Remarks to the Texas Legislative Victory Fund in Houston

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Jan 17, 2000

January 11, 2000

You know, when Debbie got into that, how we were probably related to each other--[laughter]--I did not know where she was going with it. I thought she was going to do some hillbilly shtick about how our eyes were too close set--[laughter]--or I could offer to play you that banjo song from "Deliverance." I didn't know what was going on there for a while. [Laughter] And after I became President, I found that I had all these relatives I didn't know existed. [Laughter] They just kept cropping up all over. And most of them had more limited resources than I did.

I'll tell you one real quick story. I did get one letter from a woman way up in her eighties in northeast Louisiana who showed me how John Grisham and I were like tenth cousins. And I wrote him a letter and said, "Praise God, you're the first one that has any money"--[laughter]--"come to the White House tomorrow." [Laughter] And it was really funny. It turned out it was true. She wrote him identical letters. We checked our lineage, and we turned out to be kin. And one of us is still claiming it. [Laughter]

I want to thank John Eddie and Sheridan for having us here in their home, their modest little home. [Laughter] It makes the White House look like public housing. [Laughter] I also want to thank them, if you'll indulge me, for having Hillary here just a few weeks ago. She had a wonderful time and was jealous that I was going back today.

I want to thank Debbie and Frank for being such wonderful friends to us. And for all of you being here tonight. You know, my interest in this legislative endeavor obviously relates, in part, to reapportionment. I have worked as hard as I could--and we've had some terrific fights in Washington--to preserve the integrity of the census. I just want everybody counted who's entitled to be counted, and in the most effective and complete and honest way.

I also very much hope that members of my party will win the House of Representatives, and they have actually an outside chance to at least split the United States Senate this year, if we can pick up two or three more candidates we maybe could do better.

But then the census comes along, and it will be done in 2000, and the whole thing could be undone again. And so I think it's very important that--you know, when Debbie was saying what she was saying, I wanted to just stand up and say, there is a real meaning here. You could work your hearts out and have a great 2000, and then have it undone in 2002, and you wouldn't like that. So I do want to thank you for being here, and I want to urge you to redouble your efforts.

The only other thing I'd like to say is this. One other thing Debbie said made me think of a point I wanted to make. She said that I believe that you could have a country in which we protect the individual rights of our citizens, including their access to the courts, and still grow the economy. I do believe that. And when I was pondering whether I should run for President--it seems like a hundred years ago now, way back in 1991--one of the things that just drove me crazy about the way Washington worked at the time--and I obviously felt that the other party was more responsible, but I didn't think our crowd was blameless either, because when you get into a--you know how it is, you get into any kind of relationship and you're just frozen, and then if you're not careful you just keep making the same mistakes over and over again. And we all have to work on that, in our families and our businesses and everything we do.

But the thing that really bothered me was that in order to sort of break through on the news or in the media or whatever, that it seemed to me that the people in Washington, beginning at the White House, kept posing false choices to the American people. You'd have to--are you going to be for business, or are you going to be for labor? Are you going to be for a strong economy, or are you going to be for all those trial lawyers having the right to bring suit? Are you going to be for a strong economy, or are you going to be for those chokingly burdensome environmental regulations? Are you going to be for American jobs or all that trade business?

And I could give you 30 examples. It made a nice debate. And once you decided which side you were on of the either/or questions, it relieved you of all responsibility to think, which gives you a lot of free time to do other things. But it's ultimately a very unsatisfying way to live. And it's one of the big reasons our country got in the ditch we were in, in 1992, because you just had to get on one side or the other and they were bogus choices, by and large.

There are real choices to be made, and they're hard enough in life. But you completely paralyze yourself if you spend all your time organizing your mind and your activities around false choices. And one of the things that we have tried to do in the last 7 years is to at last put real choices before the American people and to try to make the right ones. And I think the results have been pretty good.