[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 37 (Monday, September 18, 2000)]
[Pages 2055-2059]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Reception for Congressional Candidate Mike Ross

September 12, 2000

    The President. Thank you very much. Well, this is a special way for 
me to end what has been a special day, here in the home of my oldest 
friend in the world. The older we get, the more we want to say, longest 
standing--[laughter]--or some phony substitute. Mack and Donna Kay have 
been so wonderful to me, and I'm very grateful that they

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did this for Mike, because it's particularly important, and I want to 
say a little more about that.
    I want to thank Senator Bumpers and Senator Lincoln and all the 
Members of Congress who are here from Arkansas and throughout the 
country and former Members who are here and all the members of my 
administration who are here and all of you who are here without whom I 
would not be here myself and those of you who have worked so hard to 
make our last 8 years successful for America.
    You know, Mack was my first Chief of Staff, and then he was my Envoy 
to the Americas. And I think he now feels as at home in any South 
American country as he does in south Arkansas--[laughter]--because he's 
done such a great job for our country, and I'm very grateful for that.
    And I'm grateful for all of you who've served in this 
administration, one way or the other--those of you still here to the 
bitter end and those of you that got out when you can still make some 
money. [Laughter] Look at old Billy laughing. [Laughter]
    Now, I want to say a few things about this race. On the way down, 
Mack looked at me, and he put his arm around me, and he said, ``Now, you 
know, you can't go down there and say what you really think.'' 
[Laughter] ``Show a little restraint.'' So I'll try.
    I want you to know a couple of things about Mike Ross and a couple 
things about south Arkansas. This district runs the whole length of the 
southern part of our State. It includes not only Hope, the place where I 
was born, but Hot Springs, the place where I grew up.
    It includes a big chunk of the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest 
parts of America. In fact, it's the poorest part of America outside of 
the Native American reservations. It is an unbelievably wonderful place. 
I don't know that I ever had so much fun in my life as I did campaigning 
down there. It's a place where personal contact matters a lot, and it's 
a place where I got 63 percent of the vote in the 1996 Presidential 
election. It is, therefore, the most Democratic seat in America 
presently held by a Republican, a genial person and a person who, 
wherever two or more gathered, was always happy to go, and that's good 
politics in south Arkansas. I know. I've been there. I never lost since 
they stood with me through thick and thin.
    And it's a long way from Washington to the piney woods of south 
Arkansas, a long way from those soybean fields. And it's sometimes hard 
to get the message clear over the transom that exists between here and 
there. But all I can tell you is, I think that part of our State and our 
entire State are better off because of the economics, the education, the 
health care policies we've pursued, and whenever the chips were down, 
the Representative from south Arkansas was always on the other side.
    Whenever the people down there needed one thing and the party 
leaders up here of the Republican Party said another, another always 
won. Over and over and over again, for 8 long years. It was just as hard 
politically for Blanche Lambert to stand up there 8 years ago and vote 
for that economic plan, as it would have been for the Congressman from 
the Fourth Congressional District. She did it, and he didn't, because 
they told him not to.
    And when they said, ``Now, here's this budget with the biggest 
education and environmental and health care cuts in history, and, oh, by 
the way, we're going to abolish the Department of Education,'' he stood 
up there and said, ``Yes, sir, count me in.''
    And I'll bet you there never was a speech given about it at any 
country crossroad in south Arkansas. More to the point, when they--when 
we finally got out of debt and started running surpluses and started 
paying down an accumulated national debt which had quadrupled in the 12 
years before we came here, when they controlled the economic policy of 
the country, then they were up here voting for tax cuts, most of which 
would go to a lot of people in this room that don't need it as bad as 
they need--[laughter]--as bad as you need lower interest rates in a 
strong economy and a good stock market that will give you a better 
future.

[At this point, a member of the audience collapsed.]

    The President. We've got a doctor here. It's just hot. Can we get my 
doctor back there? Yes, open the door. Get the air in

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here. Oh, Vic's back there. Doctor Prince is there. Well, we should have 
opened that long ago; look how breezy it is. You can't do any good by 
staring, so just come back here. Let him go to work.
    Now, let me tell you just two other things that are more important. 
All these elections are always about the future.
    Can you get through? We now have three doctors. [Laughter] We 
observe the Patients' Bill of Rights in practice, even though it's not 
law yet. [Laughter]
    I want to tell you just two other things. I've known Mike Ross, as 
he told you, since he was a teenager. And when I heard he wanted to run 
for Congress, I told everybody that would listen that he could win if he 
won the nomination. You know why? Because he'll go to every country 
crossroads, too. He'll be working when his opponent quits, and when he 
gets elected, he'll actually vote for the people that he said he was 
going to try to help.
    This is not a complicated deal here. This is simple, 
straightforward, but hard. The reason he needs your money is, the people 
have got to understand what the consequences of their vote is, not in 
south Arkansas but in Washington.
    I can't help just making one other point. You know, I can't 
believe--the other day I got questioned by a reporter from a paper that 
had always opposed me when I was down there, asking me if I didn't feel 
bad that I hadn't delivered more pork barrel to Arkansas like Lyndon 
Johnson did to Texas. And I thought to myself: Well, if we had a 
Democratic majority in Congress and all the Representatives and Senators 
from Arkansas were Democrats, we could have done a lot better on that 
one, once the economy turned around.
    The last thing I want to say is, elections are always about the 
future. I worked really hard to turn this country around, and we're in 
better shape than we were 8 years ago, but I believe what I said at the 
convention. The best is still out there. I've waited since I was a boy 
for my country to be in a position to build the future of our dreams for 
our children. All the best is still out there.
    So even though my party has a new leader, whom I believe will be the 
next President, and his Vice Presidential partner is a man who's been a 
friend of mine for 30 years, and a very, very good person; even though 
my family has a new candidate--and I had one of the great thrills of my 
life voting for her this morning for the first time--I have decided to 
assume the role of Cheerleader in Chief in this election. [Laughter]
    What I want you to know is, the best is still out there, but it 
depends on what decisions the American people make, for President and 
Vice President, the Senate races and the House races. I'm just telling 
you, you need--those of you from Arkansas need to go home and lay the 
bacon down to all those people.
    When I passed that economic plan by a single vote, they said it was 
going to wreck the economy. Like Mike said, time has not been kind to 
their prediction. When I signed the Brady bill, when Mike and I got that 
done, I thought half the hunters in Arkansas were going to write us off 
the list, and the Congressman from down there was telling everybody, 
``Oh, this is going to end hunting, and it's going to end the way of 
life in Arkansas.'' I want every hunter that missed a single day, an 
hour in the deer woods, to vote against Mike Ross for Congress, and 
every other one ought to vote for him, because the crime rate has gone 
down for 7 years in a row in this country, because we put 100,000 police 
on the streets.
    If you look ahead--let me just mention two or three of the issues. 
If they win, they're going to give those of us who are in good income 
groups--and finally, maybe I'll be making at least half what Mack does 
next year--and we'll get some sort of short-term satisfaction, but 
they'll put this country back in debt.
    I'm telling you, by the time you add up all the taxes they passed 
last year--this year, that they promise to pass again and all the ones 
their nominee promised to pass and the trillion dollar cost of partially 
privatizing Social Security--$1 trillion--and all their other spending 
policies, you're back in deficits again.
    If you want to know--you know what it would mean--I just got an 
economic analysis that said that if the Vice President's economic 
program passes and we keep on track

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to get this country out of debt in 12 years for the first time since 
1835, it will keep interest rates one percent lower for a decade than it 
would if the other nominee's program and the program of this Congress, 
the congressional majority, passes.
    Do you know what that's worth? Listen to this: $390 billion in 10 
years in home mortgages; $30 billion in car payments; $15 billion in 
college loan payments. In other words, a $425 billion tax cut to 
ordinary working families, like the people that live in south Arkansas.
    Now, that's just one example. They promised to get rid of the 
100,000 police program, and the other 50,000 we're putting on, even 
though crime has gone down 7 years in a row because we're preventing 
more crime. There are consequences to this.
    They're not for a Patients' Bill of Rights, because HMO's don't want 
it. I don't know about you, but I want more young people not only to run 
for Congress but to want to be physicians, want to be in general 
practice, and want to know if they'd make a referral to a specialist, 
because somebody desperately needs it, they're not going to be second-
guessed.
    I don't like the fact that most health care plans won't let people 
who aren't in so-called high risk groups get tests for colon cancer, 
when we know that if 100 percent of us, after we got over 50, did the 
test, we'd cut the death rate by 50 percent in 2 years. I don't like 
that. There are consequences to this.
    They talk about how they're for Medicare drugs, and they want to 
help the poor people first because this plan might be so expensive. My 
Medicare drug program--and they've got that ad on, talking about how we 
want the Government to take over health care. We want Medicare to run a 
drug program. Medicare has lower administrative costs, by far, than any 
HMO in America.
    Even the insurance companies--God bless them; I've got to give them 
this--even the insurance companies have tried to tell the Republicans 
they can't offer drug insurance at affordable rates, and nobody will buy 
it. And in Nevada, they tried it, and they couldn't get a single company 
to offer it. And the Republican majority says, ``I don't care. They're 
going to offer it, or you can't have your drugs. But we're going to give 
it to the poor people.''
    What they don't say is, half the people in this country, half the 
senior citizens who need medicine and can't afford it and don't have 
insurance, are not covered by their program. They're above 150 or 175 
percent of the poverty line. Do you know what 175 percent of the poverty 
line is? Fourteen thousand seven hundred dollars for a senior citizen. 
So if you make $14,800 and you've got a $200 drug bill a month, which is 
small compared to what some people in that age group have, you get 
nothing.
    Now, there are consequences to this, and what you are doing here, if 
you're not from Arkansas, is giving him the money to make sure that we 
can run ads down there, so that people understand when he shows up at 
the country store, they'll get somebody who'll come home every weekend 
and work for them but who will go back to Washington and work for them, 
too.
    I've talked longer than I meant to, but I think--I think that in 
these 8 years, I've earned the right to say what I think about the next 
4 years. [Laughter] So I'm telling you, all of you that come from 
Arkansas, or any of you that have any friends down there, we needed your 
money, and we're glad you gave it. But it's not enough.
    Clarity is our friend in this election. Why did Vice President Gore 
move up and stay up after his speech? Governor Bush gave a beautiful 
speech in Philadelphia. It was beautiful. It was very well written. It 
was eloquent. It was compelling in a personal way, and people liked it. 
But it didn't have any legs. Why? Because they couldn't afford to say, 
``Hey, we're not for a real Patients' Bill of Rights. We're not for real 
Medicare drug benefits, and we do want to have tax cuts so big that when 
we privatize Social Security, we'll be back in debt.'' They couldn't say 
that. [Laughter] So they had to sort of blur everything over. Believe 
me, old Mike's in there running against the guy that's a master at that 
blurring. This seat was held by David Pryor and Ray Thornton and Beryl 
Anthony. This seat should be held by Mike Ross.
    I'm just pleading with you. The other side is going to pour a lot of 
money into it, and there's going to be a lot of good backslapping

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and a lot of people remembering when I showed up at your chicken supper 
or this, that, or the other thing. And I care a lot about that. But I 
know this district. They're mostly just hard-working, small business 
people, factory workers, farmers, people doing their best to obey the 
law, keep body and soul together, and figure out how to live together.
    The district is about a third African-American. It is a beautiful, 
wonderful place. It deserves to have a wonderful Congressman. If you can 
give him some more money for the election, you ought to do it. If you 
can't, you ought to call somebody down there or go home and work. I'm 
telling you, clarity is our friend. If the people know what the choice 
really means for them in their lives, he will win this thing in a walk. 
But he's not going to win it in a walk, because they've got a lot of 
money for--[inaudible]--but we've got to go down and fight for clarity 
for 56 more days. He's been out here for 15 months. The rest of us ought 
to do whatever we can for him for 56 days.
    Thank you very much. God bless you. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 10:45 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to reception hosts Thomas F. (Mack) and Donna Kay 
McLarty; former Senator Dale Bumpers; and Republican Presidential 
candidate Gov. George W. Bush. Mike Ross is a candidate for Congress in 
Arkansas' Fourth Congressional District.