Remarks at a fundraising dinner for senatorial candidate James M. Talent in St. Louis, Missouri

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, March 25, 2002

March 18, 2002

Thank you very much. Be seated, please. Gosh, thanks for such a warm welcome. It's always good to have a good introducer. [Laughter] Bucky is my favorite uncle when I'm in St. Louis. [Laughter] He's my favorite uncle all the time; he's a fabulous man. Thanks, Buck. And I like to call Sam Fox, "Foxy." Foxy, I didn't realize you were so eloquent. [Laughter] But I thank you for the leadership, and I want to thank you all for coming tonight. This is a magnificent crowd here to support the next United States Senator from Missouri, Jim Talent.

I appreciate Jim, and I appreciate the fact that he's a family man. Like me, he married above himself--[laughter]--so I appreciate Brenda. It's an honor to meet the three children today, and it's an honor to meet your mother, Brenda. I got a report from my homefront as well--I married really well. [Laughter] Laura is doing great, and I'm so proud of her. She's made a great First Lady for the country.

I want to thank the members of the Missouri delegation who are here, starting with the senior Senator, Kit Bond. Thank you for coming, Kit. I appreciate his leadership on a lot of important issues. Take election reform--he's making sure that we encourage people to vote, but he's working hard to make it tougher to cheat. Half of the Senators understand what he's trying to do. It seems like one out of the two Senators from Missouri understand that.

I want to thank the members from the congressional delegation here as well, Todd Akin, Roy Blunt, Jo Ann Emerson, Sam Graves, Kenny Hulshof. These are fine, fine Members of the United States Congress, and I'm proud to serve with them.

I want to thank all the members of the Republican Party who are here. I particularly want to thank the grassroots activists who man the phones and sign all the letters and get out the vote. I want to thank you for your hard work in 2000. I want to thank you for your hard work that you're fixing to do in 2002.

I'm here to support as strongly as I possibly can this good man to become the Senator--the next Senator from Missouri. And I do so for a reason, and it starts with the quality of the individual. He is a quality person who's got the right values.

He is a steady man, and he is an experienced person who will bring good judgment to the United States Senate. And let me cite some of his qualifications. First, he has been in Washington before. He was there for 8 years in the House of Representatives, where he made a mark of accomplishment.

You know, in that town, we've got some good talkers, and then we've got the doers. We've got some people up there who like to hear themselves talk and others who actually get something done. And that's the way Jim Talent is; he knows how to get things done--things done not only for the good of Missouri, to get things done for--the things of Missouri, but to get things done positively in a positive way for the country.

I want the people of Missouri to remember he served on the Armed Services Committee, and he stood up for a strong national defense when he was there. And obviously, that was before we entered this war. And thank goodness he did stand up for a strong national defense when he was there, because it enabled us to have a military capable of accomplishing the first mission we sent them out to do, which was to destroy the Taliban.

He worked on historic welfare reform. He worked to change a culture of dependency to one that recognized if you get a job, if you find work, you can be independent from Government. This welfare reform law is an unqualified success, and I want to thank you for your work on that, Jim.

We share a philosophy about the role of Government. The role of Government is not to create wealth but an environment in which the entrepreneur can flourish, an environment in which the small-business person can dream big and take risks and realize his or her dreams of owning your own company in America. Jim understands small business.

Today I was on the outskirts of the great city of St. Louis, where we had a chance to meet some small-business entrepreneurs, where I laid out a way to make the tax structure more conducive to entrepreneurial development. Jim Talent understands that, and it's important for Missouri to have a voice for the small-business person in the Halls of the United States Senate.

He also understands good tax policy. If you give people their own money to spend, that increases demand. And when there's more demand, somebody meets that demand through more production, and production means jobs. We cut the taxes on the American people at the exact right time, and Jim Talent understands that. Some in Washington seem to forget whose money we're spending. They think it's the Government's money. What Talent understands, like I understand, it's the people's money.

And one of the things we can't afford to do is to have people in Washington who don't like the tax cut because it diminishes the role of the Federal Government. I've heard some rumblings--and you might have heard them, too--that people say, "Well, gosh, we're in a recession; we probably ought to not go through with the tax cuts," which in effect is a tax raise. They're reading the wrong economics textbook. You don't raise taxes when the economy is slow; you trust the people with their own money when the economy is slow. And that's exactly what we did in Washington, DC. And that's exactly the attitude Jim Talent will take when you send him up to represent Missouri in the United States Senate.