[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 42 (Monday, October 23, 2000)]
[Pages 2477-2478]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Reception for Former Representative Maria Cantwell in 
Seattle, Washington

October 14, 2000

    Thank you very much. First, I want to thank you for coming in to be 
with me, and to be with Maria. I want to thank you for helping her. And 
I want to ask you to do everything you possibly can to get every person 
you can possibly drag to the polls on November 7th. If our people vote 
and they understand the issues, we'll win. It's not very complicated.
    I wanted to be here for several reasons. First of all, I'm 
profoundly grateful to the State of Washington. You've been very good to 
me and Al Gore. You gave me your electoral votes twice. And I hope you 
think you made a good decision, because the State's in better shape than 
it was 8 years ago.
    But the second reason I wanted to come here is because I feel a 
special debt of gratitude and a special bond to Maria Cantwell. She was 
one of the people that was willing to put her whole political career on 
the line to turn this country around. And her opponent's now out there 
running ads against her for voting to save the American economy and 
mischaracterizing, again, our budget in 1993. Let me just remind you, 
when I took office, we had a $290 billion deficit. It was supposed to be 
$455 billion this year. Instead, we have a $230 billion surplus. Why? 
Because by one vote, Maria Cantwell's vote, we turned America around. 
She ought to go to the United States Senate.
    And let me just--I remember when they said, you know, my economic 
plan would be a disaster for America, all the Republicans did. They all 
voted against it. It was terrible. It was going to have a recession. You 
know, the world would come to an end. Time has not been kind to their 
predictions.
    And so you've got a clear choice here. You've got a clear choice in 
the Senate race; you've got a clear choice in the President's race; you 
have a clear choice in all these congressional races. Now, we made the 
painful decisions before. All we have to do now is be prudent and 
visionary. Are we going to keep investing in education and health care 
and pay down this debt and give the people a tax cut we can afford, 
targeted to middle-class people and lower income working people who need 
it? Or are we going to go back and do what they did before, have a huge 
tax cut?
    And I can tell you--I will say this. In spite of how murky the 
Republicans have tried to be in the way they've messed up these issues, 
in the first Presidential debate--something that I kept waiting to see 
in blaring headlines in the press I haven't seen yet--the Republican 
nominee actually admitted that it was going to cost $1 trillion to 
partially privatize Social Security. So if you spend $1.5 trillion on 
the tax cut and $1 trillion partially privatizing Social Security and 
several hundred billion dollars on their spending promises, we're right 
back in deficit.
    Our program is, spend more than they will on education, invest more 
than they will in health care, but keep paying down this debt to keep 
interest rates down. That keeps the economy going, plus which, it's a 
huge tax cut. With lower interest rates, there's lower home mortgage 
rates, lower car payments, lower college loan payments, lower credit 
card payments, as well as lower business loans. Our deal works better.
    Now, you need to go out--you need to go out and tell people this. 
Ask them to remember what it was like 8 years ago, and if they really 
want to ratify that decision or they want to reward somebody who had the 
courage to take America in a different direction. And I'm telling you, 
it was all on her shoulders. We carried that thing by one vote. And now 
he wants you to vote against her for getting Washington out of the dumps 
and bringing America back so they can get in power and do to us what 
they did before? That's the argument they're making. You need to go tell 
people that, and don't fool around with it. It's clear.
    So the first big deal is the economy. The second thing is education. 
We believe we ought to help build more schools and repairs schools. We 
believe we ought to put another

[[Page 2478]]

100,000 teachers in these schools, so the kids can have smaller classes. 
And they're not for that. We believe we ought to pass a Patients' Bill 
of Rights and have a Medicare drug benefit that benefits all seniors, 
and they're not for that, because their interest groups won't let them 
be.
    And there's a clear choice here. Whether it's the minimum wage, the 
hate crimes bill, the employment nondiscrimination bill, the 
extraordinary efforts I'm proud to say our administration has made to 
try to support the Native American communities. In every single 
instance, their leadership has been in one place; we've been somewhere 
else.
    So you've just got to decide here. And you need to talk to people 
who tell you, ``Well, it may not make a difference.'' It does make a 
difference. It makes a huge difference. Somebody tells you one Senate 
seat doesn't make a difference, you tell them America would still be in 
the budget hole and still be in the economic hole if it hadn't been for 
every single House seat and every single Senate seat where we had the 
people voting for you. And Maria Cantwell was one of them, and she would 
be a brilliant United States Senator.
    And so I'm just telling you, I have done everything I could do to 
turn our country around, to pull our people together, to move our Nation 
forward. But now we have to decide, what are we going to do with the 
prosperity? You know, people took a chance on me in 1992. I don't know 
how many people in Washington State walked into the polling place and 
said, ``I wonder if I ought to vote for that guy.'' [Laughter] ``You 
know, he's pretty young, and the President,'' the then-President, ``said 
he's just the Governor of a small southern State.'' I was so naive, I 
thought that was a compliment. [Laughter] And I still do. But you know, 
it wasn't that big a chance, because, I mean, the country was in a 
ditch. We had to do something different, right?
    So now we're in good shape, but we have to figure out, how are we 
going to include the people who still aren't part of this prosperity? 
How are we going to give all of our kids an excellent education? How are 
we going to provide access to health care for people who don't have it? 
What are we going to do with the aging of America, when there's only two 
people working for every one person on Social Security? We have big 
challenges here. And we get to decide.
    But make no mistake about it. The differences are just as stark and 
just as clear as they were 8 years ago. And the stakes, if anything, are 
higher. Maybe once every 50 years a country gets to do what we can do 
now, where you don't have an external threat, an internal crisis, things 
are going in the right direction, and you get to paint the future of 
your dreams for you children and grandchildren. Once in a blue moon this 
happens.
    And you need visionary people who understand how to be fair to 
everybody, how to make the economy work, but make it work for everybody. 
And you know, there aren't many people with the unique background and 
achievements that Maria has presenting themselves for public office. And 
there aren't many people who can stand here and tell you--and I'm 
telling you--that they were the deciding vote that turned this country 
around.
    And if you like where Washington is today better than you liked it 8 
years ago, there is no choice. You've got to make sure she wins this 
election. Send her to the Senate.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 5:33 p.m. in the Fifth Avenue Room at the 
Westin Hotel. In his remarks, the President referred to Republican 
Presidential nominee Gov. George W. Bush. Maria Cantwell is a candidate 
for the U.S. Senate from Washington. A tape was not available for 
verification of the content of these remarks.