Remarks at a Gay and Lesbian Leadership Council Luncheon in Dallas

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 2, 2000

September 27, 2000

The President. You've got to calm down now. We've got work to do. [Laughter] But I thank you for that welcome. And I want to thank Chuck and Jim for welcoming us. This is a really beautiful place. I love the art. I love the architecture. I love the light. This is the first time I've ever gotten to give a speech under Bette Davis eyes. [Laughter] I bet I hear about that one. [Laughter]

Thank you, Julie and Kay. I'd like to thank Ed Rendell for agreeing, after he left the mayor's job, to do this old part-time job as chair of the DNC. And my friend of many, many years Andy Tobias, who has really done a wonderful job in more ways than most people know. Thank you, Elizabeth. I thank Julian Potter, my White House liaison, and the others who are here from the White House today.

I also want to thank Brian Bond, who is the director of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund. And we have one very important candidate for Congress here, Regina Montoya Coggins--[inaudible]. And Molly Beth Malcolm, thank you for being here, for getting on that--what was that talk show you were on last night, taking up for our side? That guy just talks louder when he starts losing arguments. You hung in there really well. [Laughter] You did a good job.

I want to say to all of you that this is an interesting time for America. It's a time of enormous progress and prosperity hut a time of real ferment, too. And people are trying to come to grips with all the currents of change that are running through America: The Fort Worth City Council voted to extend discrimination protection to gays and lesbians; gay Dallas city councilman changes party. Good deal. Regina wants to represent the community, and the Congressman says he doesn't--not sure he does. [Laughter] It's a big deal. We're debating all these things.

I'm honored to have bad the chance to be President at a time when all these issues were coming to the fore, and to have a record number of members of the gay community in my administration. We are fighting for the bate crimes bill, and basically, we now have a bipartisan majority in both Houses for it. We've got all the Democrats but one, and about--I don't know--12 or 13 Republicans in the Senate voted for the hate crimes bill. And we have 41 Republicans in the House who voted with about 200 of our crowd to instruct the conferees on the defense bill to leave it in there.

I was asked just before I left Washington--a couple of you mentioned it to me that one of--someone in the leadership of the Republican Congress said that he didn't think this would get to be law this year. Well, if it doesn't get to be law, it's because the leadership doesn't want it, because we've got a majority of the votes for it. So I would urge you do to whatever you can.

There's been a sea change movement. Gordon Smith, who is the Republican Senator from Oregon and an evangelical Christian, gave an incredibly moving speech in the floor of the Senate for it. I don't know if you saw it, but there was a Republican State representative from Georgia who gave a decisive speech in the Georgia legislature for the hate crimes bill. And I don't know if you've circulated that, but it's an overwhelmingly powerful speech. And I think it could have, if we can get it around, an impact on some more Members in the House, but we've got the votes. It's just a question of whether the leadership of the Republican Party in the Congress stays to the right of the country on this issue.

The same thing is true of the employment nondiscrimination legislation. I actually hope that we might pass that this year. There are big majorities across the country for this. It is not just a Democratic issue. It is not just a liberal issue. It's not even just a gay fights issue. It's a fundamental fairness issue in America. And we get a few changes in the Congress, that will pass next time too, assuming the election for President works out all right.

So we're moving in the right direction. But we're dealing with this--this election, in some fundamental way, I think, is a referendum about whether the whole approach we've taken to our national problems in our national life is the fight one. I ran for President partly because I just got sick of seeing my country held back by the politics of division, by a sense of political and economic and cultural entitlement, almost, on the part of the people who had been running things for a long time, with absolute confidence that they could divide the American electorate in ways that made their opposition look like they were out of the mainstream and not part of ordinary American life.

And it seemed to me that it gave us bad economic policies, bad social policies, ineffective crime and welfare policies, and a lot of hot air and not much results. So when the people gave Al Gore and me a chance to serve, we tried to adopt a unifying approach that would bring the American people together and that would not make choices that were essentially phony.

We believed we could cut the deficit and invest more in education and the American people, and sure enough, it worked. Today, before I came here, I announced that we would have this year a $230 billion surplus, the biggest in the history of the United States, that we would, when I left office, have paid off $360 billion of the national debt. Keep in mind, the annual deficit was supposed to be $450 billion this year when I took office. So it's gone from $450 billion projected deficit to a $230 billion actual surplus.