Remarks to the Fall Meeting of the Democratic National Committee

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 27, 1999

September 24, 1999

Thank you. Well, I'm glad to see you. And I seemed to have recovered enough of my voice to get through this, so I'll try to do that.

Governor Romer, Representative Sanchez, Mayor Archer, Joe Andrew, Andy Tobias and Beth Dozoretz, and all of our team. I wanted to begin by saying a simple thank-you to all the members of the DNC and to the leaders. I want to say a special word of thanks to the finance staff, with whom I have been dealing a lot lately; we've been working hard. And they've done a very good job, and we've done a good job under pretty difficult circumstances, raising the funds that our candidates and our party needs. And I want to thank them for their work.

I want to congratulate the convention team that was announced, Governor Romer, Lydia Camarillo, Don Foley, all the others; thank you for your determination to make Los Angeles a great success. And I want to thank my friend of many, many years, Roy Romer, for the work that he has done for our party.

I will recommend to the DNC tomorrow that, as Governor Romer moves on to this new responsibility, we elect Mayor Rendell of Philadelphia to the position of general chair. For those of you who know him, he has provided an absolutely astonishing leadership for us there. We've not had a Governor in Pennsylvania since I've been President. In the last election we carried the greater Philadelphia area by 370,000 votes, I think, about 20,000 votes more than our margin in the State of Pennsylvania. And in the city of Philadelphia, in 1996, for the first time the Vice President and I had the same victory margin that President Kennedy did in 1960, when there were 400,000 more people there. I say that to tell you I think our party has been well led and will be well led.

I just want to mention one thing that Roy Romer will always have on his resume. In 1998, when we gained five seats in the midterm elections, though we were outspent by $100 million - $100 million - and all the pundits said - I want you to remember this, as you're treated to more punditocracy over the next year - [laughter] - all the pundits said we were going to be wiped out. They were on all these shows, "I believe they'll lose 20 seats." "No, I think they're going to lose 30 seats." [Laughter] "No, I believe they might lose more." "And they're certainly going to lose five or six in the Senate. They'll never be able to stop anything there." I heard it for a year.

It was a terrible Senate election for us in terms of who was up, who was not. We lost no Senate seats. We gained five House seats, and it was the first time since 1822 that the party of the President had won seats in the midterm of a second term. [Applause] Thank you.

So for all of you that were part of that, I thank you. I thank you. And I want to just take a few moments to try to talk about where we are in this moment as a country, as a party, by referring briefly to the recent past and by looking at the present and the future.

When I first announced for President - it's amazing how much quicker things are happening now. You know, I did not even announce for President until October of 1991. It's September; I feel like I've been going through this campaign all my life. [Laughter] And I'm not even running. [Laughter]

But anyway, back to the subject at hand. In 1991, when I announced, I asked for change in our party, in our national leadership, and in our country. I asked America to embrace the new challenges that we faced with new ideas based on old-fashioned values of opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and a community of all Americans.

I asked that we have a new role, a clearly defined role, for our National Government, that didn't say we could solve all the problems, but didn't say we could walk away from them either. I asked us to stop demonizing Government, on the one hand, but to stop defending everything Government did, on the other, and instead to focus on what we could do to give the American people the tools to meet their challenges, to solve their problems.

And then I asked the Vice President to join the ticket. We put out our economic plan, and we asked the American people to give us a chance to put people first. People gave us a chance in '92. We made a lot of very tough decisions. We passed an economic plan, I would remind you, with not a single Republican vote, with the Vice President breaking the tie in the Senate. And they told everybody in America we'd raise their taxes - even though, for most people, we hadn't - and that it would be a disaster and that a recession was on the way.

Then we passed a crime bill to put 100,000 police on the street, to ban assault weapons. We passed the Brady bill. They told everybody in America we were going to come take their guns away. [Laughter] Didn't they? And in 1994, they put out their "Contract With America," and they thumped us good - they beat us good - because the voters had not felt the benefits of the economic plan. We had just passed the crime bill a couple of months before, and for all they knew, some Government bureaucrat was going to knock on their door and take their guns away. Probably - that alone probably cost us the House of Representatives. And everybody said - same crowd said, "Oh, these guys can't win, they're history." Remember that? All their, "It's over."