[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 40 (Monday, October 9, 2000)]
[Pages 2335-2339]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a National Leadership PAC Reception in New York City

October 5, 2000

    The President. Thank you for the standing ovation. [Laughter] Thank 
you for being here to----
    Audience member. New York loves you!
    The President. You guys calm down. This is a rowdy crowd here. Look, 
I'm not as young as I used to be. I don't know if I can quiet this 
crowd. I'm tired. Go easy on me

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tonight. It's almost the end of the week. [Laughter]
    I want to thank Charles Rangel for giving me a chance to be here 
tonight with Alma and Alicia. I want to thank the other Members of 
Congress who are here. I've got them somewhere. [Laughter] Congressmen 
Crowley, Nadler, and Lowey of New York are all here. Thank you for being 
here. I want to thank the New York Democratic Chair; Judith Hope is 
here. I want to thank Jane Rosenthal for being our host and for 
gathering up all of you tonight.
    I have a lot of friends here. I want to say a special word of 
appreciation to one person who is or just was in the audience, Chevy 
Chase, who was with me when I was nominated for President, when I won 
the California primary in June of '92. And I was running third in the 
polls, and no one wanted to come to my victory party, and Chevy Chase 
showed up. So thanks for being here again tonight.
    I want to thank Ron Silver for being here and for being my friend 
and for representing the entertainers of this country so well. And I 
want to say a special word of thanks to Kevin Spacey. You know, getting 
to be friends with Kevin has been one of the best perks of being 
President. [Laughter] Franklin Roosevelt used to say that the President 
had to be America's best actor. Well, I'm the second-best actor in 
America. Kevin Spacey is the best actor in America, and I'm glad to be 
here with him.
    Now, look, why are we here? Why are we here? I mean, Charlie Rangel 
couldn't get beat. If he expired before the election--which he's not 
about to do. He's been waiting a long time to be chairman of the Ways 
and Means Committee, and after November 7th, he will be.
    I just want to say one thing to you seriously. For whatever success 
we have had these last 8 years--whether it was in turning the country 
around, or in giving poor people more opportunity in the empowerment 
zones, or providing more affordable housing for people who desperately 
need it, or reaching out to Africa the first time the American 
Government ever had a serious outreach to our friends in Africa, or 
fighting against cuts in education and fighting to improve it--none of 
it would have been possible for me to do if it hadn't been for Charles 
Rangel, and I'm very, very grateful to him.
    Don't you think Al Gore did a good job in the debate? [Applause] I 
do, too. And Hillary was no slouch in her debate. You know, this is an 
interesting time for me. My party has a new leader. My house has a new 
candidate. [Laughter] It's the first time in 26 years I haven't been on 
the ballot, and most days I'm just fine about it. [Laughter] I'm having 
a good time getting out here campaigning for everybody else.
    For those of you from New York who have been helping my wife, I want 
to thank you. She will be a magnificent Senator. She will do you proud, 
and you'll be glad.
    I just want to say one thing quite seriously, though, because I know 
that the Democratic ticket is well ahead in New York. But a lot of you 
have friends all across this country. And a lot of you have friends that 
you see at work, that you see when you go out, that you see with your 
kids, who will never come to an event like this. But they will vote, 
because they want to feel that they're good citizens, so they'll show up 
and vote. But they never come to anything like this. And I was 
wondering, what were these folks thinking when they were watching the 
debate? What did they get out of it, and what did they not get out of 
it?
    I wondered what they were thinking in '92, right before they gave me 
and Al Gore a chance to change the country. You know, they were told 
that, after all, I was just the Governor of a small southern State. 
Remember when President Bush used to say that? [Laughter] And I was so 
naive, I thought it was a compliment. [Laughter] And I still do. They 
said, ``This guy is only 46 years old. He doesn't look that old''--you 
took care of that. [Laughter] ``The Republicans say he's terrible. Why 
should I take a chance on this guy?'' But I mean, come on, it wasn't 
that big a chance. The country was in the ditch. We had to turn it 
around.
    But now things are good, and we have to decide what to do with good 
times. And anybody in this audience who's over 30 years old can remember 
at least once in your life when you made a doozy of a mistake, not 
because times were so bad but because they

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were so good you thought you did not have to concentrate. Isn't that 
right? Everybody over 30 has made a mistake like that.
    So what I want to ask you to do--I thank you for your money; Charlie 
thanks you for your money; Jane thanks you for making her look good; 
Kevin and I thank you because we hate to play to an empty house. 
[Laughter] We're all real happy. But what are you going to do between 
now and election? You need to take this seriously. If somebody asks you 
tomorrow morning, if somebody called you on the phone from a State 
that's really tight--if somebody called you from Michigan, Ohio, 
tomorrow and you said, ``What're you doing?'' And you said, ``I went to 
this deal last night with the President and Kevin Spacey and Charlie 
Rangel, and we had a pretty good time.'' And they said, ``Why?'' What 
would your answer be?
    I'm telling you, we're still around here as a country after over 225 
years because--or 224 years--even I can still add--[laughter]--because 
most of the time the American people get it right if they have enough 
information and enough time. So having a clear idea in the minds of 
every voter, an accurate idea of what the choices are in this election 
is very important. We have profound differences.
    I went today over to Princeton University, where they're having this 
big conference on the last Progressive Era, when Theodore Roosevelt and 
Woodrow Wilson remade America for the industrial age, when New York City 
was full of factories and full of the first great wave of immigrants. 
And they basically preserved America by changing it.
    That's what we're trying to do, to preserve the fundamental values 
and ideas of America by changing it for this new time in which we're 
living. And there are huge differences here between the two candidates 
for President and Vice President but also between the parties in the 
House and Senate. And I'm telling you, I know every Senate seat, every 
House seat really matters.
    If somebody asks you, you've got to be able to tell them, ``We've 
got a different economic policy. We've got a different education policy. 
We've got a different health care policy. We've got a different 
environmental policy. We've got a different crime policy. We've got a 
different foreign policy. And we have got a very different policy on how 
we're going to build one America that brings us together across all the 
lines that divide us.''
    Compared to their leadership, we're for a hate crimes bill, and 
they're not. We're for employment nondiscrimination legislation; they're 
not. We're for stronger equal pay laws for women, and they're not. There 
are big differences about how we're going to pull this country together. 
We support a woman's right to choose, and they don't. And the next 
President gets a bunch of appointments to the Supreme Court.
    You know, people ask me all the time--I see all these articles--
every day the paper is full of articles about who's right on the 
economic plan, the taxes, the spending, and all that. I think that I 
have--at least, let me say this, I hope I've earned the right to make a 
comment or two about the economy. So people ask me all the time, ``What 
great new, brilliant idea did you and Bob Rubin bring to Washington on 
economic policy?'' You know what I always tell them? Arithmetic. 
[Laughter] We brought arithmetic back to Washington. And we got rid of 
that deficit. We got the biggest surplus in history. We're paying the 
debt down. We've got low interest rates and the economy. You have taken 
care of the rest.
    Now, you've got to decide. If you like the way it's going, you've 
got to decide. They want a bigger tax cut than we do, and a lot of you 
in this room would get more money under their deal. A lot of you in this 
room would do better under our deal. Why would people who are really 
wealthy still come here and support us when they could get a whole lot 
of money out of their tax cut? Because they understand arithmetic.
    If you spend a trillion and a half dollars on a tax cut and you 
spend another trillion dollars to shore up Social Security after you 
partially privatize it and then you keep all your spending commitments, 
we're back in deficits; we're back in higher interest rates; we're back 
in a slower economy; we're back in fewer jobs.
    Look, just last week we learned that poverty last year dropped to a 
20-year low. We learned that for the first time in 12 years we had fewer 
people without health insurance. We learned that child poverty had its 
biggest

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drop in 34 years. Why? Because--partly because of arithmetic. Now, this 
is serious business.
    You cannot go out here and promise to spend all this money and then 
keep your commitment when you get there, knowing it's going to produce a 
deficit, and expect anything other than what you're going to get, which 
is higher interest rates. The Council of Economic Advisers told me that 
the Democratic plan would keep interest rates about a percent lower than 
the Republican plan a year, for a decade. Do you know what that's worth 
in tax cuts? That's worth $390 billion in lower home mortgages, $30 
billion in lower car payments, $15 billion in lower college loan 
payments, Lord only knows how much money in lower credit card payments, 
plus it's cheaper to start a business and hire new help.
    This is not rocket science. He's right, Charlie Rangel is, on 
economic policy, and they're wrong. And you need to be able to explain 
that to people and tell them that's why you showed up here tonight.
    On health care policy, they're not for the Patients' Bill of Rights, 
and we are. We're for a Medicare drug program that all the seniors can 
get, and they aren't. And we're right, and they're wrong, and you need 
to be able to explain that to people. And I could just go on and on, but 
you get the picture.
    I'm telling you, you cannot assume that the outcome of this 
election--in Hillary's race, for who controls the House, for who wins 
the White House--is not in doubt. The people are in control, and until 
they show up and vote, it's in doubt. And you need to be able to say, 
you need to be able to tell people why you came here tonight, beyond the 
fact that you like Charlie or you wanted to see Kevin or you wanted to 
see if I'm still standing on two legs with 4 months to go. I'm telling 
you, you've got to be able to say that.
    Now, when Al Gore stands up before audiences and he says, ``You 
ain't seen nothing yet,'' that sounds like a campaign slogan, I know. 
But I'm not running, and I believe that. I've spent as much time as I 
could, I worked as hard as I could to turn this country around, to pull 
us together, and to get us moving forward. But it's almost like setting 
a banquet table, but the feast hasn't been served.
    We're going to have young women having babies within 5 to 10 years 
with a life expectancy of 90 years, thanks to the human genome project. 
We are going to see economic explosions in places that we never thought 
we could bring economic opportunity to, in the inner cities and the 
rural areas and Native American reservations, if we make the right 
decision.
    We're going to be able not just to bring the crime rate down to a 
27-year low, we could make America the safest big country in the world, 
if we make the right decisions. We put 100,000 police on the street and 
did more to take guns out of the hands of criminals and children. 
They're not only against the commonsense gun safety measures that we've 
been for--we're now putting another 50,000 police on the street--they 
want to abolish the program.
    You've got to admire that about the Republicans; evidence never 
fazes them. [Laughter] I mean, they know what they're for, and they 
don't want you to bother them with the facts or the results or anything 
else. You've got to kind of admire it, but you'll also have to live with 
the consequences.
    So if you want to keep the crime rate coming down, if you believe 
you can clean up the environment and grow the economy, if you want to 
keep this prosperity going and spread it to other people, and maybe most 
important of all, you look at all the troubles around the world today 
where people still can't get along because of their religious, their 
racial, their ethnic differences--the most important thing is we're all 
in this together, and we better get along together. And we've worked 
hard to say that.
    We've worked hard to say whether you're--whatever your race is, 
whatever your religion is, whether you're straight or gay, whether 
you're old or young, if you show up, play by the rules, and you try to 
do your part as an American, you're part of our America, and we're going 
forward together. That's a big deal. That's a big deal.
    So I know we all want to have a good time. We're in this festive 
atmosphere, and I thank our hosts for letting me come. I believe I've 
been here three or four times since I've been

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President. But I just want you to be serious enough. This deal is not 
over yet. Charlie is not the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee 
yet. He ought to be, and I think he will be, but it depends on what you 
do.
    So you've got to promise yourself, every day between now and the end 
of the election, you find somebody that will never show up at one of 
these deals and you say, ``Let me tell you why I'm for Al Gore and Joe 
Lieberman; let me tell you why I'm for Hillary and Charlie Rangel; let 
me tell you why you ought to support the Democrats.'' And tell them what 
the difference is on the economy, on the environment, on health care, on 
education; run it right down so they understand.
    Don't let this be one of the times when we made a mistake because 
times were so good we didn't think we had to think. We do have to think. 
You may not get another chance like this in your lifetime, and if I had 
anything to do with it, I am grateful you gave me the chance to serve.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:10 p.m. at the Supper Club. In his 
remarks, he referred to Representative Rangel's wife, Alma, and his 
daughter, Alicia; actors Chevy Chase, Ron Silver, and Kevin Spacey; and 
former Secretary of the Treasury Robert E. Rubin.