Remarks at a Federal Victory Fund Reception in Phoenix, Arizona - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, June 26, 2000

June 22, 2000

Thank you very much. I appreciate the standing ovation. [Laughter] Let me say I'm delighted to be back in Arizona again. If you only knew how many times I complained that I wasn't coming out here enough, you'd really be impressed. [Laughter] I love coming here.

I want to say, in his absence, that Bruce Babbitt has done a magnificent job as Secretary of the Interior, and I'm very proud of him. We had some rocky issues in the first couple of years, and we still do some things that our friends in the Republican Party don't agree with. But we decided together--and we've been friends for many years because we served as Governors together--that all these emerging issues in the West, the challenges of reconciling all this growth with the environmental challenges, basically were ignored by the other party when they were in power. And they normally did well in the elections because the Federal Government wasn't getting in anybody's hair. And then when the Democrats got in, they tended to try to deal with them, but in a way that alienated so many people we found--further behind. So we decided that we would not ignore them, but we'd try to do it in a way that would make connections with people at the grassroots level. And I think, by and large, the strategy has worked, and I' m very grateful.

We set aside, among other things, more land in national monuments, in the 43 million roadless acres of the national forests, otherwise, than any administration in the history of this country except those of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. And I'm very proud of that. And you should be proud of him.

I want to thank the gentleman to my left--to your left, my right--Ed Rendell, the former mayor of Philadelphia who has been a great chair of our Democratic Party and who was leading us to victory this year. And I really thank him for doing that. I decided he ought to be chair of the party when Al Gore and I won Philadelphia with about 80 percent of the vote and a bigger margin than President Kennedy did when it was a much larger city. So I figured if he could work that kind of mathematical magic in Philadelphia, there's no telling what he could do with the country as a whole. [Laughter]

I want to thank Steve for his long friendship and Janet for her outstanding leadership. I also want to thank her publicly--I've never had a chance to do this before--for her sterling service as United States attorney here in my first term, before she became the attorney general.

I want to acknowledge the event cochairs here, John Shacknai, Bob and Carolyn Wolf, Delbert and Jewell Lewis, and Fred DuVal, who is much missed in the White House, but I thank him for what he did. And let's give them all a big hand. [Applause]

Now, I also want to say a heartfelt thanks to one present and one former Member of Congress, Ed Pastor and former Senator Dennis DeConcini. I think I'm going to see them sometime today. I don't know if they're in this room, but they really did a lot to help ensure the success that this country has enjoyed in the last 7 1/2 years.

I will be brief, but I want to say some things as succinctly as I can. First, I am more grateful than you know that in 1996 we won the electoral votes of Arizona, for the first time since Harry Truman in 1948.

Second, I am profoundly grateful for the success our country has enjoyed in these last 7 1/2 years, that Steve and Janet outlined. I've worked real hard to try to turn this country around and move it in the right direction. And I think we were helped by the fact that I had been a Governor for nearly a dozen years, that I had dealt with most of the problems that the country was facing in 1992, and that we actually had specific, clear ideas about what we wanted to do and we laid them before the American people in great detail.

And that brings me to the present moment. Everybody knew what the problem was in 1992. The wheel was about to run off. The economy was in bad shape. The society was deteriorating by most indicators, and we knew what we had to do. We also knew that Washington was just paralyzed by this sort of partisan fight when basically people would say, "You got an idea; I've got an idea. Let's fight; otherwise, neither one of us will get on the evening news." And so there was a real penalty put on thinking. If you thought you had new ideas and you tried to work things out, there was really no reward. And most of us out on the country, whether we lived in Arizona or Arkansas or someplace else, thought that it didn't make much sense. So we set about trying to turn the country around, and the results have been good.

But now we're in a new election season. And people ask me all the time, "Well, who's going to win? Do you think the Vice President is going to win?" I say yes. "Do you think Hillary is going to win?" I say yes. And I do, on both counts. "Do you think the Democrats will win back to Congress?" Of course, I say yes. But here's the real truth: Who will win this election depends upon, more than anything else, what the people of America think the election is about. The question you ask may determine the answer you get.