[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 37, Number 2 (Monday, January 15, 2001)]
[Pages 72-75]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Luncheon Honoring Senator Max Baucus

January 10, 2001

    Well, Max, I thank you for what you said. But you were entirely too 
generous to a person who can't run for anything anymore. [Laughter] I 
thought, wow, I wish I had that on tape 4 years ago. [Laughter] And in 
terms of going to meetings without cue cards, look, when you're dealing 
with a guy from Montana who knows who Sisyphus was, you can't carry your 
cue cards, right? [Laughter]
    I want to say, first of all, how honored I am to be here. I like Max 
Baucus a lot, and I respect him. And I want to say just a few words 
about that, but I also want to join in what you said, because this is 
maybe one of the last public occasions I'll have to say it in 
Washington, DC. I don't think there's any way for me to explain to the 
rest of you what having Tom Daschle as a leader of our crowd in the 
Senate has meant to me and to the United States of America. And I do 
agree that his leadership had a lot to do with the fact that we were 
able to pick up five seats. And I was honored to work with him, and he's 
been great.
    And I also think you were right about my good friend Harry Reid. You 
know, Harry Reid never lifts his voice. He talks real soft. And pretty 
soon you're looking for your billfold. [Laughter] He is such a good man 
and so effective, and I am very grateful to him.
    Mary Landrieu and I have been friends for many, many years, as she's 
from my neighboring State of Louisiana, which has been very good to me 
and whom I'm very grateful. And I'm thrilled that she got elected to the 
Senate and has done so well. And I am especially proud of Maria Cantwell 
because Maria Cantwell is one of the people who gave up her seat in 1994 
that turned the miserable economic condition of this country and that 
terrible deficit around. And she got beat because of it. And she didn't 
whine around. She went out and made a

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bunch of money and went on with her life. And then she ran for the 
Senate.
    And they have this unusual system in Washington State--they actually 
count all the votes. [Laughter] And when they were counted, she was a 
Senator for Washington. And we are thrilled. And I'm very proud of her. 
And you mark my words, she's going to have a big impact on this country, 
and she has, I think, a well-deserved chance to serve.
    I kind of am partial to this new crowd of Senators. It got me in the 
Senate spouses' club, that's true, where I intend to be a very vigorous 
member. I may run for president of the Senate spouses' club. [Laughter]
    Some of you may have seen this in the paper, but I can't help 
mentioning it again, since Max said something about deregulation of the 
airlines. Hillary and Chelsea and I for 8 years have gone to Foundry 
Methodist Church here in Washington, and the minister there is a great 
guy. So he says, ``I want you to come give a little talk on Sunday.'' I 
said, ``What do you want me to say?'' He said, ``Just talk about 
whatever you want.'' So I said, ``Well, I'm going to stand up and thank 
the church for everything they've done,'' and I had this whole long list 
of things they've done. It's a wonderful place. So I had this list of 
things.
    And I walked into church, and they gave me a program, and I see that 
I am giving the sermon, and the sermon has a title. And the title of the 
sermon is ``Reflections and Anticipation.'' So I get up and give my 
little talk, and I thank them all for everything I want to thank them 
for. And I said, ``I didn't know what I was talking about until I got 
here and read it in the program, but do you want to know what my 
anticipations are? I anticipate my Christian spirit will be sorely 
tested by a return to commercial air travel.'' [Laughter] ``I anticipate 
being disoriented in large rooms for several months because when I walk 
in, nobody will play a song anymore.'' [Laughter]
    So anyway, I gave them a few anticipations. I anticipate that Terry 
McAuliffe will still ask me to help raise money for the Democratic 
Party, and I hope he will. [Applause] Thank you.
    But to get back to the main event here, I'm here for a lot of 
reasons. First, I love Montana. I was a Governor for a dozen years, and 
former Governor of Montana Ted Schwindler was one of the best friends I 
ever had in the Governors Conference. And in 1985, Hillary and Chelsea 
and I went to Montana before the Governors met in Idaho and had what 
maybe was the best family vacation we ever had. It is the most 
spectacularly beautiful place I believe I have ever seen anywhere in the 
world. In 1992, we actually carried Montana, maybe because Ross Perot 
got so many votes. But anyway, for whatever reason, I was proud to have 
those votes in the column. [Laughter]
    Secondly, I believe that Montana is--first of all, as you saw in 
these last elections, we lost both the Congress and the Governor's race. 
It was a pretty closely divided State, and we have a real chance there, 
I think, to bring the Democrats back. But the key to that is Senator 
Baucus winning reelection. Now, the people of Montana know he's done a 
good job, but I'm not sure they know just how good a job he has done. 
And I want to talk about that, because I'm interested in the country, 
and I'm not running for anything anymore.
    But the reason I always liked Max Baucus is, he cares about ideas; 
he cares about things. And he also cares about how things are going to 
work. He's not just a talker. He cares about whether something will work 
or not. He had--last summer, I think it was, he had an economic 
development conference in Montana and then set up an action group to 
implement the ideas that they came up with. That's not something 
Senators normally do.
    But a lot of rural parts of this country and a lot of people that 
have depended on natural resource-based economies have not done all that 
well in this economy. And the farmers have been having a terrible time 
in the last 2 or 3 years. And the ones that get a lot of payments based 
on the way the old farm bill doles the money out, when we come out with 
the emergency appropriations, they're getting by. But it's really been 
tough out there.
    So Max actually decided to do something about it. And I think that 
makes him a better legislator, because if you think about how

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something's going to work, you're more likely to vote for the right kind 
of bills and draft them in the right way. And I am particularly 
interested in that.
    I also am interested in the fact that he wants to bring the benefits 
of high technology to people in rural America, to small communities, to 
the Native American reservations, to the schools. This is a big deal. I 
really believe we can skip a whole generation of economic development in 
places that have been badly left behind in this country if we get the 
technology out there in the right way and train the people to use it.
    And the third thing that I want to say is, even after the 20th, 
he'll be the ranking Member on the Senate Finance Committee. They're 
going to write tax legislation that will have an impact on this economy. 
They're going to deal with Medicare reform and the question of whether 
and in what form the seniors of this country will get a prescription 
drug benefit under Medicare. They're going to continue to deal with 
trade.
    And you heard him say it, so I'll just say thank you back. I did my 
best at least to create a consensus within the Democratic Party on all 
the big issues and then to work with the Republicans wherever we could. 
And this year we actually had the best year, in some ways, we've ever 
had. We passed the China trade bill, the Africa/Caribbean trade bill. We 
passed the most massive debt relief for poor countries in the world, if 
they'll put the money--if, but only if, they'll put the money back into 
education, health care, and development in their own countries. We 
lifted the earnings limit on Social Security. We passed the largest bill 
in history--thank you, Mary Landrieu and others--to buy land and 
preserve it for all time to come. Permanent funding has never been done 
before like this. And we passed the best education bill we've ever 
passed.
    When I--4 years ago we weren't funding any kids in after-school 
programs. This year the Federal Government will fund 1.3 million 
children in after-school programs, to learn and stay off the street and 
out of trouble. And I was yesterday in Chicago in a school that's 
getting some of that money.
    So we had a great, great year. But there's a lot of big questions 
that have to be faced about the whole issue of globalization. And I've 
talked ad nauseam about this. I went to England and gave a speech with 
Tony Blair about it, and I don't want to bore you with all of it again. 
But let me just say that the growing interdependence of people on this 
increasingly shrinking planet, and the explosion of population--almost a 
hundred percent of which is supposed to be in the poorest countries of 
the world--and the phenomenal explosion of wealth in this country, which 
has helped everybody--yes, we've got more billionaires and more 
millionaires, but we also have people in the lower 20 percent of the 
population the last 3 years had the biggest percentage increase in their 
income.
    If you look at all that good and all those storm clouds, we've got 
to work out a new agreement with other wealthy countries about how we're 
going to continue to expand trade and how it's going to work in a way 
that lifts the lives of people everywhere. And if we don't, then you're 
going to see a lot of these countries' democracies themselves under 
stress.
    How are we going to do it in a way that helps everybody? And when a 
country has a noneconomic problem and they're a big trading partner of 
ours, what are we supposed to do about it? That's another thing this 
Congress did for which I'm very grateful, the Plan Colombia program. You 
know, it may or may not work, but if we lose the oldest democracy in 
South America because the narcotraffickers and the guerrillas have 
teamed up, that's not a good omen for the 21st century.
     These are big questions. You want somebody, to go back to Max's 
term, who doesn't have to look at his note cards. This guy thinks about 
these kinds of things all the time, and he understands how these big 
sort of trade issues affect people in Montana. He understands why it's 
important to have sustainable economies in other parts of the world so 
they can buy the products that people in his State want to sell. And he 
can connect it all to what he's trying to do to help empower people at 
the grassroots level to make a decent living, get a good education, and 
hook into the technology of the 21st century.
    We need people like this in the Senate. We need people who read 
things and think

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about things. I tell people all the time, the main reason I'm for 
campaign finance reform is so people like Max and Harry and Mary and 
Maria and Tom won't have to spend quite so much time at fundraisers like 
this, because if you're from a little State and it costs you a lot of 
money to run, by the time you run all over the country--especially if 
you're on a crowded airplane--you're too tired to read a book or call 
the guy that wrote an article that struck you as interesting or meet 
with a bunch of people who have got a new idea.
    That's why Max Baucus--and from my honest opinion now--this is all 
the Montana-specific issues--but when I think about America, to have 
somebody like him in the most important position our party can have on 
the Senate Finance Committee, who has read and thought about these 
issues and tried to make some sense out of them and who thinks about how 
the big things translate into the practical daily lives of ordinary 
citizens, that's a big deal for a democracy. And the more complicated 
the world gets and the more we'll have to process all this information 
and make decisions in a hurry without knowing everything, the more 
you're going to need people like Max Baucus in positions of 
responsibility.
    So I thank you for helping him today, and I hope you'll help him all 
the way through to the election next year.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 1 p.m. at the Caucus Room Restaurant. In 
his remarks, he referred to Dr. J. Philip Wogaman, senior minister, 
Foundry United Methodist Church; Democratic fundraiser Terence 
McAuliffe; former Reform Party Presidential candidate Ross Perot; and 
Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom.