[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 38 (Monday, September 25, 2000)]
[Pages 2117-2121]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Brunch for Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

September 17, 2000

    Thank you very much. I was telling Ed that I left the Black Caucus 
dinner last night about 12:15--the Congressional Black Caucus--I was 
hoping that I would be compos mentis by the time I was introduced to 
speak, and you gave me such a warm welcome, I'm about to wake up. 
[Laughter]

[[Page 2118]]

    Let me say, first of all, how grateful I am to all of you for being 
here, and so many of you have already helped Hillary. I appreciate you 
being here, and I'll explain in a minute why we're doing this.
    I want to thank Congressmen Borski and Congressman Brady for being 
not only friends of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania but true friends of 
mine in the Congress. I'm very proud of what we've done together.
    I can't say enough about Ed. It's been wonderful for me to close out 
my Presidency with a chairman of the Democratic Party who has as much 
energy as I do--[laughter]--because we knew we would have to work, and 
work we did. That first 7 months of this year, I don't think either one 
of us slept very much, but we worked very hard. And everybody was 
saying, ``Oh, the Democrats didn't have a chance. We were all going to 
get wiped out. We couldn't hold the White House.''
    And people thought Rendell and I needed a dose of reality serum 
because we'd go around and say, ``What do you mean? We're going to win 
this thing. It's''--[laughter]--didn't we? And we would go around, and 
these people in farflung places, a long way from Philadelphia and 
Washington, would look at us like, ``What have these guys been drinking 
tonight?'' [Laughter]
    You know, now all those people who were doubters think we're 
geniuses. And we just need about 50 more days of effort so that they'll 
be right. But I'm very grateful to you, Mr. Mayor, because after you did 
such a good job here, you could have taken a well-deserved rest, and 
instead, you went on the road, and we've had a good run. I'm very 
grateful.
    Let me say to--I don't even have the words to express the gratitude 
I feel to the people of Pennsylvania and especially the people of 
Philadelphia in this area who have given me and Al Gore such an 
overwhelming endorsement in 1992, and in 1996, the margin was truly 
breathtaking. I will never forget it. It does an amazing thing for a 
Democratic campaign for President not to have to worry about whether 
you're going to win in Pennsylvania.
    What happens--I can just tell you, after the conventions are over, 
the candidates and their folks, they sit down and look at a map. And 
they look at where they're going to get to 270 electoral votes, what 
they have to carry that's up in the air, what they have to go take away, 
what they have to defend. And after the convention, there are only a 
relatively small number of days left. And the candidates accept their 
public funding, so they have a limited amount of resources to travel, to 
organize, to advertise.
    And so it's like this elaborate chess game, quite apart from what we 
all see when we pick up the papers every day and they're talking about 
issues, debating issues--and, this year, debating the debates, of all 
things--and what's in the debates. Underneath it all there is the sure 
knowledge that we still have--since we're dedicating the Constitution 
Center today, we still have the same system we started with. We elect 
Presidents by States and by the electoral votes of States, which is all 
the House Members plus two Senators. That's how many electoral votes 
every State has. And even after reinforcement, when they get shifted 
around, it all still adds up to 538, and you have to have 270 to win.
    And Pennsylvania has 23 votes. And it's also in the heartland of 
America, with Ohio and Michigan and Illinois and Wisconsin and 
Minnesota, and you go over to New Jersey and up to New York. If you have 
Pennsylvania, it drastically increases your chances of carrying New 
Jersey and of carrying Ohio. No Republican has been elected since the 
Civil War without carrying Ohio. And it is very hard for a Democrat to 
be elected without carrying Pennsylvania.
    So I am profoundly grateful, because for two Presidential elections 
we got to go play on their field. If you're playing on the other team's 
end of the field, you have a chance to score. And the people of 
Pennsylvania trusted me and Al Gore to deliver for America, and I hope 
you're not disappointed. It's been an honor. [Applause] Thank you.
    There's something else I would like to say, and I won't give my 
standard speech because it's Sunday and a lot of you want to go do 
something else, and because you've heard it before, but I will say this. 
I promised myself between the first of the year and election day I would 
never, ever give a public speech

[[Page 2119]]

without reminding people that it is sometimes more difficult to make the 
right decision when times are good than when times are bad. And I know 
the American people took a chance on me in '92, but maybe it wasn't such 
a big chance because the country was in trouble, right?
    But now things are going well, and there must be clarity. People 
have got to stop and think about what is it they want for their future. 
Because I can tell you, in my lifetime, we've never had such a good 
chance to build the future of our dreams for the children that are in 
this room today and all the other kids in this country. We could 
actually do things that were unthinkable when I ran for President. We 
could actually get the country out of debt for the first time since 
Andrew Jackson was President. We now know, without any question, what it 
takes to turn around a failing public school, and we could put in place 
a system if we had the will and were willing to commit the resources to 
do it, that would guarantee a world-class education to all the kids in 
this country.
    We know how to do it now. When I started on this back in 1983, we 
had some ideas, but we didn't know. We now have mountains of evidence. I 
was in a school in Harlem the other day, a grade school. Two years ago 
86 percent of the kids--80 percent of the kids, excuse me--were reading 
below grade level, doing math below grade level--2 years ago. This 
year--74 percent of the kids are doing reading and math at or above 
grade level--in 2 years. We know how to do this. Then the question is, 
are we going to do it for all these kids? We've got more kids in schools 
than ever before; it's the most diverse student body. We could do this.
    We could actually get rid of child poverty. We could provide health 
insurance to all the working families in the country, something we've 
never done. We could turn around the environmental problems of the 
country, in the world, including global warming, in a way that would 
generate hundreds of thousands--maybe even over a million--jobs for the 
American economy alone.
    And all the best stuff is still out there. The human genome project, 
I believe, will have young mothers bringing babies home from the 
hospital within 10 years, with a life expectancy of 90 years. So all the 
best stuff is still out there. We've got to make the right decisions. 
And we need people who understand the future and understand the bedrock 
values and institutions that build the future of America and who are 
curious and thinking about what all these dizzying changes mean.
    I know you can never make an ad out of it, but I really think one of 
the best reasons to vote for Al Gore is his relentless curiosity and 
passion about the future and the issues that are central to the future. 
And one of the best reasons to vote for Hillary is that she has always 
understood the importance of taking everybody along into the future.
    So that's really important. But let me tell you why we're here. She 
has been very blessed. I thought she did great in that debate the other 
night, even though it was two on one half the time. [Applause] Thank 
you. I was really, really proud of her. I thought she did best when they 
got meanest, and that's good. It's a contact sport. [Laughter] But it 
also matters whether you're big or little, and she's nothing if not big, 
and I'm proud of her.
    She's doing well in the campaign. She's been very successful with 
fundraising, both in New York, where an astonishing number of people who 
have never been really involved before have helped her, and around the 
country. But in order to maximize her impact between now and the 
election day, she has to raise more money for her campaign--in $1,000 
and $2,000 contributions; if nobody has given to her at all before, they 
can give $2,000--and for the Democratic Committee, more money in so-
called hard money.
    I think all of you know that there's a limit under our Federal laws 
how much soft money can be spent, unless there's a matching amount of 
hard money. And we need a lot of contributions at a more modest but 
generous level. So I told Ed I was coming here today, and he said that 
he would try to get us some more help in Philadelphia.
    Philadelphia is one of the States, outside New York, that can be 
most beneficially impacted by having a good Senator from New York, 
because you can't be a responsible New York Senator unless you have a 
great urban policy. You can't serve there. But it's like

[[Page 2120]]

Pennsylvania. You also can't be good unless you know something about 
agriculture. Most people don't know that both New York and Pennsylvania 
are huge agricultural States.
    But it's very, very important, as we get down here in the stretch 
when--I think she said on her debate the other night there are 32--32--
third party committees who can spend 100 percent soft money. If you set 
up one of these sort of front committees to attack someone--unless it's 
the Republican Party--if it's some other committee with some funny name 
that's misleading, 100 percent of their money can be soft money. They 
just throw the stuff on the air and lob those bombshells at you. And 
believe me, the better she does, the more they want to beat her. I know 
something about that.
    So it's very important that she be able to make the most use of the 
resources that have already been committed to her and have enough to 
stand up to whatever comes in the next, how many, 50-odd days between 
now and the election.
    But I think she's going to win if she has the horses to stay in the 
race until the end. And that's what this is about. And I think when she 
does, a huge number of people who don't even vote for her the first time 
will wonder what they were thinking about on election day. And people 
will see what I have known for 30 years. I have never seen anybody with 
the same combination of mind and passion and heart and, actually, 
ability to get her ideas transformed into reality that she does.
    I get tickled. They attack her on health care. You might be 
interested to know that even though our health care plan didn't pass in 
'94, it got further than Richard Nixon's health care plan, further than 
Lyndon Johnson's health care plan--I mean, Jimmy Carter's health care 
plan--and further than Harry Truman's health care plan. And the same 
people that attacked Harry Truman attacked Hillary and me, with the same 
results in the next congressional election.
    But after a while, people decided he was right, and they'll decide 
we're right, too. It would be a better country if every working family 
could afford health insurance. And we've made a lot of progress. We're 
insuring over 2 million kids now. We have a law on the books that will 
allow 5 to get health insurance.
    One of the things that went in her health care plan was a strong 
Patients' Bill of Rights. One of the reasons the health insurance 
companies campaigned against it was because there was a strong Patients' 
Bill of Rights in it. And now, 70-something percent of the American 
people want a strong Patients' Bill of Rights because they've been, or 
they know someone who's been, on the receiving end of a medical decision 
being made by somebody other than a medical professional.
    So these are big, big issues here. The country is in great shape. 
We're doing right. If everybody is serious about what the choice is, I 
feel wonderful about what's going to happen in the Presidential race, 
the Senate races, the House races.
    I want to say one other thing, since I'm in Pennsylvania. We're 
trying to win--if we just win six or seven House seats, the Democrats 
will win back the House. And we probably will, and then a few. But what 
you should know is, today, if Mr. Corzine wins in New Jersey--and I 
believe he will--and Hillary wins--and we will have two Senate seats 
that are in some question, one in Nevada, where we're still behind, but 
we have a chance; one in Virginia, where Chuck Robb is running against 
the former Governor, and I believe with all my heart Senator Robb is 
going to win because he's one of the bravest people I've ever known in 
public life. He's got more courage than is good for him sometimes, given 
his State. But those are the only two seats we have in play. We are 11 
points ahead in Florida for a Republican seat; almost 10 points ahead in 
Delaware for a Republican seat. We are 25 points ahead in Georgia for a 
seat previously held by a Republican. We are ahead today, only 5 days 
after the Minnesota primary, for a seat held by a Republican. One of the 
two candidates for the Democratic nomination in Florida--I mean, in 
Washington State, is already ahead of the incumbent Republican Senator, 
and the other one is nearly ahead. We are even, to a little ahead, in 
Missouri. We are within five points in Michigan, where our candidate is 
fabulous but has been badly outspent, and if she can get back up and go 
all the way, she'll be fine. And I believe we can do right

[[Page 2121]]

well here if our candidate had enough money.
    So it's something I want you to think about because the future of 
the Supreme Court is at stake; the future of all these policies is at 
stake. And I can tell you, every single Senate seat really does matter. 
As President, I know. I mean every single one of them has an enormous 
impact on the way Americans live and the framework within which we build 
our future.
    So that's it. If you can help Hillary with some more of these 
contributions, if you know anybody that hasn't made one, may be willing 
to make a modest contribution to her campaign, it could make a big 
difference to her. Because remember, in New York, it's the Democratic 
Party against the Republican Party, Hillary against her Republican 
opponent, and then they have 32 other committees, bringing pleasant 
messages--[laughter]--of every conceivable stripe.
    She'll do just fine with it. She showed last week she could take a 
punch, and she can take a lot of them. But she needs to have something 
to respond, and if you can help, I'll be profoundly grateful.
    Thanks again for everything you've done for Hillary.

Note: The President spoke at 11:40 a.m. at the City Tavern. In his 
remarks, he referred to Edward G. Rendell, general chair, Democratic 
National Committee; Jon S. Corzine, a candidate for U.S. Senate from New 
Jersey; and former Gov. George Allen, a candidate for U.S. Senate from 
Virginia.