonight. I like Baron Hill. I've liked 
him from the first time I met him. I admire him. But I think that the 
direction that we took--first our party and then our country, beginning 
in the '92 election--is profoundly important. And the major question 
before the American people this year is, what are we going to do with 
our good fortune? Yes, the surplus but, generally, what are we going to 
do with our good fortune?
    And normally, the question asked in a campaign determines who wins. 
That is, what people think the election is about very often determines 
the outcome of the election. And I believe with all my heart the answer 
to that question is not that we should indulge ourselves but that we 
should take on the big challenges and the big opportunities that are 
still out there. Because most of what I've had to do the last 7 years 
and some odd months is to try to turn the ship of state around and get 
us going in the right direction and, to use the metaphor I used in the 
'96 campaign, build our bridge to the 21st century.
    Now the country has a chance that we've never had before to 
literally build the future of our dreams for our children. We almost had 
it in the 1960's, and it came apart over the combined impacts of the 
civil rights struggle and the Vietnam war and the divisions that ensued 
in the country and the collapse of the economic recovery of that decade.
    So if the question is what are we going to do with the good times 
and the answer is take on the big challenges and the big opportunities, 
then the issue is, how? And I would argue that what we need to do is to 
continue to change based on what we call the New Democratic philosophy. 
We believe that you can be pro-business and pro-labor. We believe you 
can be pro-growth and pro-environment. We believe you can be pro-work 
and pro-family. We believe you can be pro-trade and pro-labor and human 
rights.
    And I don't want to give a long speech about that, but I would like 
to cite two examples because they reflect Baron Hill's career, brief as 
it is, already distinguished in Congress. One is this trade issue. I 
believe that any fair reading of the record would say that I'm the most 
pro-labor President, at least since Lyndon Johnson. I believe that is 
fair. But my belief in trade is rooted in two things.
    Number one, we've got 4 percent of the world's people and 22 percent 
of the world's income, and I don't think you have to be a rocket 
scientist to figure out if you want to keep over 20 percent of the 
world's income, you've got to sell something to the other 96 percent of 
the people. And you have responsibilities to them. You want them to do 
better, so you have to let them sell stuff to you.
    Secondly, I think it's good for us in other ways. Imports--nobody 
ever talks about that,

[[Page 1034]]

but because we've had open markets, we've been able to grow without 
inflation. When I was elected President, after the election we had a big 
economic parlay down in Little Rock, and I had a private meeting in the 
Governor's Mansion, and I had Democratic economists--that is, they were 
more progressive; they wanted to believe we could have low unemployment 
without inflation.
    So I said, ``How low can unemployment get on a sustained basis 
without inflation?'' And the consensus was 6 percent, maybe 5.8--you get 
below that, you're going to have inflation. It was 3.9 last month, with 
core inflation at 2.4 percent.
    Now, if you want growth without inflation, you have to keep your 
markets open so there is some pressure on keeping the prices down. In a 
larger sense, because we're the most prosperous country in the world 
now, when we trade with others, it helps us to build friends and allies 
and promote democracy and stability and keep our kids from ever having 
to go to war again.
    And that's really what this China issue is all about. A lot of you 
are here because you know that it's a lay down, economically, in the 
short run, because we don't have to give China any more access to our 
markets, and they give us lots of access to theirs. We can put up car 
dealerships there for the first time. We can sell American cars without 
having to let them manufacture them in China or transfer technology. We 
have all kinds of agricultural access we never had before.
    But in a larger sense, what this is really about to me, having 
focused on the economy like a laser beam, is national security. Because 
China is the biggest country in the world, and in somewhere between 30 
and 50 years, it'll have the biggest economy, unless India outstrips it, 
which is conceivable. And when that happens, are we going to have a 
working relationship with them, or is it going to be a new cold war?
    Meanwhile, we want them to grow more open. I don't like the human 
rights abuses that exist there. But if we say no to them, we'll have no 
influence on their policies, because they think we're trying to stiff 
them. They'll get in the World Trade Organization anyway, but the 
Europeans will get all the trade benefits we negotiated and I fought for 
a year for. And I think the chances that there will be trouble between 
China and Taiwan will go up exponentially if the United States says no. 
I've already had to send carrier groups to the Taiwan Straits once, and 
I don't want to do it again. I will if I have to, but I don't want to do 
it again.
    If somebody were to ask--people are always asking me, ``Now, what 
have you learned as President. What can you tell somebody else?'' The 
one thing I learned about foreign policy is it's a lot more like real 
life than I thought it was. I mean, if you hear people talk about it, 
they always use these complicated words and all that. It's a lot more 
like real life. Nine times out of 10 you can get more with an 
outstretched hand than you can with a clenched fist, just like in real 
life. You never want to let your guard down, but you want to give people 
a chance to do the right thing, just like real life.
    And this is a big issue. And he took a brave position, and I want to 
be here to support him for it. And a decade from now, if we prevail, 
we'll wonder why we had the debate. And if we don't, we'll still be 
paying the price.
    One of the terrible things about public life is that sometimes you 
have to make tough decisions. I got so tickled--I read an article 
yesterday saying that I had real good approval ratings, and if it hadn't 
been for the bad approval ratings I had in '93 and '94, I'd have the 
highest average approval ratings of any President since they've been 
taking polls. And I thought, well--I showed it to Hillary and she said, 
``Sure, in '93 and '94 we made all the hard decisions that gave us the 
good approval ratings later.'' [Laughter]
    You know, even in good economic times, life doesn't give you 100 
percent easy decisions. So he's taking a tough decision. It's the right 
decision for America, and I respect it.
    The second thing I want to mention is education, because education 
will be a big subject of debate, as it should be, in this election. And 
education has now become like God, motherhood, and apple pie. Everybody 
is for it. But we had a strategy, and Baron Hill has come in to support 
a very part of that. Our strategy was, set high standards, have 
accountability, identify schools that are failing, require them to turn 
around or shut down,

[[Page 1035]]

stop social promotion, but don't blame the kids for the failure of the 
system, give them the help they need to succeed.
    And he's been especially active in promoting small, effective 
schools. I just want to tell you just two points about this and why it's 
so important.
    The Republicans, from Governor Bush on down, they're going to say 
they're for education. And they're going to say a lot of good things. 
And he'll be able to cite some things that happened in Texas. But here's 
the problem with their proposal. Their tax cut is so big and their 
defense increases are even bigger than the ones I proposed, and if you 
put those two things with their voucher proposal, there won't be any 
money left to do what they say they're going to do in education. And 
somehow we've got to get that out to the American people.
    The other point I want to make to you is this. When I became 
President, one of the things that frustrated me was a lot of people just 
didn't think things could get better. I mean, if I had run for President 
and I said, ``Now, you vote for me, and sometime in my second term, 
instead of having a $300 billion deficit we'll be paying down the 
debt,'' the voters would have said in '92, ``He seems like such a nice 
young man, but he's slightly deranged. We better send him home.'' 
[Laughter]
    When I leave office, we will have paid off $355 billion of the 
national debt. So if I said to you, ``Crime will go down every year in 
my administration,'' you would have said the same thing. If I said, 
``I'll cut the welfare rolls in half, or we will together,'' you would 
have said the same thing.
    What's the point of this? We now know it can get better. What I want 
you to understand is that public education can get better. I've been 
working on this over 20 years now. And Hillary and I put through this 
big education reform program in 1983, and we thought we knew what we 
were doing. But I can tell you that we now know more than we have ever 
known. And I just want to cite three things that are important to our 
philosophy, in the education tour I took last week.
    I went to St. Paul, Minnesota, to the Nation's first charter school. 
It's a public school with public funds set up outside the normal 
bureaucratic rules of a school system so that it can serve a specific 
population or have a special mission. The first charter school in the 
country, in St. Paul, was the only one that existed when I started 
running for President promoting charter schools and nobody in America 
knew what I was talking about.
    But I went to that school. There are over 100 kids in this high 
school. They all showed up. They were all kids that had not done well in 
other schools. A lot of them had had terrible, terrible problems in 
their personal lives, the kind of things that most of us would find it 
difficult to overcome. They're in school. There's no dropout rate. 
There's no violence in the school. There are no weapons in the school. 
The kids are learning; an extraordinary percentage of them are going on 
to college. It is working. And there are now 1,700 of those schools in 
America today. There are long waiting lists. Some of them have failed. 
But unlike other schools that have failed, they can be just shut down; 
you just revoke the charter.
    And I'll give you just two other examples. I went to Columbus, Ohio. 
And Columbus has gotten 55 of our teachers under our 100,000 teachers 
program to lower class size in the early grades. They took class size 
from 24 to 15 in the first three grades. And I went to this very poor 
neighborhood, to this elementary school where in one year--one year--
they went from 10 percent of their kids reading at or above grade level 
to 45 percent, from 10 percent of their kids doing math at or above 
grade level to 33 percent, from 10 percent of their kids doing science 
at or above grade level to 30 percent--in one year.
    I went to Owensboro, Kentucky, where in 1996 Kentucky was one of the 
first States to implement the requirement we got the Congress to pass 
that anybody got Federal aid, the States, had to identify their failing 
schools. They identified 170. Within 2 years, 91 percent of them weren't 
failing anymore.
    Now today, in this Owensboro school, in 3 years, here's what they 
did. They went from 12 percent of their kids reading at or above grade 
level to 57 percent, 5 percent doing math at or above grade level to 70 
percent, 0 percent doing science at or above grade level to 64 percent. 
They're the 18th best

[[Page 1036]]

grade school in the State of Kentucky, and two-thirds of the kids are 
eligible for free or reduced lunch.
    Of the 20 grade schools in that State that scored highest on the 
test, 10 of them--10 of them--have kids where at least half of them are 
eligible for free or reduced lunch. Race and income and location are not 
destiny if you have good schools. That's what we believe. That's the 
second reason I'm here--because I think if our crowd stays in control of 
the education policy of this country, we will have further excellence.
    And Al Gore has laid out an education plan that will enable us to 
hire more teachers--and there are going to be 700,000 retiring in the 
next few years, with the biggest student population we ever had--and 
have higher standards and put every kid who needs it in preschool and 
every child who needs it will have access to an after-school program and 
a summer school program.
    That is worth fighting an election on. That is the whole history of 
the country. And what Americans must believe is, just like we got the 
deficit gone and we're paying down the debt, just like we have got the 
crime rate down, just like we have got the welfare rolls down, all of 
our schools can become excellent schools and all of our kids can learn. 
That's the second reason I'm here, and that's worth fighting this 
election on. That's what our party ought to be standing for.
    So if somebody asks you why you came, say because the election ought 
to be fought out over what are we going to do with the good times. The 
answer is we're going to take on the big challenges. And the way to do 
it is to keep changing, based on the philosophy that has brought us to 
this point. And no person in the House of Representatives, in my 
judgment, better embodies that than Baron Hill.
    Thank you very much.

 Note:  The President spoke at approximately 9:35 p.m. at a private 
residence. In his remarks, he referred to reception hosts Joseph J. 
Andrew, national chair, Democratic National Committee, and his wife, 
Anne; Senator Bayh's wife, Susan; former Representative Lee H. Hamilton; 
and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas.