Remarks at a Democratic Business Council dinner

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 15, 1997

Thank you very much. First I want to thank Steve Grossman for his leadership and his dedication. I had an opportunity to be with Steve and his wife during my holiday, and I met his son, who was singing for me with the Princeton Glee Club. You saw Steve standing here - his son is 6 [feet] 5[inches] and weighs 290 pounds. [Laughter] So I tell you that to say, do not underestimate this man. [Laughter] He has hidden power that manifests itself in all kinds of interesting ways.

I thank Tom Hendrickson for the work that he's done on the Democratic Business Council. I love this group, and I'm very proud of the fact that since I've been President we've added hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of members to this group, people we asked to give contributions that are quite generous but by today's standards are still fairly moderate, because we want to get large numbers of people who want to participate with us in making the future for the Democratic Party.

I thank Alan Solomont. And I want to thank my Budget Director, Frank Raines, for coming tonight. After he engineered the balanced budget agreement, I thought he would never do anything else for the rest of his life. [Laughter] He thought he was entitled to refire, but I said no.

I had a great day today. I hope you did. I had a great day. I met with some wonderful people. I was able to see some progress in a lot of areas where we've been working hard. But I started the day - or I didn't start the day but in the middle of the day, at noon, I went to American University to give a speech about what I hoped we would do in the last 3 months and couple of weeks of this year. And it's a fascinating place, American University. They have students from over 140 different racial and ethnic and national groups. Ninety percent of the students are involved in community service. That's an astonishing thing.

American University 34 years ago was the site of President Kennedy's famous speech on arms control in the cold war. And many people believe it was the finest speech he ever gave. What I reminded the students of today was that in that speech, instead of just focusing on the problems that existed then between the United States and the Soviet Union, John Kennedy actually imagined a world where there was no more cold war, there was no more communist threat, our two nations were no longer enemies. We are now living in the world that he imagined 34 years ago.

And I made that point to tell them that they had to imagine the world they wanted to live in in the 21st century, and that everything I have done for the last 4 1/2 years was a product of what I had imagined we would do and should do as a country.

It was almost 6 years ago that I announced for President at a time when our country was in a very different position than it is now, when we seemed to be drifting into the future and be more divided than we ought to be and somewhat uncertain about what our role in the world ought to be. It seemed to me clear that we were going through a time where people were dramatically changing the way they work, the way they live, the way they relate to each other, the way we relate to the rest of the world, and that what is always called upon at a time like that is to take a new course that is consistent with the oldest values of this country.

And to me, my whole work has always been about three things: One, creating opportunity for everybody responsible enough to work for it; two, making sure our country remains the leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity in the world; and three, making sure that out of all of our differences, which are legion, we still come together as one America. Opportunity, responsibility, community: Those are the things that I think about every day. And I've been thinking about them every day for 6 years and, indeed, even longer than that.

Now, we can be proud of where this country is. The country has got a lot of genuine hope and a lot of solid achievement. Before the budget was balanced, thanks to the work that the Democrats did in 1993, we had reduced the deficit by 80 percent. We had a historic drop in the welfare rolls. We had huge drops in the crime rate. You have places in inner cities and isolated rural areas that are beginning to see a renaissance of growth and development again where there hasn't been any in a very long time.

Now, this balanced budget agreement not only gives us the first balanced budget since 1969, when President Johnson presented his last budget before leaving office, it also gives us the largest increase in health investment since Medicaid in 1965, which will be used primarily but not exclusively to provide health insurance for about 5 million children that don't have it now. It provides the largest investment increase in education since 1965, which will be used, among other things, to make sure we reach our goal of hooking up all the classrooms and the libraries to the Internet by the year 2000, adding large numbers of children to the Head Start rolls, putting another 100,000 work-study positions in for college students, and doing a number of things that will help make our schools better. And finally, of course, we passed the tax portions of the bill, which among other things - and I think most importantly - essentially opened the doors of college education to all Americans who are willing to work for it, so that we can now say to a child struggling in a family, maybe having a hard time making ends meet, "If you stay in school, if you make decent grades, and if you'll work for it, you can go to college. You'll either get a Pell grant or a work-study position or get a tax credit that will send you to college. You do not have to worry about that anymore."