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Remarks at a Reception for Hillary Clinton in Indianapolis, Indiana
Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 30, 2000
October 21, 2000
Thank you very much. Well, when Bren was up here talking, I thought to myself, that pretty well covers it, why should I speak? [Laughter] Thank you for our incredible generosity and support and friendship to me and to Hillary. And thank you, Mel. I want to thank Cindy and Paul for hosting this in their beautiful home in this beautiful yard. And I think I should say that today is Mel's 74th birthday, and we ought to be among the first to wish him a happy birthday.
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You know, we're going to have to redefine our definition of aging, by the way. Anybody--today, Americans who live to be 65, on average, have a life expectancy of 82. Americans who live to be 74 have a life expectancy of over 85. And the fastest growing group of people by percentage in the whole country are Americans over 80. Pretty soon, because of the human genome project, young women will come home with babies from the hospital that will be born with a life expectancy of 90 years, which means that in the context of the 21st century, Mel is just entering middle age. [Laughter] And we wish you along and happy life. [Laughter]
I want to thank my friend and supporter and Representative Julia Carson. I'm glad to be able to come back here and also do some events for her this morning. She is unbelievable in Congress. Everybody up there loves her. And she's--I told somebody that she may be an African-American woman, but she has the political skills of an Arkansas Ozark sheriff when she's working the Congress. [Laughter] She sort of sidles into a room. When she leaves she's got what she wants and nobody knows what they gave away until it's too late. [Laughter] It's great. Thank you, Julia Carson, for doing a great job.
And I want to thank Raft Peterson. I was so thrilled when he got elected, and I'm glad he and Amy are here today. And I want to say a personal word of appreciation to Frank and Judy O'Bannon. I have enjoyed my friendship with them. They have visited with Hillary and me at the White House. I want you to make sure that this election goes very well for the Governor, because he has done very well by Indiana. You can be really proud of him. And I'm delighted to be here with him today.
And finally, I want to thank Joe Andrew, who has been a great chair of the DNC. Joe, I have to tell you, when I woke up this morning and I looked outside on this beautiful piece of land and the trees are all turning and I realized how close we are to a golf course--[laugher]--I questioned your judgment in leaving Indiana and moving to Washington to deal with the sharks to be head of the DNC. But I'm real glad you did. You've done a great job, and I thank you and the Indiana people should be very proud of Joe Andrew. Thank you.
Now, I will be brief. I enjoyed visiting with all of you inside. I just wanted to say a couple of things. This election is very important--the election-Hillary's election for the Senate, in which you have helped immensely today, because she's doing well up there, I think she's going to win, but I don't want her to be outspent three to one in the last 21/2 weeks. And obviously, the people who opposed us all along are trying to give it one last shot before they give up and Hillary wins the Senate and I'm not in the White House. So we've had a pretty brisk fundraising opposition to deal with, too. So I'm very, very grateful to you for that.
But I also wanted to say that I think that as we come into the homestretch of this election, the only thing that concerns me about it is the repeated number of articles I keep reading which say that the undecided voters and the people who might decide not to vote are not quite sure whether this election makes a difference and what the differences between the candidates are for the various races they're considering.
And all I can tell you is that I think the election makes a huge difference, and I can hardly remember a time when the differences between the candidates on the issues that will affect our families, our communities, and our children's futures were any more sharp. It is absolutely clear to me that if the American people--the people in Indiana, just starting in your Governor's race here--if you understand the differences between the candidates and the consequences to families, communities, and the future, we win. If people are uncertain about the differences and the significance, then we're in trouble.
I met with my Democratic colleagues in the Senate and the House at the early part of this week, and I said, "You know, you ought to look at yourselves as sort of a weather patrol: Clear, we win; cloudy, they do well. We've got to try to make the skies clear for people. They have to understand the choices."
And I would just say just two or three things this morning. Number one, Bren talked about the condition of the economy. And people ask me all the time, "Why is the economy doing so well, and what did you do when you got in? What new idea did you bring to Washington?" And the truth is we did have some new ideas about how to make the most of technology and speed up the retraining of the American work force. We had some new ideas, but the main thing we brought to Washington was an old idea, arithmetic.
