[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.