Remarks at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee dinner in Boca Raton, Florida

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Nov 10, 1997

Thank you very much. You may or may not have already noticed that I don't exactly have all my vocal capacities. The good news is you'll get a shorter speech. [Laughter] The bad news is you'll have to listen harder to what does come out.

I want to start by thanking John and Peggy for bringing us into their magnificent home and even more for their commitment, which was so powerfully expressed in what John said.

You know, I tell people all the time that I have been in public life now almost continuously since 1974. I have been in public office all but 2 years for the last 20 years. Most of the people I've known in politics were good, honest people who worked a lot harder than they had to work and fought for what they believed in and tried to make this country a better place. And I really appreciated what you said about those Members of Congress.

Even our friends on the Republican side, when that pitched battle we had over the Contract With America, virtually all of them really believed they were doing the right thing. But I didn't, and Mr. Gephardt didn't, and Mr. Frost didn't, and the other Members of Congress who are here - Congressman Deutsch, Congressman Kennedy, Congressman Baldacci - we didn't. And we won.

But you don't work like that, under those kinds of conditions, if you don't feel it. And I must tell you, John, that it means a lot just to know it got across to somebody, because we're very well aware of the presentation that's given to the American people about people in public life, the nature of the political process, and then even the nature of fundraising.

To hear people tell it, the very act of getting people to support you is somehow suspect. You just described your activities in Washington, and I must tell, that's consistent with probably more than 80 percent of the people who help us. And if the others have something they want to talk to us about, well, that's democracy, too, and there is nothing wrong with it. So I thank you very much.

I want to thank Dick Gephardt and his legion in the House, first for the help they gave me in 1993 when we passed the economic plan which was principally responsible for reducing the deficit by 90 percent, without a single vote from a Republican Member in the Senate or the House, not a single, solitary one. Before this new balanced budget law, which I'm very proud of - but before it takes effect, don't forget the deficit dropped from $290 billion to $22.6 billion because of what a lot of brave people in our caucus did in 1993. And a lot of them lost their seats because of it, because the benefits were not apparent by the '94 election. And it made me more proud than ever to be a member of the Democratic Party.

There were a lot of other things that were done, thanks to the leadership that the Democrats here gave us. In 1994 we passed a crime bill, bitterly opposed by the leadership of the other party. They said it was all wrong. They went out in rural areas and tried to convince people we were going to take their guns away. And again, they cost us a few seats. We had some Members in Congress who gave up their seats to vote for 100,000 police, to vote for the Brady bill, to vote for the ban on assault weapons. But we've had 5 years of steeply dropping crime rates, and now we know whether we were right or they were right. The voters didn't know in 1994, but we were right.

And the President gets the credit. When the economy is up, the President gets the credit. John Kennedy thought it was fair. He said, "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan." So if it goes down, I'll be here, folks. [Laughter]

But that plan could not have been passed without the support of our people in Congress. The crime bill could not have been passed without the support of our people in Congress. We wouldn't have the right kind of welfare reform bill without the support of our people in Congress because I had to veto two bills first to get the one I wanted. We had record - 3 million plus people move from welfare to work.

And I'm very proud of what these members of this caucus have done. I'm also proud that we got caught trying to provide health insurance to people in America who don't have it. You know, our opponents said when we tried to pass the health insurance program in 1994, they said, you know, "If you support the President's health insurance program, the number of people without health insurance will go up." And as one Democrat said to me the other day. "I supported your program. We got beat, but I supported it. And they were right; the number of uninsured people went up." And now we're trying to do something about that. In the last budget, we got funds to give health insurance coverage to half the children in America who don't have it.

But I want to make it clear, even with a Republican majority in Congress, nothing I do would take place without support of our caucus in the Congress. Do you believe that this balanced budget would have the biggest increase in health care for poor children since 1965 if it weren't for enough Democrats who could support my veto? Do you believe, for example, that we would have, for the first time in the history of the country, in this budget, opened the doors of college to everybody, literally, with a $1,500 tax credit for the first 2 years of college, tax credits for the other years, better loan programs, more scholarships, more work-study funds, education IRA's? it happened because we were together and we worked together.