[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 40 (Monday, October 9, 2000)]
[Pages 2289-2293]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Reception for Representative Dennis Moore

October 2, 2000

    Thank you very much. First of all, I would like to thank all of you 
for being here today. I want to thank Dennis and Stephane for presenting 
themselves to the people of Kansas and for giving the people of Kansas a 
chance to send a Democrat to Congress who represents what the 
Republicans say they're for. [Laughter] And I really appreciate that.
    I'd also like to say, I thank the Members of Congress who are here, 
but I am particularly grateful to Jim Slattery and Peter Hoagland, who 
are here, because without them, I wouldn't be here, because they helped 
me turn this country around in 1993 and 1994, and I thank them for that.
    Now, after Secretary Glickman sort of threw down the gauntlet--
[laughter]--I completely forgot what I was supposed to talk

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about because I wasted 2 minutes back there thinking about whether there 
was anything I could still do to him. [Laughter] Now, I'm at a loss. 
There's a lesson in that somewhere. [Laughter]
    Actually, I was thinking that I kind of resented that Al Gore has 
gotten all this credit--[laughter]--for naming Joe Lieberman to the 
ticket. I mean, I know it's a big deal to have the first Jewish Vice 
Presidential nominee. But I mean, come on, now, look at American 
history. That is nothing compared to the first Jewish Agriculture 
Secretary. [Laughter] I mean, just with a decision, I destroyed one of 
the great stereotypes in American life. [Laughter] Nobody thinks 
``Jewish farmer'' is an oxymoron anymore. [Laughter]
    Not only that, if those Republicans would have listened to Dan and 
me back in 1995, we wouldn't have had to have all these bailouts the 
last 3 years with the farmers because of their failure to farm act that 
I warned about back then, which is just one of the reasons Dennis ought 
to be reelected, because he'll have a chance next year to rewrite the 
farm law. And I hope it will be done in a way that really supports the 
farmers of this country--all the farmers of this country, without regard 
to where they live, what they produce, or how big they are. And it's 
very important that we have people who have Democratic values and the 
understanding of agriculture that anyone from Kansas has to have in 
order to serve in the United States Congress.
    Let me just say a word or two very briefly. I realize that I'm 
preaching to the saved here--I'll explain that later, Dan. [Laughter] 
Glickman and I get a lot more leeway since we're not on the ballot. 
[Laughter] It's amazing what you can say. [Laughter] I say, this one 
story. Jon Corzine, who is our nominee for Senator in New Jersey, and 
who spent like $38 million of his own money winning the nomination, got 
up and--Rush Holt and I--he may still be here--I did a deal for Rush 
Holt the other day in New Jersey, in Princeton.
    So Jon comes to the event, and we were elated to see him. He's a 
great friend of mine, has been for many years. So here's Corzine, a 
candidate now, gets up and tells the following story, as a candidate. He 
said, ``You know, I spent almost $40 million getting nominated, so I was 
convinced that everyone in New Jersey knew who I was--everyone.'' So he 
said, ``I was campaigning the other day in a nursing home, and I went up 
to this lady, and I said, `Ma'am, do you know my name?' And she said, 
`You know, sonny, I don't, but if you go up to the nurse's station, 
they'll tell you.' '' [Laughter]
    I told him, I said, ``Jon, that's not a bad joke, but you need to 
let me tell that.'' [Laughter] ``Until you get past the election, I 
don't believe I'd tell that one again.'' [Laughter]
    So anyway, here we are. Let me be serious just for a moment. This is 
a different country than in it was in 1992. The country is in better 
shape. We have done it by a combination of new ideas and old-fashioned 
values. I was down in Texas the other day with my first Treasury 
Secretary, Lloyd Bentsen. And I said to him something which is true. 
People, now that I'm about to leave office, they come to me all the time 
and say, ``What great new idea did you bring to the economic policy 
process in Washington?'' People ask me questions like that all the time, 
you know--``what great new sweeping reform?'' And I always have a one-
word answer: Arithmetic. We restored arithmetic. That's what the 
Democrats brought back. And those of us in the heartland, we still think 
2 and 2 ought to add up to 4.
    So I'm profoundly indebted to people like Steny Hoyer, who helped me 
turn this budget deficit around. And last week, we had a couple of 
announcements--let me just mention the announcements we had last week. 
Last week the annual report came out which showed that the Government 
budget--which was supposed to be $455 billion in the hole this year; 
when I took office, that was the estimate--will have a $230 billion 
surplus, the biggest in history. It showed that poverty figures were the 
lowest in 20 years, the biggest drop in child poverty in 34 years, the 
biggest recorded drop in Hispanic and African-American poverty in 
history.
    And furthermore, it showed that, for the first time in a dozen 
years, there were actually more people with health insurance this year 
than there were last year, thanks largely

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to the Children's Health Insurance Program that the Democrats insisted 
be part of the 1997 Balanced Budget Act.
    What's that got to do with the House race in Kansas? I'll tell you 
exactly what. Those of us who have been here for the last 8 years, or 
who were part of any segment of it, worked very hard to turn this 
country around. And the economy is going in the right direction. The 
crime rate is going down. The welfare rolls have been cut in half. The 
school dropout rate is down. The college-going rate is at an all-time 
high. Now, with the change in the trend lines on health insurance, every 
single major social indicator is going in the right direction. And 
notwithstanding all the troubles around the world today, this country 
has been an unmitigated force for peace and reconciliation across racial 
and religious and ethnic lines on every continent in the globe.
    Now, the question is, what do we mean to do with this? Have all the 
problems gone away? Not on your life. There are still big challenges out 
there, and there are still great opportunities out there. And I said 
this over and over again--there are a lot of young people in this 
audience tonight, so I want to make this point, and maybe you will avoid 
this. There is nobody in this room tonight who is over 30 years old who 
has not made at least one mistake in your life of some significance, not 
when times were really tough but when times were going so well, you 
thought you didn't have to concentrate. Now, that is the big challenge 
in this election.
    Things are going well. People feel good. I want everybody to feel 
good. Not only that, our Republican friends, after we beat back the 
contract on America and we beat back their attempts to shut the 
Government down and we beat back several other of the more extreme 
things they tried to do, they now sound more like us than ever before. 
It's really encouraging. I don't mean to put it down. The rhetoric is 
important. But if you strip the rhetoric away, there are huge 
differences between what our policies would be--differences in our 
economic policies, our education policies, our health care policies, our 
commitment to grow the economy and preserve the environment. And there 
will be big differences in our farm policies next year, when I'm not 
around, but I think that our crowd will be sticking up, as I said, for 
farmers of all sizes, from all parts of the country.
    There will be differences in how we'll deal with the challenge of 
the aging of America. The fastest growing group of people in America are 
people over 80. Within just a few years, there will only be two people 
working for every one person drawing Social Security. We'll have to re-
imagine the whole nature of getting older in America, what it means, how 
we're going to work, and what we're going to do. And it is really, 
really important. The one thing I have learned, every single House seat 
and every single Senate seat is important.
    And when I made the comment I did about Dennis at the beginning, I 
was not just kidding. Every time I go out into the country and I listen 
to our friends in the other party speak, I normally don't have much 
objection to what they say. They talk about being fiscally conservative. 
They talk about being compassionate. They talk about this, that, and the 
other thing. All I can tell you is that this guy does that. And he has 
had a remarkable impact in a short time.
    He is widely respected in the House. You look at all the House 
Members that have come here tonight. Believe me, every one of them had 
something else to do. He must have a dozen House Members here, including 
one of the most senior and most respected and important leaders in the 
House, Steny Hoyer. And I'm just telling you, it really matters. When a 
person like Dennis gets elected from a district like his district in 
Kansas and then does everything that he hired on to do, keeps his word, 
and serves well, that person needs to be reelected.
    And this country has huge challenges to face. You know, when Al Gore 
says the best is yet to be--I mean, some people probably think it's a 
campaign slogan, but I'm not running for anything, and I have to tell 
you, I believe that. Because the country is kind of like a big ocean 
liner, you know, you just can't turn it on a dime. That's how come the 
Titanic hit the iceberg. [Laughter] They saw the iceberg, but they 
didn't see it in time to turn it around.
    So we got turned around, and we're going in the right direction, but 
all the far horizons are still out there. The young people in this

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audience, the young women in this audience, when you have your first 
children, you'll come home from the hospital with your baby and with a 
little gene card, made possible by the human genome project. And it will 
be a little scary, because it will tell you every little problem in your 
child's genetic make-up. But it will also tell you what you can do to 
minimize the impact of those problems, maybe even thoroughly correct 
them surgically or with medicine. And within a decade, I'm convinced 
that young women will be bringing babies home from the hospital that 
have a life expectancy of 90 years. Now, you can just remember 10 years 
from now, look back and see if I was right.
    Dan Glickman has worked so hard on research on biofuels, and we're 
just that close in cracking the chemical mystery that will allow the 
efficient conversion of biofuels, so that instead of taking 7 gallons of 
gasoline to make 8 gallons of ethanol, you'll be able to do it with one 
gallon of gasoline. Then everybody will have the equivalent of 500 miles 
to the gallon. And when you put that with fuel cells, alternative fuel 
vehicles, mixed fuel vehicles, it will radically alter the future of our 
country.
    It is clearly the most effective thing we could be doing to change 
the energy future of America and to make ourselves more secure. Because 
if we pumped all the oil that was available to us that's on land owned 
by Americans, it wouldn't keep us going very long. The only way to have 
a secure energy future is to take available energy conservation 
technologies and the development of alternative fuels and different 
kinds of engines, and go into the future in a whole different direction. 
We can do that. That's going to all happen while you're around.
    But we still have these big questions. We've got the most diverse 
student body in history and the biggest one. Can we give them all a 
world-class education? What is it going to mean to be 85 in 20 years, 
and how is it going to be different from now? And it better be 
different, unless we want it to financially burden the country in an 
awesome way.
    How are we going to deal with the fact that AIDS, TB, and malaria 
now kill one in four people around the world, and we need those people 
to be our trading partners? What are our responsibilities to alleviate 
the debt of the poor nations of the world? I think they're quite heavy.
    I had a meeting today--I never thought I'd see a meeting like this 
in the White House. We had in the White House today John Kasich; Connie 
Mack; Representative Baucus, a Republican from Alabama; Senator DeWine; 
Senator Lugar; Congressman Leach--all these Republicans--and Maxine 
Waters and Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Pat Leahy--we had our whole crowd 
there. We had David Sapperstein, a rabbi friend of mine who is one of 
the most liberal religious advocates in Washington, sitting three seats 
down from Pat Robertson. [Laughter]
    Why were they there? Because they believe that we have a moral 
obligation to alleviate the debt of the world's poorest countries. And 
they know if we do it in a way that allows them only to spend the money 
on education and health care, those countries will be stronger, better 
partners for us. It means less war, less famine, more prosperity, less 
bloodshed for the Americans of the future.
    And as soon as we walked out that door, the leadership of the other 
party in the House attacked me and attacked us all. Now, when you get to 
the right of Pat Robertson, you're working at it. [Laughter] You're 
working at it, and they worked at it.
    Meanwhile, Dennis Moore has worked at your business. He deserves to 
stay in. And it will be an important signal about whether our country is 
really rewarding centrist, moderate, progressive, unifying politics. 
That's what got us where we are, and that's what will take us into the 
future, if we make the right decisions on election day.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 8:08 p.m. at a the Frederick Douglass 
Museum. In his remarks, he referred to Representative Moore's wife, 
Stephane; former Representatives Jim Slattery and Peter Hoagland; and 
Rev. M. G. (Pat) Robertson, president, Christian Coalition. Dennis Moore 
is a candidate for reelection in Kansas' Third Congressional District.

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