[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 41 (Monday, October 16, 2000)]
[Pages 2365-2370]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Reception for Representative Tom Udall

October 6, 2000

    Thank you very much, Mark. Thank you, Jill. I'd like to thank some 
other Members of Congress who have joined us tonight. Representative 
Nancy Pelosi from California, thank you for being here. I don't know if 
they're still here, but I saw Representative Nick Rahall from West 
Virginia and Representative Brad Sherman from California. Thank you, 
Brad. And I know Brian Baird from Washington was here and has left. But 
I want to thank all of them.
    You know what I was thinking about when I was getting ready to come 
up here? Look at all the young people. People say they're worried about 
American politics. Folks, it's 10 o'clock on Friday night, and we've got 
all these young people at a political rally. I mean, this country is in 
good shape. I'm not worried about anything. You're doing great.
    Let me say very briefly, it's late. I want to tell you, first of 
all, why I'm late here. Starting about 2 o'clock today, my schedule was 
knocked an hour off, and I haven't caught up since for a very good 
reason. After several days, the deep, profound grassroots

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demand of the people of Serbia for democracy resulted in Mr. Milosevic 
tonight publicly acknowledging that his opponent, Mr. Kostunica, has won 
the election for President.
    I say that to say the great lion's share of the credit belongs to 
the people of Serbia who, first of all, showed up with a 75 percent 
turnout, after we had been told for years and years that they were 
listless and divided and wouldn't show up; 75 percent of them showed up 
and in an environment that is somewhat less than congenial.
    And then they had a leader, a leader who has often publicly 
disagreed with me and our policy, who is a patriotic nationalist of his 
country, but who believes in the rule of law and the primacy of the 
democratic process. And Mr. Kostunica has prevailed in a quiet and 
dignified and persistent way. It's a great tribute to the people who 
stood up for freedom in Montenegro and Croatia and all of the other 
countries of the Balkans and southeastern Europe. And I do believe that 
it's very important that the United States and our friends have stood 
for 8 years now against ethnic cleansing and the killing of innocents 
and the end of freedom there.
    What we stopped in Bosnia and what has gotten started, what we 
reversed in Kosovo and what has gotten started, I think, were pivotal to 
this. And so for freedom-loving people everywhere, this is a night to 
celebrate, a night of joy, a night of gratitude.
    So even though it's late, and we've been working on this and the 
troubling situation in the Middle East--which I hope and pray will get 
better over the weekend--I'm, therefore, a little tired and perhaps only 
marginally articulate. [Laughter] I hope you will indulge me for a 
moment.
    I'm also honored to be here because I like the Udall caucus. 
[Laughter] When I was a boy, a young man in college--the age of many of 
you--and later when I was a young person starting out in public life and 
a teacher profoundly interested in the environmental movement, which 
really took hold in America in the early 1970's, the Udall caucus in 
America then was Stuart Udall, who was President Kennedy's Secretary of 
the Interior, and Mark's father, Mo Udall, one of the best, ablest, and 
certainly one of the funniest people ever to serve in the United States 
House of Representatives.
    We were talking about when I had the great honor of giving Mo the 
Medal of Freedom. I thought to myself: I can't put this in the citation, 
but one of the reasons I want him to have it is, if we laughed more in 
Washington, we'd get twice as much done; we'd have fewer headaches, 
fewer ulcers; and we might actually understand how fortunate we are to 
be an American and that we have the chance to serve in public life. Mo 
Udall always made us laugh.
    And when I got here, my staff would tell me repeatedly all the jokes 
I couldn't tell because they weren't Presidential. [Laughter] So I 
learned to make people laugh by allusion, like I just did. [Laughter] 
Now you're all imagining every funny joke you ever heard that you can't 
tell in public. [Laughter] So that's another great thing we owe to the 
Udalls.
    And it is true that Mark and the whole crowd, they jumped on me 
about the Grand Staircase Escalante, what some people call Red Rock, in 
southern Utah. And as Jill said, it's true that Tom and I went to 
Shiprock, to the Navajo reservation. And if you have never been there, 
let me just say, to be able to land on a clear, beautiful day in a 
helicopter, to fly just above the rock and then land and see the 
breathtaking beauty of the ancestral home of the Navajo is one of the 
most extraordinary experiences I have ever had.
    I'm also here tonight because I think Tom and Mark are committed to 
seeing that our country makes a sustained, long-term effort to have the 
proper relationships with the Native American tribes of this country. 
Among the people who came with me tonight is Lynn Cutler, who has been 
my liaison to Native America since I've been President, and she's done 
it in my second term. She has done a brilliant job. We have become 
obsessed with this issue. I know I'm preaching to the saved, by and 
large, here. We've made a lot of progress, but we've got a long way to 
go. We've got a lot of good things in the Interior bill this time for 
the Native American tribes, and I want to thank the Democrats who are 
here and Tom, in absentia, and

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Mark, especially, for the work that has been done to do that.
    You know, I was introduced by a perfectly beautiful 13-year old girl 
at Shiprock, in front of thousands of people. And this young woman had 
just won a big prize in her school, this big academic contest, and the 
prize was an up-to-date, modern laptop computer. That's the good news. 
The bad news is she couldn't log onto the Internet because she lived in 
a home without a phoneline, like over half the other people who live on 
the reservation at Shiprock.
    So I am grateful for the commitment that Mark has, that Tom has to 
closing the digital divide as well as to protecting the environment and 
the other issues he mentioned: prescription drugs for seniors, improving 
education.
    I normally--I'm going to relieve you of this because the hour is 
late, but normally when I speak to groups like this, I try to emphasize 
how important it is for those of you who are here to go out and talk 
every day to those who are not here, between now and the election, about 
what is at issue; what the differences are between the two candidates 
for President and those for Vice President, the candidates for Senate 
and Congress; and what the consequences of the election are to real 
people.
    And I normally go through the economy and education and health care 
and really try to explain it so people like you can go out--you know, 
every one of you has a lot of friends who will vote in the election who 
never come to an event like this. Therefore, because they don't do that, 
and they're good citizens but less political, they are more likely to be 
undecided voters. And this election could literally be decided based on 
what somebody says to somebody else about why they ought to make the 
decision that you hope they'll make.
    Now, I'm not going to go through all that tonight because it's late; 
and because I'm so tired, I'm afraid I'll make a mistake. [Laughter] 
What I do want to do, however, is use one example, because there are so 
many young people here. I want to talk about the environment.
    Now, when I became President in 1992, I went all over the country 
saying, ``Look, we need a unifying theory of our national politics. If 
you want to get rid of the deficit and turn the economy around and clean 
up the environment and improve health care and have the country come 
together, you can't be pitting these good things against one another. So 
you have to be able to reduce the deficit and increase investment in 
education. You have to be able to be pro- business and pro-labor. You 
have to be able to be pro-economic growth and pro-environmental 
protection. You have to be able to say people should be proud of their 
ethnic and their racial heritage, their religious differences, and 
believe that their common humanity is the most important thing.''
    I remember a lot of people here--not all but a lot of people here--
who were used to talking about politics saying I was either being naive 
or disingenuous because politics was about having big cleavages in the 
electorate. And I said, ``Not where I come from; and if we'd just run 
our politics the way we try to run our lives, we'd do better.''
    So we set about trying to improve the environment. Now, 8 years 
later, the air is cleaner; we have the toughest air regulations ever to 
try to get bad particles out of the air; the water is safer, both the 
water generally and drinking water in particular; the food supply is 
safer. And we have set aside more land in perpetuity, including Red 
Rock, Grand Staircase Escalante, than any administration except that of 
Theodore Roosevelt. And it wasn't bad for the economy, was it?
    So there's a choice. So Al Gore and Joe Lieberman and Hillary in New 
York--[laughter]--and Mark and Tom, they say, ``Look, we want to keep 
growing this economy, but we've got to keep improving the environment, 
and furthermore, we have to make a much more aggressive effort to deal 
with the problems of global warming.'' We just had another test 2 weeks 
ago in a big icecap, which documented conclusively that the 1990's were 
the warmest decade in a thousand years. And even all the--virtually all; 
not all but virtually all--the oil companies now acknowledge that global 
warming is real. We have to deal with it. So we want to do that.
    Now, here is a choice. Every single year I have been President that 
our friends in the

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Republican Party have been in the majority, every year we fight these 
brutal battles over antienvironmental riders. We win just about all of 
them, but it's hard because the Republicans, sometimes they want the 
antienvironmental riders so much, they offer the Democrats a bunch of 
money hoping they'll vote for the bill, and continuing to assert, ``This 
is terrible for the economy, all this environmental protection the 
Clinton administration does.''
    One of the things I kind of like about the Republicans is that 
evidence has no impact on them. [Laughter] No, I'm serious. I mean, we 
were laughing, but you've got to respect somebody whose political 
convictions are so strong that even when it is demonstrable beyond any 
shadow of doubt they're wrong, they stick with it. You kind of have to 
like that. [Laughter] ``Don't bother me with the facts, man. I know what 
I think, and I'm going to--''[laughter].
    Now, this is a huge deal. A huge deal. Why? I'll just give you a few 
examples. This is a big deal. And every Congress seat and whether we win 
the House back and every Senate seat and this Presidential race is 
important. And I'll just deal with the environment. Why? Because their 
candidate for President--go back and read all the stuff that was said in 
the primary. They think I've gone way overboard on this clean air deal: 
it's just terrible for the economy; it's going to be unduly burdensome.
    Let me tell you something. You talk to the kids that are here. I'll 
bet you they can tell you this. Do you know what the number one cause of 
children missing school in America today is, millions of school days a 
year? Asthma and breathing problems, all over America.
    But this is a choice you've got. And if you agree with them, if you 
think that we just can't achieve a sustainable, an acceptable level of 
economic growth, if you think we'll never bring economic opportunity to 
Indian country unless we weaken our commitment to air quality, you can 
be for them. But if you would like to believe that we can live in 
harmony with nature--and the last 8 years are good evidence of it--you 
ought to stick with us.
    I'll give you another example. The Audubon Society says that the 
Executive order I issued setting aside 43 million roadless acres in our 
national forests was the most significant conservation move in 40 years. 
Their nominee for President says that he will reverse it if elected. So 
it's not like you don't have a choice here, and you can get on either 
side, but don't pretend there's no difference. There is a clear choice.
    I'll give you another example. You heard Mark talking about Grand 
Staircase Escalante. I've made ample use of the power of the President, 
enshrined when Theodore Roosevelt was President almost a hundred years 
ago, to protect important lands through national monuments. We set aside 
a million acres around the Grand Canyon the other day just to protect 
the watershed. [Laughter]
    Their nominee says, if elected, he will review all my designations 
and may undo some of them. I actually don't know if he's got the legal 
authority to do it, but you get the drift. There's a significant 
difference here. [Laughter] There is a difference here.
    I don't know if you heard the Presidential debate the other night. I 
thought the Vice President did a really nice job, a good job. But there 
was one issue on which I thought they both did a good job in stating 
their positions with great clarity. And that was on whether, because of 
the current energy situation and the higher prices, that it's time to 
get off the dime and go drill the arctic national wildlife refuge and 
get the oil out of there.
    Now, Governor Bush pointed out that there is a lot of oil up there, 
and he thought it could be drilled without environmental incident. Now, 
let's look at the facts. Look at all the oil spills you've seen, 
everything else. He might be right. They would spend a lot of money. 
They would try not to do it. Nobody would intentionally mess up the 
environment. He might be right. But he might be wrong, because in any 
human endeavor none of us are free of error. No endeavor is free of 
accident if you do it long enough. So he might be right. But he might be 
wrong.
    Vice President Gore pointed out that there were other ways to 
increase domestic energy production, number one. Number two, there was a 
world of oil out there that was going

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to be drilled anyway and natural gas around the world, not subject to 
the OPEC pricing system, that was going to be brought online. And number 
three, we had not even scratched the surface of our ability to use 
presently available energy conservation technology--not even scratched 
the surface--that, beyond that, we were going to develop fuel cells, 
fuel-injection engines, mixed and blended engines. And if we ever crack 
the chemical mystery of how to really convert any kind of biomass into 
fuel, which, as those of you know right now, it takes about 7 gallons of 
gasoline to make 8 gallons of ethanol--but the chemists that are working 
on this through research funded by your Federal Government tell us that, 
if they can do the equivalent of what was done when crude oil was 
cracked and the refining process was made possible, they can do that 
with biomass fuels, you'll be able to make 8 gallons of biomass fuel 
with 1 gallon of gasoline. Then we will be getting the equivalent of 500 
miles to the gallon. All this is out there.
    So Al Gore said, look, why take a chance on an irreplaceable 
national treasure when, if we drilled it, it's just--if we got all our 
oil out of there, it would last, what, 6 months, a few months anyway--
when we can get more energy out of sensible conservation available now. 
The higher mileage engines are about to come online, and pretty soon 
we'll have different kinds of fuels, anyway. And that's what we ought to 
do.
    They both forcefully, clearly, articulately made their case, and 
there is a difference. Now, I think we're right, and I think they're 
not. But the main thing is you can't let anybody you know show up to 
vote without understanding that there are going to be huge consequences 
to the way you live. Same thing is true in education. Same thing is true 
in health care, and it's not just seniors and medicine; it's a lot of 
other things, as well. The same thing is true in the right to privacy. 
The same thing is true in how we're going to build one America. 
Everybody is now for one America. You never see people using divisive 
rhetoric in national politics anymore, and I am proud of that. And I 
give the Republicans credit for not using words that wound anymore. We 
shouldn't demean--words matter. And I'm glad they've come closer to our 
position.
    But underneath the words, we're for the hate crimes legislation, and 
their leadership is against it. And they're going to kill it, unless I 
can figure out how to save it. And if you can figure out how to save it 
and you'll help us, the Democrats, believe me, we'll be trying until the 
last day we're here to put it on--to pass it. We've got a bipartisan 
majority now. There are enough Republicans, including another cousin of 
Mark's who is in the United States Senate, who every now and then kind 
of drifts off to the Udall side of his family and votes with us. 
[Laughter] I won't call his name because I'm afraid it will hurt him. I 
don't want him to be run out of the Republican caucus. [Laughter] But 
they're not for that.
    They're not for the employment nondiscrimination legislation that 
says that gays shouldn't be discriminated against in the work force. 
They're not for our legislation to strengthen the enforcement of equal 
pay laws for women, still a huge challenge in our country. We had the 
lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years, but we still have a big pay 
gap for doing the same kind of work, and it's wrong. You have all these 
young women here. You're looking forward to getting out of high school, 
going to college, getting out of college, going to work. Why should you 
be paid less than a man if you do the same work with the same 
responsibility? It's been illegal for 35 years, but we don't enforce it.
    Anyway, you get the drift here. This is not a personality contest. I 
think we should posit that our opponents are good people who love their 
families, love their country, and will do their dead-level best to do 
what they think is right when they get in. They have told us what they 
think is right. We sometimes have trouble unpacking it. But if you look 
with great clarity on this environmental issue, you can be under no 
illusion that there will be dramatic differences depending on how this 
election comes out.
    And everybody you know between now and election who will never come 
to something like this but would never consider missing the vote, you 
better talk to, because we need Mark Udall; we need Tom Udall; we

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need to have a Senate that has a lot more people who think like us; and 
we need to win this Presidential race. And we will do it. The good news 
is the American people get it in general. They want this election to be 
about the issues. They have a sense that this is an extraordinary 
opportunity. And that's the last thing I'll say.
    Al Gore sometimes says, ``You ain't seen nothing yet.'' And I guess, 
when somebody running says that, it sounds like a campaign statement. 
I'm not running for anything, and I believe it. I have done my best for 
8 years to turn this country around. I've done my best to turn the 
country around, pull the country together, and move the country forward. 
But it takes time to turn a country around, to get all the indicators 
going in the right direction.
    Maybe once in 50 years does a great democracy find itself with 
prosperity, social progress, national self-confidence, the absence of 
domestic crisis or external threat. This just doesn't happen where all 
this stuff happens at once. We've got a chance for you young people to 
actually build the future of your dreams. But we have to decide. We have 
to choose. We cannot pretend that this is not important.
    And I'm glad you came here. And I guess in any election year, Mark 
and Tom and their families could pull out this kind of crowd at 10 
o'clock on a Friday night. [Laughter] But this election year, you mark 
my words, this is a big deal.
    I was 18 once, the last time we had low unemployment, high growth, 
low inflation. We had a civil rights challenge, but we thought there 
would never be riots in the streets, and it would all be resolved in 
Congress and the courts. And we sort of kind of drifted off and got our 
attention divided and found ourselves kind of embroiled in Vietnam. And 
then before you know it, it had divided the country. We had riots in the 
streets. Dr. King was killed. Senator Kennedy was killed. President 
Johnson, who had done so much for civil rights and to alleviate poverty 
and so much to help education, had a country so divided, he said he 
wouldn't and probably couldn't run for reelection. And before you knew 
it, the last time we had an economy like this and a sense of 
possibility, it was gone like that.
    Now we have to concentrate, and we have to argue. We don't have to 
be mean. We don't have to be negative. All we've got to do is be clear, 
honest, and energetic. The best is still out there. You need to go get 
it.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:58 p.m. at the Washington Court Hotel. In 
his remarks, he referred to Jill Cooper Udall, wife of Representative 
Tom Udall; former President Slobodan Milosevic and President Vojislav 
Kostunica of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), 
who was sworn in on October 7; and Republican Presidential candidate 
Gov. George W. Bush. Representative Tom Udall is a candidate for 
reelection in New Mexico's Third Congressional District. Representative 
Mark Udall is a candidate for reelection in Colorado's Second 
Congressional District. This item was not received in time for 
publication in the appropriate issue.