[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 25 (Monday, June 26, 2000)]
[Pages 1421-1425]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at an Irish-American Democrats Dinner Honoring Terence McAuliffe

June 21, 2000

    Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, let me say, 
I had to rush over here from another event, and I didn't

[[Page 1422]]

have time to go change my tie. [Laughter] I thank you for letting me 
come anyway.
    Thank you, Stella, for everything you said and for everything you've 
done these last 4 years. Thank you, Chris Dodd, for being willing to 
take the chairmanship of the Democratic Party when they said our party 
and its President were dead as a doornail, and we proved that we had a 
little Irish left. [Laughter] And you've been great, and I'll never be 
able to thank you enough.
    We have some other people here I want to acknowledge: the best 
Secretary of Education in the history of this country, Dick Riley is 
here; Congressman Joe Crowley from Queens. Congressman Jim Maloney from 
Connecticut is here, I think. Where are you, Jim? [Applause] Lieutenant 
Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend from Maryland.
    Let me say--I'm going to do a little pander here--I'll be bad fooled 
if someday we're not out here campaigning for her on the national 
ticket.
    And now we come to the would-be, want-to-be Irish--[laughter]--and 
some very good friends of Ireland, Senator Chuck Robb of Virginia. I've 
said this every place I could, but one of the things the Irish admire 
are people of conscience who do what they think is right against all the 
odds. I could make you a very compelling case that based on his 
constituency and the people arrayed against him, that Chuck Robb is the 
bravest person in the United States Senate. He needs your help to be 
reelected, and I want you to help him.
    Congressman Donald Payne from New Jersey, a true friend of ours, 
thank you. And Representative Sheila Jackson Lee from Houston is here. 
Our present Democratic chair and the former mayor of Philadelphia, Ed 
Rendell. The first time he ran for mayor he spent half his advertising 
money trying to convince people he was Irish. [Laughter]
    Then we have, I see John Raffaelli back there, the Italian-Irish--
[laughter]--Tim Chorba over there; Rashid Chaudary the Pakistani-Irish--
[laughter]. I'm saying this for a point. I'm getting to McAuliffe here 
in a minute. [Laughter] I want to say three things very briefly.
    First of all, I want to thank you. Thank you for giving me the 
chance to serve as President. Thank you for supporting me. Thank you for 
helping us to make America's role in the Irish peace process a 
constructive one and to do the things that have been done here in the 
United States. It's been an unbelievable experience. We've still got a 
lot to do, and it's also been a lot of fun. And it wouldn't have been 
any of that if I hadn't had the support of the American Irish, and we 
hadn't been involved, as we've had the chance to be, in the Irish peace 
process. It's been a wonderful experience, and I'm very grateful to you.
    The second thing I want to say to you is that the President may get 
all the blame when things go wrong, but he also gets the credit when 
things go right. And very often a lot of other people are involved, 
without whom none of that would have happened. And I want to mention two 
people in particular because they both need your help.
    One is, when I took all that flack for getting involved in the Irish 
peace process, and I was being ridiculed by the members of the other 
party--Secretary Baker, a man I actually like quite a lot, did call it 
``Gullible's Travel.'' None of the elitists really thought I ought to do 
it. But all us blue-collar rednecks thought it was a pretty good idea.
    But I want you to know that it was tough. And there was a huge part 
of the permanent Government that thought I had taken leave of my senses. 
And I want you to know that Al Gore stood with me in that. And you need 
to know that.
    The second thing I want to say is that I'm especially proud of the 
work that my wife did in Northern Ireland with the Vital Voices, the 
women, the Protestant and Catholic women. And they need your help, and 
they deserve it.
    And I want to say one other thing about the peace process. One of 
the reasons that I wanted to do this, quite apart from my Irish roots 
where the Cassidy family goes back to Fermanagh--[inaudible]--and 
they've given me a little water color of the 18th century farmhouse. 
It's the oldest house we can find that has any ties to anybody that's 
kin to me that at least will admit it. [Laughter] When

[[Page 1423]]

I got elected President, I had all these relatives turn up, you know. 
[Laughter] It was kind of weird.
    I did get a letter, you should know, though, from an 88-year-old 
woman in northern Louisiana who explained to me--and she sent an 
identical letter to the other person--how I was the 12th cousin of the 
great mystery writer from Mississippi, John Grisham. And my mother's 
parents were Cassidy and Grisham. And of all the people--and I wrote 
John a letter, and he's a wonderful guy, used to be a Democratic 
legislator in Mississippi, which was almost an oxymoron for a while, but 
we're coming back. [Laughter] And I told him that I was delighted, not 
only because I liked his books but because of all the relatives that had 
turned up, he was the only one who had any money. [Laughter] So I liked 
that.
    But I felt, in addition to wanting to do this, that if we could make 
it work, this old, old conflict, with its legendary, sometimes romantic, 
often horrible ramifications, that the United States could then go to 
other places in the world and make the same argument--that if the Irish 
could do it, you could do it.
    You might be interested to know, you might remember that not very 
long ago, around last Christmas, I went to Kosovo, after the war was 
over. And we're still having a lot of trouble there, but the wounds are 
fresher there. And I got everybody in the room, the leaders of all the 
various sects--the various Kosovar Albanian groups and the Serbian 
groups and the minority groups there--there are several other ethnic 
minorities there--and we're sitting around a little table and metal 
chairs in this little airport room. And I said, ``Look, let me tell you 
something. I've been working for all these years on the Irish peace 
process.'' And I said, ``Here's the deal they've agreed to: the 
principle of consent, majority rule, minority rights, shared 
decisionmaking, shared benefits, and ties to their neighbors that they 
have ethnic and religious ties to.''
    I said, ``Now, you can have that deal today, or you can air all your 
grievances and whine and beat the table and walk away and refuse to talk 
to each other and keep letting people die around the edges. And 20 years 
from now somebody else will be sitting in metal chairs like this, making 
the deal. And the deal will be majority rule, minority rights, shared 
decisionmaking, shared benefits, and ties with your neighbors. You can 
do it now, or you can do it later. But you look at what the Irish did--
that's what you're going to have to do. You can do it now, or later. I'd 
advise you to do it now, while the rest of the world still cares a whole 
lot about you.''
    If this hadn't happened in Ireland, I could not have made that 
speech. And you need to know that.
    Now, the next thing I want to tell you is, I realize I'm preaching 
to the saved here, and I don't need to give you a campaign speech for Al 
Gore or for our candidates for the Senate or the House. But I want to 
tell you, I worked as hard as I could to deal with the big problems of 
this country, to turn the country around, to get it going in the right 
direction. Nothing lasts forever. If you've ever been through bad times, 
you thank God for that. But when you have good times, you really have to 
cherish them and make the most of them.
    This country has the chance of a lifetime now to build the future of 
our dreams for these children. People ask me all the time, who do you 
think is going to win the election? And my answer is, it depends on what 
the people think the election is about. Often, the answer depends upon 
the question you ask. And what this election ought to be about is how 
are we going to make the most of this moment of promise for all the 
people of this country? How are we going to fulfill our responsibilities 
to people around the world, to build the kind of world we want our 
children to live in? How are we going to deal with these big things?
    So, I'm for Al Gore because he's by far the most effective Vice 
President in the history of the country. He's done more good and had 
more impact in that job by far than anybody who ever had it. Because he 
will keep the prosperity going, because he wants to spread it to people 
who haven't been part of it, and because he understands the future and 
knows how to get us there--so I'm for him.

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    But the things I want you to remember about this election are these: 
It's real important. There are profound differences between our 
candidates. And number three, only the Democrats want you to know what 
those differences are.
    You watch these guys campaigning; you'd think they'd never even had 
a primary and made those commitments. Like all of this just sprung--and 
it's flattering, and I suppose we should be happy about it, but you need 
to go out there and tell people about that. We're for a Patients' Bill 
of Rights, and they're not. We believe that everybody on Medicare ought 
to have access to prescription drugs they can afford, and they don't. 
We're for an increase in the minimum wage, and they aren't. And I could 
go on and on.
    But this is very important. Look, we don't have to run these 
elections the way some of these sort of tormented elections have been 
run in the last 20 years, where each candidate was trying to convince 
the people that their opponent was just one notch above a car thief. I 
mean, this doesn't have to be a negative campaign. Nobody has to be 
smeared. You can say, ``Look, we've got honorable people from the top to 
the bottom on both sides. All we have to do is assume they mean what 
they say, see what they've said, see what they've done, compare where 
they are and where they want to go. Let the American people make up 
their mind.'' It ought to be a serious election, but a decent one. But 
don't pretend there are no differences, and don't let anybody tell you 
when you point out the difference that that's a negative campaign.
    Because there are people here who want the voters to believe there 
are no real consequences to which way they vote. And that is not true. 
I've done everything I could do to turn this country around, to keep it 
going. I'm going to do everything I can in the next 7 months I have. But 
you've got to do your job and give the election back to the people, but 
tell them there are real consequences and real differences, and they 
need to face up to what they are and vote--[inaudible].
    Now, what's all this got to do with Terry? A lot. [Laughter] A lot. 
I told somebody the other day, I think there's a real difference in 
whether somebody who's done well in this country and made some money, 
got a world of friends and contacts, is out there raising money to get 
himself another tax cut, or to try to get the people who work in this 
hotel an increase in their wages, or give them a tax break so their kids 
can go to college, or trying to make sure all working people can afford 
to give their children health insurance.
    And in the system we have, I wouldn't still be here doing what I'm 
doing if he didn't do what he's done. You'd be amazed how many 
conversations we have where we're just talking about the issues. Well, 
how are you doing with the Middle East peace process? Are you going to 
get that Patients' Bill of Rights or not? So the first thing I want you 
to know is this guy believes in what we're doing. If he didn't, he could 
be over there in the other party and he'd be making more money, out of 
raising all this money, than he's going to do because of me and what 
he's doing for the Vice President.
    The second thing I want you to know is that he and I have one thing 
in common that maybe shows that we both need help. [Laughter] But we're 
crazy enough to think that this is fun and that we're lucky to be doing 
this. I can just tell you from my point of view, one or two little other 
breaks in life and I'd still be home doing deeds and real estate 
transfers, you know. [Laughter] People say, ``Oh, hasn't it been 
horrible?'' I say, ``Are you kidding? I could be home writing deeds.'' 
[Laughter]
    You need to know--McAuliffe goes out to L.A., and they say we're 
having trouble financing the convention. He's there 3 hours and total 
strangers are walking up to him on the street throwing money at him. I 
mean, it's unbelievable. [Laughter] Why? Because he's having a good 
time, obviously doing what he believes.
    It is a great gift to be able to make people believe that they can 
do something important and enjoy it at the same time. It is a great gift 
to make people believe that they have something unique that they can 
contribute. It is the true mark of leadership, since none of us is 
indispensable--me included--none of us have the whole truth, and all of 
us have something to give. He is better at making people understand that 
than any human being I have ever known.

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    And Stella was up here bragging about how he had intelligence and 
energy and charm. And I thought, where's the blarney part? [Laughter] 
But I'm telling you, I know this guy. I know him well. And he's kind of 
hot right now because he's raising all this money and having a good time 
doing it. But what you need to know is, he believes in what he raised it 
for. He believes in what we've done here these last 8 years. And he 
knows that we couldn't have done it if he hadn't done what he did.
    And he's given in unique ways thousands of us a chance to be a part 
of changing America for the better. And I think that's something that 
his wife and his children and his family and his friends ought to be 
very, very proud of. Because this is a better country today because of 
Terry McAuliffe.
    Thank you very much.

 Note:  The President spoke at 8:15 p.m. in the Rooftop Ballroom at the 
Washington Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Stella O'Leary, 
president, Irish-American Democrats; John D. Raffaelli, partner, 
Washington Group; former U.S. Ambassador to Singapore Timothy A. Chorba; 
and Rashid Chaudary, president, Raani Corporation.