Remarks at a Dinner for Hillary Clinton in McLean, Virginia - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, August 14, 2000

I'll just tell you what the numbers are. One percent for a decade on interest rates--one percent equals $250 billion in home mortgage payments, $30 billion in car payments, $15 billion in college loan payments; never mind the impact on business loans, which affects business growth, employment, and income.

The other thing, as I've said over and over again, is this is a projected surplus. It's not there yet. And if I ask you what your projected income is for the next decade, and you thought about it, and I said, "Now, be real sure. Be conservative. Be pretty sure. This is an optimistic projection, but you be conservative," and I said, "Okay, right now I want you to contract, binding contract to spend it all right now"--if you would do that, you should actually seriously consider supporting them in this election. [Laughter] But if you wouldn't, you probably ought to stick with us and keep this thing going.

Now, there are same differences on crime and gun safety, on health care policy, on education policy--I could go through them all--on choice and the question of who gets appointed to the Supreme Court, which is not just about choice; it's about civil rights, civil rights enforcement.

So this is a huge election. And Al Gore understands what's happened the last 8 years and has been an integral part of every good thing that's happened. He has a keen understanding of the future. He understands the implications of the human genome project, not only the potential for it but the privacy issues that were raised. He understands climate change, and now nobody is making fun of him anymore, like they did in 1992 and 1988. It turns out he was right all along.

But still they took a dig at him at the Republican Convention on the Internet because, like a lot of things people said about me--he did not say he invented the Internet. There is an article in the Washington Monthly or one of those things, which was--he said, yes, he said he was instrumental in creating-- he sponsored legislation that helped to create it." The actual fact is, the Internet was for a long time a defense research project that was the private province of research physicists. There was a bill introduced and passed which essentially helped to make the Internet technology available to businesses and individuals, from which--growing out of that, it became worldwide, the fastest growing communications network in all of human history by a good long ways.

Do you know how many sites there were on the World Wide Web when I became President? Fifty, 5-0--50. You know how many there are today? About 15 million-- 7 years.

So we've got two people running for President, and the Vice President understands all this stuff. They've got the right economic policy. And the most important thing to me is, they want us all to go along for the ride. They want the people that worked here and made this dinner possible tonight to have the same chance we do to send their kids to college. They want employment and nondiscrimination and hate crimes legislation, and they don't think gay people ought to be discriminated against, as long as they show up for work every day and obey the law like everybody else. They believe in the minimum wage and Patients' Bill of Rights. They passionately share these things that I have worked so hard to advance.