Remarks at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee dinner in Beverly Hills, California

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 11, 1998

The President. Thank you very much. There may be one person in America, Dick Gephardt's 90-year-old mother, who wants to call him "Mr. Speaker" worse than I do - but no more than one. [Laughter]

Thank you for your leadership. Thank you for hanging in there these last couple of years. You have no idea, those of you who may not follow this on a daily basis, how many good things happened since the 1994 elections when we lost the majority, because we had a large, strong, united minority that on many occasions made common cause with a brave band of Republicans who would stand with us to continue to move this country forward. In some ways, that's a harder thing to do. And Dick Gephardt also led in that effort, and I'm very grateful to him for that.

Thank you, Martin Frost. I thank all the members of the California delegation who were introduced. I thank Lieutenant Governor Gray Davis and our State Democratic chair, Art Torres, for being here as well. And ladies and gentlemen, I thank all of you, especially Eli and Edye, thanks for having me back at your house.

You know, Martin Frost got up here and sort of made that offhand remark about how this was the largest amount of money that we had ever raised at a private home. And I thought if you got here in time to take a tour, you know it hasn't been a fair fight. [Laughter]

I think I should repeat something I said. I once went to Marvin and Barbara Davis's home and I walked down that beautiful spiral staircase, and I said, "You know, this place makes the White House look like public housing." [Laughter] That's sort of how I feel tonight. And of course, the White House is public housing. [Laughter] And I thank you for letting me and my family be tenants for a little while. It has effective rent control as well. [Laughter]

Ladies and gentlemen, I've had a wonderful time tonight. It's been great to see so many of my old friends and meet some people I haven't met before. I want to thank you for many things. I want to thank you for being so good to me and to Hillary and to Al Gore and to our administration. California has had a very special role in our public life, as all of you know.

I want to thank you for being here for these folks tonight. And I want to ask you to try to in the next few months find every opportunity to put your voice where you've put your investment tonight, because we have a case to make to the American people. When I took office, I believed that the most important thing I could do is to throw off sort of the dead hand of history that I thought had paralyzed Washington, to try to move our country forward and galvanize our party's energies to think about what we wanted America to look like in the 21st century.

Many of you have heard me say this before, but I'm going to say it again; I believe at every age and time, America has to reaffirm three great missions. We have always to deepen the meaning of liberty, to widen the circle of opportunity, and to strengthen the bonds of our National Union. That's an interesting thing to do in this day and age, when there are still vestiges of fairly profound discrimination against some Americans; when, in spite of all of our economic opportunity, there are still places in inner cities and isolated rural areas, Native American settlements on reservations around the country, where the spark of enterprise is still not reached, and where we now are becoming more and more diverse than we ever have been before in every conceivable way. And we are clearly the most diverse democracy in the world in terms of people that actually live in elbow range of one another. In addition, for more than 50 years now, we have had both the responsibility and the opportunity to try to lead the world toward greater peace and freedom and prosperity.

So that's what we set about doing in 1993, and with only Democrats voting for us, we passed an economic program which had reduced the deficit by 92 percent before the first red cent was saved by the balanced budget amendment that was adopted in the Congress - the balanced budget plan.

Now, we have today the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years, the lowest inflation in 30 years, the highest consumer confidence in 30 years, the highest homeownership in history, the lowest welfare rolls in 27 years, the lowest crime rolls in 24 years - lowest crime rates. And I'm very grateful for all that. But I say something to all of you that you know well because of where you live: we are living in a world where the ground is constantly shifting, where the future is coming quickly on us, where ideas are the currency of economics and politics, and where I think we have an obligation to use this magic moment not to bask in the sun but to bear down and deal with the long-term challenges of the country.

We will never have a time, probably in the lifetime of any of us here, where we have more opportunity to deal with the long-term challenges of America because of the good times. And that's what we ought to do. And that's what this election is all about.