[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[April 24, 2000]
[Pages 770-773]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in New York City
April 24, 2000

    Thank you very much. I think she's about to get the hang of it, don't you? [Laughter] 
Wow!
    The Vice President, Tipper, Hillary, Chairman 
Rendell, ladies and gentlemen. I would 
like to begin with a heart full of gratitude by saying some thank-yous.
    I thank Ed Rendell and Joe 
Andrew and all the people at the Democratic 
Party for the work they have done. I thank all of you at these tables 
who helped to chair this event and did the work so that we could all be 
here tonight. I want to thank Jon Stewart for 
making us laugh. I wish he would move to Washington. If we laughed a 
little more there, we might get twice as much done. [Laughter]
    I want to thank my dear friend Tony Bennett 
for performing again so beautifully. You know, people always marvel--
Tony's a year or two older than I am, and people always marvel at how 
great an artist he is. And I was telling people earlier tonight, the 
thing that is so amazing is that he still has perfect pitch. I lost my 
perfect pitch 10 years ago. And he has perfect pitch in more ways that 
one. I'm glad he's here.
    I thank the people of New York, the Democratic Party of New York, 
and my special supporters in this room who have been with me and Al and 
Hillary and Tipper all these years. I want to thank those of you who are 
helping Hillary in this Senate 
campaign. I have no doubt of one thing, that if you elect her, she will 
be a worthy successor to Robert Kennedy and Pat Moynihan and will make a terrific difference to the 
people of this State and this Nation. And after I heard her speaking, I 
have no doubt she's going to win if you stay with her, so I feel good 
about that. Thank you.
    I want to thank Tipper Gore for 8 marvelous 
years. I was looking at her tonight, thinking to myself--I've watched 
her raise her children; I've watched her deal with sick members of her 
family; I've watched her deal with all kinds of pressures and keep 
laughing. The thing I appreciate

[[Page 771]]

most about her is that she believes that people who are fragile and 
people who are broken, whether they are homeless or suffering from 
mental illness, are part of our common humanity and still have something 
to live for, still have something to give, and ought to be given a 
better chance. And our country would be a better place if more people 
felt the way she did. I hope that more people will.
    Let me say also that I am profoundly grateful tonight for the chance 
you gave me to serve. We were talking around our table tonight about--
one of the chances that I've had as President is to learn a lot about 
the Presidencies of people you don't know much about. I thought I knew a 
lot about American history when I became President, but I've spent a lot 
of time studying periods of time when most Americans are not--that most 
Americans aren't too conversant with, the Presidency of Franklin Pierce 
or Rutherford Hayes--and I tried to do it so that I could see the whole 
history of this country in a seamless web.
    One of the things that strikes me as strange is that some people who 
have been in this position--even people I very much admire--talk about 
what a terrible burden it is, and how the White House is the crown jewel 
of the Federal penal system, and how they can't wait to get out of 
there, and what a terrible pain it is. Frankly, most of those guys 
didn't have a tougher time than I've had there--[laughter]--and I don't 
know what in the heck they're talking about. [Laughter]
    One of my friends from home called me a couple of years ago when 
things weren't going so well for me, and he said, ``Just remember, Bill, 
a couple of runs of bad luck and you'd be home doing $25 divorces and 
deeds. Don't feel sorry for yourself. You asked for this job.''
    And that's the way I feel. Every day has been a joy and an 
opportunity, and still is, and I thank you for it. But I want you to 
know, sometimes people say, ``Well, what keeps you going?'' And tonight 
we were sitting around our table, and I looked at Bob Rose, and I said, ``Isn't this the place where we had that 
fundraiser in February of '92, right before the New Hampshire primaries, 
when I was dropping like a rock in the polls, and everybody said I was 
deader than a doornail?'' He said, ``Yes, this is it.''
    So I started telling people around the table, I said, you know, I 
met a guy here that night walking through the kitchen. This is a true 
story. I said, I met a guy there that night walking through the kitchen. 
He was working here. And he came up to me, and he said, ``Governor, 
Governor,'' he said, ``my boy is in school. He's in the fifth grade. He 
studies this election, and he studies the candidates and the issues, and 
he says I should vote for you.'' And he said, ``But I want to ask you a 
question first. If I do what my boy wants and I vote for you, I want you 
to help me.'' He said, ``You see, I came here as an immigrant, and in my 
home country I was very poor, and here I have more money and a better 
job. But in my home country, I was free. '' He said, ``Here, my boy, he 
can't go across the street to the park and play unless I go with him, 
because he'll be in danger. He can't walk down the street to school by 
himself because he could get hurt.'' So he said, ``If I do what my boy 
wants and I vote for you, will you make my boy free?''
    And as I was telling this story, that man, Dimitri 
Theofanis, came up to me and embraced me 
tonight. He doesn't even work here anymore, but he came here tonight to 
work this banquet, and I want to thank him. His son is now a student at St. John's University in New York 
City, and he is doing well.
    Now, what's the point of all this? When Al Gore and I came to 
Washington, it was to help people like Dimitri and his son, people who 
serve these banquets but can't afford the price of the tickets; people 
who need the minimum wage and access to health care, whose kids ought to 
be able to go to college and ought to be able to get a good education on 
the way; people who maybe have been homeless at some point in their 
lives or stuck on welfare and want jobs.
    And after 7 years and a few months, over 21 million of them have 
jobs that didn't 8 years ago. Over 21 million have taken advantage of 
family and medical leave. Over 5 million have taken advantage of the 
HOPE scholarship to go on to college. There are 500,000 people who 
couldn't get handguns because of the Brady bill, and gun crime in this 
country down 35 percent since 1993, the homicide rate at a 31-year low; 
2 million kids out of poverty; more than 2 million kids with health 
insurance; students borrowing money through our new loan program, saving 
$8 billion, to help them go on and go to college--real stories of real 
lives of real people. That's what this is all about.

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    I never, ever--for all the wonderful joy and love of the Presidency 
and my love of politics, and Lord knows, I have loved it--I always 
thought that it was wrong to seek power without purpose; that in the 
end, it was a hollow victory to have it and to exercise it to hurt other 
people with the painful disappointment in life that they never give you 
what you want. The only thing that really matters is knowing that people 
who otherwise wouldn't have done as well have a little better chance 
because of your endeavors.
    And what I want you to know tonight, as I bring the Vice 
President up here, is that we have worked 
very hard to turn this country around and to get it going in the right 
direction. But the theme song of this election year ought to be the 
first song Tony Bennett sang, ``The Best Is Yet 
To Come,'' because we are now in a position to take on the big 
challenges of this country that would have been unthinkable 8 years ago. 
We can get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 and 
give a generation of Americans a chance at a strong economy. We can deal 
with the challenges of the aging of America, the children of America, 
and all the things that--I'll leave it to Al to talk about.
    But we've got a chance to do that. But you have to understand that 
this election is every bit as important, if not more important, than the 
ones in '92 and '96. I want you to know a couple of things about Al 
Gore that he wouldn't say himself and I'm 
amazed that so many Americans, even a lot of our supporters, don't know.
    First of all, as you might have noticed, we've had to make a few 
tough decisions over the last 8 years. He 
was at the fore of the process that produced every difficult decision we 
ever made, every controversial one, every one that could have wrecked 
both our careers and kept him from being here tonight as the nominee of 
our party.
    He wanted us to take that tough stand 
against the deficit in 1993 that required him to break the tie in the 
United States Senate. He wanted us to become the first administration in 
history to seriously take on in a systematic way the problems of gun 
violence in this country and to try to have systematic, sensible 
measures to protect our children from its dangers. He wanted to be the 
first administration in history that took on big tobacco to try to give 
our children their lives back.
    He was out there early with me on 
Kosovo, on Bosnia, on Haiti, on all the tough, controversial foreign 
policy issues, when all the experts in Washington were saying these were 
little places unworthy of America's great interests, and besides that, 
there was lots of downside and no upside--who cares if a lot of innocent 
people are just dying like flies?
    He was there every time, in private, 
getting no credit, when a difficult decision had to be made. And the 
Presidency is defined, and the country goes forward, based on the hard 
decisions. The easy ones anybody can make.
    The second thing I want you to know is that he has had more responsibility than any person who ever held 
this job. And he has performed in an absolutely stunning manner. And I 
just want to run through--yes, you can clap for that. [Applause]
    I want to give you a few examples. He 
led our effort to give America a genuinely competitive and humane 
telecommunications policy, which meant--what did that mean? You look at 
all the companies in New York State alone that did not even exist in 
1996 when we signed the Telecommunications Act--hundreds of thousands of 
new jobs. Plus we got the E-rate to guarantee that our schools, our 
poorest schools and libraries and hospitals would be able to access the 
Internet.
    He led our efforts to hook all of our 
schools and classrooms up to the Internet. When we started in 1994, 
under Al's leadership, 3 percent of the classrooms in America were 
hooked up to the Internet. Today, 65 percent are, 11 percent of the 
schools. Today, 95 percent of the schools in this country have an 
Internet connection.
    He led our efforts to bring economic 
opportunity to people and places left behind, in the empowerment zones 
and the enterprise communities. He led our efforts in the environment, 
which--things like our partnership for the next generation of vehicles 
with Detroit, with the automakers and the auto companies, the 
autoworkers and the auto companies. Now you'll be able to buy cars, 
decent size cars, actually getting 70, 80 miles a gallon in the next 
year or two.
    He had a big part of our foreign policy 
when it came to arms control or dealing with Russia or South Africa or 
the Middle East. He led our efforts to reinvent the Federal Government, 
which meant, as I think all of you, even our

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adversaries would admit, we have been slightly more active than previous 
Presidents in the last several years, and we did it while shrinking the 
Government to its smallest size in 40 years--all because of Al Gore's 
leadership.
    But what I want you to know is more important than all that. I had 
lunch with this guy once a week, before he 
got something better to do here a few months ago. [Laughter] From the 
day I took office until the onset of the Presidential campaign, I 
probably know more about him than anybody but Tipper. I know what he 
likes and what he can't stand. I know what he loves. I know when he's 
having a bad day and how he deals with it. And by the way, he knows the 
same about me.
    And all I can tell you is, I feel absolutely comfortable putting the 
future of my daughter, and the grandchildren I hope she will give us, in 
his hands. He is the most accomplished and 
effective Vice President in the history of the country. That is not a 
matter of dispute; that's a statement of fact. He is the most well-
qualified candidate we have had in my lifetime. I wish I'd had half his 
experience coming into office in '93 that he will bring in, in 2001.
    But the most important thing of all is, he understands the future, and he knows how to take us 
there. There are big challenges out there. We have not done all this 
work to turn this country around, to fritter away the chance of a 
lifetime to deal with the big issues. And there are huge differences 
between our parties and our candidates that will have dramatic, 
immediate, practical impact on the lives of the American people--not 
just those of us who came here tonight but, keep in mind, those of us 
who served us here tonight.
    So for all my gratitude to all of you, for all my gratitude to the 
American people, for the chance to serve in a job I love, the most 
important thing is always, for our country, what are we going to do 
today and tomorrow? All I have done for 7 years and 3 months was to try 
to get the country I love in the position to build the future of our 
dreams for our children. Now it's up to you to decide whether we do 
that.
    And believe me, for the rest of the lives of everybody in this 
audience, I will be very surprised if you ever get a chance to vote for 
anyone for President again who has done so much, who is such a fine 
human being, and who so clearly understands the future that is unfolding 
at such a rapid pace. We owe it--we owe it to ourselves, to the labors 
of the last 8 years, and more importantly, we owe it to our children and 
the dreams we have for them, to make sure that the next President of the 
United States is Al Gore.
    Thank you very much.

 Note:  The President spoke at approximately 8:50 p.m. in the Imperial 
Ballroom at the New York Sheraton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to 
Edward G. Rendell, general chair, and Joseph J. Andrew, national chair, 
Democratic National Committee; actor Jon Stewart; singer Tony Bennett; 
investor Bob Rose; and Nick Theofanis, son of Dimitrios Theofanis. The 
transcript released by the Office of the Press Secretary also included 
the remarks of the Vice President, Tipper Gore, and the First Lady.