[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 39 (Monday, October 2, 2000)]
[Pages 2184-2187]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Barbecue for Congressional Candidate Mike Honda in San 
Jose, California

September 23, 2000

    Thank you very much. Well, I never, in my wildest dreams, thought I 
would be introduced by a Japanese-American wearing cowboy boots. 
[Laughter] I mean, you're the walking embodiment of one America right 
there. [Laughter] I love it. Good for you. Look, we've got to have a 
little fun. It's too nice. You know, we're all having a good time.
    I want to thank Jessie and Surinder and the Singh family for 
welcoming us to their beautiful home, and for so conveniently having 
such a nice deck so we can all gather. Let's give them all a hand. 
[Applause] That's really great that they had us. Thank you.
    I want to thank Secretary Mineta and his wonderful wife for flying 
out here with me today so he could be here with Mike. You should be very 
proud of Norm Mineta. He's doing a good job at the Commerce Department; 
he did a great job for you.
    And I want to thank your Representatives who are here. They are some 
of the best in the Congress, some of the best I've ever seen, and you're 
very fortunate. I want to thank Anna Eshoo and Zoe Lofgren and Sam Farr. 
And Paul Pelosi, thank you for coming today. And we look forward to 
Nancy's continued progress. And I thank Senator Liz Figueroa for coming 
here. Thank you very much.
    I want to thank all of you for coming, and I'd like to say, before I 
get into any substantive remarks, how profoundly grateful I am to the 
people of this State, and particularly the people of this community for 
over 8 years now--partnership and friendship and support for me and the 
Vice President and our administration. Some of you in this audience were 
here the very first time I came to Silicon Valley a long time ago, and I 
am very grateful to you.
    I am also grateful because this has been my daughter's home for 3 
years now. And I wonder if we'll ever get her back from here. [Laughter]
    I wanted to be here today because I like Mike Honda, and I admire 
him, and I strongly support him, and because the stakes in this 
particular race are quite high.
    I've done everything I could do in the last 8 years to show that a 
Democrat could be pro-business and pro-labor, pro-growth and pro-
environmental protection, for a high-tech future and the preservation of 
traditional American values. And that's what I think he represents. And 
I can't tell you how important I think it is for Mike and so many of our 
other good candidates here--I'm going to southern California to help 
some more of them tonight--to win these House races.
    I think it's very important that the American people decide what 
they think this election's about. I've often found in politics that what 
people think the election's about determines for whom they vote and how 
it comes out. And if somebody were to say, ``Vote for me because I think 
Bill Clinton's been a great President, and I won't change anything,'' 
I'd vote against that person, because the world is changing.
    The question is not whether we're going to change, but how we're 
going to change and whether we're going to use this moment of incredible 
prosperity and social progress to meet big challenges and seize big 
opportunities or whether we're going to be sort of distracted and take 
some of the siren songs that are being sung in this election.
    You know, anybody in this audience that's over 30 years old can 
remember at least once in your life when you made a mistake, not because 
things were going so poorly but because things were going so well you 
thought you no longer had to concentrate. If you live long enough, 
you'll make one of those mistakes. I see a lot of people nodding their 
heads. [Laughter].
    It is sometimes more difficult to make a good decision in good times 
than it is in tough times. I mean, I know the people took a big chance 
on me in California in 1992. I can only imagine how many people on 
election day in 1992 walked into the ballot box and said, ``Should I 
really vote for this guy? He's only 46. His opponent says he's only the 
Governor of a small southern State.'' I was so naive, I thought it was a 
compliment, and I still do. [Laughter] So people think, ``You know, this 
is a big chance.'' But now, give me a break. Look at what California was

[[Page 2185]]

going through in '92. It wasn't that big a chance. We had to do 
something different.
    Now there is a sense of well-being, a sense of progress, a sense of 
possibility, a sense of confidence. But it's easy for people to lose 
their concentration. And I'm telling you, in my lifetime, our Nation has 
never had both the opportunity and the obligation to build the future of 
our dreams for our children and to fulfill our responsibilities around 
the world that we have today.
    And I have so much greater appreciation than I ever did before I 
became President of the importance of every single seat in the House, 
every single seat in the Senate. Our economic plan in 1993 passed by a 
single vote. Everybody in the other party said it would bring on another 
recession, lead to a big increase in unemployment. As I said in Los 
Angeles a couple of weeks ago, time has not been very kind to their 
prediction.
    But we turned the country around, and Al Gore now says the best is 
still out there. Now, a lot of people just think that's campaign 
rhetoric. I believe that. I really believe the best is still out there. 
But we have to decide. We have to decide that we'll meet the challenge 
of the aging of America so that when all of us baby boomers retire and 
there's only two people working for every one person on Social Security 
and Medicare, we won't bankrupt our children and their ability to raise 
our grandchildren.
    We have to decide to talk about what Mike did, that we are going to 
give a world class education to the largest and most racially, 
ethnically, and religiously diverse group of schoolchildren in the 
history of the United States. But it's not like we don't know how to do 
it.
    There are schools all over this State succeeding against all the 
odds. When I started working on school reform 20 years ago and Hillary 
and I started trying to rewrite the standards when I was Governor 17 
years ago, people sort of had a hunch about what would work. We know 
now.
    And you can see it in a lot of your most successful charter schools 
in California. You can see it in a lot of the other public schools. I 
was in a school in Harlem the other day where, 2 years ago, 80 percent 
of the children were doing math and science and reading in an elementary 
school below grade level--80 percent--by any measure, a failing school. 
Two years later 74 percent of the kids are doing math and reading at or 
above grade level--in only 2 years.
    Look, we can make public schools work, but we need smaller classes, 
modern facilities, Internet connections, well-trained teachers, high 
standards, and if the schools that are failing don't turn around, they 
have to be put under new management and change.
    This is not rocket science. We now know how to do this. But we have 
to decide to do it. We have to make a decision. We have to make a 
decision. We like running a surplus instead of a deficit and having low 
interest rates--big decision in this election.
    We could get this country out of debt in 12 years for the first time 
since 1835, when Andrew Jackson was President. Now, what difference does 
it make here? This area got about 30 percent of all the venture capital 
invested last year in the United States.
    I received a study from my economic advisers a month ago that said 
if the Vice President was elected and had the support of Congress to 
stay on the path of paying down the debt as opposed to adopting the tax 
cut proposals of his opponent, plus privatization of Social Security, 
which costs another $1 trillion over the next 10 years, and will take us 
back to deficits, it will keep interest rates a percent lower.
    One percent lower interest rates means $390 billion in lower home 
mortgage payments--$390 billion--$30 billion in lower car payments, $15 
billion in lower college loan payments, or a $435-billion and--what does 
that mean--$435 billion tax cut, keeping interest rates lower. We have 
to decide. Are we going to do that, or are we going to go back to the 
way we used to run our budget?
    We have to decide whether we believe we can grow the economy and 
improve the environment or whether it's too much trouble, we don't want 
to take the chance, and so we're going to relax all these environmental 
regulations, repeal my order setting aside $43 million roadless acres in 
the national forests, undo some of the national monuments I've set 
aside.

[[Page 2186]]

    These are specific, clear choices. We have to decide whether we 
believe that we can have a health care system we can afford where 
medical professionals still called the shots instead of allowing people 
who don't have medical training to make these decisions. That's what the 
fight over the Patients' Bill of Rights is all about. It's a decision we 
have to make.
    Now, and I can tell you I used to believe, even after I got into 
politics that, you know, these races for Congress and Senate sometimes 
could be just decided on local issues and personal feelings without 
regard to that. Look, I like Mike Honda. If I lived out here, I'd be for 
him just because I like him and because he's a Democrat. But I'm telling 
you, there are far bigger stakes here.
    Don't take my word. Ask Anna. Ask Zoe. Ask Sam. They've been living 
with this. We have lived with this for 6 years. And we may never have 
another time in our lifetime to do this. We also, I might add, have very 
different views about immigration by and large.
    We want to raise the H-1B visa ceiling--all of us do--a lot. But 
we'd like the permits to cost a little more so we could put the money 
into training Americans who are still here, who have insufficient 
skills, who also need to be part of the high-tech economy. We think 
that's important.
    I could give you lots of other examples, but I hope that I'm making 
the point. Number one, you've got to go out here and convince people 
that didn't come today that this is a big election and no choice can be 
taken lightly, and that the decision you make for President and Vice 
President, for the Congress seats, it has to be rooted in what you want 
for your country and your State and your family. And I'm telling you, we 
may never have a chance like this again.
    And the last thing I would like to say is, to echo something that's 
been said earlier, I think the most important difference today, based on 
8 years of working at it pretty steadily now, is that our party really 
does believe that everyone counts, that everyone deserves a chance, and 
that we all do better when we work together. We believe that we live in 
a country that is stronger if it's a community, and we believe in a 
world that is becoming increasingly not only connected through the net 
but interconnected through a web of mutual interdependence, and we think 
it's a good thing, not a bad thing.
    We don't like the politics of division. We like the politics of 
unity. We want to try to find a way for us all to go forward together. 
And if you just look around the world at all the troubles that I've 
tried to deal with in the last 8 years that were rooted in people's 
inability to treat those of different races or ethnic groups or 
religions as equal in terms of their common humanity and if you look at 
all the troubles we've had in America that we need not have had, if we 
hadn't had such bitter partisanship in Washington, there's a pretty good 
argument for sticking behind our side and trying to build a stronger, 
more interdependent American community.
    I am glad that we have people here--I'm glad we've got people here 
from all over the world. And if we can get along together within our 
borders, we can have a much more profound impact on helping people to 
get along better beyond our borders. If we can be good at home, we can 
do good around the world.
    But there really is an important issue at stake here. I see it all 
the time, when I make the arguments for expanding trade in the global 
economy but doing so in a way that lifts people up and improves the 
environment, improves labor standards, and fights against child labor 
and other abusive labor conditions.
    I see it when I argue that we ought to be out there aggressively 
reducing the debt of the poorest nations in the world, if they'll have 
honest governments and be good trading partners with us. I see the same 
thing here at home, when I argue that we ought to--we should have passed 
the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban like we did. We ought to 
close the gun show loophole and ban child trigger locks. And we ought 
to, not because I'm against people hunting or going and doing their 
sport shooting but because we have mutual responsibilities to one other, 
and one of those is that, together we ought to take some special effort 
to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and kids. That's our common 
responsibility.
    So, that's what the Democrats amount to. We want to go into the 
future together. And

[[Page 2187]]

I just--let me just close with this story. I had an amazing day a couple 
days ago in Flint, Michigan. I went to one of the community computer 
centers that we set up. And this one--we're trying to set up a thousand 
around America so that people who aren't connected in their own homes or 
in their own businesses can come in, get training, and turn their lives 
around.
    The one in Flint is especially focused on the needs of disabled 
Americans, and oh, it was quite a kick. I got to see people who were 
blind work in braille and then put it into the computer and have the 
computer speak back to them. I got to see people who were deaf work with 
a computer, and it spoke to those who could hear and wrote to those who 
couldn't. And I got to see an amazing laser technology where people who 
had no movement in their bodies and could only use their eyes, could use 
their eyes on a computer screen to turn the lights on and off in their 
house, to turn the music on and off on their tape deck, to write 
messages to their relatives.
    And I actually got to use this, and I realize this is about way more 
than money. I've got a friend with Lou Gehrig's disease, with whom I 
used to work 20 years ago. He lives in North Carolina. We used to work 
on economic development in the South. He has no movement anywhere, 
except in his eyes. And in the next month or two, his latest book will 
be published, that he wrote with his eyes.
    Now, he counts, too. He deserves a chance. We're a better country 
because he can live and communicate and because he has been empowered. 
That's what we stand for. So I want you to help Mike, because most of 
you know him, like him, trust him; he's your friend. But you have to 
understand, most people who vote on election day never come to one of 
these events. Most people who vote on election day, no matter how many 
hands he shakes, have not met the candidate.
    And you, every one of you, will see a lot of people between now and 
the election, and you have got to talk to them and tell them this is the 
chance of a lifetime for America. And we can meet these really big 
challenges, and they ought to be for Mike Honda, and they ought to be 
for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, because we believe that we all do better 
when we help each other.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 3:11 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to barbecue hosts Jessie and Surinder Singh; Paul 
Pelosi, husband of Representative Nancy Pelosi; and State Senator Liz 
Figueroa. State Assemblymember Mike Honda is a candidate for 
California's 15th Congressional District. A tape was not available for 
verification of the content of these remarks.