Remarks at a Saxophone Club reception in San Francisco

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 29, 1997

Thank you very much. I'm always uneasy when Hillary is up here about to introduce me. [Laughter] I never know what is really going to be said. [Laughter]

You know, we - it's the world's worst-kept secret that we took our daughter to Stanford over the weekend - [laughter] - and bid her goodbye yesterday. And so, from, like, 6 o'clock on, Hillary and I are officially overseeing one of America's empty nests. [Laughter] And I've been thinking about how I was going to fill it. I was thinking about maybe I would get a dog to go with Socks, you know. [Laughter] When I heard Hillary talking, I thought that Willie was going to move in with us. [Laughter] Mayor, I love you, but they need you here. They need you. [Laughter]

I love to come to San Francisco. I love the community. It was wonderful, we got off the highway and were coming up from - we came up from Palo Alto and were coming up through the streets, and I now know - I've made that trip so many times from the airport that I know every block. And there's a little marker on every block, and I see the neighborhoods change. And I look for the people to change in the street. And I can always sort of measure how I'm doing by whether it's the same good response in every block, and then when I'm not doing so good there's a difference. [Laughter] And once I was doing so poorly, there was no difference in any of the neighborhoods the other way.

But I always love coming here, where the people are so expressive and so alive and so committed, I think, to building the kind of community that involves all Americans that our whole country needs. And so I'm very glad to be here.

I want to hear this band. The name of this band really - LaVay Smith and her Red Hot Band? Is that really the name of this band? I like that. That's good. [Laughter] And I love all these 1940's ties, you know. It's just great. It's another part of San Francisco, right?

I want to just say a couple of things seriously. First of all, I love this Saxophone Club. And every Saxophone Club meeting I've been to since I started out in 1992 and some bright young person had the idea of forming it, has kind of reaffirmed my faith in America, because it gives people a chance to participate in the democratic process, to contribute at a modest level, and to feel like they're a part of our administration. We also have all kinds of people in the Saxophone Club, including people of all ages.

It used to be, when we started out, there were only young people in the Saxophone Club, and I decided that was discriminatory, and I see we've taken care of that here tonight. [Laughter] We have a wider range of people, which I think is good.

But I'd just like to say, as I'm very much thinking about this today as we started our daughter on her college education, our administration has been very much about the future of this country, about trying to fix America's present problems and organize our country in a way that will enable us to have the best years of America in the 21st century.

So when I ran for President, I said that I had a rather simple vision, which I still think about every single day: I want this country to be a place where everybody who will work for it has the opportunity to live out their dreams; I want this country to be a place that people still look to to lead the world toward peace and freedom and prosperity; and in some ways most important of all, I want this country to be a place where we not only tolerate, not just respect all of us for our differences but we actually celebrate them and are still bound together by a set of common values which make us all Americans and enable us to have one America with all of our differences. In a word in which people are killing each other tonight, are full of hatred tonight in different places because of all of their differences, I think it's very important that we build that kind of America.

And I'm glad that what we sought to do has worked for our country. I'm proud of the fact that we cut the deficit by 80 percent even before we passed the balanced budget plan. I'm proud of the fact that we've invested in education. I'm proud of the fact that this new budget has the biggest increase in education funding since 1965 and the biggest increase in helping people go to college since the GI bill was passed 50 years ago.

When all these tax incentives, work-study positions and Pell grants and IRA's get in place, it will literally be possible for us to say that every person in this country who is willing to work for it can get a college education. For the first time in history we can say that. And that's important. I'm proud of that.

Christine talked about what we tried to do in health care, with health insurance in this budget for half of the kids in America, 5 million of them don't have health insurance; more work for the 16 million families that are affected with diabetes; new advances to help people deal with breast cancer and prostate cancer and other things. We're moving in this health area. I'm proud of that.