Remarks at a Brunch for Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 25, 2000

September 17,2000

Thank you very much. I was telling Ed that I left the Black Caucus dinner last night about 12:15--the Congressional Black Caucus--I was hoping that I would be compos mentis by the time I was introduced to speak, and you gave me such a warm welcome, I'm about to wake up. [Laugher]

Let me say, first of all, how grateful I am to all of you for being here, and so many of you have already helped Hillary. I appreciate you being here, and I'll explain in a minute why we're doing this.

I want to thank Congressmen Borski and Congressman Brady for being not only friends of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania but true friends of mine in the Congress. I'm very proud of what we've done together.

I can't say enough about Ed. It's been wonderful for me to close out my Presidency with a chairman of the Democratic Party who has as much energy as I do--[laughter]--because we knew we would have to work, and work we did. That first 7 months of this year, I don't think either one of us slept very much, but we worked very hard. And everybody was saying, "Oh, the Democrats didn't have a chance. We were all going to get wiped out. We couldn't hold the White House."

And people thought Rendell and I needed a dose of reality serum because we'd go around and say, "What do you mean? We're going to win this thing. It's"--[laughter]--didn't we? And we would go around, and these people in farflung places, a long way from Philadelphia and Washington, would look at us like, "What have these guys been drinking tonight?" [Laughter]

You know, now all those people who were doubters think we're geniuses. And we just need about 50 more days of effort so that they'll be right. But I'm very grateful to you, Mr. Mayor, because after you did such a good job here, you could have taken a well-deserved rest, and instead, you went on the road, and we've had a good run. I'm very grateful.

Let me say to--I don't even have the words to express the gratitude I feel to the people of Pennsylvania and especially the people of Philadelphia in this area who have given me and Al Gore such an overwhelming endorsement in 1992, and in 1996, the margin was truly breathtaking. I will never forget it. It does an amazing thing for a Democratic campaign for President not to have to worry about whether you're going to win in Pennsylvania.

What happens--I can just tell you, after the conventions are over, the candidates and their folks, they sit down and look at a map. And they look at where they're going to get to 270 electoral votes, what they have to carry that's up in the air, what they have to go take away, what they have to defend. And after the convention, there are only a relatively small number of days left. And the candidates accept their public funding, so they have a limited amount of resources to travel, to organize, to advertise.

And so it's like this elaborate chess game, quite apart from what we all see when we pick up the papers every day and they're talking about issues, debating issues--and, this year, debating the debates, of all things--and what's in the debates. Underneath it all there is the sure knowledge that we still have--since we're dedicating the Constitution Center today, we still have the same system we started with. We elect Presidents by States and by the electoral votes of States, which is all the House Members plus two Senators. That's how many electoral votes every State has. And even after reinforcement, when they get shifted around, it all still adds up to 538, and you have to have 270 to win.

And Pennsylvania has 23 votes. And it's also in the heartland of America, with Ohio and Michigan and Illinois and Wisconsin and Minnesota, and you go over to New Jersey and up to New York. If you have Pennsylvania, it drastically increases your chances of carrying New Jersey and of carrying Ohio. No Republican has been elected since the Civil War without carrying Ohio. And it is very hard for a Democrat to be elected without carrying Pennsylvania.

So I am profoundly grateful, because for two Presidential elections we got to go play on their field. If you're playing on the other team's end of the field, you have a chance to score. And the people of Pennsylvania trusted me and Al Gore to deliver for America, and I hope you're not disappointed. It's been an honor. [Applause] Thank you.

There's something else I would like to say, and I won't give my standard speech because it's Sunday and a lot of you want to go do something else, and because you've heard it before, but I will say this. I promised myself between the first of the year and election day I would never, ever give a public speech without reminding people that it is sometimes more difficult to make the right decision when times are good than when times are bad. And I know the American people took a chance on me in '92, but maybe it wasn't such a big chance because the country was in trouble, right?

But now things are going well, and there must be clarity. People have got to stop and think about what is it they want for their future. Because I can tell you, in my lifetime, we've never bad such a good chance to build the future of our dreams for the children that are in this room today and all the other kids in this country. We could actually do things that were unthinkable when I ran for President. We could actually get the country out of debt for the first time since Andrew Jackson was President. We now know, without any question, what it takes to turn around a failing public school, and we could put in place a system if we had the will and were willing to commit the resources to do it, that would guarantee a world-class education to all the kids in this country.