[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 41 (Monday, October 16, 2000)]
[Pages 2442-2446]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Reception for the Pennsylvania Democratic Coordinated 
Campaign in Philadelphia

October 11, 2000

    Thank you. Well, thank you for the welcome. Thank you, Mayor Street. 
I was honored to help you win because I wanted Philadelphia to win, and 
I'm glad you won, and you're doing great.
    Thank you, Senator Tartaglione, for being the chair of our party and 
for doing such a good job. Thank you, Bill George. I got here in time to 
hear Bill George's speech. [Laughter] You know, Bill is so restrained 
and laid back. [Laughter] I loved it. He said everything that needed to 
be said and said it well. And he's been a great friend to me for more 
than 8 years now, and I thank him for that.
    And I can't tell you how grateful I am to Ed Rendell for being 
willing to take over the leadership of our party, and you should be so 
proud of him. He's done a great, great job.

[[Page 2443]]

    I came here to campaign for the Democrats, and this is a pretty 
nostalgic trip for me. As John said, it may be the last time I come to 
Philadelphia to give a speech as President; maybe not, though. If I get 
a chance, I'll come back. I love it here.
    One of the young men who has been with me for more than 8 years now, 
Kirk Hanlin, is out there smiling. He said, ``Do you remember how many 
times we've been to this hotel since 1992?'' [Laughter] What a wonderful 
time, and then we talked about every hotel we've been in, in 
Philadelphia. And we started talking about, you know, going all the way 
back to early 1992 and our wonderful trips here.
    I feel a deep sense of gratitude to the State of Pennsylvania. 
You've been good to me and to my family and my administration family. 
You've given us your electoral votes twice. And both times the great 
magnet was this breathtaking vote out of Philadelphia, which 
reverberated into the region here and all over this part of eastern 
Pennsylvania. We did better than Democrats normally do, and I just 
cannot thank you enough. So coming here to be for the Democratic ticket, 
for my long-time friend, Catherine Baker Knoll and Jim Eisenhower and 
Bob Casey, Jr., but especially for Ron Klink, it's not only easy, it's 
an honor.
    I just want to say a couple of things very candidly. John said them 
before. I know Ron Klink pretty well. We have worked together for a long 
time now. He represents a district in western Pennsylvania where the 
biggest city has 27,000 people. And so as you might imagine, they have a 
lot of concerns that are somewhat different than the ones Lucien used to 
represent here in Philadelphia. You know, it's different.
    And it's hard for a Member of the House of Representatives from an 
essentially rural and small-town district way across this vast State to 
be well enough known on the eastern side of the State for people to know 
who he is, what he stands for, what the differences are between him and 
his opponent.
    I want to tell you something, folks. I think I know Pennsylvania by 
now. You know, my wife's family is from here, from Scranton. My father-
in-law's family is there. He's buried up there. I've spent lots and lots 
of time here over many years. I have absolutely no doubt that if a 
hundred percent of the registered voters who will vote on election day 
knew Ron Klink's record, knew his opponent's record, and knew what the 
differences between them on the issues facing the United States Senate 
and the United States of America over the next 6 years are, Ron Klink 
would win and win handily.
    Number two, he's working as hard as he can. He's working hard. 
Therefore, if he doesn't win, it's our fault, all the rest of us that 
are for him. Now, I don't know how else to say it. It's hard to beat an 
incumbent, particularly the incumbent of the other party, because 
everybody with lots of money--they spend overtime trying to make sure 
they stay happy. And they work at it, steadily, and then when they run, 
they are able to run.
    But we don't have to have as much money as they do. All we have to 
have is enough. And enough means enough for everybody to know who you 
are, what you stand for, what the differences are. And if they give you 
a little incoming fire, you can give a little answer. That's all you 
need. And you need a lot of word of mouth.
    And I'm just telling you, if people really understood the true story 
of the last 6 years, Ron Klink would get as good a vote out of 
Philadelphia as I did in 1996. And I want you to understand this: 18 
million people every year in this country, 18 million, have care delayed 
or denied because we don't have a Patients' Bill of Rights. We lost it 
by one vote in the United States Senate. If he had been your Senator, I 
would have signed the Patients' Bill of Rights into law already.
    We passed hate crimes legislation in the House and the Senate, and 
then the Republican leadership turned around and took it out of the 
bill. If he were in the Senate, it would be one more vote to stop that 
kind of nonsense from happening. If you voted for something, you would 
send it to the President so he could sign it and make it the law of the 
land.
    You heard what Ed Rendell said to you about school construction. The 
average school building in this city is 65 years old. I've been to 
schools that have 12 trailers out behind it. I've been to other schools 
where you couldn't wire all the classrooms for the

[[Page 2444]]

Internet or the circuits would go out. I've been to schools where whole 
floors had to be closed down because they couldn't be properly insulated 
or rendered safe because they couldn't afford to fix the roof.
    We've got the biggest group of school kids in history. We say 
they're the most important things in the world to us. We now know how to 
turn failing schools around, something we didn't know a few years ago. 
And I could give you lots of examples. All we propose to do is to share 
the cost of financing school bonds with local school districts. So if 
you want to undertake a school building program, we'll cut the cost to 
the taxpayers some to make it easier for you to do it.
    Now, while we've got more school kids than ever before, a smaller 
percentage of the property owners have children in the schools than they 
did 50 years ago when this happened before. So we need to do this. 
There's a limit to how much the property tax will bear. We can afford to 
do it. It's not even that expensive. But we cannot pass it through the 
leadership of the other party. If Ron Klink were in the Senate, he'd be 
out there fighting for, not dragging against, school construction 
legislation that will help our children have the school buildings they 
need.
    Now, those are just three things. Now, let me back up and put it in 
some larger context. I'll say much more briefly what I tried to say in 
Los Angeles. And you heard a little of it today. When you gave--when 
Pennsylvania voted for Bill Clinton and Al Gore, you gave us a chance to 
try out some new ideas. And people ask me all the time, now that we've 
got the best, longest expansion in history and the lowest unemployment 
rate in 30 years and 22 million new jobs, they say, what great new idea 
did you bring to Washington. And I say, ``Arithmetic.'' [Laughter] We 
brought arithmetic to Washington. And that's what caused the 
Republicans--they always talked about balancing the budget. Remember 
that? They always told you how they wanted a constitutional amendment to 
balance the budget. They wanted everything to help keep them from having 
to make a decision to balance the budget. Why? Because if you're 
spending more than you're taking in, there is no way to balance the 
budget except to spend less, take in more, or do a little of both. It's 
arithmetic.
    And for 12 years they quadrupled our national debt, and they ran the 
interest rates up and ran the economy into a ditch. And so I brought 
arithmetic back. And frankly, we lost the House of Representatives and 
the Senate in part because we had Members with enough guts to stand up 
to the kind of attacks that were rained down on people like Ron Klink in 
1993 and 1994, for saying, ``Hey, you want to balance the budget, get 
growth back, get interest rates down? Arithmetic.''
    And oh, they said it was going to be the end of the world. We'd have 
a recession, the whole thing. It would be terrible. People would quit 
working because we asked the top one percent to pay a little more in 
taxes. They would quit working, and nobody would do anything. The whole 
thing would go haywire. [Laughter] Well, time has not been kind to their 
predictions. [Laughter]
    Now, look, we're all laughing. I want you to have a good time, but I 
am dead serious. Look, we changed the economic policy. We changed the 
crime policy. We changed the education policy. We changed the health 
care policy. We changed the environmental policy. We changed the foreign 
policy of the country. And we certainly changed our policy on building 
one America and bridging all the divides that exist in our very 
complicated society, trying to pull people together instead of drive a 
wedge between us. Now, we changed all that. And it's a better country. 
We've come together. We're moving forward. We're doing it together.
    You have to decide by your votes whether you're going to ratify that 
direction and keep changing in that direction or say, ``Well, who knows. 
We're doing so well, it probably doesn't make any difference. Let's take 
a U-turn and try it the other way.'' Now, make no mistake about it, 
that's what's going on. The differences in this election between the two 
candidates for President, their counterparts for Vice President, the two 
candidates for Senate in the State of Pennsylvania, on the economy, on 
education, on health care--just to take three--are huge.
    Now, you can have a tax cut so you can send your kids to college, 
pay for long-term care, pay for child care, pay for retirement,

[[Page 2445]]

and still be small enough to invest in education and health care, the 
environment, and keep getting us out of debt so interest rates will stay 
down. Or you can take their tax cut, which is 3 times bigger, and then 
partially privatize Social Security, which costs another trillion 
dollars, and then take their spending promises, and you're right back in 
the ditch. You're back in deficits. You're back in high interest rates.
    Now, let me just tell you this. Tell this to your friends. Our plan 
will keep interest rates--what Klink will vote for--will keep interest 
rates one percent lower a year for a decade. Do you know what that's 
worth? Three hundred ninety billion dollars in lower home mortgages, $30 
billion in lower car payments, $15 billion in lower student loan 
payments. And those alone are a $435 billion effective tax cut for 
working-class Americans and everybody else with those expenses. That's 
the right thing to do.
    Now, the same thing--we're for a Patients' Bill of Rights, and 
they're not. We're for a Medicare drug benefit that every senior who 
needs it can buy into. They're for a Medicare drug benefit that leaves 
out half the seniors who need it. They tell them to buy insurance, with 
the insurance companies screaming there's no such thing as an insurance 
policy for medicine that people can afford to buy that's worth having.
    Do you ever wonder why they did that? Did you ever hear of anybody 
in any business that didn't want more customers? [Laughter] Don't you 
think it's funny? Don't you think it's weird, this drug debate?
    Where the Democrats and Vice President Gore and Congressman Klink--
they want a Medicare drug benefit that all seniors who need it can buy 
into on a voluntary basis. And Governor Bush and the Republicans and the 
drug companies say that we're trying to have the Government take over--
give me a break--the Government take over the drug business and set 
prices. And they don't want that many customers. They only want half the 
people that need it.
    Well, originally, they didn't want us to do it all. And then the 
Republicans went to the drug companies, and they said, ``Look, guys, we 
can't carry your water anymore. They're going to beat our brains out 
here. You can't be against everybody having medicine who needs it.''
    And so the drug companies said, ``Okay, take this bill and give it 
to half the people who need it.'' Does that make any sense? Did you ever 
meet a politician that didn't want more votes? [Laughter] Did you ever 
meet a car salesman that didn't want to sell cars? Now, this is serious. 
I want you to understand it. You need to know what's going on. It's a 
big deal.
    If you live to be 65 in America, your life expectancy is 82. The 
young women in this audience that will still have babies, because of the 
human genome project they'll be having babies in a few years with a life 
expectancy of 90. It matters whether seniors can get the medicine they 
need to lengthen their lives and improve the quality of their lives.
    The reason they don't want to do that is, if Medicare represents the 
seniors, they can use market power to squeeze down the price of drugs in 
America so they're almost as cheap when they're made in America, bought 
in America, as they are when they're bought in Canada. That's what is 
going on, because the drug companies have to recover all their research 
and all their advertising costs from us.
    Now, I say that not to demonize them. I'm glad they're here. They 
give us great jobs, and they save our lives. They've got a problem. All 
these other countries have price controls.
    So this is a big example, though, in the difference in the two 
parties. Their party says, ``Let's solve their problem, even though 
we'll leave a lot of old people without the medicine they need.'' Our 
party says, ``Let's give the seniors the medicine they need, then we'll 
figure out how to solve their problem.'' We're not going to hurt them, 
but we're not going to let them use their problem as an excuse to keep 
hurting other Americans. That's the differences in the two parties.
    So I ask you, why am I doing this? I know I'm preaching to the 
saved. [Laughter] Because every single one of you will come in contact 
with a lot of people between now and election, day who have never come 
to an event like this and never will, but they'll vote. And all they may 
know, unless you talk to them, is what they see in a paid ad.

[[Page 2446]]

    So I want to ask you to do two things. Number one, if you haven't 
given him a contribution, give him one, even if it's just $10. Give him 
more money. If people know the difference between him and his opponent, 
he wins. And believe me, he can still win. The other guy is nowhere near 
over 50 percent. And it's all about eastern Pennsylvania, name 
recognition, and clarity of understanding of their position.
    Number two, I want you to promise yourself when you leave here 
today, every day between now and the election, you're going to talk to 
them about Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, Ron Klink, the Democrats, where we 
were 8 years ago, where we are now, what we want to do, what the 
differences are, how we'll affect people's lives.
    Look, this is real stuff. I am grateful you gave me the chance to 
serve. I hope I've made some contribution to the well-being of 
Philadelphia, as the mayor said, and the State of Pennsylvania.
    But listen to me. All of our public life is always about the future. 
And the future now, for me, is getting back to New York in time to 
celebrate my 25th anniversary. And the future for you is Al Gore, Joe 
Lieberman, Ron Klink, and the New Democrats that brought America back. 
You go tell people that.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 5:20 p.m. at the Wyndham Franklin Plaza 
Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor John F. Street of 
Philadelphia; Christine M. Tartaglione, chair, Democratic Party of 
Pennsylvania; William M. George, president, Pennsylvania AFL-CIO; Edward 
G. Rendell, general chair, Democratic National Committee; Catherine 
Baker Knoll, candidate for State treasurer; Jim Eisenhower III, 
candidate for State attorney general; Bob Casey, Jr., gubernatorial 
candidate; Representative Ron Klink, candidate for U.S. Senate; and 
former Representative Lucien E. Blackwell.