Remarks at a Luncheon Honoring Representative James H. Maloney in Danbury, Connecticut - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 18, 2000

September 11, 2000

Thank you. Wow! [Laughter] Well, first of all, that's the best talk I ever heard Jim Maloney give. It was amazing. [Laughter] I thought two things when he was giving that speech: The first thing I thought is, that's the speech everybody ought to be giving around America this year; and the second thing I thought is, if he keeps giving that speech, this election won't be nearly as close as the last one was, if you guys help to get the message out. Thank you.

Let me say, I'm honored to be here with Jim and Mary and what he referred to as the delegation from his family. I thought Lew Wallace gave a great speech, too. We ought to give him--[applause]--it was a very good speech. Thank you.

I want to thank your attorney general and my law school classmate and friend of 30 years Dick Blumenthal for being here, and Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz and Comptroller Nancy Wyman, thank you. Did I say it right?

And I want to thank the mayor of Danbury for making me feel welcome here. Thank you, Gene. Where are you? Thank you, Gene Eriquez. And Ed Marcus and John Olsen, John Walkovich, I want to thank all them. And I'd also like to, on a point of personal privilege, one of the most talented people who ever served on my staff and one of the most valuable to me, personally, is a young man named Jonathan Prince, who has now gone off to do well. But he's from Danbury. He and his parents are here today. Jonathan, where are you? Give him a hand. He did a great job. He's here somewhere. [Applause] Thank you.

I also want to thank my longtime friend Mayor Joe Ganim from Bridgeport for coming over here. He and Gene and I took a picture together. We took a picture together, and they whispered to me that most mayors, unlike Presidents, aren't term limited. [Laughter]

Let me say to all of you, I am having a great day today. I started off today, Hillary and I were in Washington at the White House, and we went up to Westchester County, where we now make our home. And we did an event at a Jewish community center on the Federal Trade Commission report today on violence in the media, pointing out that a number of entertainment companies--by no means all of them; we don't want to paint with too broad a brush--but a number of them actually have been advertising these violent movies to the same kids that they say shouldn't go see them.

And Senator Lieberman and Vice President Gore talked about it yesterday, and I think Joe is going to testify before the Congress sometime this week, in the next few days, about it. But we had a wonderful time, talking about the future and the challenges that families at work face, and succeeding at work and succeeding at raising their children, which is the most important work of all.

And then I came up here to be with you, and I'm going back to New York, and we're going to do, I think, three or four more things today. [Laughter] And I'm going to--Hillary and I are going to end up tonight at a dinner honoring the efforts that we made, along with several others in a bipartisan way, to deal with the so-called Nazi gold issues in Switzerland and get the wealth returned back to the people who needed it. So, it's a great day.

This is an interesting time in my life. My family has a new candidate. My party has a new leader, and I've become the Cheerleader in Chief of America. [Laughter] And I like it. [Laughter]

I guess what I would like to tell you is, as someone who is not running for office--for the first time since 1974, I'm not going to be on the ballot--I, too, believe what Jim Maloney said. And the most important thing to me to try to get across to the American people is, yes, we've had a great year. This has been a terrific run. And I'm grateful, not just for the economic prosperity but for the greater sense of unity that the country has for the social progress we see in crime and welfare and teen pregnancy and a whole lot of other indicators, showing our country is coming together, for the change in the American political climate now, away from the kind of just dripping venom that dominated so many elections of the last 20 years. I'm grateful for all that.

So what I want you to understand and believe is that the best is still out there, because we have spent a great deal of time these last 8 years just trying to turn the country around, to dig it out of a mountain of debt, to dig it out so that the interest rates could come down and so that people just in their private lives could go about making America the success it ought to be, changing the crime policy, changing the environmental policy, changing the education policy, changing the health care policy. But a lot of the biggest, best things are still out there.

At least in my lifetime, we have never had a period where we had so much progress and prosperity with so little internal crisis or external threat. I think Jim told me when I came in that Theodore Roosevelt was the last President to come to Danbury and spend any time. And I like Theodore Roosevelt. [Laughter] If he were alive today, he'd be a Democrat, too. [Laughter]