THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(San Francisco, California)
___________________________________________________________________________
______ For Immediate Release November 3,
2000
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT GOTV RALLY
Moscone Convention Center
San Francisco, California
12:50 P.M. PST
108
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Are you ready to win this
election?
AUDIENCE: Yes! (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: I want to thank the Mayor for bringing us all together
today, and for being my friend for all these years. (Applause.) I want to
thank the some 2,000 people who are outside the hall today, still listening
to us. I'll be out there to see you in a minute. (Applause.) I want to
thank California's great Governor, Gray Davis, who's been with me every
step of the way and has been great for Al Gore, right from the start, never
wavered. (Applause.)
I want to thank Representative Barbara Lee from Oakland, who just had
a rally for us over there. (Applause.) And my good friend, Congressman
Tom Lantos, who went to New York to campaign for my wife for the Senate,
I'll never forget that. (Applause.) And most of all, I want to thank
Nancy Pelosi, who has worked so hard to bring the Democrats back. She is a
leader in the Congress, a leader in the country and she'll be in the
majority after Tuesday night. (Applause.)
I want to thank Walter Shorenstein for having the guts to stand up
here and say he didn't need the tax cut and he wanted you to have it. I
love him, thank you. (Applause.) And I want to thank a man who has been a
hero of mine for more than 40 years: Willie Mays. (Applause.) He's been
so wonderful to me all these years I've been President. Thank you, Willie.
Thank you. (Applause.)
And I want to thank this great choir behind me from Glide. I love
these folks. (Applause.) And I want you to sing again for me after I
speak, okay? Will you do that?
Now, look, I would like to just sort of give a speech here and have
one applause line after another and you could cheer. But we all know that
we're all converted or we wouldn't be here. (Laughter.) So I want to ask
you to, just for a minute -- give me about five minutes, because I want to
ask you to do something else. Every one of you has lots of friends who
have never come to an event like this, don't you, never came to a rally
where the President spoke, maybe the governor, maybe not even where Willie
spoke, although I think he has spoken to every living person within 150
miles. (Laughter and applause.)
But these folks you know that don't follow this as closely as you do,
they will vote, or they might vote if they know it matters, and they would
certainly vote with us if they knew what the choice was and what the
consequences are.
And many of you have friends who live outside San Francisco, live in
one of these congressional districts where we're trying to win a Democratic
seat; or maybe you have friends beyond the state of California, who live in
battleground states where one or two or three or 10 votes could make a
difference.
Now, you look at this vast crowd today. If every one of you decided
that every day between now and the election you were going to tell 10
people why you are for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, why you want the
Democrats to win, what the stakes are in the election, you might have a
decisive impact on whether we win the House and on how well we do in some
of these other areas of California and in other states.
So I just want to tell you what I believe this election is about, what
I think the signal differences are and what the choice is for America. I
want to begin by thanking the people of San Francisco and California for
being so good to me and Hillary and Al and Tipper Gore these last eight
years. I can't thank you enough. It has been an honor to serve.
(Applause.)
But let's start with this. There are a lot of younger people who can
vote now, and I'm the only President they've ever known. (Laughter.) And
there are a lot of people who literally don't remember what it was like
eight years ago when the unemployment rate in California was nearly 10
percent, the society was divided, crime was going up, there were riots in
L.A., the environment was deteriorating.
The schools were troubled, the number of people without health
insurance going up every year. We had all these problems. And the
political system in Washington was pretty unresponsive. And I came here
and asked you to give us a chance to put the American people first again.
Now, President Reagan used to say the test for whether somebody got
reelected was, or whether a party was continued in office was whether you
were better off than you were eight years ago. Now, all of a sudden, they
have forgotten that test, another party. They think there ought to be some
other test, you know. Or they think if we're better off, the Democrats had
nothing to do with it.
One of Al Gore's finest moments in the first debate was when his
opponent said, I think Clinton-Gore got a lot more out of the economy than
the economy got out of Clinton-Gore. The American people have been working
hard. They brought this economy back. And Al Gore said, yes, the American
people have been working hard, but they were working hard in 1992 when it
was in the dumps, and it's different now. (Applause.)
So I want to say, the first big question: do you want to keep this
prosperity going and give it to the people who aren't a part of it yet?
(Applause.) If you do, you only have one choice: Al Gore, Joe Lieberman
and the Democrats. (Applause.) But you've got to be able to tell somebody
in a couple of minutes, why. So let me explain that, in a couple of
minutes.
Here's the Gore-Lieberman Democratic program: keep paying down the
debt. Why? It keeps interest rates low, it keeps the economy going. Take
what's left and invest it in education, health care and the environment,
and a tax cut we can afford for average Americans for child care, long-term
care, college tuition and retirement savings. That's the Gore plan.
(Applause.)
What's the alternative? A tax cut that's three times as big.
Although most of you would do better under the Gore plan -- after I get out
of office, I might do better under theirs. (Laughter.) And to privatize
Social Security and promise to spend money on their own.
Here's the problem. This is arithmetic. People ask me all the time,
Mr. President, what great new idea did you bring to economic policy? And I
say, arithmetic. Arithmetic. (Laughter and applause.) You've got to make
the numbers add up. Now, look, everybody can remember this. The projected
surplus is $2 trillion. We'll forget about the zeros -- $2. They want to
spend over three-quarters of it on a tax cut that benefits mostly upper
income people. It costs $1.6 trillion, with interest.
Then they want to privatize Social Security, and that costs a trillion
dollars. Why? Because if the young folks here take your money out of
Social Security and put it in the stock market, but people like me get
promised we're going to get our money, the money has got to come from
somewhere. It costs a trillion dollars.
Then they want to spend some money. They want to spend about half a
trillion dollars, that's $.5. Here's the problem: the surplus is $2
trillion, right -- $1.6 trillion for the tax cut, plus $1 trillion to
privatize Social Security, plus $.5 to spend is $3.1 trillion. Three point
one is bigger than two. (Laughter and applause.)
This is not rocket science, folks. (Laughter.) If you vote for Al
Gore and Joe Lieberman and the Democrats, interest rates will be about a
percent lower every year for a decade. Do you know what that means? Lower
car loans, lower college loans, lower home mortgages, lower credit cards,
lower business loans, more businesses, more jobs, higher stock market.
(Applause.)
Now, look, this is a big deal. This is the first economic recovery in
30 years where we're all going along for the ride. It's a Democratic
recovery, big "D" and small "d"; we're all going along: average income, up
15 percent; average income over $40,000 for the first time; poverty among
seniors below 10 percent for the first time; poverty at a 20-year low; a 30
percent drop in child poverty; half the people moving from welfare to work.
This is a different America, because we did it to benefit everybody and
because the numbers add up. (Applause.)
So you can remember that. If you want to keep the recovery going,
you've got to vote for Gore. Why? Because three point one is bigger than
two; it doesn't add up. (Laughter.)
Number two, it's not just a better off country, it's a better country.
What do I mean by that? Crime at a 26-year low; the number of people
without health insurance going down for the first time in a dozen years;
cleaner air, cleaner water, safer food, safer drinking water; more toxic
waste dumps cleaned up, three times as many as they did; and more land set
aside forever than in any administration since that of Theodore Roosevelt a
hundred years ago. (Applause.)
But most important of all, there is the revival of American education.
That's why Bob Chase, the president of the National Education Association
is here for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman today. Thank you, Bob, for being
here with us. (Applause.)
Now, look, here are the facts. Reading, math and science scores are
up. The dropout rate is down. The college-going rate is at an all-time
high, thanks in part to the biggest expansion of college aid since the G.I.
Bill. (Applause.) Thanks to Barbara Boxer, we are now serving 800,000
kids in after-school programs around America. We're putting 100,000
teachers in the classroom. We're moving in the right direction.
(Applause.)
We have 1,700 charter schools in America. We have a program to turn
around failing schools or put them under new management. We're moving in
the right direction. So here's the issue. If education and health care
and the environment and crime are moving in the right direction, do you
want to build on the progress of the last eight years and even do better?
AUDIENCE: Yes! (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Well, if you do -- if you do, there's only one choice:
Al Gore, Joe Lieberman and the Democrats. Why? If somebody asks you, you
have to be able to say why. Why? Because the other party has promised --
promised -- to do the following things: to abolish our program to put
100,000 and more police on the street; to abolish our program to put
100,000 teachers in the classroom for smaller classes in the early grades;
to oppose our program to promote school construction, to build new schools
and repair old ones.
They're against our program for a patients' bill of rights, for
Medicare drugs for all our seniors, to expand coverage to all the children
of the country and the parents of children in the Children's Health
Program. And they are against the tighter clean air standards we have
adopted. They want to repeal my order setting aside 40 million roadless
acres in the national forests.
Now, those are commitments, right? So here's your choice. If
everything is going in the right direction and one ticket wants to build on
it and the other ticket wants to reverse what was done, it's not much of a
choice. But you've got to be able to say that. You've got to be able to
say, crime is down, the schools are better, the environment is cleaner,
we're making progress in health care, and everything that we have done,
they want to undo; instead, vote for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman. They will
build on it and do even better. That is the second choice. (Applause.)
So here's the third choice. Here's the third big question. And for
me, the most important of all. Yes, I want to keep building on the
prosperity. Yes, I want to keep building on the progress. But most of
all, I want us to keep building together as one America across all the
lines that divide us. (Applause.)
This country has become more and more diverse. California, our first
state in which Americans of European heritage are no longer in the majority
-- (applause) -- there is no majority here, we're all just here, folks.
(Applause.)
We've tried for the last eight years to make you feel at home, to make
you feel that you had friends in the White House, people that cared about
you. Whatever your racial or religious background, whether you were a man
or a woman, whether you were young or old, whether you were straight or
gay, we wanted you to feel like you had a friend in the White House.
(Applause.)
Now, what did that mean in practical terms? We fought for family
leave, the minimum wage, we fought to mend but not end affirmative action,
we fought for fairness for immigrants, we're fighting for hate crimes
legislation, for employment nondiscrimination legislation, for equal pay
for women enforcement. (Applause). We are fighting for court appointments
so that we'll have a Supreme Court that will defend civil rights, human
rights and a woman's right to choose. That is an issue. (Applause.)
In every one of those areas, the people who are running on the other
side have an honest disagreement with the Democrats. The leadership does
not agree with the hate crimes legislation or the employment
nondiscrimination legislation or strengthening the equal pay laws. And
they certainly don't commit themselves to a Supreme Court and federal
courts that will preserve civil rights, human rights and a woman's right to
choose.
Now, they disagree honestly. But for people to say there are no
differences in these elections -- you should be happy. The country is in
great shape and you have choices. But it's important to understand what
the choices are. You don't have to say a bad word about any of their
candidates from the President on down. You can just say, look, we have a
different view of what's good for America.
But I'm telling you, the reason this election is so close is that I
think people feel a certain comfort level with how well things are going.
And, you know, this one sounds good and that one sounds good; and today I
like this one, today I like the other one.
But this is an exercise in citizenship. And I'm telling you, I've
been doing this a long time now. This is the first time in 26 years I
haven't been on the ballot at election time. (Laughter.) And I'm
perfectly happy out here campaigning for the Democrats for Congress and for
Hillary for senator and for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman. I'm grateful.
(Applause.)
But what you have to do -- I'm telling you, you can do this for
people. You can walk up to people you know, you can walk up to people you
don't know. But I'm telling you, you cannot let this election unfold
unless everybody you know votes and votes as a knowledgeable citizen. If
you want to build on the prosperity, if you want to build on the social
progress of the last eight years, if you want to keep going forward as one
America where we keep coming together across all the lines that divide us,
those are the three big questions.
And if you want to do that, you only have one choice: Al Gore, Joe
Lieberman and the Democrats.
Thank you, and God bless you. (Applause.)
END 1:08 P.M. PST
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