Remarks to the Democratic Leadership Council in Hyde Park, New York - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 29, 2000

May 21, 2000

Thank you. Bill, thank you for welcoming me back to Hyde Park and the Roosevelt Library. I love coming here. I'm sorry I've only come three times. And Al, thank you for your wonderful introduction, and to you and Ginger, thank you for your years of friendship. He's very good at giving the credit to everybody else, but the truth is it would be hard to think of a single American citizen who, as a private citizen, has had a more positive impact on the progress of American life in the last 25 years than Al From.

I am delighted to see so many Members of Congress here, Members of the Senate and the House; the Governor; present and former members of the administration. Mack McLarty was Chief of Staff when we did four big DLC things. We did the economic plan, the Brady bill, family leave law, and NAFTA. Somebody said, Mack, the other day--I saw a commentator; Hillary and I were watching the commentators--"You know, if it hadn't been for his first 2 years, Bill Clinton's approval ratings would be the highest ever recorded." And Hillary looked at me, and she said, "If it hadn't been for the first 2 years when you made all the unpopular decisions, the next 6 years would not have happened." [Laughter]

Mayor Brown, we're glad to see you here. And my Mayor, Mayor Williams, thank you. And thank all of you for being here and for what you're about to do.

Franklin Roosevelt said he often came back to Hyde Park because it gave him, quote, "a chance to think quietly about the country as a whole, and to see it in a long-range perspective." That's what you're being asked to do.

I've often, in quiet moments at the White House, thought about my predecessors, the ones that succeeded, the ones who didn't, why they did. Roosevelt had what Justice Holmes called a first-class temperament, a lot of personal courage, a good mind, and a great attitude. He had a good time being President, even in difficult times. And he learned to have a good time in the midst of almost constant personal pain.

It's worth remembering that life's successes are a curious blend of what you make happen and what happens to you, the gifts God gives you and what you do with them. But today I want to focus on the fact that he was always interested in ideas.

I read the other day Frances Perkins' wonderful book about her lifetime friendship with Roosevelt. You know she was the first woman in the Cabinet; she served as Secretary of Labor the entire time President Roosevelt was in office. She kept trying to quit, and he wouldn't let her. And if you read this book, at the end you get some sense just in the curious, wonderful relationship between these two remarkable people that he had some sense of his own mortality. She kept trying to leave, and he kept trying to get her to hold on to the end. And then, of course, he died shortly after being reelected to his fourth term.

But through this whole thing, you get this sense that from the time she was a young social worker and he was a young State Senator, when he still had full use of his physical facilities--and played a pretty good game of golf, I might add--that they had this magical chemistry born of the fact that even though they were different people from different worlds in the beginning, with very different positions on certain issues, they both understood that public service was something that you weren't supposed to covet for the power but something you wanted to do so you could help other people, and that ideas mattered.

So you come here today to think about where we are and where we ought to go and what the long-range challenges are. And Al's already said a lot of what I want to say, but I want to say some of the things he said and tie it back to what we did in New Orleans in 1990, because I believe that thinking is a big and often underutilized part of success in public life. [Laughter] And I think ideas matter.

Let me say that sometime into my first term, maybe 1995 or something, a distinguished scholar whom I at that time had never met, and who at that time was at Syracuse--I believe he's at Harvard now--named Thomas North Patterson--no, Thomas Patterson-I can't remember what his middle name was-anyway, he wrote this article and he said, "Contrary to the popular belief that most politicians are congenitally dishonest, most people do what they say they're going to do when they get elected." And if you look at the history of Presidents, most of them do what they say they're going to do. And when they don't, it's usually because something has really changed, and we're glad they didn't.

We're glad Franklin Roosevelt didn't balance the budget, because if he had, under those circumstances, it would have been worse. Abraham Lincoln promised not to free the slaves. We're glad he broke that commitment. But, by and large, if you look at the whole history of American public life, when a President runs for office and says, "Vote for me, this is what I want to do," they pretty well do that. Or they at least get caught trying to do it.