Remarks and a question-and-answer session at a Democratic National Committee luncheon in Palm Beach, Florida

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Nov 10, 1997

The President. Harriet got on a roll, I didn't want her to stop. What did you say? No, I was just thinking Harriet was on a roll. I didn't want to stop her.

Thank you, and thank you, Jerome. We are old friends. And I want to thank Sidney and Dorothy for having me back in their wonderful home. I was here a little over 5 years ago. They look much younger even than they did then, and I have all this gray hair to show for the last 5 years, but I've enjoyed it immensely.

You mentioned the St. Mary's Hospital Board, and for those of you who don't know, that was the hospital that took care of me when I tore my leg off by falling 8 inches here a few months ago. I visited the little school in Jupiter that I was supposed to visit that day when I couldn't go. And I'm delighted to be back here.

We're in Florida, among other things, pushing the fast-track legislation. There's going to be a vote in Congress next week. And Secretary Daley, the Secretary of Commerce, and my Special Counselor, Doug Sosnik, who has a wife from Argentina, the three of us just got back from Latin America. And I came back even more convinced than ever that it's the fight thing to do for our country.

Let me just be very brief. What I'd like to do is to talk a minute or two and then, if you have a couple of questions maybe I could hear from you. That would help save my voice, and it will be more interesting for you.

We learned today that growth in the last quarter - this quarter, is 3.5 percent, and growth has averaged almost 4 percent over the last year, the highest in more than a decade. I think that has come about because we both broke political gridlock in Washington in 1993 with the economic plan and in 1997 with the Balanced Budget Act, and because, perhaps even more important, we broke an intellectual gridlock.

Harriet mentioned that she knew me a long time before I became President. Most Americans didn't. And one of the things that never ceases to amaze me is when I read things written about our policies and they say, "Well, he's adopted this Republican policy and that Democratic policy and just making it up as he goes along." I was reading the other day - last night, getting ready to come down here, an article I wrote in 1988 that basically sounds like the speeches I'm giving today. But if you're a Governor out in the hinterland, you don't exist for people that interpret you to America until you move to Washington. So I thank Jerome and Harriet for being my old friends.

But what I wanted to do when I came to Washington 6 years ago was to get people to stop thinking in these sort of outdated, left-right terms, and start thinking instead about what we were trying to do, what is the mission of America. And if you think about it in that term, it helps you to pick the proper course.

Without economic policy, it seemed to me there was a huge fight between whether we should run a huge deficit and cut taxes or whether we should run a slightly smaller deficit and spend more money. And I thought both of those were wrong for the modem economy. And people laughed at me when I went to Washington and said, "Here's what we're going to do. We're going to reduce the deficit, balance the budget, and spend more money on education and the health care of our children and empowering our poorest communities." And they said, "Yeah, and the $3 bill is coming back." But that's what we've done, and it worked.

On crime, it seemed to me we were having a phony debate in Washington about whether we needed to talk tougher and have harsher sentences or do more to help prevent crime in the first place. The sensible thing to do is to sentence more harshly people who should be and prevent everybody you can from committing crimes and also work on the environment. That's what the Brady bill, the assault weapons ban, 100,000 more police on the street were about. And we've contributed to a dramatic decline in crime in the last 5 years.

On welfare, the debate was, "It's an unfortunate system, but don't you have to take care of these children," or "These people don't really want to work, so you have to make them work" - sort of polarizing debate. My experience as a Governor was that nearly every person I ever met on welfare was dying to go to work; that the system penalized them because they generally didn't have the education and skills they needed on the one hand, or on the other, if they took a job that was a minimum wage job, they lost Medicaid health coverage for their kids, and they didn't have the money to pay for child support.

So we said, "Let's be tough on work, require people that can work to work, but take care of their children, because everyone's most important job is taking care of their kids." We've had over 3 million people drop off the welfare rolls, the biggest decline in history, the smallest percentage of Americans on welfare since 1970, after 20 years of high levels of immigration.

I guess what I'm saying is, what I think works is saying, "The Government can't sit on the sidelines. The Government can't be a savior. The Government's job is to create the conditions and give people the tools to make the most of their own lives and to build good communities and families."