Remarks at a Democratic senatorial campaign committee dinner in Miami, Florida

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 24, 1994

October 15, 1994

Thank you very much. There's nothing left for me to say. [Laughter] You know, Hillary kind of got into that zone that sometimes you get into, and she was just hitting on all cylinders. And I felt very much like I did the first time I ever gave a public speech as an elected official over 18 years ago. I went to a Rotary Club installation banquet in south Arkansas as attorney general. And it was the first time I'd ever spoken since I'd been elected, and I was nervous as a cat. There were 500 people there; we started at 6:30. Everybody got introduced in the whole crowd, except three people; they went home mad. [Laughter] And I got introduced to speak about a quarter to 10. And the only guy more nervous than me was the guy introducing me, and he said, "You know, we could stop here and have had a nice evening." And when I heard Hillary hitting her stride, I thought, we ought to stop here, we'll have a nice evening. [Laughter]

Let me say, first, to Hugh and to Carol, thank you, thank you so much not only for this evening but for all the days and all the nights that you have helped to advance the cause of the Democratic Party and of our administration and all the things that you have given to your country out of a genuine desire to make things better for other people. I thank you so much, and I'm honored to be here in your home tonight.

I want to thank the Members of Congress who are here, Senator Daschle, who was here, and Congresswoman Meek and Congressman Hastings, Congressman Torricelli, who's come all the way from New Jersey, and say how very glad I am to be here. I want to echo the sentiments of my wife about my fine brother-in-law; I may have a little more to say about that in a moment. And I want to thank my long-time friend Bob Graham. You know, I told somebody not very long ago, someone--I don't even know how the conversation came up, but it got around to the fact that I'd known Bob Graham a long time. And this person who was talking to me had not known him a long time and was marveling about how much money he had raised as chairman of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. I said, "Well, it doesn't surprise me because he gets more done than anybody I know, and secondly, he's had me at every crossroads in the United States at these fundraisers." [Laughter]

I was a Governor for a good long while. Some days I wish I still were--[laughter]--but rarely. I served with 150 American citizens, men and women, who were Governors. And I can say without any qualification that he is one of the 5 ablest people I ever served with as a Governor out of that 150. But he has a weakness that I also have, apparently, and that is that on occasion, we're better doers than we are talkers. And the crowd we're running against are a whole lot better talkers than they are doers. And part of the reason is, they have more time to think about what they're going to say because they spend so little time worrying about what they're going to do.

And I must say, just for example, our friends here in Florida--I didn't carry Florida in the last election, but I worked hard to do a good job for Florida. We've worked hard not to let Hurricane Andrew be forgotten. We've worked hard to get Homestead rebuilt and regenerated and revitalized. We worked hard to save the space station and the space program, which is so important to central Florida; to settle the American Airlines strike, which is very important down here. Florida was one of the States that got permission to slash through all the Federal rules and regulations to try to find new and innovative ways to control health care costs and cover more people without health insurance and to reform the welfare system and to move people from welfare to work. And that's just a beginning.

I'd also remind everybody, with Mr. Torricelli here, that until I really got behind the Cuban Democracy Act, along with Democrat Torricelli and Democrat Graham, we couldn't find the Republicans and where they were on that legislation or what they were doing.

So I don't know if any of that will register in this election, because they talk very well. But I want you to think tonight about what you can do in the next 4 weeks, maybe in a nonfinancial way, in the States in which you live to change the outcome of the election, or in the cases where we're winning, to reinforce the outcome of the election.

You heard Hillary make the case, but the fact is, I ran for President to be a different sort of President. I did not expect that the environment in Washington would be as partisan as it turned out to be. I never dreamed I'd see grown people actually get up and willfully kill bills that they themselves were for, just to make sure that nobody else got credit for helping. I thought that was something that children did in a play yard. I didn't dream grownups would do it, and I sure didn't dream that anybody could get away with doing it.

I wanted to go to Washington to get this economy going again, to get our people together again, to make that Government work or ordinary citizens again. And I think we've made a good start. We have brought the deficit down; we've got the economy up. When Bob Graham cast the decisive vote on the economic plan--all the Republicans voted against it, and they said, "If this thing passes, the economy is down the tubes; if this thing passes, we'll lose jobs and the deficit will go up." Well, they've been telling us that fairytale for 12 years. We tried it their way for 12 years, and they quadrupled the national debt and drove the economy in the ditch. We changed our policy, we reversed trickle-down economics, and we've had 4.6 million jobs and 3 years of deficit reduction for the first time since Harry Truman was the President of the United States.