Remarks at a Dinner for Hillary Clinton - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, August 14, 2000

August 9, 2000

Thank you. Thanks for the tie. You know, I got interested in ties when I realized that the older and grayer I got, the more it would be the only sort of fashion statement I could ever make for the rest of my life. Thank you, Tom; thank you, Pam; thank you, Brasim, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for coming.

I'll tell you what I would like to do. I'd like to just talk for a couple of minutes and then just have a conversation. If you have any questions you want to ask, anything you want to say to me, I will be glad to do it. We kind of started our dinner that way.

But I want to begin by thanking you for coming here and for helping Hillary. And I wanted to just give you a little background on that. I am immensely proud of her for making this race. And we just got a good poll today from Quinnipiac College, saying that she was ahead 46 to 43, which I think is quite good. And if you understand anything about New York democratic politics, if you go into election day and you're two or three points ahead, you're going to be just fine.

So I feel good about that, and I'm very proud of her because, you know, we had actually been looking forward to this year and being able to relax a little bit. We knew we'd have to work hard for the Vice President and now for Senator Lieberman and for our crowd in Congress. But we also looked forward to the nights at the White House and enjoying our last year there and going to Camp David. And my wife gave up a lot of that because she understood that it was important to carry on the work that we have been about this last 8 years and because half a dozen or more New York House Members asked her to do it, and she got up and spent her time--she's been to every county in New York now, and she fell in love with it and figured out that what they needed and wanted was the same thing she had been working on for 30 years.

I can tell you this, for 30 years all she ever did was help everybody else, and I'm kind of proud of her for sort of venturing out on her own now and trying to do something for herself.

I wanted to mention just a couple of things because I think it's quite important. I think it's important that the people of New York know, the voters know that what she did as First Lady and what she did before. So if you can help us with that, I'd appreciate it.

She had basically had an unprecedented level of activity in her present position over the last 8 years. She's been active in lobbying for specific pieces of legislation from the family and medical leave law to the Children's Health Insurance Program to the several bills we passed that dramatically expanded the availability of adoptions, gave tax credits to people who would adopt children with disabilities, did more for kids in foster care and for kids that are leaving the foster care system--which is the product of a lifetime of commitment for her.

She has been very active in promoting a lot of our education initiatives. She had the first-ever White House conference on early childhood and brain development, which is a very important issue; on violence against children, we had a big meeting on that that she put on. And the last thing that she did as First Lady that may have, ironically, one of the most enduring impacts was to basically run all of our millennial efforts. We came up with this slogan for the millennium that we would "honor the past and imagine the future."

And we've essentially done two things. We've had a series, probably 10 now, of lectures and dialogs at the White House on big issues that will define the next several years in the new century. The last one on exploring the ocean depths and exploring outer space and what's in those black holes. And they've been followed widely all over the world. It's been amazing. And it was just her idea to put it together. We had the famous scientist Stephen Hawking, who as you may know, has lived longer with Lou Gehrig's disease than anybody in history, still teaching at Cambridge, in England, came all the way across the ocean and gave us a lecture and talked on his little electronic machine about the whole concept of time and space and how it would change in the new century.

And then in terms of honoring the past, she set up this millennial treasures event to do everything from save the Star-Spangled Banner and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to specific sites in communities all over America. We were just up on Martha's Vineyard. There is a 19th century tabernacle there that was used for a hundred years for Bible study in the first integrated event, racially integrated event, starting right after the Civil War in America, to Abraham Lincoln's summer home at the Old Soldiers' Home in Washington.

And last week when we were up there, 2 weeks ago, Dick Moe, the head of the National Preservation Historic Trust--Historic Preservation Trust, said that Hillary's millennium treasures effort was the single largest historic preservation movement in the history of the United States. So, she's done a good job as First Lady. She's made a difference in people's lives.