Remarks in a discussion entitled "The Third Way: Progressive Governance for the 21st Century."

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 3, 1999

April 25, 1999

[Moderator Al From, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, opened the discussion.]

President Clinton. Thank you very much. I'd like to begin just by expressing my profound gratitude to Al From, and to all the people at the Democratic Leadership Council for having the passion and the patience to work at this for years and years and years.

I, too, want to thank Hillary and the hearty band within the White House who keep us focused on the big ideas and values that got us here in the first place. And I'd like to say a special word of thanks to my friend and aide Sidney Blumenthal, for the work that he's done in trying to put this meeting together.

I would also like to just very briefly say how very much I admire the people who are here with me at this table today, how much I have learned from them, how much I look forward to working with them at every opportunity.

Wim Kok, from The Netherlands, actually was doing all this before we were. He just didn't know that - he didn't have anybody like Al From who could put a good label on it. [Laughter] But he was doing it, for years and years and years. Tony Blair has made me long for a parliamentary system. [Laughter] Gerhard Schroeder had to wait even longer than I did - [laughter] - and was also a distinguished Governor. And Massimo D'Alema has proved that you - I think - I'll make you a prediction here - I think he is already proving that even in Italy, where governments tend to be like the flavor of the month for ice cream, that the right sort of politics can have a sustained long-term impact on some of the most wonderful people in the world. So I'm honored to be here with all of them.

I'd like to thank my friend and ally, Congressman Cal Dooley, who is out there; the Secretary of Transportation, Rodney Slater; the Secretary of the Army, Louis Caldera, who helped me in so many ways. And we're going to hear afterward from Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, former Governor and Democratic Party Chairman Roy Romer; Mayor Wellington Webb of Denver; and Commissioner Michael Thurmond. I thank them.

All of you know we've just finished a 3-day NATO conference, celebrating the 50th anniversary of NATO, bringing in new members, celebrating an astonishing partnership with over 40 countries, including the countries of southeastern Europe, all except for Serbia, and the countries of central Asia in this amazing new group which, itself, is full of Third Way questions.

At our last luncheon, one of the members made a crack that we had five members of the last Politburo of the Soviet Union sitting around our table today. And another one said, "Yes, and a lot of the rest of us should have been on the Politburo, but we weren't." [Laughter] And it was a picture of how much the world has changed.

What gives rise to this kind of politics, when the old order is destroyed or when the realities of daily life or popular dreams can no longer be accommodated by a given set of political arrangements through a political debate? We see that in southeastern Europe today, with the crisis in Kosovo, where the old choices between state stability and being consumed by ethnic hatreds, and what we're arguing for is a new integration based on the embrace of difference, not the oppression of it.

I would like to just pose a couple of questions and then let our panelists take off. You heard Al From say that basically our lodestars have always been in the United States the concept of opportunity, responsibility, and community. We've worked on this for years. We tried to think of simpler and more complex ways to say what we stand for, but we've never done any better than that.

So I think I will just leave it there. But let me say, what could that mean in the present time? What is giving rise to all these people's elections? Why is this happening everywhere? It's not some blind coincidence. I believe it is because the social arrangements, which were developed within countries, and the international arrangements among them, which grew up from the Great Depression through the Second World War and then the cold war, are no longer adequate to meet the challenges of the day.

And most of the parties of the right made a living by beating us in elections by saying how bad we were. And whatever - we were always for more Government, and they were for less of it. And if you thought it was, by definition, bad, then less is always better than more.

So they had quite a run in the 1980's. And then it became readily apparent that that didn't really solve any problems. And that there were serious questions that demanded serious answers. So I will just pose three, and then let our panelists go in whatever order they would like.

I seems to me that the great question that any political party that purports to represent ordinary citizens must answer is: How do you make the most of the economic possibilities of the global information economy and still preserve the social contract? What can governments do to help make sure that every responsible citizen has a chance to succeed in the global economy? And how can we discharge our responsibilities, as the leaders of wealthy countries, to put a human face on the global economy so that in other countries, as well, no one who's willing to work is left behind?