    [Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 33 (Monday, August 21, 2000)]
    [Pages 1865-1867]
    [Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

    <R04>
    Remarks at a Hollywood Tribute
    to the President in Los Angeles

    August 12, 2000

        Thank you so much. I want to thank all the people Hillary mentioned,
    all the other wonderful entertainers who are here in the audience
    tonight, all of our friends and supporters. There are so many things--
    I'd like to say something about everyone. I do have a confession to
    make. When I was in Aachen, Germany, the other day to receive the
    Charlemagne Prize, the ceremony began in Charlemagne's Church, built in
    the 8th century. And you can actually sit in the place where Charlemagne
    sat, and you can actually see the throne on which Charlemagne was
    crowned. And at that very moment, I really thought Shirley MacLaine was
    sitting right next to me. [Laughter]
        I would also like to thank the members of our family, some of whom
    are here tonight, some of whom, like my mother and Hillary's dad, aren't
    here anymore. I'd like to thank my mother-in-law and my stepfather, Dick
    Kelley, my brother and his family, Hillary's two brothers, our wonderful
    nephews, my wonderful sister-in-law, Maria. And all these times over the
    last 8 years, they shared a lot of the joy, which was their perfect
    right, but they also had to take a lot of the bullets, which they
    shouldn't have. And I'm really glad that they're here with us tonight.
        I was looking at those movies up there, interspersed with all the
    entertainment and the wonderful, wonderful things that were said. And by
    the way, the people that produced this show and conceived it did a
    fabulous job, and we ought to give them a round of applause, too.
    [Applause]
        And I was thinking how quickly it all passed and what an absolute
    joy it was. I want you to know that for me this was not only the
    greatest honor of my life but every day, even the bad days, were good
    days, as long as I remembered who hired me and what I was doing there.
        There were some days when the cost of doing business seemed
    reasonably high at the end of the 20th century, but it was still a joy.
    Because of you and the other Americans who gave me a chance to serve, I
    had a chance to save lives and lift lives. I hope I made some little
    kids and forgotten people think that they still counted. I hope that
    around the world, fewer people will die of AIDS, fewer children will
    grow up poor, fewer people will die in battle. I hope that here at home,
    now that we have this unbelievable prosperity, the American people will
    decide this year to make the most of it.
        That's the last thing I'd like to ask you. I've often wondered why I
    love music and movies so much. And Franklin Roosevelt

    [[Page 1866]]

    once said it was necessary for the President to be America's greatest
    actor. When I read it, I had no clue what he meant. Now I understand all
    too well. [Laughter] I think it is because public life and politics are
    more than reason, and progress is more than policy. It helps to have a
    pretty good mind. It helps even more to have a strong constitution and a
    reasonably high pain threshold. But in the end, the most important thing
    is to do the people's business from the heart.
        For in the end, it is the life we share with people whom we'll never
    know, many of whom have to struggle every day, perhaps that get into a
    wheelchair to move around or to keep body and soul together or to keep
    their kids out of trouble. But the difference between them and us is
    actually quite small.
        I used to tell people in some of the dark days, when they'd say,
    ``Don't you sometimes regret that you ever got into this?'' I'd say,
    ``Lord, no. Just a few twists in the road, and I could be home doing
    real estate transactions in a musty loft.''
        This has worked out wonderfully, because America is better off. I
    want you to remember that for me it was an affair of the heart, that
    every slogan I ever used was something I believed. I still believe we
    should put people first. I still believe that everybody counts;
    everybody ought to have a chance; we all do better when we help each
    other. I still believe we ought to build bridges instead of walls. I
    still think we should never stop thinking about tomorrow.
        And more than anything else, I feel gratitude. But more than
    anything else, you should feel, if you really believe what was said and
    what we celebrated, that the best is yet to be. It is a rare thing when
    a country has a chance to build a future of its dreams for its children.
        When Hillary decided to run for the Senate after half a dozen New
    York Congressmen asked her to do it, and she stirred around up there and
    decided she kind of liked it and that she wanted to do things that still
    needed doing that she had worked on all of her life, I was really proud
    of her, because we could have spent more evenings like this, and we
    could have simply spent the last year celebrating and enjoying the good
    fortune that our country has had, perhaps in some measure because of our
    efforts.
        But she took all those things I've been saying all these years to
    heart. So after 30 years of helping other people and fighting for good
    causes, she decided to run for office. I hope you'll help her win, and I
    thank you for your help tonight.
        And I just want to say one thing about the Vice President and Joe
    Lieberman. I couldn't top what Red Buttons said. I wish I'd written it
    down. I might actually crib it Monday night when I speak. [Laughter] Al
    Gore is a good person, a brilliant person, a hard-working person. But
    the reason you ought to be for him is he understands how to keep this
    magical prosperity going and how to spread it to the people that, I
    regret to say, are still left behind.
        He understands the future. He was talking about global warming when
    we ran in '92, and people were still making fun of him. Now even the oil
    companies admit that it's real. He understands the implications of the
    Internet because he helped to take it out of being a private province of
    a handful of physicists.
        When we became President and Vice President, there were only--listen
    to this--50 sites on the World Wide Web. Today, there are 10 million or
    20 million. He understands the magical promise of the human genome but
    doesn't want anybody to have a little gene map that costs them their
    health insurance or their job. And I want somebody in the White House
    that understands the future, because it's really unfolding fast.
        And picking Joe Lieberman showed a lot of judgment, as well as a lot
    of character. Hillary and I met Joe Lieberman when he was 28 years old,
    running for the State Senate, not so long after he had been a Freedom
    Rider in the South, helping black people to register to vote, when it
    was still very segregated. I've known him a long time. He also is a
    brilliant man, who is a little bit of an iconoclast and not afraid to
    think differently. And we need some of that in the White House, too,
    because it's awful easy to get hidebound there and to stay with the
    conventional wisdom.
        But the most important thing is, to me anyway, they want to take us
    all along for the ride. And they think the people who worked

    [[Page 1867]]

    this stage tonight whose names we'll never know deserve the same chance
    we have to send their children to college and to build the American
    dream for their families. They think in the arena of citizenship there
    are no backup singers, that everybody should have a starring role, and
    that's real important to me.
        So that's the last thing I'd say to you. Whoopi said it right; I'm
    not going anywhere except to a different line of work. I'll try to be a
    useful citizen, and I'll try to hang around. But it's in your hands now.
    And the best thing you could do to honor me is to go out to everybody
    you can find between now and November, through every network of
    influence you have, and say, ``Hey, the best is still out there, and the
    problems are still out there, and the challenges are still out there.''
        And those of you who are at least as old as I am know that the kind
    of chance we have today to build the future of our dreams for our kids
    maybe--maybe--comes along once in a lifetime, and nothing stays the
    same.
        So thanks for the honor. Thanks for the memories you gave me
    tonight. But don't stop thinking about tomorrow.
        God bless you, and thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:15 p.m. at a private residence. In his
    remarks, he referred to entertainers Shirley MacLaine, Red Buttons, and
    Whoopi Goldberg; and the President's brother, Roger Clinton, mother-in-
    law, Dorothy Rodham, and brothers-in-law Tony and Hugh Rodham.