Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Luncheon in Minneapolis - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, June 19, 2000

June 10, 2000

Thank you very much, Vance. Thank you, Darin. And thanks for being my friend for such a long time, and thank you for giving us a little walk through memory lane. [Laughter] I'm still proud I was a child of the sixties. [Laughter]

I never have known what I was supposed to be embarrassed about. I remember President Bush used to refer to me as the Governor of a small southern State. I was so dumb, I thought it was a compliment. [Laughter] I still feel that way.

I want to thank my friend of more than two decades, Joan Mondale, for being here, and for all the years that we've shared together. I'd also like to thank your former secretary of state, Joan Growe, for being here. Thank you, Joan. Sandy Novak, thank you. And I'd like to thank the people here from the Minnesota Teachers Group for their leadership in this event and for sticking with the Democratic Party and for their support of education reform.

Let me say, first of all, I am glad to be standing here, because in the last week I have been to Portugal, Germany, Russia, Ukraine. I came back to the United States to meet with the King of Jordan, and then I flew to Japan to the funeral of Prime Minister Obuchi, then came back to meet with the President of Mexico. And now I'm here. [Laughter] I feel like a character in that H.G. Wells novel, "The Time Machine." [Laughter] But if by some chance I should slip a word or two here, you'll just have to make some allowances for me. [Laughter]

I would also like to thank Mayor Rendell. He didn't really plan on leaving the mayoralty of Philadelphia and taking this little part-time job that I talked him into.

One other, just--thing I want to say preliminarily, I've been to Minnesota three times in the last 5 weeks--[laughter]--and it's really funny, because I was screaming to the point of irritability at my scheduling staff for months before that. I said, "Look, here's three places that I have not been in 2 years, and I'm really upset," and one of them was Minnesota. I said, "I really want to go." [Laughter]

So then, they said, all right, you know. So Fritz Mondale and I went to a farm in David Minge's district to talk about the China vote, and then I went to St. Paul on my education tour, to the first charter school in the United States. There are now over 1,700 thanks to our administration pushing that, and they're working well.

And today I got to speak at Carleton about the importance of opening the doors of college to everyone. It's been a really rewarding thing. The people of Minnesota have been so good to me and to Al Gore and to Hillary and to Tipper. You know, I still remember when we rolled into Minneapolis on the bus tour in '92, we were about an hour and a half or 2 hours late, and there were over 25,000 people in the streets. And I think Vice President Mondale kept the crowd there--[laughter]--by hook or crook. So I'm very grateful to you.

I just want to say a couple of things briefly--one other thing. I want to thank Vance for helping Hillary, too. She's doing well. You'd be proud of her. I think she's going to win that race, and I'm very, very proud of her.

When we took office 7 1/2 years ago--Al Gore and I and our whole team--we were animated by some fairly basic ideas. One is that we could have good economics and good social policy, but to do it, we'd have to get rid of the deficit and have to go through the fire of doing that. The second was that we could grow the economy and improve the environment. The third was that we had to stop the politics of personal destruction and the kind of old rhetoric that had paralyzed Washington and try to find some way to bring the American people together as a community. And the fourth was that we had to abolish the distinction between domestic and foreign policy--that in the 21st century, in a globalized society, it really wasn't going to be as--there are some things that are clearly, discretely foreign policy-oriented, like what we did--this is the one-year anniversary of our victory in Kosovo over ethnic cleansing, something I'm very proud of. But by and large, we needed to begin to look at the world more in terms of how it affected us here at home and look at how we were--what we were doing at home in terms of its impact around the world.

So, for example, I think that it helps America that we're trying to relieve the debts of the poorest people in the world, that we now treat AIDS as a national security problem. I know Senator Lott made fun of me the other day when our administration announced that we considered the AIDS problem to be a national security problem, but I think it is. Seventy percent of the AIDS cases are in sub-Saharan Africa. There are countries there that are now routinely hiring two people when there is a job vacancy because they expect one of them to die within a few months. And this could wreck whole societies, wreak havoc on the continent, just at the very time when Africa offers the promise of new partnership to so many of us.

Anyway, we bad these ideas, and so we set about trying to make them work. And lo and behold, they did. And I'm grateful for that, and I thank you. But I just want to make a couple of points very briefly, because somebody might ask you why you were here. And if you say, "Well, I wanted to shake hands with Bill Clinton," that's a good answer, but that won't get any votes for us.