Remarks at a Reception for Governor Tom Carper in New York City - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 9, 2000

October 5, 2000

Thank you very much. First, I will try to be brief tonight, because most of you have heard what I have to say. [Laughter]

I want to thank Mark Fox for sucking with his friend, Tom Carper, and for helping again, and for being so kind and generous to me over these last couple years. I want to thank Denise Rich for letting me come back into her home again. I don't think that Hillary and I have had a better friend anywhere in America than she's been to us for the whole time I've been President. Denise, you've been wonderful, and I'm grateful to you. Thank you very much. Yes, give them a hand. [Applause]

I want to thank Brian Kennedy and Sarah Clancy for singing. Some of you know this, but I'm half Irish. And Brian Kennedy sang for me on November 30, 1995, in Belfast--he's from Belfast--with another Irish singer you might know, by the name of Van Morrison. [Laughter] Van and Brian sang to a crowd of about 50,000 people in the streets of Belfast, who came there to see Hillary and me, when I turned on the Christmas lights. They came because we had turned on the lights of peace in Northern Ireland. I loved hearing him sing again.

But the Irish have meant a great deal to me. James Galway, the great Irish flutist, probably the greatest living flutist in the world, has played at the White House. And Bono, the lead singer of U2, has been a great friend of mine--now better known as the leading advocate for debt relief in poor countries in the entire world. He has that great sense of humor. When I left Brian, and I went to Dublin, we had a big rally in the square there. There were over 100,000 people. And after--Bono was there, and he had brought me a signed copy of W.B. Yeats' plays, and had William Butler Yeats in his little-bitty handwriting. And underneath, there was Bono's handwriting. It said, "Bill, this guy wrote some good lines, too." [Laughter]

So the Irish have their way, you know, and they worked their way with us tonight. They were wonderful. I want to thank Tom Carper for running for the Senate. When I met Tom years ago, I was a Governor, and he was a Congressman. And we worked together in writing the first major overhaul of the welfare laws, back in 1988. I liked him then; I like him more now. He's been a remarkable Governor. He told you a little bit about his record.

I think that of all the Governors in the country, I can honestly say in during his period of service, no one was more innovative or made more progress on a wider range of social problems. And he's got that sort of disarming "Aw, shucks, I'm from the 49th biggest State; you better watch your billfold when I talk to you for 5 minutes"--[laughter]--way about him, which allows him to be very effective.

But it takes a lot of guts to make the decision, especially when he made it, to run against the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. I told Tom, I said, "Two years ago we were outspent by $100 million in the congressional races. This year you may be outspent by $100 million." [Laughter] So you're helping make sure that doesn't happen.

I'd just like to make a couple of general points. First, I thought Al Gore did a really good job in those debates, and I was proud of him. Second, I'm sorry I'm making you miss Joe Lieberman's debate, and I'm going to shut up so you can watch it. Third, a lot of you here have helped Hillary, and I want you to know how grateful I am for that. I'm very proud of her, and she was no slouch in her debate, either. I thought she was very good. I was really proud of her.

She's going home tonight, and we're going to get ready for another one on Sunday. But when I was watching that debate, what I was thinking is that all you should really hope for, in a great free society like ours, is that somehow people will understand the nature of the choices before them. Because we wouldn't be around here, after 224 years, if people didn't nearly always get it right. The American people nearly always get it right, if they have enough time and enough information. There's some mysterious center that anchors us in our freedom and our sort of forward progress.

And the only thing I've ever really worried about this election is that I've lived long enough now to know that anybody over 30 can look back on at least one occasion in his or her life when you made a colossal mistake, either a personal mistake or a business mistake, not because times were tough but because things were going so well you thought you no longer had to concentrate on life. If you Live long enough, you'll make one of those mistakes. And countries are no different than people. They're just a collection of people, even a great country like ours.

So here we are with the best economy and the longest expansion we've ever had, welfare rolls down, crime rates down, all the social indicators going in the right direction. We learned last week we had a 20-year low on poverty; biggest drop in child poverty in 34 years; first time senior poverty ever went below 10 percent. We've got, for the first time in 12 years, even the number of people without health insurance is now going down again, because of our Children's Health Insurance Program.