Remarks at a Democratic Senatorial campaign committee dinner

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, March 23, 1998

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to begin by thanking all of you, not only for your warm welcome in this magnificent Women's Museum, which I always love to visit and which is a real treasure of our National Capital, but for being here to support the Senators who are here and those whom we hope to add to their ranks.

I thank Senator Torricelli not only for his friendship and his kind words but for his fighting spirit. He has the heart of a lion. And when others feel weak, he feels stronger, and we are stronger because of what Bob Torricelli has done. And I thank him.

I thank Senator Kerrey, my longtime friend. We used to be Governors together, and we used to lament the condition of our country in the eighties, and the escalating deficits and what we saw as the irresponsibility of decisionmaking here. Bob Kerrey did east the deciding vote on that budget bill, and I thank him for that. But in a real sense, so did all the other Democrats, because we didn't have a single Republican vote. And Al Gore even had to vote. And as he says, "Whenever I vote, we win." [Laughter]

But imagine how different the last 6 years would have been - 5 years and 3 months - if we hadn't done that. And I want to thank Senator Kerrey for being willing to do this job for 2 years. It's not easy. It's easy to give the speeches. You know, he just asked me to show up every now and then at these events and smile and take a few pictures, see people I enjoy visiting with anyway, and give a talk. But he's had to go across the country and do all the work and see all of you and ask you to help. And it's often a thankless task. And when he took it, it was certainly a thankless task because we were down and our numbers were depleted. But he took it on, and I predict a stunning and historically unpredicted result in November of 1998. And you will have a lot to do with it, Senator Kerrey. We thank you very much.

Finally, I want to say that it would be impossible for me to do my job if it weren't for Tom Daschle. He is a magnificent leader of our Democrats in the Senate. Yes, let's stand up for him. [Applause]

I want to talk very briefly about what I believe to be at stake. First, just a little picture on the past. It is wonderful to stand up and say that these are good times for America, that we have the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years and the lowest crime rate in 24 years and the smallest welfare population in 27 years and the lowest inflation in 30 years and the highest homeownership in history. That's wonderful to say. But we forget how hard it was to do.

Before the Balanced Budget Act ever saved a dollar, the deficit had been reduced by 92 percent because of the votes solely of Democratic Members of Congress in 1993. The crime rate is down in part because we moved beyond the hot rhetoric of tough talk to put 100,000 more community police officers on the street, to give our children something positive to do in their leisure hours, and to take assault weapons off the street. And many of our people gave up their jobs on those two votes.

And so I say to you, I am proud to be a member of my party, and I'm proud of every Senator and every Congressman who east those votes. And the people who lost their jobs because they did it can at least go to sleep tonight knowing that this is a better, stronger, safer country because they were in the Democratic caucus, and they did what was right when the chips were down. And I'm grateful to them.

After a year of real, harsh partisan fighting back and forth in which the majority party in the Congress today shut the Government down, and we didn't shut down - and so the "Contract With America" was abandoned, and we moved on to bipartisan cooperation.

We passed a balanced budget bill. That bill did a lot to keep our recovery going, and I thank every Republican who supported it. But that bill had the biggest increase in child health care since 1965. It will add 5 million people - children - to the ranks of those with health insurance. It had the largest increase in aid to education since 1965. It opened the doors of college to all Americans by giving a $1,500 tax credit for the first 2 years of college; further tax credits; education IRA's; 300,000 work-study positions; finally, tax deductibility for the interest on student loans. Those education provisions and those health care provisions - you know who put them in the Balanced Budget Act: the Democrats in the United States Senate and in the United States House of Representatives. And I thank them for it.

And more importantly, I ask you to look to the future. We have a lot of challenging decisions. Senator Kerrey said we've got an ambitious agenda; we do. We now have virtual consensus in Washington that before we spend a surplus that hasn't even materialized, we should save Social Security for the 21st century and not allow the baby boomers to bankrupt their children or to live in abject poverty because we failed to do it. It was because of the unanimous support of the Democrats in the Senate and in the House for that position that it is now the position of the entire United States Government. And that's another thing that the future will be able to thank Tom Daschle and all the other members of this caucus who are here tonight for, and I thank them for it.