[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 44 (Monday, November 6, 2000)]
[Pages 2708-2714]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to African-American Religious and Community Leaders in 
New York City

October 31, 2000

    Thank you. I knew I was going to have a good time here when I walked 
in the backdoor and they were singing ``Oh, Happy Day.'' [Laughter] So 
they finished before I got here, and I had to have another song, and you 
were magnificent. Thank you very much. I'm proud of you all for changing 
your lives and for being hooked on something good. Thank you. I'm proud 
of you all. Bless you. Bless you.
    Thank you, Bishop Gaylord, for making us feel welcome. Thank you, 
Bishop White, for praying over us--[laughter]--making us feel holier. 
Thank you, Reverend Williams, for getting us here to remind us of what 
we're supposed to do as citizens in this life. I would

[[Page 2709]]

also like to say a special word of thanks to Reverend Herb Daughtry, 
whose daughter works for Alexis Herman, the Secretary of Labor. I know 
he was here before me, but I thank him. Yes, sir.
    I thank your borough president, Virginia Fields, for being here and 
for supporting Hillary and Al. And I know Senator Schumer was here 
earlier, and our public advocate, Mark Green, is in the back. And we've 
been friends, Mark and I have, for 20 years, and he shook his hand out--
I came in before--he said, ``Reverend Green to you.'' [Laughter]
    So, you know, after all these years you've been working--he's got to 
get in the mood, you know, that's good. He's coming right along.
    I cannot say enough about my admiration for Carl McCall, the job 
he's done for you and the--Hillary and I like him and his wonderful 
wife, Joyce, so much, and we're proud of him, and I'm very grateful for 
the support he's given to Hillary. I said--I want to express my support, 
too, for Senator Schumer. I know he was here earlier. And let me say one 
thing about Charlie Rangel. If we win six more seats, he'll be the 
chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He's been very good to 
me. Harlem has been very good to me.
    I can't speak in this pulpit in Harlem without also noting that one 
of the most important people in my becoming President was my first 
Secretary of Commerce, Ron Brown, who grew up in Harlem. I miss him 
every day, and I want to--[applause]--he'd be glad to know I'm finishing 
up my career as President in a church in Harlem. [Laughter] Mayor 
Dinkins, I'm glad to see you. You'll always be mayor to me, and I love 
you. Thank you. Glad to see you.
    Now, I love to come, especially, to the Church of God in Christ. 
Bishop White talked about the presiding bishop, Bishop Owens. His 
predecessor, Bishop Ford from Chicago, was a great friend of mine, and 
he has been a magnificent friend of mine. He brought the bishops to 
their annual meeting in Washington just so I could say thanks and 
goodbye to them.
    We were all having a good time. We're all old friends. So I got up 
and thought I was being funny. I said to Bishop Owens in front of all of 
the bishops, I said, ```You know, I wanted to come here because I wanted 
to see a group of leaders who aren't term-limited.'' [Laughter] And you 
know, I thought that was pretty cute. And Bishop Owens looked at me and 
said, ``Mr. President, we are all term-limited.'' [Laughter] And so we 
are. But while we're here, we're supposed to do the best we can. Is that 
right?
    Now, we all know why we're here, and we can shout amen and have a 
great time, and we're all preaching to the saved; we're talking to one 
another. But I want to talk to you about the people that aren't in this 
church tonight, the people who have never come to an event like this and 
never heard a President speak or even a mayor or a comptroller or a 
Senator or anybody. But they could vote. And they need to vote, and they 
need to know why they're voting. And that's really why you're here, 
because of all the people who aren't here. Isn't that right? There 
wouldn't be a need in us having a meeting if everybody who is not here 
planned to show up, understood what the stakes were, what the choice 
was, and what the consequences were. Is that right?
    So what you have to think about tonight is, what is it you intend to 
do between now and Tuesday, and on Tuesday, to get as many people there 
as possible and to make sure when they get to the polls, they know why 
they're there, what the stakes are, and what the consequences are. And 
from my point of view, which is one most of all just filled with 
gratitude for the people of the United States, to the people of New 
York, and to the people of Harlem for the support you have given to me 
and Hillary and Al and Tipper Gore these last 8 years, I'm not running 
for anything; my party has got a new leader; my home has a new 
candidate. [Laughter] And I like that. I like getting out here and 
speaking for other people. That's what I did when I was a kid, you know, 
and now I'm getting to learn it all over again, and I like it. But I 
want to tell you tonight in public what I would tell you if I were 
sitting alone in a room with any of you, and you asked me, what's this 
election about, anyway?
    I think there are three great questions that I want you to tell 
everybody you can reach--

[[Page 2710]]

everybody in Harlem, everybody in New York State. If you've got any 
friends across the river in New Jersey or anyplace else, I want you to 
reach them between now and Tuesday, because this is a razor-thin 
election. I believe because people are not quite sure--``What's it 
about, anyway? And is it a big deal, or can we relax because things are 
going so well?''
    One thing I can say in a church is that anybody that's lived more 
than 30 years has made at least one big mistake in his or her life, not 
when things were so bad, but when things were so good, you thought, 
well, this is all right; I don't have to concentrate anymore. Isn't that 
right? If you live long enough, you make a big mistake when things are 
going well, not when things are going bad. When things are going bad and 
your whole survival is at stake, it kind of concentrates your mind; you 
make better decisions. If things are going good, you think, ah, what's 
the difference?
    Now, this is a happy election, I think, for America because the 
country is in good shape, and I like it that these candidates aren't 
really badmouthing each other. I like it that we can just say, let's 
assume we're dealing with good people here who love their families and 
love their country and will do their best to do a good job based on what 
they believe.
    And once you say that, then you've got to figure out, what is it 
they believe? What are they going to do if they get these jobs, and how 
will it affect me, my family, my community, and my country? That's all 
that matters. And I'm hopeful that the work we've done in the last 8 
years has taken some of the poison out of America's political life so we 
could actually have an election about what it's really supposed to be 
about, which is, how is this going to affect you?
    After all, the race for President, the race for Vice President, the 
race for United States Senator, those are hiring decisions. You're 
hiring people to do a job for you. John Kennedy once said that the 
Presidency was preeminently a place of decisionmaking. You're hiring 
people to make decisions, because they can't be made by all 280-some-odd 
million of us, so we hire somebody to make these decisions. What 
decisions will they make; will they be good or bad; will they move us 
forward or back; will they bring us together or divide us?--that's what 
this is about.
    And the same thing is true in the Senate. And I can tell you, after 
8 years, one of the things I have learned is, every single one of these 
Senate seats is profoundly important. So, you know how biased I am in 
this election. I mean, the most important person in the world to me is 
running for Senator, and my partner for 8 years is running for 
President, and so I'm biased.
    But what I want to do is tell you the three questions I think you 
ought ask to answer to anybody. And you don't have to say anything bad 
about their opponent. And you sure don't have to get down and do what 
some of them have been doing around here lately--those kinds of phone 
calls and stuff I read about in the paper. You don't have to do any of 
that. Just say--look, say these three things.
    Number one, look where we were 8 years ago, and look where we are 
today. We have the longest economic expansion in history, nearly 22 
million new jobs; African-American unemployment the lowest ever 
recorded, nearly half, almost cut in half what it was 8 years ago; and 
record numbers of new businesses, record numbers of new minority 
businesses, record numbers of new homeowners, record numbers of new 
minority homeowners.
    The female unemployment rate is the lowest in 40 years; poverty rate 
at a 20-year low; the child poverty rate has dropped about a third. This 
is amazing--seniors living in poverty below 10 percent for the first 
time in the entire history of America--ever.
    So, question number one, do you want to build on this prosperity and 
keep it going and extend it to people who aren't part of it yet, or do 
you want to abandon the path we're on and go back to a different 
economic policy that let us down before? It's a big question.
    Now, Hillary and Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, they say, ``Hey, let's 
keep paying down the debt.'' Remember, we had the biggest deficits in 
history; we quadrupled the debt when I became President; interest rates 
were high, and the economy was weak. So we got rid of the deficits; 
we're now paying

[[Page 2711]]

down the debt that had accumulated in those years before, and if you pay 
the debt off, you will have lower interest rates.
    So they say, our side says, ``Look, let's figure out what we've got 
to do to pay the debt down over the next 12 years, and take the rest of 
it and spend on our kids and our seniors, in health care and education 
and the environment, and spend what we have to spend on the national 
security, and give the rest of it to people in a tax cut for child care, 
for long-term care, for college education, for retirement savings. But 
first, keep the economy going.''
    Now, if you want to do that instead of have a tax cut 3 times as big 
and a trillion dollar program to privatize Social Security and spend 
another several hundred billion dollars and put the country back in 
debt, which will give you higher interest rates, you have to vote for 
Hillary and Al Gore and Joe Lieberman. You've got to talk to people. 
It's a simple thing. You want to keep the prosperity going, keep the 
debt coming down, invest in our kids and our future, and have a tax cut 
we can afford--you just have one set of choices here. This is a big 
question. And there's an honest difference here about what the best 
economic policy is.
    People ask me all the time, you know, ``What did you do to help turn 
the economy around? What was the Federal Government's role? What great 
new idea did you bring back?'' I always tell them, ``I brought this 
great idea all the way from Arkansas--arithmetic.'' [Laughter] ``A big 
new idea. We made the numbers add up.'' And see, if you have--if you're 
supposed to have a $2 trillion surplus--it won't be that big now, by the 
way--but is supposed to be 2--forget about the trillion; forget all 
those zeroes--surplus is supposed to be 2, and the tax cut and the 
interest costs are 1.6, and it costs you 1 to privatize Social Security, 
never mind whether you think it's a good idea or not; it costs 1 
trillion dollars, and you spend another 5 trillion, or .5, on something 
else; well, 1.6 plus 1 plus .5 is 3.1--that's more than 2. And that 
means deficits, and that means higher interest rates.
    Now, if you keep interest rates one percent lower, let me tell you 
what it means for America. One percent lower a year--that's about what I 
think it will be under the Gore/Lieberman plan that Hillary will vote 
for in the Senate--that's worth $390 billion in lower home mortgages to 
the American people. That's a pretty big tax cut. Thirty billion dollars 
in lower car payments, $15 billion in lower college loan payments.
    So, question number one, do you want to build on the prosperity and 
keep it going and give it to people that have been left behind with 
things like the empowerment zone program that Charlie Rangel and Al Gore 
put here in Harlem to do more of that sort of thing, or do you want as 
much of this money as you can get right now, even if it puts us back in 
deficit?
    Now, that's a decision the American people have to make. But we've 
tried it our way for 8 years, and we tried it the other way for 12 
years, and I think you will admit that based on the evidence, our way 
works better. So that's the first thing I want to say.
    Now, question number two, remember where we were 8 years ago on the 
society? We had an economy in trouble and a society that was divided. 
Now, compared to 8 years ago, crime has dropped in every year; it's at a 
26-year low; it's going in the right direction. Teen pregnancy and drug 
abuse among young people are down; the number of people without health 
insurance is down; 2 \1/2\ million more kids have health insurance. The 
environmental quality of the country is up--cleaner air, cleaner water, 
safer drinking water, safer food, 3 times as many of these toxic waste 
dumps cleaned up in our 8 years as in the previous 12. And we've 
protected more land than any administration since Theodore Roosevelt of 
New York almost 100 years ago. Now, that's the fact.
    So question number two is, do you want to build on this until 
America is the safest country in the world, until we have provided 
Medicare prescription drugs for the seniors who need it, all of them, 
until we have a Patients' Bill of Rights that protects people and their 
health care, until we solve the energy problems that bother you every 
winter when home heating oil comes around--you worry about it going to 
be too expensive--with long-term energy solutions to develop 
conservation and new sources of energy, the

[[Page 2712]]

stuff that Al Gore knows a lot about? Do you want to do that?
    And look at our schools compared to 8 years ago. The dropout rate is 
down; the African-American high school graduation rate is equal to the 
white rate for the first time in history. The test scores in math and 
science are up. We've had a 300 percent increase in the number of 
African-American kids taking advanced placement tests for college in the 
last 3 years alone--a 300 percent increase.
    We see schools turning around that were failing. I was in a school 
in Harlem the other day, where 2 years ago, 80 percent of the kids were 
doing reading and math below grade level; today, 74 percent of the kids 
doing reading or math at or above grade level--in just 2 years. We're 
turning these schools around.
    Now, do you want to build on that with the program that Hillary and 
the Vice President and Joe Lieberman have advocated--100,000 teachers in 
the classroom; hook them all up to the Internet; double the number of 
people in after-school programs so you won't have these latchkey kids 
and they will be able to stay in school and work their computers and do 
stuff like that after school; give people a tax deduction for the costs 
of college tuition; and require these failing schools to turn around or 
put them under new management so all the kids get good education? There 
is a clear choice here.
     So the second thing you need to say to people is, ``Look, it's not 
just about the economy. Crime is down; the schools are better; we're 
providing more health insurance; the environment is cleaner. And are we 
going to build on these changes, or are we going to support policies and 
candidates that will reverse our crime policy, reverse our environmental 
policy, take down our education policy, and don't support our health 
care initiatives?''
    It's a choice. It's not like there's no choice; there's a huge 
choice. And again, you don't have to say anything bad about our 
opponents, but they are different. There's a difference here. They have 
a different view here. [Laughter] And if we were having a debate, I 
could go over there and stand there and argue their position; I could 
come back here and argue ours, but I think ours is better.
    It's not like you don't have any evidence here. Just look at the way 
it was 8 years ago, and look at the way it is now. And the third thing 
may be the most important thing of all. So number one, we're going to 
keep the prosperity going; number two, we're going to build on the 
social progress; number three, we're going to keep building one America. 
We're going to keep going forward together.
    Our side is for increasing the minimum wage, strengthening the equal 
pay laws for women in the workplace, strengthening the civil rights 
laws, passing hate crimes legislation, passing employment 
nondiscrimination legislation, and having appointments to the U.S. 
Supreme Court that will stand up for civil rights and human rights and 
individual rights.
    Now--so that's where this election is, in a nutshell. If 100 percent 
of the people understand, number one, this is a real important election; 
number two, it's about three things. Do you want to keep the prosperity 
going or change those policies? Do you want to build on the social 
progress or take down the policies that have contributed to them? Do you 
want to build one America and keep moving forward together? Those are 
the three things at stake in this election that people need to 
understand.
    And in the Presidency, I would just say one other thing. I think 
we're doing well in these congressional races, but you look at what I've 
had to do the last 6 years. The American people should think about it 
before they run the risk of leaving Congress and the White House in the 
hands of the other party, because I've stopped a lot of bad things from 
happening, as well. And that's another good argument for--of course, if 
they decide to give the Congress and the White House to the Democrats, 
that would be quite wonderful from my point of view, and that's a 
possibility. But if it doesn't happen, that's another thing people ought 
to factor in.
    So I say to you, in my lifetime, we've never had an election like 
this. And I'm 54 years old. We have never had an election where we had 
so much economic prosperity, so much social progress, the absence of 
domestic crisis or foreign threat to our existence.

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It never happened in our lifetime. It may not happen again in our 
lifetime. It may not happen again for 50 or 60 years or more. Therefore, 
you need to go out and tell young folks who may think it's always been 
this way--you know, somebody 18 years old, they were 10 when I got 
elected President. But they're old enough to vote now. They weren't 
paying attention, maybe, before they were 10. Right? You have memory, 
and you have to impart that. This is a precious opportunity.
    One of the greatest honors I've had as President was walking across 
the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to celebrate the 35th anniversary of 
the voting rights march with Congressman John Lewis and Josea Williams 
and others. We did it a few months ago. And Mrs. King was there; 
Reverend Jackson was there; lots of folks were there then. John Lewis 
got beat up bad that day.
    You need to go tell the young people that people died so they could 
have this right to vote. When I grew up in the South, black people still 
had to buy poll taxes, and other people bought them for them and handed 
out like raffle tickets on election day and gathered people up. And then 
other places, they couldn't vote at all. And people died for the right 
to vote unfettered, unencumbered, unthreatened.
    And now, lo and behold, we've had an administration where 14 percent 
of our appointments have been African-American, 17 percent of my judges, 
where we've all been part of this. But it worked for other people, too. 
You didn't gain anything that Latinos and Asians and white folks didn't 
gain. We all went forward together. That's the only way we can do it. 
Black Americans never asked to go ahead of the line; they just wanted to 
get in the line and go on. Right? Is that right? [Applause]
    I wanted everybody to have a home in America. I wanted us to be one 
family. But I'm telling you, you just go out there. You hear what I'm 
telling you. You don't have to remember all these statistics and all 
these details. Just say, if you want to keep the prosperity going and 
take it to the people and places left behind, we've got to keep paying 
this debt down and invest in our kids and our future and take a tax cut 
we can afford. We can't afford to go back into deficits and high 
interest rates and get off the track.
    If you want to keep the crime rate coming down, the number of 
uninsured people coming down, give all of our seniors a Medicare drug 
benefit, keep helping the schools to turn around so that all our kids 
can have a good education--you don't want to reverse the policies we're 
on--we need to build on them, not reverse them--and if you want to keep 
building one America, there is one party that favors all these things: 
the hate crimes legislation, the employment nondiscrimination 
legislation, stronger civil rights enforcement, stronger enforcement of 
equal pay laws for women, a minimum wage, and a Supreme Court that will 
protect civil rights and the ability of the National Government to 
protect civil rights and human rights.
    Now, the last thing I'd like to tell you is, I'm very grateful not 
only for the way New York has treated me these last 8 years but for the 
way you have taken my wife in and accepted her and supported her and 
lifted her up. I've been doing this a long time. I was, I think, 6, 7, 8 
years old first time I started handing out cards for my uncle when he 
ran for State legislature. And my aunt hated politics so much, she made 
him quit after one term. [Laughter] So they sort of--they got the 
political virus over to me then. And I didn't quit. I liked it more.
    So I've been doing this a long time. And I've liked most of the 
people I've known in public life. The Republicans and the Democrats, I 
find that, on balance, they're more honest and hard working and try to 
do what they think is right. They are better than they get credit for 
being. I've never known anybody that cared more, knew more, and worked 
harder and had a better ability to blend heart and mind and passion and 
commitment than Hillary--never. She will make you very proud.
    And don't forget, they're big shoes to fill. Senator Moynihan was a 
giant in the Senate. Robert Kennedy changed the life of a whole 
generation of young Americans, including me. She will be a worthy 
successor, if you help her get there. And don't let all this last-minute 
mudslinging deter you.
    But the main thing I'm here to say is, you all got your minds made 
up, and you're all

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going to show up. So we're having this whole event for people that 
aren't here tonight. So when you leave here, you promise yourself--and 
you promise yourself, this is a big deal. The way you live is going to 
be affected by the decisions that are made. If you want to keep the 
economy going, if you want to keep the society going forward, if you 
want to keep us pulling together, make sure that everybody you can find 
is there a week from today for Hillary, for Al Gore, for Joe Lieberman, 
for Charlie Rangel. We'll do the right thing. I am proud to be here for 
them.
    Thank you all, and God bless you.

 Note:  The President spoke at 9 p.m. at Kelly Temple Church of God in 
Christ in Harlem. In his remarks, he referred to Bishop James Gaylord, 
Kelly Temple; Rev. Reginald Williams, Charity Baptist Church; Rev. Herb 
Daughtry, founder, National Black United Front; C. Virginia Fields, 
president, Manhattan Borough; New York State Comptroller H. Carl McCall; 
former Mayor David Dinkins of New York City; and Bishop Chandler D. 
Owens, presiding bishop, Church of God in Christ.