Remarks at a Clinton/Gore '96 fundraising dinner

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 11, 1995

September 7, 1995

Thank you very much. Thank you all for your wonderful welcome. What a way to come back from vacation. I want to thank Fred Baron and Larry Stewart so much for the work they did to help bring us all together tonight. I want to thank all of you for being here and for the contributions you have made to our campaign. Many of you are old friends of mine, and I'm glad to see you again. Some of you I have never seen before, and I hope I have a chance to shake a few more hands before I leave tonight.

I thank Terry McAuliffe and his fine staff, all of them, for the work they have done, and I want to thank my good friend, John Breaux, not the least--so many reasons I have to thank him for--for finally giving me credit for where he got that joke. [Laughter] Pretty funny, don't you think?

I told him another story he didn't tell tonight, which illustrates another point about what's going on in Washington today, which is that one of my laws of American politics which people--everybody tends to be for change in general but against it in particular. So it's important to know what the fine print is in these contracts.

The same minister he talked about was having trouble getting his congregation to exercise, so he worked his heart out on a sermon that he thought would finally inflame his congregation. And he was going on and on and pumping, and they were saying "Amen" and ginning and finally, he got to the punch line and he said, "I want everybody in this congregation who wants to go to Heaven to stand up." Everybody leapt to their feet, except this one old lady on the front row that hadn't missed a Sunday in church in 45 years. And he was crestfallen. He said, "Well, Sister Jones, don't you want to go to Heaven when you die?" And then she jumped up. She said, "I'm sorry, Preacher, I thought you was trying to get up a load to go right now." [Laughter] It's very important to get the fine print of these contracts.

I want to tell you, I've had a wonderful experience with the American people in the last few weeks. My family and I had the opportunity to go to Wyoming, as I'm sure you know, on vacation, and we got to spend a lot of time in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. And I had the opportunity there as President to defend the national parks and the importance of preserving and maintaining them in this budget battle. I wish every young person in our country could go to one.

I also had an opportunity to talk to a lot of Westerners who, you know, think that one of their hands would fall off if they ever voted for a Democrat, because they're so used to, you know, disliking the Federal Government, and they've got us identified with them. You know, it's interesting, the Republicans, if they hate the Government so much, why do you supposed they've devoted a whole generation to trying to take it all over? [Laughter] They lost the White House for 2 1/2 years, and they missed it so much they can't bear to give it up. [Laughter]

But anyway, I talked to a lot of people, then I went to Hawaii and represented our country at the last of the many wonderful occasions commemorating the 50th anniversary of World War II, and I got an incredible sense of the diversity of this great country, meeting again, as--I'm always overwhelmed by this incredible generation of Americans that literally saved our way of life and paved the way for all the prosperity and the security and the victory we had in the cold war.

My State had one of those Japanese internment camps in World War II, and I met a couple--it's an incredible story--that met and got married in the internment camp in Arkansas. And the man had volunteered to join the service, and they sent him to Mississippi to train, and he said he got hungry for Japanese food. And they said the only place you can get anything is internment camp in Arkansas. [Laughter] So he went over and met his wife there, he said, "We're the only two Japanese-Americans who actually are glad those camps were set up. We had our marriage there."

I met another Japanese-American who came here on his own, was thrown into a camp, volunteered to join the military, got out, and by the grace of God, the war ended the day before he was about to be sent to an island where he would have been in combat against two of his brothers who were in uniform for the Japanese. But the atomic bomb had ended the war, damaged his own home, injured his mother, and killed one of his other brothers.

This is an incredible country. We come from all different backgrounds and all different walks of life. And we've come a long way in the last 50 years.

When I ran for President in 1992, I did it because I thought we were not making the changes we needed to make to get ready for the 21st century. I did it because I thought that we had not seriously come to grips with the economic and social challenges of the time. And I said I would try to change the economic direction and the social direction of the country, to try to move us forward and bring us together. And virtually everything I've talked about doing, except the fight we lost on health care, we've succeeded on.