Remarks at a Democratic National Committee dinner in Chevy Chase, Maryland

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 3, 1999

April 27, 1999

Thank you very much. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been an atypical and thoroughly enjoyable fundraiser. [Laughter]

First of all, when I was introduced, Father, to you, I thought to myself, how did the conversation go, when Tommy Boggs asked you to come and pray over all these politicians, lobbyists, and fundraisers? And I think it must have gone something like this: He asked you, and you said, "Well, if I can pray over you, Tom, I can pray over anybody." [Laughter]

Let me say - we were having a conversation here at the table, and I was telling Pat Kluge, Tom, how much I liked your whole family and how much I admired your late sister Barbara and treasured the brief occasions I had to be with her, how I will always cherish the fact that I was with your remarkable father on the last weekend of his life, in San Antonio, Texas, .when I was a very young man - and I was completely enamored of him - and how your unbelievable mother took me under her wing and didn't shed me when a lot of other people were, in 1992. [Laughter] And now she represents me to the Pope - [laughter] - and is maybe the only person on the Earth - [laughter] - who could convince the Pope that I am worth dealing with. [Laughter] So, anyway - so I love the Boggs family. [Laughter]

And I understand that one of the things that Lindy's going to do before she leaves the Vatican is to nominate you for sainthood, Barbara. [Laughter]

But let me say to all of you, I appreciate, Tom, what you said in the introduction. But I would like to say that I hope all the people who came here, who are not rank-and-file Democrats, would just consider a few things.

We had a remarkable NATO summit here, over the weekend. The largest number of world leaders who had ever been gathered in Washington, heads of government and heads of state, at one time, not only to deal with the immediate crisis of Kosovo but to envision the world of the 21st century that we want to make. A world in which Europe, for the first time in history, is undivided, democratic, and free, and at peace. A world in which people are working together and cherishing both their diversity and their interdependence, A world which offers our children the promise of greater peace and prosperity than any age in human history.

And at the end of that summit, Al From and the Democrat Leadership Council sponsored a forum, in which Governor Romer spoke about his experiences as Governor, and the new labor commissioner in Georgia - the first, along with the attorney general, the first two African-Americans ever elected to statewide office in Georgia - talked about the work he had done to move people from the welfare rolls to the work rolls.

The Mayor of Denver, an African-American in a city where African-Americans are decidedly in the minority, talked about the work he had done to get the unemployment rate in the city of Denver down to 3.9 percent and what they'd done to try to knit the community together and build support for the schools.

And the Lieutenant-Governor of Maryland, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, talked about, among other things, the work they were doing to try to keep more people out of prison but to make people with drug-related offenses be drug tested twice a week as a condition of being out of prison, and how much it had reduced the growth of imprisonment, reduced the crime rate, and reduced the recidivism rate.

And it was a remarkable thing. But what really is interesting about it is, the discussion was not partisan in any conventional sense. And I brought to the discussion the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the Chancellor of Germany, the Prime Minister of Italy, and the Prime Minister of The Netherlands, all of whom represent the same sort of movement that came to our country when Al Gore and I were elected in 1992.

I say that to make this point: Every major country has to confront the challenges of creating as much opportunity as we can in the global economy and at the same time preserving the cohesion that any decent nation and any decent community has. How do you get the benefits of all this exploding technology and entrepreneurialism and global economics and retain and strengthen the benefits that come from supporting families and communities, raising children well?

And I believed in 1992, when I ran for President, and I believe it more strongly today, that we had to break the citizens of this country from the grip of an outdated political debate, that it would be possible, if you followed the right policies, to balance the budget and increase your investment in education and health care. It would be possible to preserve the environment and improve it and grow the economy at a more rapid rate. It would be possible to move the world toward peace and still use force in a disciplined way to stand up for peace and to stand against the resurgence of ethnic and racial and religious hatred in the world.

And insofar as we have had any success, I am thankful that I could be the instrument of that in the White House for the 18 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment in 29 years and the first surplus since 1960, now, to the biggest peacetime surpluses ever. I'm grateful for that.