[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 26 (Monday, July 3, 2000)]
[Pages 1548-1551]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Reception for Representative Sanford D. Bishop, Jr.

June 29, 2000

    Thank you. If I had any sense, I wouldn't say a word after that. 
[Laughter]
    Thank you, Margo. I want to thank you and Briggs for opening your 
beautiful home. I had a great time. They took me in through the ground 
floor, where there are all the golf clubs and golf pictures. [Laughter] 
I almost didn't make it up here to you, folks. [Laughter]
    I want to thank you all for helping Sanford Bishop. I have a lot of 
friends here. In case any of you think I was scandalizing Ada 
Hollingsworth, we've been friends for more than 20 years, so it's okay. 
[Laughter] And Calvin Smyre was with me in 1991, when only my mother 
thought I could be elected President. [Laughter] Jesse Brown and 
Secretary West and Ron Dellums and I--I miss him in the Congress, and so 
many of the rest of you here. I thank you for being here for him.
    Sanford, I thank you for everything you said, and especially for 
that poem. People used to tell me in the tough times in the last 8 years 
that the good Lord never gives you more to carry than you can carry. And 
I thought, ``Well, he's certainly tested the envelope with me.'' 
[Laughter] There was a time or two you could have fooled me. [Laughter]
    People ask me all the time, ``Well, what did you do? How did you do 
all that?'' And I don't have much of an answer, except I got up every 
day and realized that all those people that were kind of after me, 
didn't hire me in the first place, that people like you hired me, and I 
just figured if I worked on my job and treated the rest as the cost of 
doing business in the 1990's, that everything would work out all right. 
And it sort of did.

[[Page 1549]]

    I want to say to you that, you know, I do a fair number of these; I 
always try to help our Members, our Representatives and our Senators. 
It's very important to me. But it was especially important to me to be 
here tonight because I think that Sanford Bishop represents what, to me, 
is the best in our party and in our country and, to me, the best hope of 
our becoming a majority party again.
    Look at all the people who are here tonight. He's got people from 
the agricultural community, people from the industrial community. He's 
got the friends he grew up with, which to me is always the acid test. 
[Laughter] I'm the only guy you ever met who got elected because of his 
friends. Nobody ever got elected just because he has friends, before. 
But I believe that--you know, because they'll like you if you're running 
a service station. [Laughter] And that's pretty important.
    I want you to know that this guy has served well, and he has had to 
take a lot of tough votes. For some of our Members, everything I wanted 
to do--they've been in totally safe seats. They've had people that 
thought sort of just like we did, and they never had to cast a tough 
vote. There is no telling how many tough votes this man has had to cast 
to get our economy turned around, to get the crime rate down, to do 
things that were right.
    So he could have read that poem about himself. And I wanted to be 
here for that reason. Because if we can't command the support of people 
like the ones he represents in Georgia, we can't really be a majority 
party. So I admire him, I like him, and I'm grateful.
    Now, I just want you to know three things about this election--tell 
you everything you need to know. Number one, it is real important. It's 
just as important as the elections of '92 and '96 were. And in 1992, as 
Sanford said, this country was in deep trouble. One of the biggest 
problems the Vice President has got today in this election is, everybody 
has forgotten what it was like before we showed up. They sort of pocket 
that, take it for granted. This country was in trouble.
    But to be fair, we knew what we had to do. We knew we had to change 
the economic policy. We knew we had to change the social policy. We knew 
if we were going to get the crime rate down and reduce welfare, reduce 
poverty, lift children up, grow the economy, help people who were left 
out and left behind work themselves into the middle class, we had to 
change things. And so we did. And then in '96, we knew that if we wanted 
it to work, we had to ratify that, we had to build that bridge to the 
21st century, in the slogan of our campaign.
    This election is just as important. Why? Because how a country 
chooses to deal with its moments of prosperity and promise is just as 
stern a test of our judgment, even our character, as how we deal with 
adversity.
    There are a lot of young people here tonight, and I'm really glad, a 
lot of young people working for Sanford and working this event. And I'm 
grateful for that, and I like that. We even have a young woman from 
Russia here tonight. There you are. You're welcome here. We're glad to 
have you here.
    But I want to say something here to the people that aren't so young. 
[Laughter] No, wait a minute. Calm down. There is not a person in this 
audience tonight over 30 who cannot remember at least one time in your 
life when you made a humdinger of a mistake, either a personal mistake 
or a business mistake, not because things were going so badly but 
because things were going so well, you thought there was no penalty to 
the failure to concentrate.
    And that's what we've got to deal with in this election and the 
congressional races and the Senate races and the Presidential race. So 
the first thing is, this is really important. In my lifetime, our 
country has never had at the same time so much economic prosperity, 
social progress, national self-confidence with the absence of gripping, 
paralyzing crisis at home or threat abroad.
    Now, what are we going to do with it? That's what this election is 
about. What do we propose to do with a truly magic moment? And it is a 
very stern test of our judgment, as well as our character and our 
values.
    The second thing I want to say to you is: There are real differences 
between the two parties. And you don't have to be hateful to say that. I 
tell everybody, you know, we can

[[Page 1550]]

really have a positive election this year because we can talk about the 
honest differences in our different vision of what we ought to do with 
this moment. And that's great. We've had enough elections over the last 
20 years when the candidates tried to convince the voters that their 
opponents were just one notch above a car thief. [Laughter] And you know 
what I'm talking about. We don't have to do this. We can assume that 
everybody is honorable and that they mean exactly what they say. But 
there are real differences.
    The third thing I want you to remember--and this is the kicker; this 
ought to tell you who you ought to vote for--only the Democrats want you 
to know what those differences are. [Laughter] Now, what does that tell 
you? It's interesting, the Republicans, who sort of pioneered this sort 
of mean, vicious campaign--what they did to McCain in the primary was 
embarrassing even to those of us who thought we'd seen it all. 
[Laughter] And now they all take the position that if you talk about how 
they voted or where they stand, you're running a negative campaign. If 
you give the voters information that's relevant to the decisions that 
are going to be made about their future, that's somehow going negative, 
and that's bad. I don't agree with that. Going negative is when you 
attack your opponent personally, when you say there is something wrong 
with their character, their value system, they're bad people.
    But why have an election if you're not going to have a debate? But 
you just remember those three things: It's an important election; there 
are real differences; only the Democrats want you to know what they are.
    Now, lest you think I'm kidding, there was a story in the press a 
few days ago saying that the Republicans in the House, where Sanford 
served, had hired a pollster to tell them what words or phrases to use 
so they could convince the people that they're for a drug benefit for 
all the disabled and senior citizens on Medicare, even though they're 
not.
    Now, this is not what you normally hire a pollster for. At least, I 
don't. Normally, you hire a pollster to figure out how you're doing in 
an election, whether what you believe in is flying, and not to change 
your positions but to change your campaign, emphasize other issues some. 
But this is--it's astonishing--hire a pollster to give you the words and 
phrases so that the people will think you're for something you're not, 
that is, to blur the differences. And I see this all over.
    But there are differences. We're for a Patients' Bill of Rights that 
is real and enforceable, and they're not, by and large. I'm talking 
about the leadership and the vast majority. And we're for a 
comprehensive Medicare drug benefit for senior citizens, and they're 
not. And we're for a tax cut, but one that helps people educate their 
kids or pay for child care or pay long-term care for family members that 
you've got to take care of, but that's affordable so we don't spend all 
this projected surplus, and we can keep paying the debt down and 
preserve Medicare and Social Security for the next generation, when all 
us baby boomers retire. And they don't agree with that. They really 
believe that you can take all this non-Social Security surplus right now 
and commit to spend it all on tax cuts or their Social Security plan, 
their missile defense plan, the other spending things--just spend it 
all.
    Now, if I were to ask you tonight, what is your projected income 
over the next 10 years, you would all have a different answer. And then 
I said, ``Okay, how much confidence do you have that this is your 
projected income?'' And you say, ``Oh, I'm more than 50 percent sure.'' 
I'd say, ``Great. Now, I want you to sign on the dotted line--here's a 
piece of paper--that you're going to spend every nickel of it right now, 
and you can't get out of it for the next 10 years.'' That's their plan.
    And I'm just telling you, we didn't get to where we are today 
without being careful. Interest rates are low. If you keep interest 
rates a point lower for the next decade than they would otherwise be--do 
you know what that's worth to you? Two hundred and fifty billion dollars 
in lower home mortgages alone--in lower home mortgages alone.
    So we don't have the more popular side of this argument. They're 
saying, ``Hey, we'll give it all back to you right now. We know what our 
income is going to be for the next 10 years, and we're going to sign it 
away.'' And we say, ``Excuse me, but we were in

[[Page 1551]]

debt''--we had quadrupled our national debt in the 12 years before our 
side showed up, and now we're going to pay off $400 billion of our debt 
before I leave office, and I'd like to get this country out of debt so 
these kids will always have low interest rates and be able to afford a 
college loan, a car loan, a home mortgage, and we'll be able to keep 
growing this economy. It's a huge difference. It's huge.
    And I could go through issue after issue--the hate crimes 
legislation, the environmental position, in the Presidential race, the 
appointments--two to four people to the Supreme Court. Did you see all 
these decisions that came out this week? Five to four, six to three. 
There are going to be two to four appointments in the Supreme Court. 
Either one of them will change the balance of the Supreme Court--either 
one. The question is, how do you want it to go?
    So here you've got this guy who is, I think, a really stand-up 
person. There are so many times in the last 8 years when it would have 
been easy for him to take a dive and call me on the phone and say, ``Now 
listen, man, you're my buddy, but I've got a problem'' -- [laughter]--
``and my district is not like the whole rest of America, you know; it's 
rural. And I've got all these farmers, and they think I'm a little too, 
you know, maybe close to you anyway. I don't know.'' [Laughter] I mean, 
just time after time, when we really needed somebody to stand up, he 
stood up. So I'm glad you're here helping him. But I want you to leave 
here committed to help shape this political environment.
    This election is going to be fine. The American people normally get 
it right, if they have enough information and enough time to digest it. 
Otherwise, we wouldn't be here. We're the oldest big democracy in the 
whole history of the planet. And other people think it's a pretty good 
idea because over the last 8 or 9 years, we've had more people living 
under democratic governments than non-democratic governments for the 
first time in all of human history, around the world.
    Russia, where she is from, they just had their first transition from 
one democratically elected President to another in a thousand years. 
This works if people have enough information and enough time to digest 
it. So I have absolute confidence in the outcome of this election if the 
people have enough information and enough opportunity to digest it. But 
you've got to help that.
    The only problem here is, good times are full of danger as well as 
opportunity. So you sort of slide along here and think, well, there is 
not really much difference; these two guys seem pretty nice; our side 
had it for 8 years, maybe we should give their side a chance--you know, 
just sort of, blah, blah, blah, I've heard all this stuff. [Laughter]
    And I'm telling you, you just remember, if people ask you about the 
election, you say, ``It is really important, and I want you to take it 
seriously.'' If you meet a Republican, an independent, anybody, you tell 
them that. In a lifetime you may get one chance--one chance--to set a 
course in times as good as this. Even the kids here may never see 
another time like this. And then the second thing you tell them is, 
there are real differences, and you should listen to both sides. And 
then the third thing you tell them is, however--a key to who you'll 
agree with is--only the Democrats really want you to know what the 
differences are. And the final thing is, a guy like Sanford Bishop, he 
can always make all the difference.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

 Note:  The President spoke at 9:17 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to reception hosts Fernal and Margo Briggs; Ada 
Hollingsworth, owner, A&A Travel Services; former Georgia State 
Representative Calvin Smyre; former Representative Ron Dellums; former 
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jesse Brown; and Senator John McCain. 
Representative Bishop is a candidate for reelection in Georgia's 2d 
Congressional District.