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�O co
�CURRENT SPEECH LANGUAGE
I o/1 7 /<? 7
w o version of the current opening, thematic passage of the President's stump
speech and other speeches.
Six years ago, when I announced my candidacy for President, I said that America had a
vital mission for the 21st Century — to keep the American Dream alive for every person
responsible enough to work for it, to keep America the world's strongest force for peace and
freedom and prosperity, and to bring our people together across all the lines that divide us into
one America. America's oldest, most incandescent ideals ~ opportunity for all, responsibility
from all, a community ofall -- these must illuminate our path as we stride forward to address the
challenges of a new era.
I pledged then to take America in a new direction — toward the future, not the past;
toward unity, not division; with America leading, not following; putting people and values, not
power politics, first; reforming government not to do everything or do nothing, but to give all our
people the tools they need to make the most of their own lives; and beginning by building an
economy that works for all, not the few.
We started with a new economic policy for the new economy, putting in place a bold
new strategy to shrink the deficit and balance the budget, invest in our people and lower unfair
trade barriers to our goods and services. The philosophy was solid and simple: remove the
impediments that have restrained the American people and give them the tools and training to
help them race ahead. By reducing the nation's massive deficits, we could free our people of the
dead weight that slowed their every step from the early 1980s. By investing in their education
and health, we would enable them to run fast and strong over the long run. By reducing trade
barriers, we would knock down the unfairly high hurdles that we have had to leap over for far too
long, and build bridges to new democracies with growing economies to ensure our leadership for
peace and freedom well into the next century.
The strategy has succeeded: nearly 13 million new jobs; America leading the world in
auto production once again; unemployment below five percent; the biggest drop in welfare rolls
in history, with welfare reform that is tough on work, but pro-child and pro-family; dramatic
drops in crime year after year, putting 100,000 more community police officers on the street and
the Brady Bill preventing 250,000 sales of handguns to people with criminal or mental health
histories that indicates they should not have them.
The news is good today. And in the face of good news the easiest thing to do is to rest,
to believe our work is done and to be satisfied that our challenges are met. But complacency is
not an option in a time full of challenge and change. There is much more to do to renew our
values, to strengthen our nation, to deal with problems still unresolved, if we are going to give
you the 21 st Century you deserve.
* **
THE BODY OF THE SPEECH FOLLOWS
�* **
Conclusion
Recently, the President has liked closing with a passage about "imagining the future " —
a device that is easily tailored to the audience at hand.
This is the version he gave at the AFL-CIO.
A century ago the working men and women of labor imagined an America where older
people had health security, where African Americans enjoyed equal protection under the law,
where working people had the right to organize and fight for a better life. Because they imagined
it and because they worked for it, it's the America we're living in today.
Now it is up to us to imagine the America of the 21st Century. And on every issue I
discussed today, that is all I ask you to do. Imagine it, based on what we now know. Imagine an
America in which every child has a world-class education; in which every family can fairly
balance the demands of work and child-rearing; in which we lift living standards here and around
the world; in which we learn to grow our economy and preserve the common environment which
is our home; in which our oldest values of opportunity, responsibility and community guide us
into a new time of greatest opportunity.
As American working men and women have shown time and time again, if we imagine it
and we work at it, we will build it ~ an America for our children, always eager for tomorrow.
You have brought new energy to the labor movement. You have brought new energy to
America. Let us work to build that into a future we can be proud of.
�THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
November 18, 1997
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE DINNER
City Club of Washington
9:44 P.M. EST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you very much for being here tonight. I won't
take a lot of time because I want to just sit and visit. But I would like to just begin with a story.
Yesterday I was in Wichita, Kansas, coming back from California and I visited this Cessna
airplane manufacturing facility ~ not the plane facility, but their training facility for people
they're trying to move from welfare to work. And we went there for a number of reasons. One
was to announce that we now have 2,500 businesses who have committed to be part of our
partnership to hire people from welfare and put them into the workplace. These 2,500 businesses
are small, medium, and large. Seventy-five percent of them are small businesses, but combined
they have over 5 million employees.
The other reason I went there is because the way this Cessna project works is the way I'd
like to see America work, not only in this issue but a lot of others. They receive support for a
number of the things they've done from the Labor Department and from the Housing and Urban
Development Department, and of course they have the framework of the welfare reform bill.
But here's what they do: They go out and take people — many of them the hardest to
place people on welfare — and they put them through a three-month training program. And then
if they go through that, they put them through a three-month sort of pre-job program. And if
they get through both, they get an automatic guaranteed job at Cessna at high wages and good
benefits.
And some of these people have very, very difficult home circumstances. They're not just
— they're not taking the most well-educated people who just temporarily hit a bad patch and get
on welfare. A lot of these folks are high school dropouts. Many of them are women who have
been abused in a domestic setting. And they actually have a housing development across the
street from the training center to give temporary housing to anybody who either doesn't have a
car or has been kicked out of their house because of a violent situation.
�And I'm telling you, it was the most exhilarating thing. 1 was introduced by two women
who graduated from this program, and then I met their children. And when it was all over, I
looked at the man who was with me and I said, this is why I got into public life: to be a part of
things like this, to change lives in this way, to do something that works.
And of course having a good economy has helped. They have 1,000 more employees
than they had four or five years ago. But the main thing is, it'sfreshevidence that we can make
the country work if we do something that makes sense and we do it together and it's consistent
with our values.
So for all of you who have made any contribution to the fact that we have the lowest
unemployment rate and the lowest crime rate in 24 years and the biggest drop in welfare in
history, and we've grown the economy while making the air and water cleaner and the food
supply safer and having fewer toxic waste dumps, that we've built more jobs but tried to help
families with the Family and Medical Leave Law and tax cuts to raise their kids or adopt children
or send their kids to college ~ I hope you'll take a lot of pride in that.
We've got a lot of challenges up the road, but at least no one in America could doubt
today that we can make this country work and that when we make it work for everybody, you see
the kind of profoundly humbling and awesome stories I saw in Wichita yesterday.
I'd also like to remind you that elections are contests of ideas and perceptions. And I
think in a rational world, where everybody had equal access to the voters, our party would be in
better shape than it is today, because in '93 we had a big fight over the economic direction of the
country, and I think the evidence says we were right and they were wrong. But they profited
from it.
In '94 we had a big fight over our crime policy and we stood up to the people who said I
was going to take their guns away if we passed the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban. And
I think the evidence is we were right and they were wrong.
I think the evidence is our environmental policy, our education policy, our family leave
policy ~ all these things, I think, our party has been on the right side of history and on the right
side of the basic values of America. And I think the more people like you help us to get our
message out and make our points, the more you'll change America and the more, parenthetically,
people will know who did what, when, and why.
So there is a direct connection between what I saw in Wichita yesterday and your
presence here tonight. And we have to make a lot more of those stories in the future. And I'm
very grateful to you for your role in doing that.
Thank you very much.
�END
9:49 P.M. EST
�THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
November 18, 1997
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
TO DEMOCRATIC BUSINESS COUNCIL
ITT Sheraton Luxury Collection Hotel
Washington, D.C.
9:00 P.M. EST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Thank you, Tom. Steve Grossman, Alan
Solomont, and all the people who worked on this dinner tonight, thank you very much for being
here.
I have just returned from a great trip to California. I stopped yesterday in Wichita,
Kansas, at the Cessna plant, and I saw there a picture of why I got into public life, so I thought I
would start by telling you what I did. We wanted to go to Wichita, to the Cessna plant, because
they have what I believe is the best corporate welfare-to-work program I have ever seen in
America, and because they have support from any number of federal agencies who are helping
them to do what they're trying to do.
Cessna has about 10,000, 11,000 employees in Wichita, and they have this program
called the 21st Street Program, where they built a training center for people who have been on
public assistance. First, if you want to come there, you go through their training program; that's
three months. Then if you like it, you go through a sort of pre-work program; that's three more
months. If you survive them both, they guarantee you a job with good income and good benefits.
And they take the most difficult to place people on welfare — people who have almost no
education, no skills, people who have been subject to terrible cases of domestic abuse. And not
only that, if you don't have a car or if you've been beat up in your own home, they'll give you an
apartment across the street from the training center for yourself and your kids.
I went there and two of these women got up and talked who had graduated from this
program. And there were over 200 there who had. And there were all the local officials, all the
state officials in this incredible celebration of this partnership, doing basically what we all ought
�to do, anyway ~ trying to make sure that everybody has a chance in life. Once you set up a
system where people are required to be responsible, you've got to give them an opportunity, and
recognizing that our destinies are dependent upon one another in very profound ways. It was
wonderful.
And when I walked out of that place, the two women that spoke to introduce me were by
far the most popular speakers there, I can tell you that. And they just basically told their life
stories. And this lady came up to me and she ~ on the way out, I shook hands with all of the
people who were graduates of the program. She said, you can read about me in the moming
paper today, and I'm really glad you came.
So I pick up the paper, and this woman is a single mother with three kids of her own and
two twins she took in, trying to raise five kids - a high school dropout, abandoned by her
husband, desperate. All of a sudden, shefindsthis program, she's got a place to live, she's got a
training program, she's got a future.
That's why I got into public life, to do things like that. And I say that because there is a
direct connection between your presence here and what we're able to do in the lives of people in
the country. And it often gets lost. And I think it's a real shame.
Most of you who come to a Democratic fundraiser do so not in the hope of getting a tax
cut, you probably, when you help the Democrats, you just hope you don't get a tax increase.
Most of you who come to help us come here because you believe that we are obligated to one
another, that we have a sense of mutual responsibility for the future. And you have kind of a
large and expansive hope for what people can achieve if they work together to bring out the best
in each other. That's probably the driving distinction between us.
But I want you to understand that there is a connection between your sitting here and
what I'll be doing tomorrow, and then how somebody will be affected by it out in the country
within a week or a month or a year or sometime down the road.
I was thinking about it sitting at dinner tonight — you know, when I became President I
said, look, I've got a simple strategy here. I want to create opportunity for everybody who is
responsible enough to work for it. I want us to come together across the lines that divide us into
one America. I want us to continue to lead the world for peace and freedom. I want a
government that is less bureaucratic but gives people the tools and the conditions they need to
make the most of their own lives. That's what I want to do.
We started with an economic program that not a single member of the other party voted
for. Instead, they sounded like Chicken Little. They said, if you pass the President's economic
program, the sky will fall, the end will come, the deficit will explode, unemployment will
increase.
Well, five years later, they're out there able to brag that they voted for a balanced budget.
The only reason they could do it is that we had reduced the deficit by 92 percent before the
�balanced budget law ever triggered in, because of what we did in 1993 with our Democrats. And
it was the right thing to do for America.
Five years later, we've got the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years. Look at the crime
issue ~ same thing. I couldn't ever figure out what was going on in Washington on the crime
issue when I lived out there in the country. It appeared to me that what happened was, when
crime got high and things got hot and heavy, that Congress just passed a bill and increased
penalties for everything in sight. But it had been a very long time since anybody had done
anything to help people on the streets ~ either catch criminals or keep people out of trouble in the
first place.
So I gave the Congress a crime bill that was essentially written by police officers,
community leaders, and prosecutors. - 100,000 more police, prevention programs for kids,
punish people who are truly bad actors, take the assault weapons off the street, don't let people
with criminal and mental health histories buy a handgun. That's what we did. It was pretty
simple. It was a police officer's bill.
We had a bitter, bitter fight in Congress. The leaders of the other party fought us. We
got a few Republican votes for the Crime Bill, unlike the economic bill, but they were precious
few. And we had to break an angry, angry filibuster in the Senate. All these, you know,
ominous things — we were throwing money away, these police would make no difference, the
Brady Bill would make no difference, the assault weapons ban would make no difference.
All I know is we've now put 65,000 of those 100,000 police out, the Brady law kept over
a quarter of a million weapons out of the hands of people with criminal and mental health
histories, the assault weapons ban is good - nobody needs an assault weapon do go deer hunting,
and I ought to know: I'm from a place where people do a lot of it. And I just moved last weekend
to try to stop people from running through a loophole that's so big you could drive a truck
through it in sending assault weapons back into the United States from foreign places of
manufacture disguised as sport weapons.
But anyway, you know, they'd say it wouldn't make a lick of difference. All I know is
the crime rate has gone down every year for five years and we have the lowest crime rate in 24
years. And if you talk to the police officers of the country, they believe it's because of the ideas
advanced by the Democratic Party and supported by the Democratic Party.
There are people alive today because we did not cave in one more time to the people who
didn't want the Brady Bill, who didn't want the assault weapons ban, who didn't want to do
anything different on crime. They wanted to talk tough; they liked to do that. But when it came
time to step up and do something that the police and the prosecutors and the community leaders
said was work, the Democrats were there.
Look at the welfare bill. I get sick and tired ~ I get so tired of hearing our friends in the
Republican Party and some of our friends in the press say, oh, the President caved in and signed
the Republicans' welfare bill. It's a load of bull. And no one could say it and mean it and be
�honest unless they just didn't understand how the welfare system works.
The bills that they passed, I vetoed. And they passed another bill, and I vetoed it again.
They passed a third bill and I signed it. Why? Because I believe we ought to require able-bodied
people to go to work. It didn't particularly bother me that we were ending the national guarantee
of a monthly welfare check and letting the states set the guarantee, for the following reason: We
have in effect had a state-set guarantee for 25 years, something I never read in any article.
Before the welfare law passed, the most generous state in the union paid a welfare family
of three $655 a month; the most tight-fisted state paid the same family $187 a month, under the
so-called "uniform federal law." There was no uniform federal law on the check.
But I'll tell you what was uniform ~ food and medicine for the kids. So I said, if you
want me to sign a law requiring people who can work to go to work, leave the kids with food and
medicine. You try to take that away, I'll veto it. They did and I did. And I said, if you want to
make these people go to work, don't make them be bad parents; give me some money for child
care. Give me some money to create jobs for people in the high unemployment areas.
And we worked it out and I signed the bill. It was a great bipartisan bill, it had
overwhelming bipartisan support, but the only reason I could get that bill and that I didn't get
overridden on my veto was that the Democrats said, require people who are able-bodied to go to
work, but don't make them give up on their kids. Don't do anything to their kids. We stood for
that, we made it stick, and we made a difference.
And when we did it, there were people on the other side who said, well, it won't be as
effective now. All I know is that there are 3.8 million fewer people on welfare than there were
the day I took office — the biggest drop in welfare in history — largely due to the fact that we
have a good economy and the right kind of welfare reform system.
I could give you lots of other examples. The first bill I signed was the Family and
Medical Leave Law - vetoed twice by my predecessor. The leaders of the other party thought it
was an undue burden on business to say that, even for larger employers, that a person ought to be
able to take a little time off when a child was sick or a parent was dying. But I've had more
ordinary citizens come up to me personally all over this country and thank me for the Family
and Medical Leave Law than any other thing that I've been involved with as President.
And I personally believe it ought to be expanded to cover regular trips to the doctor and a
couple of trips to school a year, because one of the biggest challenges we face as a nation is
balancing the demands of work and family. Nobody should have to choose between being a
good parent and successful at work, because the most important work of any nation is raising
children. And if we do that right, most everything else takes care of itself.
So I say that there's a direct connection between your presence here and the 12 million
people that have taken advantage of the Family and Medical Leave Law, the 8.5 million people
whose pensions we saved, the 13.5 million people who have jobs, the 10 million people who got
�an increase in their minimum wage, the 5 million children who are going to get health insurance
coverage for the first time now under the new balanced budget law, the countless number of
people who will now have a real tax cut to help them pay for the cost of college tuition, all the
children that are going to get computers and software and better instruction in their schools
because we said we're going to hook up every classroom and library to the Intemet by the Year
2000. There's a connection between your support and that happening.
These things do not happen by accident. They happen because parties with philosophies
and choices have the power to make those choices and bring them to the American people and
get them done.
And I must - you know, I've been criticized by some in my own party - I like to work in
a bipartisan fashion. I'm always happy to reach agreement. But when the tough work had to be
done on the deficit, our party did it alone, and 92 percent of the deficit was gone by the time the
balanced budget law passed.
When the tough work had to be done on crime and someone had to stand up to the
special interest groups that have kept us from doing things we should have done years ago, our
party did it almost alone. And when someone had to remind people that welfare was not just a
way to punish poor people, it was a way to support work and family, it was the people in our
party who supported me, saying, yes, require people to go to work but, no, don't hurt their kids.
They gave us the right kind of law.
When there was a wholesale assault on the environment, when people in the other party - they honestly believed this. I'm not attacking their character, I'm attacking their judgment here.
They honestly believed that most of these environment laws and rules and regulations caused a
lot more trouble than they were worth, and that they were a terrible impediment to the economy.
I honestly believe the right sort of environmental laws grow the economy because they
accelerate the movement into new technologies, into newfieldsand dealing with new challenges.
That's what I believe; I've always believed that. And I think that we permit the degradation of
our environment at our peril. I think it's an obligation we owe our children.
Well, five years later, the air is cleaner, the water is cleaner, the food supply is safer we have more to do, but it's safer. We have fewer toxic waste dumps and the economy is the best
it's been in a generation. I think our idea that you can grow the economy and preserve the
environment was the right idea. I think the assault they waged on the environment that we
stopped them from raising was ill-advised and unnecessary. And I think now we have five years
of evidence.
So when you go home tonight, I want you to think about those folks I talked to you about
in Wichita. I want you to think about all of the millions of people whose lives have been changed
for the better by the policies that we've implemented, and I want you to realize there's a direct
connection between the fact that you were willing to stand up and put your voice on our side, put
your contributions into our efforts, and give our side a chance to be heard. You made that all
�happen. That's what the public system we have in America is. That's what it means to be a
citizen.
And as you look ahead, I really believe that our country has the 50 best years facing it
that any society has ever known if we do the right things — if we do the right things. We've still
got a lot of challenges out there ~ economic, educational, entitlement reform, environmental
challenges ~ a lot of things. But we have to keep our eye on the ball. We should do those things
which create opportunity and reinforce responsibility. We should do those things which bring us
together as one community ~ celebrating our differences, but identifying those values that are
even more important that bind us together.
We should do those things that reinforce our role as a beacon of freedom and hope and
prosperity and security in the world. That's what we should do. That's what the Democratic
Party stands for. And that's what you have stood for. I am very grateful and I hope you will
always be very proud, not only that you were here tonight, but that you have contributed to
changing the face and the future of this country.
Thank you very much.
�THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(St. Louis, Missouri)
For Immediate Release
November 17, 1997
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
DSCC DINNER
Fox Theater
St. Louis, Missouri
9:00 P.M. CST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Thank you, Jay. Thank you for running.
Thank you for being a good attorney general. Thanks for inviting me to dinner. Maybe I will
come back next Monday. I'd also like to thank the owners of this magnificent theater for
allowing us to be here tonight and for doing such a wonderful job of restoring it.
I think that when we come here and you see all this beauty and sort of your eyes
normally just sort of go up, don't they, and you feel elevated, that's the way you ought to feel
about your country; that's the way you ought to feel about your political system. That's the way
you ought to feel about your choices as citizens to support people in campaigns.
So the first thing I want to do is just to thank you for being here tonight and for being
proud to have the freedom to come here to contribute to this man's campaign and to what he's
trying to do for our country - to take a stand and to be a part. I hope that when you think about
it over the next year you will be constant in trying to help him get elected and that you will go
beyond financial support to talking to your friends and neighbors and doing whatever you can to
help prevail. And I hope you will always try to remember how you felt when you walked into
this theater tonight. If you can create that kind of spirit among the people of Missouri I think
you'll win the election. And I think you can do it.
Let me say that ~ all of you know just from reading the press, this is a rather
challenging time for our country and I don't have anything else to add about what I'm trying to
deal with in Iraq to what I've already said. But it has made me a little more reflective even than
normal, and I'd like to try to put this race for the Senate in some sort of larger context for you so
you can see how I see it and why I came here.
�When I ran for president, when I decided to run for president about six years ago and I
was the governor of your neighboring state to the south, I was really concerned about the country
— not because I was worried about Americans or I didn't think that we could deal with any
problem, but because we were going through this period of sweeping change with no unifying
vision about how we were going to go into the 21st century together; and because we had been
dealing with the impacts of the global economy and increasing technology and changes in the
way we work and live for 20 years. Even by the time I ran for president, it had been nearly 20
years since it had become apparent to everyone that there were big changes going on. The
average wages of Americans had been stagnant for 20 years. Unemployment was going up and
we were beginning to see tensions — racial tension rekindled in America. The economic
anxieties, I'm convinced, were the primary driving force in the movements ??that I faced - that
we all faced as Americans to try to restrict opportunity to minorities and to immigrants.
And it seemed to me that Washington was making it worse by having the same old
debates over and over and over again. And what I wanted to do was to take the values that I was
raised with, which I think are the values of the Democratic Party and I hope are the values of
America, and tie them to new ideas and new policies for new times, so that we could not just
reclaim the White House, but reclaim the future for our children; so that we could challenge
every American to be responsible and give opportunity to every responsible American; so that
we could bring this country together across all the lines that divide us into one community; and
so that we could continue to lead the world for peace and freedom and prosperity.
Now, when I went to Washington, thanks to the votes of the people in Missouri and a
number of other places, I encountered an atmosphere very different than any I had ever seen as a
governor. I had always had opposition and we had fought hard and I welcomed my opposition to
the debate. We fought hard over issues. I had never been to a place where they said no before
they heard what you were for, a place so dominated by partisanship and old categories and old
thoughts and old behavior that I could see that breaking the paralysis was not going to be easy.
But I ask you to consider the decisions that we have made in the last five years and the
consequences of those decisions and the decisions that still have to be made, and think about how
it's going to affect you and your children and your grandchildren, and then you can decide how
hard you want to work on this Senate race.
The first thing we had to do was to scrap trickle-down economics. It was a failure. It
quadrupled the debt of the country in 12 years. The country was drifting apart. And we put in a
new economic policy that I called invest-and-grow. I said, give me a shot. I believe I can reduce
the deficit and still have more money to invest in education and technology and our future. And
we got our shot by one vote in both Houses. It was the Vice President's incentive - as Al Gore
never tires of saying whenever he votes, I win.
By the narrowest of margins ~ why? Not because the Democrats didn't support me. I
received more support from my party than my previous Democratic predecessors. Because every
�single member of the other party voted against my economic program, and railed to high heaven
and talked about how it was going to bring a recession, how it was going to be a total failure, told
all the American people we were putting these huge tax burdens on them, when they knew that
98.5 percent of the American people were not going to have an increase in their income tax.
They knew that we were cutting taxes for more people than we were raising taxes for - mostly
hard-working people ~ now, a family of four with an income of under $30,000 is paying $1,000
less income tax than they would have paid under the system that existed before our economic
plan passed.
They knew all that, but they hoped that the people couldn't figure it out by 1994's
election and that they wouldn't feel a better economic climate. And they were right about that
and they won a lot of seats in Congress over it.
But now it's five years later and we're in a position to make a judgment. Every single
one of them including Mr. Nixon's opponent voted no on our '93 economic plan. What did it do?
Well, before one dollar kicks in from this balanced budget amendment, we reduced the deficit by
92 percent, produced 13.5 million jobs ~ a record for this period of time ~ and we now have the
lowest unemployment rate in 24 years.So you have a clear choice there and you should bring that
choice to bear on this race.
On the area of crime, Jay Nixon, as Attorney General, supported our efforts to put
100,000 police on the street, to have gun-free school zones, to ban assault weapons. Now,
consider what happened. In 1994,1 brought the crime bill up. I was an attorney general; I have
been working on criminal justice matters for 20 years now. That crime bill was not written by
me or by bureaucrats in Washington; it was written by police officers and prosecutors and
community workers who work with young people in trouble all across this country. And all I did
was reflect what was already working in many communities to bring the crime rate down.
So I said, you know, violent crime has tripled, but we only have 10 percent more police
officers. Let's put 100,000 police on the street. Our friends on the other side said, oh, if you do
that, it won't make a lick of difference; it's just a waste of federal money. I suggested that it was
time to pass the Brady Bill and not let people who had criminal histories buy hand guns. They
said, oh, it's unenforceable and it won't do any good. I said, you know, I come from a big
hunting state, but I just don't think the NRA is right on these assault weapons. I never saw a
single deer killed with an assault weapon. And they said when we passed that we were going to
go out and take everybody's guns away. We had this bitter fight over this crime bill — pure
politics ~ law enforcement community in the country was on our side. But they were good
politicians and they did everything they could do in the Senate to beat it, everything they could
do. A bitter, bitter, bitter filibuster ~ the awfulest things said you ever heard.
And we broke the filibuster finally because there were five brave Republicans who stood
up and said, enough is enough, we're going to go out and vote with the Democrats and try
to give our kids a better, safer life. And so we put 100,000 police on the street. That's what
we're doing. We're three years ahead ~ we're three years into it, we're two-thirds of the way
done, we're ahead of schedule and under budget.
�And we banned the assault weapons and we kept over a quarter of a million people with
criminal histories or mental health histories or people who were stalkers from buying handguns,
who shouldn't have done it. And the crime rate is the lowest it's been in 24 years.
Now, he took one position; his opponent took another position. You have evidence; you
know. Make a judgment and tell the people who live in Missouri to make a judgment. But don't
pretend that there are no consequences to this vote. There are consequences. And we could have
used another vote or two in 1994 when we were trying to save the lives of the children in this
country. This is a safer, better country today because we won that fight and they lost it. And I'd
like to have some more help when we deal with the issues that are still ahead of us.
Juvenile crime hasn't dropped as much as crime among adults. Most juveniles commit
crime between 3:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. in the afternoon. We have to do some creative things to
keep those kids out of trouble in the first place, and we don't need any more speeches on the floor
of the Congress about how its a waste of money to try to keep kids out of trouble in the first
place. I'd rather keep a kid out of trouble than send another kid to jail, if we can do that. And I
think we ought to do it. So we were right and they were wrong.
In 1994, they picked up a lot of seats in the Congress. They went out there and told
people in rural areas and all over America, you know, President Clinton and the Democrats are
coming to get your guns. I told the group earlier, I said, I went back to New Hampshire where I
won in '92 — unusual for a Democrat — and I went to this crowd of people and every one of them
had a hunting license. And they were looking at me kind of funny. And I said, you know, in
1994 you people beat a congressman up here because he voted to ban assault weapons. And they
told you that you were going to lose your gun. And now it's 1996 — if you lost your gun I want
you to vote against me, too. But if you didn't lose your gun, they didn't tell you the truth and you
need to get even.
My vote in New Hampshire in 1996 was 12 percent higher than it was in 1992. And
they got even. I say that not for personal reasons but because there are consequences to this.
There are a lot of voters out there that think, oh, it's all politics; it doesn't make any difference.
That's bull. It does it make a difference and it makes a huge difference.
If we had lost that economic fight in 1993, the deficit would not have gone down by over
90 percent and the economy wouldn't have produced 13.5.million jobs and interest rates wouldn't
have gone down. If we had lost that crime bill in 1994 we would not have as much success with
crime as we've had today — the lowest crime rate in 24 years.
Or look at an area where we've worked together on. We got a big bipartisan majority for
welfare reform finally, and I'm grateful for that and I appreciate the fact that the members of the
other party worked with us on it. I tried every time I could to get a bipartisan resolution. But I
had to veto two bills first because they said, if you want to require people on welfare to work, we
also want you to take away from their children the guarantee that you want to leave them with of
nutrition and health care. And we don't want to give you a lot more money for child care even
�though these women are going to get minimum wage jobs and they can't afford child care. And
we're not going to give you very much money to help people in big cities where there aren't any
private sector jobs find jobs.
So I vetoed the bill twice. Finally, we got it. But it would have been a tragedy if we
hadn't passed the right kind of welfare reform. We've now seen the welfare rolls drop by 3.8
million in America, the biggest drop in American history.
But I think our side was right on that. The Democratic position was, yes, require ablebodied people to work, but do not require them to abandon their children. The most important
job anybody ever has is being a good parent. And if everybody did a better job of that we
wouldn't have half the problems we've got in this country. You can't ask people to go to work
and forget about their responsibilities at home; the trick is to allow people to fulfill both those
responsibilities. And the parties had different positions on that.
There are huge differences in our attitude toward the environment. Look, we have gotten
rid of more regulations than the two previous Republican presidents have. We have given more
authority to the states and local governments. We've even privatized more government
operations. I do not like federal bureaucracies. The federal government is 300,000 people
smaller than it was the day I took the oath of office. It's the size it was when John Kennedy was
president.
But the air is cleaner, the water is purer, the food is safer, there are fewer toxic waste
dumps. And I think we have established the fact that on the environment our philosophy is right
and theirs is wrong. Their philosophy is, we hope somebody will clean up the environment, but
nothing should be allowed to get in the way of short-term economic gain. My philosophy is, we
owe it to our children and our grandchildren to keep the environment and improve it. And we
have proved that you can grow the economy faster with new technologies if you're committed to
cleaning up the environment. It's a clear choice, and let's not pretend that there is no choice
there. There is a choice there.
So I've enjoyed these fights enormously. I like to debate, I like to argue. But I am
impatient with those who think it doesn't make a difference. It makes a difference. And when I
think about how far this country has come in the last five years and what we still have to do to
build our bridge to the 21 st century, when I think about the honest differences ~ I don't want to
get into condemnation here - I'm talking about the honest differences in the parties. I know that
a person like Jay Nixon could make a positive contribution to the people of Missouri and the
people of this country. And I know that it would help in the fights we've still got ahead of us.
We finally ~ finally ~ succeeded against intense opposition in convincing a bipartisan
majority of the Congress to embrace the elemental notions that it's high time in America we had
some national standards of academic excellence and we quit putting kids out of school that can't
read, write, and count. And instead, we give the schools of our country the trained teachers, the
technology, the support they need, but there has to be, first, high expectations, high standards,
and high measurements to see if they're being met. Every child in this country is capable of
�learning, but I'll guarantee you, a child in difficult circumstances with low expectations won't.
And it's to the poorest children that we have the highest obligation to give a world-class
education.
Now, I'm not trying to have the federal government take over education. Their argument
was that the federal government should keep its mouth shut about education - maybe write a
check. My argument is, we put more money into education in this last budget than any
presidency and any administration in 35 years. But it's not a question of money. It's money plus
standards. It's a big issue. And I could give you - if we had all night, I could talk to you all
night about the differences between our parties. It makes a difference. A senator's vote makes a
difference.
Last year they held all these judges hostage, in election year, hoping against hope I'd get
beat and they wouldn't have to appoint them at all. This year, I had a four-year term, they still
only confirmed 35 judges - slow walk and everything. It's like pulling teeth.
One of the finest people you ever met, this man Bill Lee that I've nominated to head the
Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. A Chinese immigrant raised in Harlem, devoted
his entire life to the civil rights of people of all colors in this country. The Senate Judiciary
Committee says they don't really think they should confirm it, even though he has sworn to
uphold the letter of the law, even though he is unquestionably qualified ~ intellectually, in terms
of experience and moral character - because he agrees with me that we shouldn't just throw out
all affirmative action.
This is an unusual position they're taking: the President must appoint someone to the
Civil Rights Division who is not committed to civil rights in the way the President is. Now, if
the Democrats had felt that way you wouldn't have half the people on the Supreme Court that are
on there today. If the Democratic majority in the Senate had done a Republican President that
way you wouldn't have that.
There are differences in terms of what we do and how we do it. That's why I'm here
tonight. I'm telling you, the next 50 years can be the best years this country ever had. If I told
you five years ago, come back in five years and we'll have the lowest unemployment rate in 24
years, the lowest crime rate in 24 years, the biggest drop in welfare in history and the
environment will be improving even though the economy is growing, you would have said, I'll
take that bet. And you'd be dam proud of it. And if I said, oh, and by the way, we'll have passed
the Family and Medical Leave law, we'll give families tax cuts for their children and for their
children's education, and if they'll adopt other children that need a home, we'll cut their taxes ~
you would like that.
All that has happened because of choices that have been made. And I believe the
direction that our party has taken has led the way toward building an American future where we
can go forward together.
That's the last thing I'll say. Just look around the theatre on your way out. How do you
�want to feel about America? How do you want to feel about American politics? Do you want to
make it lift your eyes and you feel big and you want to take a deep breath? Or do you want it to
be a mean-spirited, divisive, demeaning, diminishing experience? I have tried to give this
country a unifying vision. I have tried to heal the divisions of the country. I have tried minimize
the sharpness of the partisan debate. But I am prouder tonight to be a Democrat than I was five
years ago. And I am prouder tonight because I know things I could never have known before I
became President about the importance of every single solitary vote in the United States Senate.
He is a good man, and if you will work for a year, you'll make him a senator. Thank
you.
END
9:20 P.M. CST
�THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(St. Louis, Missouri)
For Immediate Release
November 17, 1997
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT RECEPTION FOR JAY NIXON FOR SENATE
Fox Theater
St. Louis, Missouri
8:00 P.M. CST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very, very much. Thank you for the wonderful
welcome. Thank you for letting me listen to Team Eleven - weren't they great? I wonder if they
could come to Washington tomorrow. If they could cheer me up once a day I'd stay in a better
frame of mind as President.
I want to thank Mayor Harmon for the fine job he's doing and the leadership he's
showing and for making me feel so welcome.Thank you, Lt. Governor Wilson, for being here,
and Missouri Democratic Party Chair Joe Carmichael; St. Louis County Executive Buzz Wesfall;
all the other officials who are here. And I want to thank Jay Nixon for running for the United
States Senate.
I want to thank the people of Missouri for voting for Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1992
and in 1996. And I want to thank Jay Nixon for getting such a big vote, I could kind of ride in on
his coattails. I enjoyed that.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is a very important election for you. And you should know
it's also a very important election for the United States, because policies that are good for the
people of Missouri are also good for the people of America. And when I ran for president, just
remember what it was like ~ unemployment was high, the country was becoming more divided,
we seemed to be sort of drifting and stumbling into the future. And I ran to reclaim the basic
American values of opportunity and responsibility and community, and to reclaim the future for
the young people, here and throughout our country.
In almost every step of the way, the changes that I wanted to make ~ new policies and
new ideas for new times - were fought bitterly by the members of the opposition party.
Even when we finally wound up reaching agreement, it was only after a fight.
�In 1993,1 had an economic plan that I said would bring the deficit down and get the
economy going again. They said it would bring a recession, and they all voted against it, every
single one of them. And then in '94 they went out and told the country that we'd raised
everybody's taxes unconscionably. It wasn't true, but a lot of people didn't know it and a lot of
people hadn't felt the benefits of the economy, so they got a bunch of gains in the Congress.
But in 1997 we see that under that plan, before the balanced budget takes effect, the
deficit is 92 percent lower than it was when I took office, and we've got the best economy in a
generation. Our approach was right and they were wrong.
You heard Jay Nixon say that he supported us on putting 100,000 police on the street and
banning assault weapons and establishing gun-free school zones. Now, in 1994 we had a bitter
debate in the United States Senate ~ bitter ~ on the crime bill. And I was ridiculed by the
Republicans because I had signed the Brady Bill, because I wanted to ban assault weapons they said it would do no good. Because I wanted to put 100,000 police on the street - they said
it would do no good. Because I thought we ought to have more prevention programs in our
neighborhoods to keep more kids out of trouble in the first place — they said it would do no
good. And we had to work and work to break afilibusterled by the members of the opposition
party. All I did was listen to police chiefs and prosecutors around the country. The crime bill
was a reflection of what people on the street in law enforcement said they wanted — that's all I
did.
Oh, in '94, they went all around the country telling people we were going to take their
guns away, and they picked up a few seats in Congress for telling people that. We lost a
congressman in New Hampshire — I'll never forget it. In '96,1 went back running for president in
New Hampshire and I faced all these people, everyone of them just like my folks in Arkansas
had a hunting licence. And I said, you beat a guy in Congress here in '94 because they told you
that we were going to take your guns away, and you voted against him. And I said, if everybody
that lost their guns, I want you to vote against me, too. But if you didn't you know all we did
was try to keep them out of the hands of criminals - they didn't tell you the truth and you ought
to vote for us and send them a message. That's what you ought to do for Jay Nixon, too. They
were wrong and we were right.
And you just take all the otherfights~ on welfare reform, I wanted to require people
who could work to work. Missouri has been a leader in welfare reform. What I did not want to
do is to ask people who are poor to go into the work force and do something I don't want you to
have to do, which is to sacrifice being good parents. Don't forget ~ our first and most important
job in this country is taking care of our kids. If we all did a better job of that, we wouldn't have
half the problems we've got in America today.
So twice I had to veto their welfare reform bill because they wouldn't guarantee health
care and nutrition to children, wouldn't put enough money in to give to mayors like
your mayor for the very high unemployment areas where there may not be jobs for people, and
�wouldn't put enough money in for child care. We finally got it right.
Now, what is the result of all this? You now have five years - you don't have to vote for
this guy blind — you know what his record is and you know what he's advocating and you know
what his opponent has done, and you just make a simple judgment about what you think is right.
But consider the evidence.
They opposed our economic philosophy, and we've got the best economy and the lowest
unemployment rate in 24 years. They opposed our crime policy ~ we've got the lowest crime
rate in 24 years. They opposed what we were trying to do in welfare, and I said we would still be
able to dramatically lower welfare rolls and put people to work if we took care of children.
We've had the biggest drop in welfare rolls -3.8 million since I took office - in the history of
the United States.
And we had to fight to preserve the environmental protections in this country. The air is
cleaner, the water is cleaner, the food is safer, and there are fewer toxic waste dumps than there
were five years ago. But we have had to fight to preserve an approach that says we can grow the
economy and improve the environment. And that's what we owe our children. We cannot
abandon our commitment to clean up the environment. You have a clear choice.
So I'm asking you to help Jay Nixon ~ not just tonight with your funds, but tomorrow
with your voice and for another year. I think it's a pretty gutsy thing for a guy to give a year to
run a campaign, to try to unseat an incumbent, when we know historically our party has been
badly outspent in these kinds of races. You can give him your contributions. You can give him
your voice. You can give him a year in which every time you walk into a coffee shop, every
time you've got a break at work, every time you're sitting around talking with your friends you
can ask people: What do you want for this state? what do you want for this country? What are
the real consequences? What difference does it make who the senator is? I can tell you, it makes
a big difference.
He's a good man. I'm glad you're here for him tonight. Thank you very much.
END
8:10 P.M. CST
�Laura K. Capps
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Forwarded by Laura K. Capps/WHO/EOP on 11 /I 7/97 01:48 PM
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Subject: 1 997-11 / I 6 remarks by President to Rock The Vote
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(Los Angeles, California)
For Immediate Release
November 16, 1997
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT ROCK THE VOTE RECEPTION
Spago's Restaurant
Beverly Hills, California
6 : 3 0 P.M. PST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. I love Rock
The vote. (Laughter.) I liked it the first time I heard about
�it. I pledged to support the motor-voter bill when I ran for
president in 1 9 9 2 , and I was thrilled when it passed and we had a
great signing ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House - a
real tribute to the efforts of all those w h o started Rock The
Vote and were so involved in it.
And I w a n t to thank Dan for those fine remarks. I
want to thank Dan and Jenna and Jeff and Hillary and my great
friend, Ricki Seidman, for all the work they've done for Rock The
Vote over the years. Good luck, Donna. You gave a good speech
up here; t h a t ' s a good start.
Let me say that - oh, I also want to thank Wolfgang
and Barbara for having us here at this wonderful place. We
should probably be sitting d o w n and eating instead of standing up
and talking, but I'm delighted to be here.
Let me say to all of y o u , when I ran for president,
I did so out of an urge, a compassion, almost a compulsion to try
to change this country, to give it back to the people and to make
it work again - t o , basically, reclaim the future for your
generation and for the young children who are here. And I've
tried to continue to always think every day about how whatever I
do will affect not just the moment, not just a month or a year
from n o w , but what will be the impact 10 or 20 or 30 years from
now.
Most of what we do today will become only clear in
its impact when I'm long out of the White House. Part of that is
a function of the time in which we're living, when things are
changing so dramatically. But I've tried to stay in touch w i t h
young people and their concerns throughout my presidency. As a
matter of fact, the last meeting I had before I left for the West
Coast, at the White House, was one of my regular roundtables. We
don't call them coffees anymore - (laughter) - although we can
n o w . Now I insist that we have a reporter in every one; I wish
w e ' d had had one in all the others - but anyway, w i t h a lot of
young people. And these young people came and they talked to me
about a number of different things. And then a young man w h o
used to work for me, now works for MTV, reported on a survey that
had been done by MTV about the attitudes of young people and how
basically optimistic they were about their prospects and how well
things were going in the country, and they had some concerns, and
they were the ones you would expect.
But there was one sort of dark spot in this survey I
want to bring up, because it seems to me to undercut everything
that Rock The Vote stands for, and I say it to throw it d o w n as a
challenge tonight and to thank the people w h o have organized this
event and to thank all of you w h o have come here. Basically,
�young people were upbeat about the country, skeptical about the
political system, skeptical about whether it was really working
for t h e m , skeptical about whether they could make a difference.
And what I would like to say to you is, no serious student of the
last five years could possibly believe that. Therefore, we have
a lot of work to do if you expect your generation to completely
fulfill its promise, and if you expect to have this democracy
work for y o u .
Just consider where we started in ' 9 2 . I said that
I wanted to be President because I wanted to reverse trickle-down
economics; it w a s n ' t working for America. I wanted to go to a
strategy I called invest-and-grow. I said that I wanted to
replace welfare dependency w i t h a system that emphasized work and
child rearing. I said that I wanted to change our crime policies
away from hot air and tough talk toward a strategy based on
police, prevention, and punishment. I said that I wanted to try
to find a w a y so that we could support families both in raising
their children and in succeeding at work, because nearly every
family I k n o w , even upper-income people, find conflicts
repeatedly between their obligations they feel to their children
and the obligations they feel at work.
I said that we ought to have a world-class education
system for all Americans. We ought to reform health care to
expand coverage and quality, to control costs. I said that we
had to do more for poor people in isolated communities in our
urban and rural areas. I said that I thought we had to build one
America out of all of our diversity across the racial and
religious, the gender, the sexual orientation, even the political
divides. We had to find some way to define ourselves by what we
had in c o m m o n , because we were growing ever more diverse, and if
we didn't find a way to do that, then our efforts would be
undermined.
And finally, I said, I thought it was terribly
important that America not withdraw from the world at the end of
the Cold War. We had to continue to push for the world to enjoy
more peace and prosperity and freedom.
N o w , some people said, including me on occasion,
that that was a new Democratic approach. For me, it was our
oldest ideals w i t h new ideas for a new era. But you be the judge
- is it different n o w than it was five years ago? We have the
best economy in a generation. We have the lowest crime rate in
24 years. We have the biggest drop in welfare rolls in history.
We have cleaner air, cleaner water, fewer toxic waste dumps, and
safer f o o d . All of that has happened and it is directly related
to the work the American people have done, most of all, but also
to the changed direction of this country in the last five years.
And it happened because people participated in the political
process and it got a result they were seeking, and the result
�changed the lives and the framework in which we live in America.
That is terribly important.
We have the family leave law, we have the law that
says you can't lose your health insurance if you change jobs or
somebody in your family gets sick. We're about to cover 5
million more children in poor working families w h o don't have
health insurance today. We passed tax credits to open the doors
of college to all Americans and to give
families
credits for their kids and credits when they adopt children w h o
need homes. This has made a difference. And I believe we're
moving closer to one America.
In 1 9 9 4 , we had an election, and the Republicans w o n
the majority in Congress and they had a Contract on America and
that election had consequences, too. We know it was a very low
turnout election and we know that more than anything else, it was
younger voters and single women workers w h o stayed home. And I
spent a year contrasting my vision of America w i t h theirs and
telling them that if we could work together for positive change,
but that I was determined to beat back a vision of this country
that said that government is always the problem, there were no
responsibilities we had in common, and w h o cares if we became
more unequal and more unfair. And I'm proud that we defeated
that vision. And that, t o o , had consequences as a direct result
of the electoral process, and I think you have to acknowledge
that. (Applause.)
N o w , more importantly, there are a lot of things to
do. Can we grow the economy and clean up the environment? Can
we meet America's responsibilities to avoid global warming and
reduce greenhouse gas emissions? I think we can. How are we
going to continue to create this vision of one America. We still
have problems. A distinguished Chinese American who grew up in
New York City can't get voted out of the Senate Judiciary
Committee because he believes in what his President believes in
on affirmative action, even though he has promised to faithfully
enforce the law, whatever it is -- in the Civil Rights Division.
Bill Lee ought to be confirmed. That is w r o n g . That is w r o n g .
(Applause.)
How did it happen? A whole bunch of people voted
and a whole bunch of other people stayed home and certain people
got elected. There are consequences to active citizenship and
consequences to sitting on the sidelines. That's w h y I love Rock
The Vote. Yes, it's been f u n . Yes, the events are exuberant.
Yes, they feature young people. But I think the work of
citizenship can be f u n , too.
We have 8 0 0 colleges, tens of thousands of young
college students going all across America today, every week,
going into inner city schools to teach children to read, to give
�them a chance — because that was one of the things that I
promised in the campaign of ' 9 6 and that's one of the things that
we started since then in 1 9 9 7 . These efforts have consequences.
Citizens matter.
And I just want you to think about that. Whatever
the headlines in the daily paper are -- "The President is trying
to contain the spread of biological and chemical weapons today"
- a very important issue -- whatever the consequences are,
remember, in a democracy the people making the decisions were
elected by people w h o voted and by people w h o stayed home.
That's w h y Rock The Vote is important. Remember. Almost
everybody in this room has a lot more future ahead of you than I
do. Most of what we're doing you will live with the consequences
of, you will reap the benefits of, you will bear the burdens of.
And this country is in good shape today in no small
measure because our Constitution has permitted us to recreate
America based on our oldest values in every new time of challenge
and change. That's what we're doing n o w . You should be glad
you're alive n o w . If we do it right, the next 5 0 years will be
the most exciting and yet peaceful time in all human history -if we do it right. But it requires that people neither be
lackadaisical or cynical.
If you believe, as I do, that every person can make
a difference and that every person is obliged to make a
difference, then it necessarily follows that anyone who doesn't
try is shirking his or her duty as a citizen. That's really what •
Rock The Vote is all about.
I'll just close w i t h -- I had an interesting meeting
at the White House w i t h Senator Dole after that election. And we
were sitting around, relaxing, talking like old friends,
forgetting about all the things that were said that probably
shouldn't have been. (Laughter.) And I said, you know, you've
been in Washington a lot longer than I have. He said, that's
what I tried to convince the voters of at the election.
(Laughter.) And I said, n o w , do you think that public life is
more honest or less honest today than it was 30 years ago or 35
years ago. He said, it's not even close, not even remotely
close; it is m u c h , much more honest today than 30 or 35 years
ago.
N o w , if young Americans don't believe that, if they
don't believe that their vote makes a difference, and if they
don't believe there are consequences to what they do after the
titanic struggles of the last t w o years, we have, all of us w h o
believe that, have somehow failed in our responsibilities as
citizens, and we have to redouble our efforts to do better.
That's w h y I always try to do a lot of t o w n meetings. That's w h y
I've insisted in the t w o presidential elections that we have one
�debate each election that involved ordinary citizens w h o could
ask the candidates directly what their concerns are.
But we have to do more. There is more for Rock The
Vote to do. There is more to do to involve ordinary citizens.
We have now tried for five years in a row, so far unsuccessfully,
to reform the campaign finance laws. But I will remind y o u , we
have not only to control the cost of campaigns, we have to
increase the access of the people to the candidates through free
or reduced air time so that we can have more positive,
constructive, interactions so that people will get excited by the
debates at election and participate.
But whether that happens or not, no one has an
excuse to sit on the sidelines. You have only to look at the
differences in America now compared to five years ago to say,
yes, it makes a difference. Yes, we made a difference in Rock
The Vote. Yes, motor-voter made a difference. Yes, every time
we tell young people they have to take some time to be good
citizens, it makes a difference.
I will always try to be here for Rock The Vote, even
when I am in a rocking chair and out of office. (Laughter and
applause.) But I want you to remember that. And those of us w h o
have done well in this country and in our lives have a special
responsibility to reach out to try to help those who have not
done so well, and to tell them that at election time their vote
counts just as much as ours and can make the kind of America we
want to leave to our children.
Thank you and God bless you. (Applause.)
END
Message Sent To:
6:44 P.M. PST
�THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(Los Angeles, California)
For Immediate Release
November 16, 1997
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE DINNER
Private Residence
Los Angeles, California
9:34 P.M. PST
THE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you -- haver. Actually, I learned how to do that - you
know, that's just the way we say it in Arkansas. What can I say? You walk into any redneck bar
on the weekend ~ that's the way we talk.
Thank you, Haim. Thank you, Cheryl. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being here.
I'm, first of all, delighted to see you all, and I want to thank you for your presence here and for
your support. And I want to thank you for having us in your beautiful home and your beautiful
tent. I used to say, when I was on the stump running for President, I wanted to create a big tent
in America that we could keep everybody in, I think we've almost achieved it tonight.
You mentioned Itzhak Rabin, who was my great friend, and we sadly observed the
second anniversary of his death just a few days ago. And I've only been through this twice, two
anniversaries of his death, but I have observed ~ both times I remember exactly where I was and
exactly what I was doing when I heard that he had been shot. And I remember exactly what I did
waiting for the news of whether he lived or not. So I've thought a lot about what it was to me
that made him so special, because we had a relationship that one of the most important things
that ever happened to me in my life. The thing I liked about Rabin was that he was tough as
nails, but he had a great heart and a great imagination. And he understood that the status quo
would not work for Israel and, therefore, he was prepared to make changes even though they
carried risks.
In a less dire way entirely, that is the general choice that has faced America for the last
few years, because when things begin to change in a society, if you want to hold on to your basic
values, you can't hold on to your basic values by holding on to old conditions. In order to hold
�on to your basic values, you have to change conditions. You have to change your approach.
You have to be open to new things and even open to taking risks.
Six years ago, when I decided to run for President, I did it basically because I thought
that we were not changing fast enough and that we didn't have a strategy about how we were
going to get into the 21st century. We were talking about the revolution in telecommunications
and software and other things around the table tonight — they are really metaphors for the
breathtaking changes that are going on in the way Americans work and live and relate to the rest
of the world. And if we want to preserve what is best about America, therefore, we have to be
the most aggressive change agents in the world. That is the premise on which I began to seek the
presidency six years ago.
I thought the only way to restore opportunity and responsibility and a sense of
community in this country was to basically have new ideas that were relevant to a new time.
And so we set about doing that. And the people of California were kind enough to vote for Vice
President Gore and me and to give us a chance to serve, and we changed the economic policy of
the country. We went from trickle-down economics to invest-and-grow economics. We changed
the national government's approach to crime and focused on police, prevention, as well as
punishment. We changed our approach to welfare and focused on requiring work but also
supporting children. We aggressively embraced the environmental policy designed to facilitate
economic growth by improving the environment.
And we did a lot of other things. We tried to take on what I think is a central challenge
for almost every family in America today, even quite well-to-do families, even though it's
tougher for poor families, and that is, nearly every person I know with young children can cite at
least one example where they have felt a conflict between their obligations at work and their
obligations to their children. And our society is not sufficiently organized to enable people to
succeed at work and at what is everybody's most important job, which is raising good children.
It is still the most important work of every society, and we have given no thought, really, or very
little thought as a country to what our national approach ought to be to making sure that no one
had to give up being a good parent in order to be successful at work.
So these were some of the challenges we tried to take on. I also have been concerned all
my life, but particularly in the last few years, about how we could bridge our old divides of race
and deal with all the incredible manifold new diversity coming into our society, respecting that
diversity, even celebrating it, but still saying, these are the things which unite us as Americans.
We can have one America, no matter how kaleidoscopic we get. As a matter of fact, the richer,
the more diverse we get, we can even be stronger as one country.
And finally, I was quite concerned that the temptation would be very great at the end of
the Cold War for the United States to lay down the responsibilities of world leadership. And I
was worried that there would be a vacuum at the very time when we had enormous opportunities
in terms of trade and the economy to bring people together and to reinforce democracy, and we
had enormous new responsibility. Just because there is no Cold War and the threat of two great
countries annihilating each other and half the rest of the world with nuclear bombs is receding.
�we see a whole new set of threats from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, from
international criminal cartels and drug traffickers, and potentially, over the next few decades,
from more international diseases, infections, traversing national borders. Particularly it will
become more pronounced if we have dramatic changes in the global environment. So we needed
a new approach there, and so we set about trying to change all these things, and a number of
others I haven't mentioned.
Five years later, thanks largely to the work of the American people, but not unrelated to
these changes, we've got the strongest economy in a generation, the lowest crime rate in 24 years,
the biggest drop in welfare in history, the air is cleaner, the water is cleaner, there are fewer toxic
waste dumps, and our food is safer.
We have made a beginning on trying to deal with the conflicts of work and family by
passing the family leave law and by providing special tax breaks for people to finance college
education, for parents with young children, and for adoption, which is a very important issue to a
number of you in this room and also to me.
We're about to expand health care coverage to 5 million more children in working
families who don't have it. We're moving the country forward. We have fought back our worst
impulses to divide the country over immigrants and over race, and I hope we'll be able to take on
a whole range of other issues as I continue this initiative of racial dialogue that I started here in
California a few months ago.
The nuclear threat has been reduced. We've been a positive force for peace in Bosnia
and Haiti and Northern Ireland and in the Middle East, troubled though the peace process is
today. And we have begun to bring the world together, I think, around a shared approach not
only to our common opportunities through trade and economic cooperation and dealing with
common concerns over human rights, but also in dealing with these terrorist problems and other
related problems.
So I think it's a very different country today than it was five years ago, and I am very
gratified for all the people who have helped. So the first and most important thing I'd like
to say tonight to all of you is thank you. I think it is very important that you understand there is a
direct connection between the decisions people make in elections, the policies that are put in, and
the consequences that flow. And the system we have today requires us to be able to raise funds
so that we can communicate.
I would very much like to see campaign finance reform pass. I've worked hard on it.
We've tried for five years. The forces that benefit from the present system keep trying to keep it,
but I will say this, too — and a lot of you ~ I'm sure that Lew Wasserman has probably been
contributing to
campaigns as long as anybody in this room - would say the
escalating costs of campaigns is like the escalating costs of
making movies or the escalating costs of anything else. You
don't raise the money and then look for something to throw it at.
�The costs go up and you raise the money to meet them.
So if we're going to have meaningful campaign
finance reform, we also have to have a meaningful way to lower
the cost of candidates communicating with the electorate, through
free or reduced air time for people who accept spending limits
and other things like that.
But you ought to be proud tonight that you have
played a role in moving your country to a better place over the
last five years. You also ought to know the we are nowhere near
done, for two reasons. One is that a lot of things still need to
be done. The second is that the American people are almost
evenly divided, or they go first one way and then another,
between what I think are the two dominant governing philosophies
today, represented by the two parties.
My philosophy is that the government should be
smaller and less bureaucratic, but should be strong enough to
create the conditions and give people the tools to make the most
of their own lives, and that there are things that are very
important for us to do as one America. Even though we often
agree on things, the Republican philosophy is that government is
basically the source of our problems and it would be better if
there were less of it, even if there is more inequality and more
unfairness.
And I don't agree with that. I've done everything I
could to lift the burdens of government from the American people
but to bring the benefits of our common endeavors to moving the
country forward. And as you see in all these elections that are
genuinely contested, it's a near-run thing. The American people
are still trying to work this through as we define what it means
to be an American and what America means as we move into a new
era.
I can only say this, in addition to thank you ~ you
should all be very excited to be alive now, and grateful, because
we have the chance - the chance - to give not just our country,
but the world the 50 best years in all of human history, in terms
of freedom from genuine fear of extinction, elevation in material
conditions, resolution of a lot of our most difficult problems,
if we work together and we really work at it.
�And in terms of the difficulties, they always attend
this level of change. And every time this country has gone
through a change, we've had a big debate about what America
means. We had a big debate in the beginning about what America
means. A lot of people in the beginning thought America meant a
bunch of states that basically had to put up with a national
government so we could have a common currency and some trade
rules and we could raise an army if anybody ever threatened us;
otherwise, go away and leave us alone.
Then, because our Constitution said all people were
created equal, but slaves were three-fifths people, we had
another debate about what America means that led to the great
Civil War. And we said, no, America means all people are created
equal. And it changed the politics of America for another 40 or
50 years.
Then the Industrial Revolution came on. We had
another debate about it and Theodore Roosevelt first, then
Woodrow Wilson said, this can't be America to say, yes, we want
to have these great factories up, but we don't want 9-year-olds
working 12-hour days and six days a week in factories; that's
wrong. It's a good thing to get all the resources we can out of
the land, but we ought to save our national parks, we ought to
save our natural resources. We owe something to our
grandchildren and to their grandchildren.
When Franklin Roosevelt came in and one in four
Americans was out of work and he had to face the threat of
Hitler, we had to redefine again what the role of America was.
The same thing happened in the civil rights crisis. That's
what's going on today, and you should be very excited to be a
part of it.
You know, when I became President the Internet was
still the province of physicists. It is now the fastest growing
human organism in all of history. While we've been having dinner
there are probably a million new sites on the Net. Things are
happening at a pace and in a way, in a dimension we could never
imagine before. This is good. It's basically a good time.
But there are challenges we have to face. I'll just
mention a few of them. We've got the budget balanced. We've
�reformed Medicare for the next 10 or 12 years; it's going to be
fine. We have not fully come to grips with the implications of
the retirement of the baby boomers on Social Security and
Medicare. How are we going to do that? I personally think it's
very important to preserve them because of the large number of
Americans who would be in a world of hurt if they weren't there.
But we have to do it in a way that does not bankrupt our own
children as they attempt to raise their children. Can we do it?
Of course we can. But we have to do it.
In the area of criminal justice the crime rate has
been coming down for five years, but it's not coming down so much
among children between the ages of 12 and 18. Most crime by
juveniles is committed between 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon and
7:00 p.m. at night, when the parents are still at work or coming
home. We haven't thought about how our schools, our community
centers and other things -- how should they be organized? If we
know that this is when it occurs and we don't really want to jail
a lot more kids and we'd like to keep them out of trouble in the
first place, we need a national commitment to give these kids the
future they need.
We finally got a vote out of Congress for the first
time to establish national academic standards and voluntary exams
to see whether kids were meeting them, but we still haven't
implemented it and I'll have to fight it every step of the way
for the next three years. But I'm telling you, it is wrong to
let children get out of school without the basic educational
skills they need to do well in this modern economy, and we will
never overcome our economic and racial problems until we do it.
(Applause.)
If you look at the economic changes that are going
on and the big argument we had over fast track ~ which I still
think will be resolved in a positive way for my position some
time next year ~ when a plant closes, you see it. When trade
adds jobs, it's one here, 10 there, 50 the other place. People
are traumatized by the churning of the economy even when the
unemployment rate is low. Does that mean that we should run away
from trade? It's ridiculous. You know, we could try and it
would still happen, we just wouldn't benefit from it.
But it is true that no society, no wealthy country
in the world has figured out how to get all the benefits of all
this economic change and still help the people that are
�temporarily dislocated to start their lives anew, to be on an
equal or better footing and to do it in a hurry.
So the answer is trade more; get rid of more trade
barriers, but do more and do it more quickly to help people that
aren't very well suited for this modem economy in terms of their
skills move into the mainstream again. And we don't have a
system to do that. No other country has a very good system
either. But we ought to have the best and we're nowhere near the
best. And we can do better and we must.
In 1994, a lot of people didn't like what I proposed
in health care. But I said if we didn't do something the
percentage of uninsured people would go up and, sure enough, it
has. So here we are with the world's best medical care and more
and more people without any health insurance. We've got to find
a way to make health insurance affordable and to emphasize
quality care at the same time. Can we do it? Of course we can.
But we can't do it by having bogus debates about the things that
don't have anything to do with this. We have to have a
practical, as well as passionate and compassionate approach to
this.
And let me just mention one or two other things.
I'm convinced this challenge of climate change is real. I have
reviewed every document I can get my hands on. I am convinced
the climate of the Earth is warming at a rapid rate that is
unsustainable. I am also absolutely convinced that the
technology is there, or right over the horizon, to enable us to
continue to grow like crazy and drastically change the basis of
energy consumption in this country to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. Every one of us should be concerned about that.
That's something we owe to our children and our grandchildren.
Most of us in this room won't live to see a terrible
adverse circumstance in all probability. But turning 6 billion
people around cannot be done on a dime. It's going to take 20 or
30 years of hard work. It's the sort of thing democracies aren't
very well suited to do. But we've got to be visionary enough and
disciplined enough to say this is a gift we're going to give our
grandchildren and we're going to start now. (Applause.)
The last point I want to make — I don't want to get
�into the details on this so much ~ but it is very important that
we recognize that our security problems in the future, in all
probability, will not be the United States against some other big
country. I hope to goodness we can reach a constructive
accommodation and partnership with all the major nations of the
world. I hope we can build a trading network in the Americas and
one with the Asian Pacific, and that we can continue to advance
democracy and human rights throughout the world. But there will
always be organized forces of destruction that will seek to
profit from opportunities in whatever situation exists. The more
society becomes integrated around the globe, the more open our
borders are; the more we move money and technology and people
around rapidly, the more vulnerable we will be to organized
crime, to drug syndicates, to terrorists and to people who can
take advantage of small scale weapons of mass destruction.
That's why I'm working so hard on this biological
and chemical issue. We have got to be firm in making sure that
we've done everything we possibly can to set up a system which
protects the world from the worst aspects of the new security
threats in the same way we worked hard during the Cold War to
keep the world from being blown up. It is the same sort of
challenge, it just will happen in a lot of different places. Can
we do it? Of course we can, if we have the vision and the
determination to do it.
So I guess what I want to say to you is this is a
great time to be alive, and it is a great time to be a citizen of
the United States. It is a great time to be involved in the
political process, but don't ever think it doesn't matter. It
has serious consequences what you do or don't do; what you're
committed to or what you withdraw from. And your presence here
tonight I hope at least gives you the satisfaction that you've
helped to make America a better, stronger, more unified country
than it otherwise would have been. And I hope it will redouble
your determination to make sure that when we finish our business
here that this country will be in great shape for the best 50
years in all of human history.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
END
9:55 P.M. PST
�THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(Sacramento, California)
For Immediate Release
November 15, 1997
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
TO THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE
Sacramento Capital Club
Sacramento, California
2:15 P.M. PST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Eleni, thank you very much for your
remarks and for the hard work that you have done. Thank you, Angelo and Sophia.
Congressman Matsui, when he stood up and said that he was speaking on behalf of the
Tsakapoulous family, I thought we were taking ethnic diversity a little far there. But you know
me; as far as I'm concerned, it should have no limits. So I liked it.
I want Bob Matsui and Vic Fazio for the wonderful work that they do in Congress. I
have wished on many days — privately, so I might as well say publicly ~ that a higher percentage
of people in both parties were more like Bob Matsui and Vic Fazio. They always try to find
common ground and they're always willing to stand tough and fight if necessary. They get a lot
done and they're always looking to the future. And I'm very grateful to them.
I'm also glad to be back in Sacramento and back here with your mayor, who has been a
good friend of mine and a good leader. And I thank him for that. And Phil Angeles, good luck
to you in your endeavor this year. Most people should trust you to handle the money. You've
had a lot of experience at it. Thank you.
I'd also like to thank my good friend, Dan Dutko for coming all the way from
Washington, D.C. to be part of the Democratic Party's efforts today. And let me thank all of you.
Congress has just gone home and this was a remarkably good year. It's a two-year
congressional session; we have a lot to do next year, but we did pass the first balanced budget in
a generation. We ratified the Chemical Weapons Treaty, which will help to protect our children
�and our grandchildren, and involves a lot of what is at stake in Iraq today.
We made progress on expanding NATO in ways that will give us a chance to have a
21st century where Europe is a source of peace and prosperity, not a cause for war that involves
Americans. We passed a wonderful adoption bill that I will sign in the next few days to facilitate
adoptions in many ways in America. We passed a huge increase in medical research in all kinds
of areas and the best package to help families with diabetes, according to the American Diabetes
Association, since the discovery of insulin 70 years ago. So it was a very good year for the
American people in the Congress.
What I'd like to talk to you about a little bit today is how that year is a part of what we've
been doing for the last five years, and what I hope to be doing for the next three; how it fits in
with what we celebrated just a few moments ago when I went out, literally, to the wetlands area
today ~ to celebrate this joint partnership to try to restore wetlands and to preserve some of your
precious environmental heritage, even as you permit the economy to grow and the uses of water
to proliferate.
When I started running for President about six years ago, our country was not in very
good shape - California was in terrible shape economically. But times come and go. In every
person's life, in every country's life there are times that are better than other times. There will
never be a period where we have complete, unbounded, uninterrupted good news. I used to have
a set of rules for public life I kept with me, and one of them said you're almost most vulnerable
when you think you're invulnerable. Something is always going to happen, it's endemic to the
human condition.
But what a free people must always have is a vision of where they're going, a strategy to
get there and the concentration and discipline to pursue the strategy through the tough times.
That's what I didn't think we had in 1991 and why I ran for President. And my goal as a
Democrat was basically to take the mainstream values of our party and our country and marry
them to modem ideas and policies that would move the country forward, and that would take us
into the 21st century with the American Dream alive for everybody responsible enough to work
for it. It would help us to create a country where we were coming together across all the lines
that divide us into one America, and would keep us strong enough to continue to lead the world
for peace and freedom and prosperity.
As you see from the events of the last week, I think it is clear that at the end of the Cold
War not all of the dangers of the world have gone away. And it is very important that the United
States be strong enough to do what is necessary to stick up not only for our own interests and our
own security, but for the kind of world we are trying to create.
And that's what we have been doing for the last five years. And what I want you to
understand that is so often overlooked is that there is a direct connection between your
presence at this lunch here today and what we have been doing and what we will be able to do,
�because, in the end, the people who make decisions are those that are put there by the American
people. They are put there after elections. And if you don't have the capacity to communicate
your message to be heard and to answer the charges against you in this world today, you'll be in a
lot of trouble.
So every time you hear ~ if you've been out here helping us all these years ~ every time
you hear of a new breakthrough, a new movement forward for the United States, you should feel
that you are a part of that. And you should be under no illusion that if there were not people like
you around to help us that all these ideas, all these policies and all these people would be around
anyway ~ it's not so. I've seen elections conducted in an atmosphere of unilateral disarmament
and I wasn't very satisfied with the results. It doesn't work very well in politics and it doesn't
work very well in other areas of human endeavor. So I'm glad you're here.
What is it that's changed in the last five years? Well, the first thing we had to do was to
make up our mind in Washington what the government's job was. What's the President supposed
to do every day when he gets up? What's the Congress supposed to do? What is our job? What
is the role of government and what must our priorities be?
The old debate seemed to me to be a little bit artificial, where people said, well, the
government has to try to do everything when there's a problem, and others would say the
government is the problem and should do nothing and we hope everybody will come out all
right. Neither one of those was consistent with the way I saw people living in my state and my
hometown, or everything I knew about how you build an economy or a society.
So I tried to reformulate what I believe the mission of government is, and I think it is ~
and I hope it is — the philosophy of the Democratic Party on the edge of a new century. We
believe the role of government is not to do everything or to sit on the sidelines, but to give people
the tools and conditions they need to make the most of their own lives. If you think about it in
that way, it tells you what to do and what to stop doing.
Now, that doesn't answer the question - so what should your economic policy be? We
believe that there was a false choice put before the American people - should we cut taxes and
run a huge deficit, or don't cut them and spend a little more money and run a slightly smaller
deficit? Our country's debt quadrupled in the 1980s and it was wrong. We said we're going to
cut the deficit, we're going to cut spending, but we're going to spend more on education, on
technology, on medical research, on the things that are key to our future. We're going to make
choices.
The strategy worked. Before the balanced budget kicks in, the economic plan adopted
by Democrats only, including the two members of Congress in this room, have reduced the
deficit by 92 percent - 92 percent - from where it was the day I took office.
What was our crime policy? I was amazed when I got to Washington, there were people
who actually wrote in newspapers and respectable journals that if I talked about crime I was
trying to get a Republican issue. And I was not aware that Democrats were pro-crime. Nor was I
�aware that the Republicans had done such a great job, since the crime rate was — had gone up
quite a lot.
Now, most anticrime work is done at the community level — in the city of Sacramento, in
this county. But it was obvious there were things that national government could do to make a
difference. And I went all across the country looking at things that were working, talking to
people. And I said, our crime policy is not going to be caught in the old debate, lock them up
and throw away the key or hope things get better and when things get better the crime rate will
go down. Neither one was, I thought, particularly accurate. I thought we ought to be tough
and smart and do what works ~ put 100,000 more police on the street, take assault weapons off
the street, keep handguns out of the hands of crooks, give kids something to say yes to so they
don't get in trouble in the first place, and punish people who are really bad. That's what I thought
our policy ought to be.
And the crime rate has dropped now for five years in a row. And we played a role in it.
And I feel good about that.
Our welfare policy ~ the old policy was encourage people to do better, or cut them off
and who cares. That was the old debate. Our theory was require people who can go to work to
go to work, but don't ask them to give up their most important job, which is raising their kids.
And we started working with states from the day I got there on moving people from
welfare to work. The Republicans said when they got a majority in Congress they wanted to pass
a welfare reform bill. I said, fine, we'll work with you on it. They passed two bills that I vetoed.
Why? Because they were more than happy to be tough in cutting people off of welfare, but they
did not want to give them the tools they needed to get in the work force and they were willing to
hurt their kids by taking away the guarantee of food and medical care.
So I vetoed those two bills; they put the guarantees of food and medical care back in,
gave me some money for job-training and child care — we're off to the races. The result?
Welfare roles have dropped by 3 million people. And it's working, it's working.
What I want you to understand is there's a direct connection between you being here at
this lunch and that happening. And I thank you for it. We are changing the nature of politics in
this country.
We had a big reaction to a lot of what we did in '93 and '94 and the benefits of it weren't
apparent. The Republicans won the Congress in '94. The American people got to see what they
wanted to do in '95 and '96. We beat back the Contract on America. It didn't happen by
accident, it was a lot of hard, disciplined work, putting our message out against their message.
And it's a good thing for the country that we did.
What we celebrated today at that wetlands project was people who want to grow the
economy and people who want to preserve the environment working together to do something at
the grass-roots level. That's how we ought to be doing this. Their idea on the environment was it
was a nice thing if you could get it, but it was really an irritant that shouldn't get in the way of
�people going about their daily lives.
I think that's wrong. I think we have proved conclusively. You have cleaner air today,
cleaner water, more toxic waste dumps cleaned up, a safer food supply, all through major
initiatives of this administration, and a stronger economy. We have got to do it in the right way.
We don't want to do things that are stupid. We don't want to shoot ourselves in the foot, but we
know we have got to preserve public health and the environment and grow the economy. That is
the policy of our party. And we are determined to do it and we are making progress on it and
your presence here today contributes to the triumph of that idea. And you should be proud of
that and you should talk about it and you should help us to refine it.
I don't mean there aren't tough decisions out there. This climate change issue, for
example, is a very difficult, challenging issue that will occupy us for the rest of my term in
office. But I know that the technology, the know-how, the creativity is out there in the American
people to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and grow the economy. We've already done it in two
other areas ~ you know these chlorofluoro carbons and CFCs that were in all the spray cans —
they said, oh, they'll do terrible damage to the economy if we get rid of them. Well, we got rid of
them and the American economy is doing just fine. They say we do terrible damage to the
economy if we took sulfur dioxide out of the atmosphere. We found a pro-business, marketoriented way to do it; we're getting it out of the atmosphere at less than half the cost I was told it
would cost and we're doing just fine.
And we'll solve this problem and we'll do just fine if we'll all work together and realize
that we cannot be forced into a position where somebody says, if you want to save the
environment you have to taint the economy, or if you want a good economy you just have to tum
your back on the environment. That is wrong. And it's one of two big choices that I think we
can't afford to make.
The other one, and the last issue I want to emphasize domestically, is the choice that I
alluded to earlier ~ welfare. That's the choice between work and family. When I signed the
family leave law a lot of people said you're going to hurt a lot of small businesses ~ even though
we exempted people with under 50 employees. For five years we've had a record
number of new small businesses formed in every single year. It is a good thing to allow people
who go to work every day not to have to worry themselves sick about their children at home or at
school. It is a decent thing to do that.
I will say again, every society's most important job is raising healthy, good, strong
children with good values. There is no more important work. More than half of the children in
this country under the age of one have mothers in the work force. And since I have had a wife, a
mother, and a grandmother in the work force ~ as long as I have been alive, that is what I have
known - I do not think that is a bad thing. But I think it is a very bad thing when people who are
working are worried sick about their children.
And so as we look ahead to the future, our party has to find a way to provide more
affordable child care. Our party has to find a way to provide health insurance for these children -
�- all of them ~ we're going to cover half of them with this balanced budget this year ~ all these
children who live in families where their parents are working in lower-income jobs and they can't
afford health insurance. Our party has to find a way to help the American people balance the
demands of raising their kids and going to work every day. And if we have the same approach
that we've had for the last five years, we can do that as well.
Lastly, let me just say very briefly, because I think you can understand that I don't want
to talk about this in any detail, we've got all kinds of other challenges. We've got to make sure
that Medicare and Social Security are there for the baby-boom generation and for their children
and their children's children. And we have to do it in a way that doesn't ~ where people my age,
of the baby boom generation, don't ask the smaller generation of our children to bankrupt
themselves and not take care of their kids to preserve these institutions. We can do all that.
We also, though, have to have a framework in our mind for what it means for America to
be secure in the 21st century. National security during the Cold War was pretty straightforward.
We wanted to keep a big strong military and plenty of nuclear weapons, and we wanted to have a
system that existed between ourselves and the Soviet Union so that either side thought that if
they launched nuclear weapons the other side would be destroyed, so no one would ever do it.
And then we'd fight around the edges in various places around the world, to try to keep them
from getting much of a toehold.
With the decline of the Cold War, with the Russians becoming our partners and our
soldiers standing side by side in Bosnia, we now know that national security has to be defined
somewhat in different terms. To be sure, there's a lot of problems still with nuclear weapons.
We're doing our best to continue to work with the Russians to get rid of more and more nuclear
weapons and actually destroy them and make sure that the nuclear materials don't fall into the
wrong hands. And we've gotten a wonderful amount of support around the world for a
comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty.
We're working hard to deal with the after effects of these civil wars, the worst of which
is land mines. And while I do not agree with all the terms of the Ottawa Convention on land
mines, it is encouraging that over 100 nations are willing to say that they will never build, buy or
use any kind of land mines. The United States has destroyed a million and a half such mines;
we're going to destroy another million and a half while I'm President. And this year we'll spend
slightly more than half the money spent in the entire world to go get those land mines out of the
ground so kids don't walk on them and blow their lives away in the years ahead. This is a good
thing.
But the most likely problems ~ there are a couple little babies in this audience, or there
were today, and some children ~ the most likely problems these children will face when they
come of age will be problems that cross national borders - terrorism, organized crime and drug
running, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological weapons and maybe
small-scale nuclear weapons.
This much nuclear cake put in a bomb would do ten times as much damage as the
�Oklahoma City bomb did.
The spread of environmental problems or diseases across national lines ~ we are going
to have to, in other words, find ways to cooperate, to keep the organized forces of destruction
that are taking advantage of the Internet, the technological revolution, the freedom of travel and
the freedom of movement, access to computers and moving money around and all that - there
will always be organized forces of destruction.
That is fundamentally what is at stake in the stand off we're having in Iraq today. I don't
want you to look at this backward through the prism of the Gulf War and think it's a replay. I
want you to look at it forward and think about it in terms of the innocent Japanese people that
died in the subway when the saran gas was released; and how important it is for every
responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big
stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people
develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be
exploded in small rooms.
And I say this not to frighten you. The world will always have challenges. I think the
chances are quite good that we can organize ourselves for this challenge and deal with it very
effectively. I personally believe that the next 50 years will be far more peaceful and less
dangerous for our children and our grandchildren than the last 50 years were. I also believe they
will be the most prosperous and interesting time in all of human history ~ but only if we do the
right things.
And so I say again to you, this is an exciting time to be alive. There have only been
maybe four periods like this in American history over our 220-year history, where we are really
being called upon to rethink what we want of our government, rethink what we want of our
nation, meet a whole set of new challenges and, in effect, recreate the American Dream. It can
only happen once every generation, sometimes once every two or three generations. You are
living in that kind of America.
In that kind of time, political participation is more important; the integrity and validity
and strength of your ideas are more important; and your passionate willingness to stand up and
defend what you believe in is more important.
So I thank you for being here today because I believe that what you are doing is helping
to build an America that your children and your grandchildren will be very proud of and will
thank you for.
Thank you very much.
END
2:39 P.M. PST
�THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(Las Vegas, Nevada)
For Immediate Release
November 14, 1997
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
TO THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE DINNER
Private Residence
Las Vegas, Nevada
11:32 P.M. PST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you very much. We've had such a nice
evening it seems a shame to spoil it with a speech -- but I'd like to say a few words. First of all, I
want to thank Brian and Myra for once again welcoming me into their homes and for being my
friends, and for being my friends when I was the fifth-best known candidate for President in the
New Hampshire primary. When the only person in America who thought I could be elected was
my mother — they were my friends.
I also want to thank them because we share something else in common. In addition to
the fact that Brian and I went to college together, our family and theirs, we're both parents of
only daughters who are reasonably important to us. And I had Amy with me for a long time, and
I miss her terribly, so I'm glad to see her here tonight. It was wonderful having her in the White
House for the years that we had her.
I'd like to thank Governor and Mrs. Miller and Senator and Mrs. Bryan and Senator
and Mrs. Reid for being here tonight. And I'd like to thank the people of Nevada for voting for
Bill Clinton and Al Gore twice.
When we ran, I was told that there were all these states that I could never carry, among
which were any between the Mississippi River and California. And that seemed to be an
irrational thing to me, to give them all up. And most of them we did lose, both times - but
Nevada was here for us both times, and I never will forget that and I'm very grateful.
I would like to tonight just ask you to think about where we are as a country on our
�journey, what we're going through as a people, and what we should be doing about it together.
If you look at ~ now that I have been President for five years, I tend to have a little bit
of detachment and see a lot of the specific struggles and contests and efforts we're making as part
of the broad sweep of American history, and as sort of human drama of our generation, in terms
of how people work and live and relate to each other, related to the rest of the world. And one
thing I've learned from studying our history and from living it the last five years, is that
whenever we go through a period of real sweeping change, where our working patterns change,
communications pattern change, living patterns change ~ in our chase, the very composition of
our population is changing. We're becoming much, much more diverse with these new waves of
immigration. And then our relationships after the Cold War to the rest of the world is changing.
Whenever something like that happens, and all the balls get thrown up in the air, there is
not only the need that individuals feel to know what the deal is ~ how am I going to constitute
my life, how am I going to constitute a stable family life, how are we going to keep our
community together, what's our future like — we also engage in redefining the nation.
When we started as a country, we basically define ourselves as a bunch of people that
didn't want to be under British control anymore. So then we had years where we really argued
about what ought to be in our Constitution and, once we had a Constitution, what did it mean -what did it mean to be one nation of associated states.
And we pretty well worked it out, and then things rocked along fine for a while. And
then finally we had to come to grips with slavery, and whether slavery would be extended or
restricted or done away with altogether; and how were we going to accommodate that within the
Constitution; and could we do it and keep the country together. And half the country said no,
half the country said yes; and we fought the bloodiest war in our history with each other. The
casualties in the Civil War were slightly greater than the casualties in World War II with a much,
much smaller population.
But we once again wound up defining the nation. We fought a war to do it and then we
had to pass a bunch of constitutional amendments. But essentially America, by 1870, was what
Abraham Lincoln said it ought to be in the Gettysburg Address.
Then we became a great industrial country and we had to do this all over again. Wasn't it
wonderful. We had all these factory jobs, but wasn't it terrible that nine-year-old kids were nine
hours a day, six days a week in some of these factories. What were we going to do about that.
And so through the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, we did it
all over again. We defined what the nation was. And we found a way to get the benefits of a
new era and still meet its challenges and kind of come together as one people. And we had to do
it again during the Depression in the second world war.
And we had to do it all over again for the Cold War. Now we have to do it again,
because we're moving into a truly global society, bound together more than anything else by
�shared technology and communications; where the movement of money and ideas and people is
more rapid than ever before; where the security threats we will most likely face for the next 20 or
30 years are not animosities between two nations ~ although there may be some of that ~ we see
that in the press today, there may be some of that ~ but far more likely it will be terrorism, the
spread of weapons of mass destruction into the hands of organized crime or drug dealers, shared
international environmental problems or new diseases crossing national borders. New problems
we share with people who are living in different countries because they cross national borders
and require a much higher level of cooperation than before.
So there's a lot of change in the air. And when I ran in 1992,1 attempted to address that
and what I thought the nation was. I said, look, I want to build a country in the 21st century
where everybody who's responsible enough to work for it has the opportunity to live out his or
her dreams. I want to build a country that's still the strongest force for peace and freedom and
prosperity in the new world. And I want to build a country where, in spite of all of our
differences, we're still coming together as one America.
It wasn't the end of the debate, it was the beginning of the debate. In '94, the
Republicans won the Congress. They said, we've got a different idea. We think government is
the problem and we will be a nation if we just say we believe in the same things, and we get the
government out of the way, and the international market is a wonderful thing, and so vote for us
and we'll drastically diminish the role of the government, and that's the real problem. And
people liked it when they heard it. But then when they saw it in action in 1995 and 1996 they
didn't like it so well. And we fought them over that.
But you need to see all this not just as an isolated political event. All of you are present
at another moment of creation for America. We are in the process of once again redefining what
it means to be an American and what we want our country to be. And my idea is that we have to
be faithful to our oldest values and then be highly pragmatic and aggressive about what the
challenges are.
What are the challenges we face in this country today? First of all, you can't do very
well in this world unless you've got a decent education. So it's more important than ever before
to give a world-class education to every child in the country.
Secondly, with more and more people in the work force, men and women, over half the
children in this country under one have mothers in the work force — way over half. We have to
recognize that even for upper-income people, and certainly for lower-income working people, we
have to work very hard to enable people to balance the demands of work and family, because if
we have a society where you have to choose whether you're going to be a good parent or
successful in the workplace, we are defeated before we begin. The most important work of any
society is raising children. There is no more important job. It is the most significant work we
ever do. But if people who want to be - and indeed we need to be - in the work force can't be
successful parents and get the kind of supports they need and still succeed at work, we're in deep
trouble.
�And so that's what the -- when you see a specific issue like family and medical leave, or
we cut taxes more for lower-income working people with a lot of kids, or we're working on
trying to broaden the child care system of the country, or I wouldn't sign welfare reform until we
put $4 billion in it so Governor Miller and his colleagues could figure out how to give these
lower-income parents who go from welfare to the workplace adequate child care for their kids ~
all of that is really part of a big issue, which is that a decent, good America will reconcile the
conflicts of work and family. That's what Harry Reid and Dick Bryan have to deal with every
week in some form or fashion.
We have to prove that we can make our streets safe, and we have to prove we can make
our communities coherent, and we have to have a system that brings the benefits of free
enterprise to places that it hasn't reached yet. We have to prove we can grow the economy and
preserve the environment ~ a huge issue.
A big difference between us and the Republicans in '95 and '96 was whether you could
actually increase environmental protection and increase economic growth at the same time. I
always believed if you did it right, you'd make more jobs with the proper kind of environmental
protection, because that would be the new technology of the future and there will be more
demand for it in the future. And I think the evidence is on our side. I believe that's exactly what
we've done. The air and water's cleaner. We're making our food safer. We're cleaning up toxic
waste dumps. And we're creating jobs like crazy in all those areas. And it's very good.
But when you strip it down, what we believe is that in order to be bound together as a
nation, we must do certain things as a nation ~ to create opportunity, demand responsibility,
bring us together as a community, and preserve our leadership. And if it works, America will
once again be, in effect, reborn as the strongest country in the world and a beacon of hope to
people.
And so far the evidence is pretty encouraging. We've got the lowest unemployment rate
in 24 years, the lowest inflation rate in 30 years. The crime rate has been dropping for five years.
We've got the lowest ~ biggest drop in welfare rolls in history. We're moving in the right
direction. We have average incomes that are rising now. And our environment is significantly
improved. We are moving in the right direction.
This year we had a good year. We passed the balanced budget law, with the biggest
increase in investment in education since '65, the biggest increase in investment for children's
health since '65. The American Diabetes Association says what we've done for families with
diabetes is the best thing since insulin was discovered 70 years ago.
And the most important thing, I believe, over the long run is, I think with the latest tax
credits, scholarships, work-study funds, we can honestly say we have now opened the doors of
college to every American who is willing to work for it. This year we had the biggest increase in
assistance to people to go to college since the G.I. Bill was passed 50 years ago. This was a good
year for America.
�Are there problems? Of course, there are. You read about them in the paper every day.
But I just want you to feel good about this because when I started this little odyssey six years
ago, when I spent my first night at this house, I would go from place to place in America and I
would really meet a lot of people who weren't sure that we could — this country worked anymore.
They didn't know if we could get the economy going again. They didn't know if we could bring
the crime rate down again by working together. They didn't know if we could ever really kind of
break the culture of poverty again. They weren't quite sure how we were going to relate to the
rest of the world again.
We're in better shape than we were then. And all we need to do is to remember this. We
just are fortunate to be living in a time of truly breath-taking change. It makes it more
interesting. But it also imposes on all of us as citizens higher responsibilities — because you
have to figure out how you're going to make the economy work for everybody again, how are
you going to keep the society together again, how are you going to help families again.
We also have a lot of new challenges, particularly in the environmental area, that no one
has ever had before. And finally, we have to figure out how to relate to all these other countries
around the world when we're not all divided up into communist and non-communist camps. And
we have to figure out how to build new alliances for cooperation all the time. It's almost as if
you abolish the two-party system in the world and now nations were just trying to figure out
were they going to organize themselves issue by issue. So it's fascinating, it's endlessly complex,
but in the end it's pretty simple. If you're expanding opportunity, if citizens are being more
responsible and if we're pulling people together instead of driving them apart, this country is
going to be fine.
And I am gratified beyond measure, but I can also tell you this - we have a lot left to do.
When the baby-boomers like me retire, we have to have reformed Medicare and Social Security
enough so it will be there for our children and so that we're not going to bankrupt our children as
they raise our grandchildren to pay for our retirement.
We still have to work through the big tobacco settlement issue next year to guarantee that
we protect the health of our children. It's still the number one public health problem in America - illegal smoking among children will lead to bigger health care bills and more problems than
anything else.
We have a number of exciting issues to deal with in the environment and on climate
change. But the general thing is people now believe that we get it in America. You know, you
should all have a very high level of confident that our country can function, that it can succeed,
that we can meet any challenge.
And I just am so grateful to have been given the chance to serve and to play a role in
once again proving that America will always be a young nation if at every time of
challenge it can redefine what it means to be an American. That's what you're doing. And I hope
�you're very proud of it. And I hope, so far, you're very pleased with the results.
Thank you very much.
END
11:47 P.M. PST
�THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
November 12, 1997
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE DINNER
Private Residence
Washington, D.C.
10:29 P.M. EST
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I hardly know what to say. You have unwittingly uncovered
how Elizabeth came to be appointed an ambassador. In 1992, these 10 guys came to see me from
Washington. They said, if you can make Smith Bagley hush for three years ~ we'll support you
for president. I'll never look at you the same again ~ I'll always think of you as the President of
the American Women's — for the rest of my life.
I can see, this is going to be on Pat Robertson's television show tomorrow night. There's
something brewing here.
I'd like to thank Smith and Elizabeth, first of all, for opening their home to us. This is a
beautiful, beautiful place, and a very interesting place. I got a little history of the house tonight.
If you haven't gotten it, I think you should. I'd also like to thank you, Elizabeth, for your truly
extraordinary service in Portugal. You did a great job and I'm grateful. And thank you for
making Hillary and Chelsea feel so welcome over there.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have not a long talk to give tonight. I'm feeling rather nostalgic
today. We were talking around the table ~ I spoke today, earlier, at the memorial service for
Congressman Walter Capps, who was a particular friend of mine because his daughter, Laura,
has worked for me for several years and used to work as George Stephanopoulos's assistant. So
she was literally in the room next to the couple of rooms I occupy along with the Oval
Office in the White House.
He was about 62 years old and only served 10 months in Congress. He was a college
professor for over three decades, and he got elected in '96, after having been defeated in '94. But
he was a wonderful, wonderful human being and a very close friend of ours.
And he, like me, absolutely idolized his daughter, and so he used to hang around the White
House all the time ~ even when congressmen shouldn't have been there -- just to catch a glimpse
�of his sweet child.
All these eulogies today were talking about how Walter Capps was always in a good
humor, and always basically felt relaxed and at peace and was so unpolitical in the Washington
sense of the term ~ and also, that even though he was in his early 60s, how utterly completely
devoid of any kind of cynicism he was, which I think is an admirable thing.
So, anyway, I got myself in the right frame of mind. And then right before I left to start
my rounds this evening I spent an hour and a half with my political director, Craig Smith, who is
here with me, and we sat around a table, along with Micky Ibarra and Maria Echaveste who also
work in the White House, with - I don't know - 12 or 15 young people, all under 30. And there
was an Indian American state legislator from Minnesota who is one of four South Asian state
legislators around the United States. There was a young Hispanic city councilman from Tucson
who persuaded his wife that they should delay their honeymoon so that he could come to this
meeting with me. I personally thought that was going a little far.
There was a young woman who is head of the Future Farmers of America in South
Dakota. There was a young Native American woman who had a degree in physics and was
going back to study to teach physics to children on Indian reservations in the United States. It
was a very impressive group of people - a number of others.
And we just went around the room and they said whatever they wanted to say to me.
They asked me whatever they wanted to ask. There was a young African American man who is a
Rhodes Scholar who went to Jackson State University in Mississippi. And they talked about a
lot of different things, but I left the meeting feeling really good about our country, that we had
young people like that and that, contrary to a lot of the stereotyping about Generation X, they
didn't have a bit of cynicism and they were quite upbeat about their future. And they were very
determined to see that their generation did its part in meeting the problems of our time. They
were all especially interested in citizen community service, which I found was very moving.
I say that by way of background because we are coming to the end of the year ~ I guess
Congress will go home in the next day or two when we ~ we've got a few little disputes
outstanding. And then we'll resume again around the time of the State of the Union in January.
And I feel a great deal of gratitude this year. We have the lowest unemployment rate
we've had in nearly a quarter of a century; lowest inflation rate in 30 years. The deficit has been
reduced by 92 percent before the balanced budget kicked in on October 1 st — 92 percent
reduction from the day I took office.
We have cleaner air, cleaner water, safer food and we're cleaning up more toxic waste
sites than ever before. The crime rate has gone done, the welfare rolls have had a record drop.
And I think, more importantly, people really know down deep inside America can work again,
and we can really make this thing work.
Your presence here tonight is important because it's very important as we get ready to go
�into an election season that we do our dead level best to make sure people understand what the
real choices are before them, and what policies we have adopted that are, for instance, the
Republican Party would never have adopted and people can make a judgement about whether
they're right for America .
But if you take this balanced budget bill, for example, if there had been a Republican
president and a Republican Congress they might have adopted the balanced budget bill and it
would have had a capital gains tax in it. It might have had the $500 per child tax credit, even if
they controlled the presidency and both Houses. It never would have had the tax credits for all
forms of higher education after high school that effectively opened the doors of college to all
Americans. It never would have had the biggest increase in education since 1965, with funds to
put computers in all the classrooms of the country. It certainly would not have had the biggest
increase in child health since 1965. I doubt very seriously it would have had the Medicare
reforms we have and the Medicaid reforms we have. The American Diabetes Association said
that the diabetes changes were the most important things since the discovery of insulin 70 years
ago.
We added 12 years to the Medicare trust fund and covered more women for
mammographies; did a lot more work in testing of prostate cancer, which is I think the most
under-researched and under-treated major form of cancer in America today now — now that
we've more than doubled the efforts that we're making in breast cancer. And I'm very grateful for
that and the country will be stronger because of it.
We passed the Chemical Weapons Convention in a bipartisan fashion. We got bipartisan
support to expand NATO, and that's good. And we're heading into a Thanksgiving with ~
tomorrow, I believe, I'm going to sign the appropriations bill which finally, finally secures a
victory I've been working for since the State of the Union ~ Congress has agreed to let us
proceed to establish national academic standards - not federal government standards, but
national academic standards ~ and have voluntary tests in reading and mathematics for the 4th
and the 8th grades. So I'm very, very happy about that.
They also fund our America Reads program, which is now in 800 colleges around
America. We have tens of thousands of college kids going out into schools every single week
now — more than once a week — teaching young people to read. So it's a good thing, and I feel
very good about it.
As we look ahead next year, we've tried to set the framework for what we still have to
do. We're about to appoint congressional leaders in both parties as members to a Medicare
commission that will attempt to come up with a bipartisan long-term solution to the Medicare
problem so that we won't - when my generation retires we won't bankrupt our children and
prohibit them from taking care of our grandchildren.
We're now working full steam ahead, hoping we can reach an agreement with other
countries in Kyoto about how the wealthier countries of the world can together reduce the threat
of global warming and climate change without having to give up economic growth. I am
�absolutely positive, based on the evidence, that it can be done if we can organize ourselves
properly to do it.
We had a great conference on hate crimes yesterday, which I think will lay the
foundation for our continuing efforts to reconcile people across all the lines that divide us in this
country. And not very long ago, Hillary and I hosted the first White House Conference on Child
Care ever, which I think is one of the great outstanding social issues of our time.
One of the young men who was at our meeting today said, you know what I'm worried
about? He said, I'm worried about how I'm supposed to feel secure in a world where I might get
laid off at any time and a lot of my friends don't have any health insurance. And I want to have
children, but I want to know how I'm supposed to feel secure. And so we had this interesting
discussion about what security meant when I was his age. I said, you know, when I was your
age ~ he was about 20,1 think — I took it for granted that my folks would have the jobs they had
as long as they wanted them. I mean, they might get laid off in a recession or something, but
people generally had one job and they kept it for their careers. And if they were lucky, they had
health insurance on the job; and if they didn't, health care wasn't all that expensive anyway.
And so we talked about that. And we talked about how for a long time you knew at least
if you could get an education you could have security. And he said, well, I'm not even sure
Social Security will be there for me. And I said, it will be there for you. I know that people say
your generation doesn't believe it ~ it will be there. We have to - it's another thing we're going
to work on.
But if you think about what I've been doing, a lot of what I've been trying to do is to
prepare a way for us to get into the future so that that young man and people in his generation
can feel a sense of social security in a time dominated by global economics, global technology,
rapid changes and, oftentimes, big changes in the workplace.
One of the reasons we had as much trouble with the fast track as we did - and I still
believe we'll succeed in getting some fast track authority in this Congress ~ but one of the
reasons we had the trouble we did is that people feel, even though it might have nothing to do
with trade, they pick up the paper three days before the vote and see that Levi Strauss is laying
10,000 people off. And then today they see Eastman Kodak is laying 10,000 people off. And
one man in Louisiana who said, I'm an ardent free trader, had to deal with the fact that one
company laid 2,400 people off in his congressional district right before he got ready to vote on
this.
Now, how do we create an atmosphere of security there? Everybody knows that the
economy is in good shape today, but they're still looking at tomorrow. The one thing we cannot
do is to say we're not going to trade with the world, we're going to run away, we're going to
freeze everything in place, because we can't freeze everything in place. We can't.
We did a study, the Council of Economic Advisors did, which said that 80 percent of our
job loss was due to technological change; 20 percent due to trade and business failures, where
�people just stop buying your product or service. So a lot of this is just intrinsic to the changing
economy, which means we have to have a new definition of security in a more dynamic world.
What would that be? First ofall, everybody's got to have access to a good education, and people
have to have access to education for a lifetime. If people my age lose their jobs, they have to be
able to get a good education to go back to work. You have to set up a system of lifetime learning
that operates at higher levels of excellence at critical points than sometimes it does today.
Secondly, people have to have portability of health insurance and portability of
retirement. It's not enough to secure Social Security because most people can't live on just Social
Security; at least they can't maintain their lifestyle on Social Security.
Now, we have actually done quite ~ I've been trying, under Democratic and Republican
Congresses now, for five years to pass what I called my G.I. Bill of Rights which would set up go a long way toward setting up a system of lifetime learning, because if you're eligible for
public aid and you lose your job, what I think we ought to do, since nearly everybody in America
lives within driving distance of a community college, is just give people a certificate and let them
take it wherever they want and get whatever training they want. And take a lot of the
government programs out of it and let the educators and the marketplace decide. That's what —
I'm trying to do that.
The tax credits that we gave to college students, though, or to their parents to pay the
cost of college also go to adults who have to go back to school. We have made health insurance
somewhat more portable with the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill, although there is increasing
evidence that there are people, lots of people, working in America where their employers are
offering health insurance, but they still don't feel they can afford to buy it. And there are a lot of
younger people now who are worried sick that they work in places where they can't buy health
insurance, and they don't need it most of the time, but if they have a car wreck or develop a
serious illness, they'll really be in trouble if they don't have health care. So I intend to keep
doing more on that. We're going to add five million kids to the rolls in this budget. We're going
to do more.
Perhaps in an area kind of unheralded where we've done the most good in the last five
years is in protecting and making more portable pension plans. In December of '94,1 signed the
legislation which stabilized 40 million people's pensions and outright saved 8.5 million people's
pensions that were under water. Since then, we have slowly but surely added provisions that
make it easier for people to get pensions, private pensions, 401K plans and take it around if they
move from place to place.
The next big challenge is child care. Every family I know with school-age children, even
people with very high incomes, has — every single family I know, without regard to income, has
felt some significant tension at some point in their children's lives between their obligations at
work and their obligations at home. And I think we are really going to have to work hard to find
the way ~ the government can't afford all this ~ we've got to find a way to have a quality child
care network in America that's safe and affordable. We've got to have - we've got to do more
than we've done so far on family leave law, and we've got to have more flexible working hours
�so that people, if they earn overtime - if they work overtime -- a lot of people in this country,
keep in mind, have to work overtime. It's a part of their job. They have to do it. And a lot of
people want to work overtime. But if you have children, you ought to be able to take your
overtime in cash or time at home. I strongly believe that.
These are the sort of things we need to be thinking about. These are the kinds of things
that will create a new sense of social security and a highly dynamic economy. And I'm
convinced if we deal with our long-term challenges like climate change and entitlements, if we
continue to work on education, if we try to build a country where you can balance family and
work, and then if we keep working on trying to solve this problem of how we can celebrate our
diversity and still be bound together as one America, I think things are going to work out pretty
well for this country — for that group of young people.
And what I'm hoping people will say when our time here is done — it won't be so long
now - I keep telling my eager Republicans bashing me around, they ought to just relax; time is
taking care of a lot of their problems. That people will say that we are really prepared for a new
century, we are really prepared for a new era, we really have a chance to create a country where
there's opportunity for everybody responsible enough to work for it, where we're coming together
and where we're still leading the world for peace and freedom.
And we have been able to do that, in no small measure because there was a core of
people in our party — not just in the Congress, but among the governors and mayors ~ who
believed that we could be faithful to our values and still embrace new policies for the new times,
and that it would work.
And I don't think anyone can seriously argue that we're
not better off today than we were five years ago. And you'd have to
be pretty disingenuous ~ (applause) ~ and you'd have to be pretty
disingenuous to say that the policies of our administration had
nothing to do with it. So I feel good about it.
But I just tried to have a little conversation with you tonight - these are the things that
I'm thinking about, and I'm feeling a little mellow because I went to my friend's memorial service
today, and I feel very reassured because of the young people I saw today. But the last thing I'd
like to say is, I think what you have done here in supporting this party is a good thing. And I
disagree with those who say that people in both parties who support their political convictions
with their financial support are doing a bad thing ~ I disagree with that.
And I passionately believe we should change the campaign finance laws. I also believe
if we want to make it work we're going to have to change the media availability laws, because
most of us do not - most of us in public life don't spend our time hitting on people like you in
private life repeatedly because it's all we want to do in office. This is not a demand — people
don't just sit around thinking, I think I'll raise a lot of money and then go throw it out a window
somewhere. This system we have was driven by the increased cost of communicating with the
public, primarily through the electronic media, although not entirely. And if we want it to
�work, in the absence of a Supreme Court decision which allows us to limit the size of
contributions that people make to their own campaigns — wealthy people — or that limit the
amount of money you can spend on a campaign ~ the only way to make it work is to provide in
exchange for the willingness to observe certain limits, to provide free and reduced air time.
And so I want to say to you I think you have done a good thing. I think our country is
better because of what you have done. I want you to help our party in the '98 elections. I believe
if we have a clear, unambiguous agenda to try to create the kind of framework for life in the 21st
century I talked about, that our people running for Congress will do quite well.
But I also hope you'll continue to help us reform the campaign finance laws. But I want
you to understand — you know this, a lot of you who have been with us a long time, you know
that what is driving this is the cost of communicating with the voters. And every time we see an
election where only one side is doing the communicating, I know of no example where the voters
ignored the person who was talking to him or her the most and instead embraced the person who
was totally silent - although there have been times when I wanted to do that myself, as a voter. I
know of no example where that, in fact, occurred.
I'd also like to thank you, Mr. Grossman, for your willingness to take on a very difficult
job at a tough time and to do a good job of it, and I'm very grateful to you.
And again I say to all of you, this is an act of high citizenship, what you're doing. And
we cannot afford to let the American people become skeptical or cynical about this endeavor just
at the time when our country is on a roll. And if we do the right things, it will stay on a roll and
we'll be able to have a positive impact on all the good people in the rest of the world who are
trying to make the most of their freedom, too. That's what you're part of, and when you go home
tonight I want you to be proud of it.
Thank you very much.
END
10:50 P.M. EST
�THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
November 12, 1997
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
TO THE DEMOCRATIC GOVERNORS ASSOCIATION RECEPTION
The Mayflower Hotel
Washington, D.C.
8:47 P.M. EST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Thank you, Loretta. Thank you, Katie.
Thank all of you who had anything to do with this fundraiser. This is an exercise of true
affection because Howard Dean would probably win next year if none of us gave him a penny. )
But I am delighted to be here.
Senator Leahy and I were standing back there when Howard was giving his remarks, and
he said, he suffered through 16 years of Republican leadership, the deficit was going up before I
came in. And I said, you know, Pat, it was really only 12 years, it just seemed like 16.
I'd like to say a special word of thanks, too, to Senator Pat Leahy, who is truly one of the
finest people in the entire United States Congress and one of the most effective. Whether the
issue is economic policy, agriculture policy, social policy, foreign policy, his passion to remove
the scourge of land mines from the Earth, Pat Leahy is always there. And we can be proud that
he represents not only the state of Vermont, but all of America very well.
I'd also like to say that whatever it is that Howard Dean knows, or whatever it is that he
eats for breakfast every moming, if I could give it to every other Democratic office holder and
would-be office holder, we would immediately become the majority in the Congress and we
would have about 35 governors. I have to tell you, I think a big part of it is just producing for
people, actually doing what you say you're going to do at election time. And I very much
appreciate what he said about what we've tried to do here in Washington.
One of the - I'm delighted ~ I love to do fundraisers and events for Democratic
governors or the Democratic Governors Association in Washington because one of the things
that I learned when I moved to Washington and what I feared was that people don't think that
those of us who have been governors exist out there. And we might as well be in a zoo
somewhere.
When I came to Washington, I would read editorials from the prominent newspapers
�saying that if you cared about the deficit and crime and welfare, you were stealing Republican
issues. And I said, now, wait a minute, the last time I checked, the debt of this country
quadrupled under a Republican President, crime was going up when I took office and the welfare
rolls were expanding. And since I've been in office, we've cut the deficit by 92 percent, crime
has gone down every year, and the welfare rolls have dropped by three million. I think those are
American issues the Democratic Party has done very well on, and I don't understand all this.
Out in the country, you know, Democrats care about the deficits and welfare reform and
safe streets. And you know what? Democrats care about them in Washington, too. We passed a
crime bill in 1994 overwhelmingly with Democratic support with a little Republican support.
We passed the economic program in 1993 only with Democrats. And we began the welfare
reform effort through the Executive Branch, as Howard Dean said; then I vetoed two bills first
because I refused to take away the guarantee of health care and nutrition from children, and I
wanted to have enough money for child care if we were going to require people to go to work.
So we got it right and the results were good for America, and I'm proud of that.
But one last point 1 want to make. This has been a very good year for the United States
in Washington. We had an enormous effort to pass the balanced budget that has things that I
think every Democrat in this country and every American ought to be proud of. It's the biggest
investment in health care for poor children since 1965 — Howard talked about that — biggest
investment in education since 1965, biggest investment in helping open the doors of college
to all Americans since the G.I. Bill 50 years ago. Substantial reforms of Medicare, including
efforts to improve what we're doing in diabetes that the Diabetes Foundation says are the most
important advances in the care of diabetes since insulin was developed 70 years ago. We have
added 12 years to the Medicare trust fund and given our seniors more choices. This was a big
deal.
We also are working on expanding NATO to ensure our partnership in security in
Europe. We've passed the Chemical Weapons Convention, a big issue. One of the big disputes
we're having with Saddam Hussein now and these inspectors is that these inspectors in Iraq have
found enough potential chemical, biological and incipient nuclear technology, more than was
destroyed in the Gulf War. We want to wipe the prospect of chemical warfare off the face of the
Earth. We don't want a bunch of terrorists with laboratories in briefcases going from airport to
airport wreaking havoc in the world of the 21st century that our children will live in. We took a
big step toward that. So this has been a good year.
But in addition to my affection for Governor Dean and my gratitude to the people of
Vermont for voting for Bill Clinton and Al Gore twice by big margins ~ and my desire to help
members of my party, I want — I think it's very important that you understand that even though
sometimes I get the feeling around here many people don't remember that the governors or the
mayors or the county officials, for that matter, are really out there doing a lot of things - the
governors are especially important for the strategy that I'm pursuing for America to succeed.
We got $24 billion for children's health; that's good. What's step two? The governors
have to design a program that works. And I promise you every governor with any sense in this
�country without regard to party is going to wonder what Howard Dean is going to do with the
money because they know that Vermont has done the best job of expanding health care coverage
for children. So it matters who the governor is.
You can put more money into education, but the governors have to decide how it's going
to be spent. We won a huge battle which we're going to be really highlighting in the next couple
of days when we sign the appropriations bills - to get the Congress after months and months of
contentious fighting to embrace the notion that we ought to have national standards of academic
excellence and national exams in reading and math for elementary students and 8th graders. But
what happens afterwards? Education is the primary province of the states. The federal
government can facilitate national excellence in education; the governors have to ensure it.
In the environment, we're trying to clean up 500 toxic waste dumps and prove we can
have clean air, clean water and safe food and grow the environment. We can provide funds, we
can have federal standards; but in the end, the specific work is largely done in the states.
And as we move into this new era where we have to have more flexibility, more
partnerships and more common sense, in which we want to reject the kind of ideological false
choices we're often confronted with in the political debates here, the partnership that exists and
the quality of it and the quality of the people that do the work at the state level - the partnership
with the federal government will be critical in terms of how Americans actually get to live and
what kind of world our children actually grow up in. That's what this is about.
So in so many ways the governorship is more important than ever before. We have tried
to give more responsibility to the states. We've also tried to give them more things to do. And it
has succeeded in places like Vermont, which have had visionary leadership.
I can only hope and pray that every governor will do the job that I know that he will do in health care, in education, in the environment, in building a solid future for our children.
You're going to help him to do it by your presence here tonight, and I'm very grateful to you.
Thank you.
END
8:55 P.M. EST
�THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
November 3, 1997
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT DON BEYER FOR GOVERNOR RALLY
Market Square
Alexandria, Virginia
12:43 P.M. EST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. This looks like a crowd of winners to me.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am so honored to be here with Senator Robb and Mrs. Robb and
Congressman Moran, Congressman Scott, your Mayor, your Democratic State Chair; with Bill
Dolan and Susan Payne. And let me say, I thought Yvonne gave a great speech, didn't you?
And I am very, very proud to be here. Very proud -- to be here with Don Beyer and his
fine family.
Now, let me say to you, I think the last two speeches were about as good as it gets. And
I may have nothing to add, but let me speak to you as someone who will never be a candidate for
public office again ~
AUDIENCE: Ahhhh THE PRESIDENT: Unless you let me run for the school board down here someday.
But I was a governor for 12 years, and I've been your President for five years, and I've seen most
of the major political battles of the last 20 years unfold. Many times they were Democrats
against Republicans in traditional ways, liberals against conservatives. That is not what this is.
This is nothing more or less than what Don Beyer said ~ this is a vote for an easy hit today or
doing the right thing for tomorrow.
And I was a governor for 12 years -- nobody likes to fool with licensing their cars, with
taxing their cars ~ it is a pain. This is a brilliant ploy because there is hardly anything in life
more irritating. So let us give the opposition credit ~ they have found an irritant that we would
all like removed. The question is, at what price? At what consequence? And what happens after
its done?
This really is a question about whether Virginians will be selfish in the moment or
selfless for their children and their future. Not because there is anything inherently wrong
�with getting rid of a pain in the neck, wherever it is ~ but because as we grow older and we
assume responsibilities, we all do things in life because we can't think of a better way to do
something even more important. And I say to you, that's what's at issue here.
This reminds me back in 1993, when Senator Robb bravely stood by me and we adopted
that tough economic program. And the easy thing to do was to oppose it. And our Republican
friends said, the President's economic program is going to raise your income taxes. It didn't, but
they convinced a lot of people it did - unless you were in the same income group that Don Beyer
and I are in. Ninety-nine percent of the people didn't have their income taxes raised. And they
said it would bring a recession. Well, five years later, we have reduced the deficit by more than
90 percent before the balanced budget law kicks in, because we did the right thing.
And we have 13 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in a generation, and
the lowest inflation rate in over 30 years. But, in 1994, some good members of Congress lost
their seats because they did the right thing for the long-term and the people hadn't felt it yet.
I was in New Jersey yesterday ~ you heard Don Beyer talking about that. Well, the
Governor said, I'll cut income taxes by 30 percent, and sounded so good. And she did. But what
she didn't say was, they'd have to run the state into huge debt to do it and, oh, by the way, local
governments had the power to raise the property tax by every dollar that they cut the income tax,
which was more regressive, more burdensome, and wound up being a bigger pain in the neck.
And so, a race which we shouldn't even be having up there because the economy is good, with an
incumbent governor, turns out to be a real horse race, because people figured out four years later
I went for the quick hit, and maybe I got sold a bill of goods.
Now, you don't have four years, you just have 24 hours. But it's amazing how common
sense can strike people in the flash of an eye. This is a great state. This is the state of our
Founding Fathers. You have a tradition to uphold. You have a meaning that is special not only
to you, but to the rest of America. How could you knowingly damage the education of our
children and the future of your state for something that will be immensely satisfying for about 30
seconds, maybe an hour, maybe a week, at most ~ and then you'll be paying for it for the next
four years?
That is the issue. You have to get people to think not about the immediate frustration
being relieved or the comfort of the moment, but about what they really believe in.
The other thing I want to say is I know that a lot of people vote who don't have children
in school, but if we hadn't learned anything in the last two years in America, surely we have
learned they are all our children.
I think it is amazing that all these former Republican governors have come out against
this plan. I also think it is amazing that it's the Democrat in this race, not the Republican, who is
standing up for higher standards and accountability and moving our state - your schools
forward, not just with more investment in education, but with higher quality of education. I am
proud of the fact that it is the Democratic Party in Virginia and in Washington,
�D.C. standing for high standards, accountability and excellence, as well as investment in
education.
So I say to you, this is really a race where you have to choose the moment over the
lifetime ~ or today or tomorrow; or a mature, full, whole vision of the future, or what gratifies
you personally, but very briefly. This is going to be like one of those meals you order and you're
hungry 30 minutes later. Or it's going to be like something you do and afterward you are so
proud of yourself.
Think how this state will feel on Wednesday moming when Don Beyer is governor.
Think how you'll feel. Think how you felt every time in your life when you did something you
knew wasn't quite so, wasn't quite right, selfishly gratifying, and you felt lousy the next day.
And think how you felt every time in your life you were tempted to do something that was
selfish and you didn't do it, and the next day you felt wonderful. You felt more alive. You felt
more human. You said, this is what I'm here on this Earth for.
Every time you gave up something so you could do something else for your children;
every time you gave up something so you could give a little more to your favorite charity; every
time you didn't sit home and watch a ball game and instead went out and helped the Scouts or
some other community group — think how good you felt. That's how this state is going to feel if
you vote for Don Beyer, because you'll know you did it for the future, for your children, for your
noblest instincts. That's why you will do it.
Now, I've seen all these polls. Let me tell you something I know about them. I've been
on both sides of them. Always more fun to be ahead than behind. The remarkable thing about
these surveys is they all agree on one thing ~ there is still an enormous undecided vote. Now,
that means two things. Number one, it means if everybody who is willing to make the mature,
long-term noble choice here on this issue shows up to vote, that counts about one and a half
times as much as it would in a race where there's not a big undecided vote.
So before you go pat yourselves on the back too much for being here, just remember, if
you and everybody else you know who is for Don Beyer don't show up, then your good
intentions don't amount to a hill of beans. So you have to be there. The second thing is, with all
these undecided votes, that's telling you something. That's telling you that the electorate of
Virginia is just like all of us are whenever we're confronted with this kind of choice. Yes, I want
the pie after the meal. No, I want to feel good tomorrow. I think I'll spend this money. No, I
had better put it in my child's college savings account.
That's what's going on; that's what this undecided vote's about. There's a scale in the
mind and psyche of the voters. And the scale can still be shifted. So you need to think about it.
You've got 24 hours and then all day when the polls are open tomorrow. And if the polls are
right and there are these undecided votes, you could practically just start walking up and down
the street here today talking to people, and find a bunch of them. And so I want you to do it.
I'm telling you, once in a great while an election like this comes along where a murmur
�starts in the people. And it spreads like wildfire and people really get caught up in it — and it
doesn't happen until the last minute. That is what is happening now. You have a chance to win
this election. If you go ~ if everybody you know who is for Don and L.F. and Bill goes, and if
you go out there and say, I am not going to treat this election like it's over, there are too many
undecided people, there must be 10 or 20 people I can call, I can go out into the mall and walk up
to strangers and ask them to think about this.
Remember, this is about how the state is going to feel the next day. It's about where the
state is going to be four years from now, and it's about where your children are going to be in the
21st century. Do the right thing and you'll love it.
God bless you. (Applause.)
END
12:55 P.M. EST
�THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(Amelia Island, Florida)
For Immediate Release
November 1, 1997
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
TO THE DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE
Private Residence
Boca Raton, Florida
9:54 P.M. EST
Thank you very much. You may or may not have already noticed that I don't exactly
have all my vocal capacities. The good news is you'll get a shorter speech. The bad news is
you'll have to listen harder to what does come out.
I want to start by thanking John and Peggy for bringing us into their magnificent home,
and even more for their commitment, which was so powerfully expressed in what John said.
You know, I tell people all the time that I have been in public life now almost
continuously since 1974. I have been in public office all but two years for the last 20 years.
Most of the people I've known in politics were good, honest people who worked a lot harder than
they had to work and fought for what they believed in and tried to make this country a better
place. And I really appreciated what you said about those members of Congress.
Even our friends on the Republican side, when that pitched battle we had over the
Contract With America, virtually all of them really believed they were doing the right thing. But
I didn't, and Mr. Gephardt didn't, and Mr. Frost didn't, and the other members of Congress who
are here ~ Congressman Deutsch, Congressman Kennedy, Congressman Baldacci - we didn't.
And we won.
But you don't work like that, under those kinds of conditions, if you don't feel it. And I
must tell you, John, that means a lot just to know it got across to somebody, because we're very
well aware of the presentation that's given to the American people about people in public life, the
nature of the political process, and then even the nature of fundraising.
To hear people tell it, the very act of getting people to support you is somehow suspect.
You just described your activities in Washington, and I must tell you, that's consistent with
�probably more than 80 percent of the people who help us. And if the others have something they
want to talk to us about, well, that's democracy, too, and there is nothing wrong with it. So I
thank you very much.
I want to thank Dick Gephardt and his legion in the House, first for the help they gave
me in 1993 when we passed the economic plan which was principally responsible for reducing
the deficit by 90 percent, without a single vote from a Republican member in the Senate or the
House - not a single, solitary one. Before this new balanced budget law, which I'm very proud
of — but before it takes effect, don't forget deficit dropped from $290 billion to $22.6 billion,
because of what a lot of brave people in our caucus did in 1993. And a lot of them lost their
seats because of it, because the benefits were not apparent by the '94 election. And it made me
more proud than ever to be a member of the Democratic Party.
There were a lot of other things that were done, thanks to the leadership that the
Democrats here gave us. In 1994 we passed a crime bill, bitterly opposed by the leadership of
the other party. They said it was all wrong. They went out in rural areas and tried to convince
people we were going to take their guns away. And again, they cost us a few seats. We had
some members in Congress who gave up their seats to vote for 100,000 police, to vote for the
Brady Bill, to vote for the ban on assault weapons. But we've had five years of steeply dropping
crime rates, and now we know whether we were right or they were right. The voters didn't know
in 1994, but we were right.
And the President gets the credit. When the economy is up, the President gets the credit.
John Kennedy thought it was fair. He said, victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an
orphan. So if it goes down, I'll be here, folks.
But that plan could not have been passed without the support of our people in Congress.
The crime bill could not have been passed without the support of our people in Congress. We
wouldn't have the right kind of welfare reform bill without the support of our people in Congress
because I had to veto two bills first to get the one I wanted. We had record ~ 3 million plus
people move from welfare to work.
And I'm very proud of what these members of this caucus have done. I'm also proud that
we got caught trying to provide health insurance to people in America who don't have it. You
know, our opponents said when we tried to pass the health insurance program in 1994, they said,
you know, if you support the President's health insurance program, the number of people without
health insurance will go up. And as one Democrat said to me the other day, I supported your
program; we got beat, but I supported it. And they were right — the number of uninsured people
went up. And now we're trying to do something about that. In the last budget, we got funds to
give health insurance coverage to half the children in America who don't have it.
But I want to make it clear, even with a Republican majority in Congress, nothing I do
would take place without support of our caucus in the Congress. Do you believe that this
balanced budget would have the biggest increase in health care for poor children since 1965 if it
weren't for enough Democrats who could support my veto? Do you believe, for example, that we
�would have, for the first time in the history of the country, in this budget, opened the doors of
college to everybody, literally, with a $1,500 tax credit for the first two years of college, tax
credits for the other years, better loan programs, more scholarships, more work-study funds,
education IRAs? It happened because we were together and we worked together.
So I'm grateful and you can see ~ I'd like it very much if we could win 11, 12, 20, 30
more seats. What are the stakes, though? Let's talk about this. What are the stakes and what are
the chances? Why is the country working now?
First of all, when I started running for President six years ago, I basically was driven by
two things. The first reason was, I didn't really think the country had a plan for the 21st century.
It's a big, complicated country, and I thought we were just going to kind of wander in to a new
millennium, and I didn't believe we were very well-prepared.
The second reason was, I thought the debate in Washington was downright
counterproductive, and that our Democrats had tumed into sort of cardboard cutouts of real
people, just what you were talking about. They said we were weak on defense and weak on
welfare and weak on crime and couldn't be trusted with tax money and all that stuff they said
about us. And as a result, it sort of relieved people of the burden of having to think, because if
they made us unacceptable, particularly in races for President, well, then, the voters didn't have
to think. I think that's why folks in the other party get so mad at me sometimes. We've gotten
the American people to thinking again. They're not on automatic anymore.
For example, why should we have had this old debate on the budget - are we going to
explode the deficit with tax cuts or just have a little smaller deficit with spending. So I said, vote
for me and we'll cut the deficit and spend more money on education. And people said, yeah,
right. But that's exactly what we've done and it worked, because we're Democrats.
Take the crime debate. Every time you read about crime, it was to hear the way they had
framed it. You've got to be tough on crime. Well, what do you mean by that? Put everybody in
jail longer. And the other guys, they just want to let them out because they're soft-hearted. So
we said ~ I said, I don't know anybody who thinks like that, not a single living soul. So we said,
why don't we find the people who really deserve to be in prison longer and keep them, and spend
more time trying to keep our kids out of prison, and take these guns off the street and out of the
hands of people who shouldn't have them. And it worked, we put police on the streets.
This was not rocket science. This was the way people think out here in the real world
when they're not being presented in artificial terms from a long way away.
On welfare, the debate was structured as, all these people on welfare, they don't want to
work and we're tough, we're going to make them work. And the other side, our side, was, well,
that's probably right, but we feel so bad about the kids we don't want to do it. I didn't know a
single living soul who really thought that way. And I'd spent a lot of time in welfare offices. I
never met anybody on welfare who didn't want to go to work.
�So we said, okay, make people who are able-bodied go to work, but them the education
and training, and let's don't hurt their children because their most important job is raising their
children ~ provide the child care for the children, provide the medical care for the children; then
you can be tough on work and good to the kids. Guess what? It worked. Why? Not because it
was rocket science. It was common sense, mainstream values, thinking about tomorrow, and
getting away from the hot air.
Same thing on the environment. I believe in preserving the environment. I've worked
hard on the Florida Everglades. We've got an agreement in this Interior bill to save the
Yellowstone Park from gold mining and to save a bunch of the redwood forests that are precious,
and there are not many of them left in California.
But I always thought it was crazy - you know, they said, well, the environment is nice,
but we've got to grow the economy. And then we were made to look like sort of blissed-out tree
buggers who never got over the McCarthy campaign. And that wasn't consistent with my
experience. It looked to me like, for example, if we had a really sensible economy we could
organize it in a way that would promote a clean environment and create more jobs, not fewer
jobs.
They said when we tried to take - and this was before my time - we took CFCs out of
the atmosphere to stop the hole in the ozone layer. Have any of you missed them? Do you know
the name of anybody who has lost a job because of it? But the hole over the ozone layer is
shrinking and the layer is thickening and it's good for your children and grandchildren.
We had all these coal-fired power plants that were putting out a lot of sulphur dioxide
and making acid rain. The Democrats in Congress, before my time ~ the Democrats in Congress
authorized a trading system so that the free market could trade permits to allow the most efficient
way to take the sulphur dioxide out of the atmosphere. We're 40 percent ahead of schedule at
less than half the projected cost because the Democrats found a way for the free market to clean
the environment and grow the economy. That's our policy and that's what we intend to do in the
future. And it's the right thing to do.
I say this because I think it is terribly important that we look to the future. I'm glad the
economy is in good shape. We learned at the last ~ over the last ~ this year, this
quarter,compared to last year, we grew at 3.5 percent. We've got the lowest inflation since 1964.
That's good.
But we've got more to do. Not everybody who needs a job has one. Not everybody who
is losing jobs in the technological changes and the trade flows is getting the kind of training that
he or she needs to move on with their lives. We've got more to do on the economy. Dick talked
about education. We need desperately to have national standards in education and we need to
measure whether our children are measuring up. And we ought to give them more choice in the
public schools they attend.
I want every grade school kid in America to go to a school like the one I visited in
�Jupiter today, the one I should have visited a few months ago before I hurt myself.
We've got more to do. We've got more to do in so many areas. And if you think about
it, our Democrats are not vulnerable anymore to the old cardboard pictures they painted of us —
not just because of me or the Vice President, but also because they were with us. They can't say,
you can't trust that crowd anymore; they're not good with your money; they won't give you a tax
cut; they can't manage the economy; they can't manage crime; they're weak on welfare; they're no
good in foreign policy and defense. All that stuff is out. We can have a real conversation in
1998.
And what is it about? What is it about? Just what you said: How are we going to
prepare this country for the 21 st century? What still needs to be done? How are we going to
preserve Social Security and Medicare for our generation, the biggest generation, without asking
our kids to pay too much to take care of us because we're bigger than our kids are in numbers?
How are we going to give a world-class education to every American? How are we going to
embrace all this diversity we have and still be bound together as one America? How are we
going to stop being the biggest polluter in the world when it comes to carbon dioxide, which is
warming the planet with potentially serious consequences to our people and people around the
world, and still keep this economy growing so everybody can make a good living? How are we
going to provide working families with the tools they need to succeed at home and at work ~ still
the biggest challenge we've got?
I'm glad everybody has got a job, folks, but now —you ask our hosts, they now have a
one-year-old daughter - that little child has become their most important work. It dwarfs
everything else. Every day ~ every day ~ there are people in this country, hard-working lower
middle class people, who are spending 25 percent of their income on child care and still can't
afford child care where their children are stimulated, to upper middle class people who feel like
they can't hold on to their jobs unless they spend so many hours at work they're not with children
when they need to be.
Every day there are people in this country who are making choices between being good
parents and good workers. And that's why the Democrats ought to expand family leave sopeople
can get a little time off from work to go to parent-teacher conference or take their kids to the
doctor. That's why the Democrats need to keep working until all the children in working families
can be insured with health insurance. That's why we need to keep working until we have
uniform standards of excellence and lots of local reform in schools. That's why we need to keep
working on these things.
We have done so much, but believe me, maybe it's just because I've just got three years
and a few months left, but I think all the time about 2010 and 2015 and 2020 and what this
country is going to be like when my child is my age. And I'm telling you, the best days of
America are still ahead if we keep on doing what we're doing.
That's what this election in '98 is about. Why is it important that you're here? Because
the voters ~ there are a lot of voters out there who are still like you were for a long time. They
�don't think it matters. They think everybody is just screaming at each other in Washington. And
what happens? Usually at the end of these campaigns, the party with the most money wins
because the airwaves get full of these 30-second ads which either persuade people who are
undecided or tum them off so much they stay home. And the marginal voters that stay home are
the working people who would vote for us if they showed up.
That's why this dinner is important. You ask Martin Frost to go through the 20 closest
congressional races in the last election, 1996, when the Vice President and I were honored to be
returned to office with the electoral votes of the people of Florida. We were honored. We won a
nice victory. But you go through those races and you will see that in the 20 closest races, in the
last 10 days we were out-spent 4 to 1.
So I have to tell you, I am unapologetic about being here. I am proud of you for being
willing to help carry on this debate. We can have a discussion, an honest discussion about the
future in 1998, but we have to make it possible for Patrick Kennedy and John Baldacci and
Martin Frost and Dick Gephardt and Peter Deutsch and all those people we've got running,
fabulous people who are not in office, to be heard, because we now are in a position to finish this
work of preparing our country to be what our children deserve.
I'm proud of you for being here and very grateful. Thank you.
END
10:14 P.M. EST
�THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(Amelia Island, Florida)
For Immediate Release
November 1, 1997
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AND THE VICE PRESIDENT
AT DNC DINNER
Ritz-Carlton
Amelia Island, Florida
8:32 P.M. EST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Please be seated. We're going to reverse
the order tonight and I'm going to introduce the Vice President because you've all heard me
speak before ~ (laughter) ~ because I need to save my voice to campaign for our candidates in
New Jersey and New York tomorrow. (Applause.) Thank you.
Let me once again thank all of you for coming. I hope you have enjoyed this. I
certainly enjoyed it today. I was glad to meet with the various panels, and I enjoyed Governor
Romer's speech at lunch very, very much. Didn't he do a terrific job? (Applause.)
Ladies and gentlemen, six years ago when I began running for President, I wanted to
win the election to change the country, and I felt very strongly that we were not preparing
America for the 21st century and that our party needed to break the logjam not only with a set of
new policies, but with a set of new ideas. I thought the political debate had become, frankly,
stale, and at least to someone like me, governing a state out in the country, often completely
meaningless.
I believed we had to move the debate toward what was good for the future, not the
past; what would support positive change, not the status quo; what would bring us together, not
divide us; and move away from the old left-right, liberal-conservative and, frankly, outdated
name-calling and labeling that dominated national politics. Six years later, we've made a lot of
progress, not only in moving the country to a better place, but in changing the nature of political
debate.
I very much hope that the simplistic antigovemment, reactionary approach had its last
gasp in the Republican congressional victory in 1994. (Applause.) The fact that we beat
�back the Contract With America and signed the right kind of welfare reform, got a balanced
budget with the biggest investments in education and health care since 1965, and that
we're moving forward in a way that brings the country together around the ideas of opportunity,
responsibility and community that we have espoused now for a long time is deeply encouraging
to me.
The fact that all around the world now people are beginning to talk in the same terms ~
the First Lady is in Great Britain today; she's been in Ireland. I, frankly, was very flattered that
Tony Blair's campaign was often compared to ours, and that the so-called new Labor movement
has a lot in common with what we try to do here. I believe all over the world countries that are
serious about helping people make the most of their own lives, assuming a leadership role in
dealing with the challenges of the modem world are going to have to basically adopt similar
approaches.
If you hadn't helped us, none of the that would have been possible. But what I want to
say to you is, if I hadn't been smart enough to pick Al Gore to be my running mate, none of it
would have been possible. (Applause.)
Let me just give you a few examples. Sam Raybum used to say it's a lot easier to tear
something done, even a jackass can kick a bam down, but it takes a carpenter to build one. Now,
we took the position that the old debate that government could not be a savior, but couldn't sit on
the sidelines, either, was a false debate, and that we had to have a new kind of government that
was smaller, that did more with less, that could balance the budget, but also invest more in our
future. Al Gore's Reinventing Government project was the instrument through which we put that
principle into practice.
And five years after we took office, our government is smaller by 300,000, several
thousand pages of regulation, several hundred government programs that were out of date. It has
been modernized in many ways, but we did not walk away from the problems, the challenges,
and the opportunities of the American people.
The Reinventing Government project was often, frankly, made fun of because it's not the
sexiest issue in town. But it's what enabled us to cut the government by 300,000 and
increase the quality of public service and have money left over after we reduced the deficit,
passed the balanced budget bill, to still invest in our future. The American people owe the Vice
President a great debt of gratitude for that achievement alone. (Applause.)
Second example: When I became President, I got a very interesting letter shortly after I
took office from former President Nixon, written a month and a day before he passed away. And
it was about Russia, the importance of Russia to our future, and how we had to work with them
to make sure we didn't repeat the ugly history of the last 50 years, but instead had a partnership
for peace and prosperity and cooperation.
Well, I struck up a pretty good relationship with President Yeltsin and I stuck by him
through tough times because he was standing up for democracy and prosperity. But we had a
�huge number of exceedingly difficult issues and, frankly, we still have some tough issues, and we
always will because it's in the nature of relationships between two great countries.
The Vice President agreed to head a commission along with the Russian Prime Minister,
Mr. Chernomyrdin, for which there was really no precedent in global affairs. And the
Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission is the instrument through which the good intentions and
principles articulated first by me and then by Boris Yeltsin have made the United States-Russia
partnership the success it is. They've made it possible for us to go together into Bosnia. They
made it possible for us to dramatically reduce the number of nuclear missiles we have. They've
made it possible for us to detarget missiles so that none of our missiles are pointed at each other's
children. They made it possible for us to do a whole range of things.
The Vice President has done a similar thing with the Vice President of South Africa. He
has worked out an environmental partnership with top officials in China. In other words, it's fine
for the President to make these statements; it's quite another thing if you have to look up four or
five or six years from now and nothing has been done. It won't happen because Al Gore was the
Vice President of the United States with unique responsibilities for helping to build our common
future. (Applause.)
I could give you any number of other examples. I remember not long after I became
President, when I was still reading critical columns ~ (laughter) ~ someone wrote a column in
which they said something like — well, anyway, the import of it was that obviously I was a weak
person and that's why I had a wife who was so influential and why I gave my Vice President so
much power, more than any President ever had before. And that sort of tickled me, because it
seemed to me that if I had a partner in the Vice President who had knowledge in areas greater
than mine, who had expertise in areas greater than mine, and who had all this energy and ability
and a passionate dedication to this country and its future, I would be a fool not to use it. And I
would be disserving you and every other American citizen if I had done anything other than
make Albert Gore the most influential and effective Vice President in the history of the United
States. So I think I did the right thing there. (Applause.)
We've had a unique partnership. Believe it or not, we don't always agree. (Laughter.)
Our disagreements have been among the most stimulating experiences of my presidency. But if I
want to disagree with the Vice President, since I get the last vote, I know at least that I have to go
to school and I better have my facts straight.
I will never be able to convey publicly or privately the depth of gratitude I feel for the
partnership that we have enjoyed. But I just want you to know that every time I see another
economic report like the one we saw yesterday, that the economy grew another 3.5 percent in the
last quarter; every time I think about the 13 million people who have jobs, the 3 million
people who aren't on welfare, the more than 12 million people who have taken advantage of
family and medical leave, and all of the achievements that this administration has played a role
in, I know ~ I know that one of the most important factors was the unique and unprecedented
relationship I have enjoyed with this fine, good man.
�Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice President. (Applause.)
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, I sure didn't expect
to stand up here and listen to that, and I sure do appreciate it very much. You weren't supposed
to — I mean, the whole point of why they asked you to flip the order was so that you wouldn't
speak ~ (laughter) - to save your voice. And you went ahead and spoke, and thank you very
much, Mr. President. I'm touched by the kind words.
And, of course, ladies and gentlemen, you can probably get a clear sense of how
meaningful this friendship is to the two of us. And I know that many of you have had the great
blessing of having a really close friend with whom you work on a regular basis, and when you
take on challenges that are just really tough and you have somebody to talk with who
understands and who is right there without any question, just as a teammate and partner, that's
the kind of friendship that we have had.
Of course, the burdens and duties that this President has on his shoulders are just
unimaginable. And that's true of any President, of course, but it's been such a privilege for me to
watch at close hand and see how he conducts the business of this country and to see how he
handles these challenges. And it's really a great privilege.
You know, the two of us feel so much gratitude to those of you here for making it
possible for this President and his team to take on these challenges. And I want to thank Roy
Romer, our general chairman of the DNC, and his wife, Bea Romer. Roy, thank you for the
speech today; thank you for your leadership of the party; and thank you for all the hard work and
effort that you're putting into this.
Likewise, Steve Grossman, thank you. As our national chair, you are right there every
day making the tough decisions, moving us forward. We're very grateful to you as well.
And to all of the talented team at the DNC, our national victory fund chairman, Dan
Dutko; our DNC treasurer Carol Pensky, who was just here on stage, and her husband David; to
Cynthia Freedman, our women's leadership forum chair; to Tom Hendrickson, the Democratic
Business Council chair who is here with his wife Jill; Alan Solomont, our national finance chair;
and to all of the other members of the team ~ and especially this weekend, to our DNC retreat
chair Walter Shorenstein, thank you very much, Walter, for making this weekend an
extraordinary and unforgettable experience. We're very grateful to you. (Applause.)
And I'm looking forward to Art Garfunkel and Billy Porter. We're going to have some
great entertainment after dinner. (Applause.)
Let me just say a few words first on behalf of the President, both about politics and about
the future of our country. We are witnessing a great contest between two sets of ideas and we
have the privilege of having had a test of both sets of ideas and we can assess how well the ideas
have served our nation.
�But we also have a political struggle, and the outcome of this struggle will depend in
many ways on you. But in looking at where we have come under the leadership of President
Clinton, we often talk about the economic recovery and all the success in our nation, but look at
what has happened politically. You know, for a quarter century, the Republican Party raised
doubts about the ability of Democrats to handle fiscal policy, to handle the budget, to bring crime
rates down, to keep our military strong, to reduce the welfare rolls. They drove a wedge between
Democrats and the middle class.
Well, that was never the party that we knew. But in the last five years, we have proved
that those charges and allegations were just nonsense, because in political terms what President
Bill Clinton has done is nothing short of revolutionary. The entire political landscape has been
transformed.
The American people know that Democrats are responsible for reducing the budget
deficit from $300 billion down to $22 billion this year on the way to a balanced budget,
that Democrats have been responsible for bringing all the crime rates down in every single
category for five years in a row, putting all those new community police officers on the street,
emphasizing prevention programs, building the strength of the communities.
The American people understand that Democrats have managed the government well,
reduced its size to the lowest level in 30 years and improved its efficiency in the process.
Democrats have reduced the welfare rolls and put people back to work. Democrats have handled
our nation's business so well that we have had the longest sustained economic recovery in more
than a generation. It is a success that Democrats deserve credit for. (Applause.)
Now, the point in political terms is that we have won back the trust and confidence of the
middle class in this country. And that is a remarkable achievement. Look, by contrast, at what's
going on in the Republican Party. They talk constantly among themselves about how they do not
have an agenda. They have the same kind of bickering that they used to point do
in the Democratic Party a quarter century ago, over on the right. While they're so disorganized,
the right hand doesn't know what the far right hand is doing. And they're fighting among
themselves. (Laughter and applause.)
Their vision for the future is right out of Jurassic Park - they would turn the clock back.
Incidentally, last Sunday we all felt, Saturday night, like Republicans for just one brief dark
moment as we tumed the clocks back with the end of Daylight Savings Time. (Laughter.) But
the country doesn't want to tum the clock back 50 years, and that's what the Republican agenda
would do.
They're at each other's throats because they are competing with one another for the
affections of the far right-wing fringe. And their agenda is being driven by those elements in the
party that hold them hostage. And it's scary to think, here, the day after Halloween, it's scary to
think what they would really propose if they were to once again be in control of the White
House.
�We cannot let that happen. We've seen what they tried to do when they acquired control
of the Congress. And whenever they could not convince the country to accept their proposals
through the normal constitutional processes, the right wing has ginned them up to take hostages.
And so they shut the government down ~ twice.
President Bill Clinton, of course, as is now legendary, backed them down and forced
them to retreat. But they didn't learn their lesson. When North Dakota had that
devastating 500-year flood and was in desperate need of relief, they shut down the relief to North
Dakota in order to try to blackmail the country into accepting yet another part of their agenda.
Now, they're shutting down the confirmation process forjudges on the Courts of Appeal because,
again, one of their right-wing groups wants to prevent the filling of these judgeships around the
country with anybody that does not agree with their right-wing approach.
So it's a very high-stakes battle. And they know they do not have the American people
on their side, so they're trying to win by hook and by crook with political sleight of hand and
massive infusions of money into the process ~ like on Staten Island, for example, where - I
guess Roy talked a little bit earlier today.
By contrast, as I said, we've won back the confidence of the middle class. And in the
famous saying on the front of the Archives, the past is prologue, and the American people
understand that the performance under President Bill Clinton during these past five years is what
the country can expect by continuing these policies in a Congress that is once again Democratic.
Never forget that the economic recovery and the transformation of America's economic and
financial fortunes came about because of the adoption of President Clinton's plan, without a
single Republican vote — not one in the House, not one in the Senate.
And what has happened as a result is truly remarkable. You know, the President referred
to these new figures yesterday. Just let it sink in a minute. Growth went up again, while
inflation went down again. That's kind of what you want. That's a combination that we just
convinced ourselves was impossible during the long, dark years of Republican rule, where
almost every day there was more distressing economic news about the deficit going through the
roof, and businesses had no confidence in the future because every time they thought they felt a
little strength in the economy and tried to borrow money to expand or hire new people they ran
headlong into that government demand for credit and drove interest rates up. and the economic
recovery shorted out before it even got started.
The Bible has a passage, "they built an ambush for themselves." Well, under Republican
economic policies they built an ambush for every potential economic recovery we attempted. It
shorted out because of its internal contradictions. And the policy contradictions that the
Republicans inflicted on this nation mirrored the internal political contradictions inside the
Republican Party. It's not coherent. And so they tried to put in place policies to satisfy the
various groups, even though they are internally contradictory. And the result for the country is
confusion and dissidence and poor performance.
Now, of all the things that have been written about the success of President Clinton's
�policies, the one thing I think has received too little emphasis is the extent to which this
President, beginning even before he was President, assembled the best thinkers in our party to
put together a coherent set of policies that would be good for America across the board. It's not
an accident that all this good news is happening all at the same time, because the policies fit
together.
When the crime rates go down in our cities, that works hand in glove with our
community empowerment strategy and our brownfields approach to bring new investment into
the cities. When we have a sound economic policy that drives interest rates down and stimulates
new investment, that works hand in glove with the increased investment we have made with
public funds in research and development and science and technology and the Information
Superhighway and the new technologies that are making us more productive. That in turn works
hand in glove with the President's efforts to open new markets around the world, to have this
huge increase in exports from this nation to the rest of the world, with high-paying jobs
increasing rapidly as we go out to sell goods and services to the 96 percent of the world's
consumers that are outside the United States of America. It is a coherent agenda that is working
extremely well for the United States of America.
Now, if it were ideas alone that determined the outcome of political contests, then it
would be all over. They would have to call the fight. They'd have to say this is no contest. But
that's not the way it works, and thank goodness you all understand that, because a clearly
superior agenda may not be selected and chosen if those who believe in it are not willing to fight
for it, if there is not a requisite level of intensity being put behind those policies.
What is so interesting about the current political landscape is that even though the
Republicans are incoherent, even though they are presenting an agenda to the country that does
not make sense and failed the nation in the past, they, nevertheless, have a lot of people who feel
very intensely that they want to win, and they're fighting very hard. So a lot of times they will
pull out a victory in a political race purely on the basis of extra resources and more fight.
So that's why we're here this weekend, to talk about the ideas. And I look forward to
participating in the panel discussions tomorrow, incidentally, and I've heard wonderful reports
about all of the ideas exchanged here already and I'm really eager to participate in these sessions
tomorrow. But, in addition, we're talking with one another about how we can match the intensity
on the other side with an even greater intensity of effort on the part of those of us who believe
deeply that politics is about more than just winning and losing. It really is about the future of
this country.
So your willingness to come here and to identify yourselves as leaders for the future, to
be willing to be a part of this winning team is something that we really appreciate more than we
can tell you. It is great to have a friend, as I began by saying, and both the President and I feel
the same way about your friendship to the Democratic Party and to the people of the United
States of America. We're grateful to you and we look forward to fighting alongside you and
winning in the future.
�Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for being here. (Applause.)
END
9:00 P.M. EST
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Michael Waldman
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Michael Waldman was Assistant to the President and Director of Speechwriting from 1995-1999. His responsibilities were writing and editing nearly 2,000 speeches, which included four State of the Union speeches and two Inaugural Addresses. From 1993 -1995 he served as Special Assistant to the President for Policy Coordination.</p>
<p>The collection generally consists of copies of speeches and speech drafts, talking points, memoranda, background material, correspondence, reports, handwritten notes, articles, clippings, and presidential schedules. A large volume of this collection was for the State of the Union speeches. Many of the speech drafts are heavily annotated with additions or deletions. There are a lot of articles and clippings in this collection.</p>
<p>Due to the size of this collection it has been divided into two segments. Use links below for access to the individual segments:<br /><a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=43&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=2006-0469-F+Segment+1">Segment One</a><br /><a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=43&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=2006-0469-F+Segment+2">Segment Two</a></p>
Creator
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Michael Waldman
Office of Speechwriting
Date
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1993-1999
Identifier
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2006-0469-F
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
Segment One contains 1071 folders in 72 boxes.
Segment Two contains 868 folders in 66 boxes.
Provenance
A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource.
Clinton Presidential Records: White House Staff and Office Files
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Adobe Acrobat Document
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recent Stump Speeches 10/97-11/97
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of Speechwriting
Michael Waldman
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
Box 40
<a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/36404"> Collection Finding Aid</a>
<a href="https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7763296">National Archives Catalog Description</a>
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
2006-0469-F Segment 2
Provenance
A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource.
White House Staff and Office Files
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Adobe Acrobat Document
Medium
The material or physical carrier of the resource.
Preservation-Reproduction-Reference
Date Created
Date of creation of the resource.
6/3/2015
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
7763296
42-t-7763296-20060469F-Seg2-040-009-2015