Speech: Remarks of President Clinton at Drew University

April 13, 2005
Madison, NJ

I thank you for that wonderful welcome. I’m honored by the presence of Governor Cody here. Thank you very much for being here. And I thank the members of the Drew faculty who are here, but especially our long-time friends, Don and Karen Jones, and all of the others who have contributed into making this such a great school.

I am really honored to be the Inaugural Speaker at the Tom Kean Visiting Lecturer History and Political Science Program. You know, that’s Kean’s a better politician than I am. [LAUGHS] Usually to have something like that named after you, that takes so long to say, you’ve got to be dead first. [LAUGHS] He also got a job where he could keep the title “Mr. President” for more than eight years, [LAUGHS] which I was profoundly impressed by.

You know, I was talking to Tom on the way out here and I was looking at him and I-- He’s older than I am, and looks younger, which I resent, but anyway. [LAUGHS] I thinking that we may be two dinosaurs, a Republican and a Democrat who actually like each other [LAUGHS] and admire each other [CHEERS] and work together. [APPLAUSE]

Tom became famous obviously when he served as Co-Chair with my old friend, Lee Hamilton of the 9/11 Commission, and I spent four hours answering their questions, so I can promise you they did a thorough job. But long before that, I knew that he was a leader that reached across party lines to try to solve problems and move our country forward.

When we were Governors together, he mentioned this, I succeeded him as Chairman of the Education Commission of the States. And I’ll never forget, I came up here to New Jersey for a meeting one time, he hosted on education. We worked together on Welfare reform. In 1987, we co-Chaired a Commission-- We both served on the Commission for the Carnegie Council on Middle School Education and I’m proud to say that we were the first group, Tom and I and the others, who served to recommended that community service be made a part of the regular school curriculum of all schools in the United States, which I strongly believed in then and I still do. [APPLAUSE]

In 1995, he agreed to be the Vice Chairman of the American Delegation of World Conference on Women in Beijing, and he talked about race. He agreed to serve on the President’s Initiative on Race Advisory Board. They did a marvelous job. He gave me lots of wonderful suggestions and in spite of the confidence he gave me, there were lots of things still to be done when I left office. My last message to Congress, on the day before I left the Oval Office, was on closing the remaining racial divides in America and the message came right out of the work and recommendations of the Board on which Tom served with such distinction.

And he told me the other day-- I mean, tonight, before we came in, I got him to Chair our national campaign to reduce teen pregnancy and told him it was going to be a year-long job, and he’s about to celebrate his 10 year anniversary in that post. [LAUGHS] So I’m surprised that he let me come at all. I say that because, as I’ve said many times, in many places, if Tom Kean were to call me in the middle of the night tonight and told me to empty my bank account and bring it over tomorrow morning, I’d do it without asking any questions. And I think-- [APPLAUSE]

I think that it’s a good thing to have healthy, honest, open political debates. I don’t care how sharp it is or how pronounced it is, particularly if the differences are deep. But we wouldn’t still be here as a great nation if people who differed with each other politically had been bad people.

When I wrote my autobiography, all of a sudden I remembered a story that I had forgotten, I guess, somewhere in the dim recesses. I ran across a note about it. But when I was in the 8th grade, I had a Science teacher named Vernon Dolke(?), who was an ex Coach. And Mr. Dolke’s wife was my History teacher, and his sister-in-law was my Geometry teacher. I was 13 years old. And his-- And to put it mildly, his wife and his sister-in-law were very attractive women, and no one ever made the mistake of saying, “Vernon Dolke was a handsome man.” He wore very thick glasses. He by then had gained a lot of weight. He had kind of a hawk nose, and he smoked very cheap cigars with a cigar holder that he kept in his mouth that gave him a real pinched look. He thought it was funny that he was no Hollywood movie star.

So one day we were sitting in class and he looked at us and he said, “Kids, most of you will never remember a thing you learn in this Science class.” (Keep in mind, this was 45 years ago and I remember this verbatim). [LAUGHS] He said, “Most of you will never remember anything you learn in this Science class, but if you don’t remember anything else, remember this.” He said, “Every morning I get up and I go into my bathroom and I throw water on my face. I put the shaving cream on, I shave, I look in the mirror and I say, ‘Vernon, you’re beautiful.’” [LAUGHS] He said, “You just remember that. Everybody wants to think they’re beautiful.”
And I think we have made a mistake in this country over the last 20 years and nobody’s entirely blameless for it, by thinking that we should demonize with whom we occasionally disagree. And I think that-- [APPLAUSE]

Some of the proudest moment in the long and rich life I had in public service were the moments both personal and public that I shared with Tom Kean, and that’s why I’m here tonight. I’m honored to be here. And I hope that those of you young people who are here, who care about public service, whether you are a Republican or a Democratic, consider yourself a liberal or conservative, will remember that.

The founding fathers knew that no one could be trusted with absolute power and no one had the complete truth. They gave us a commission, which is timeless, to form a more perfect union. They said, “A more perfect union,” because they both were progressive and that they believed in the idea of progress. But they were conservative in that they did not believe in the perfectibility of human nature on this earth in this lifetime. So they never said, “You can form a perfect union” and they never said, “We should junk the government because we can’t do any better.”

They said our common mission, from our different perspectives, was to find a way to form a more perfect union. So I think about that now from a very different perspective. The politician in my family is not me anymore. [LAUGHS] I was at the UN today talking about Tsunami Relief and one of the reporters asked me whether I thought Mr. Bolton should be confirmed as the Ambassador to the United Nations. And I said, “Well, one person in my family actually has a vote on that and it’s not me [LAUGHS] and she doesn’t tell me how to run Tsunami Relief and I’m not about to tell her how to vote on that nomination. [LAUGHS] So for the sake of my domestic tranquility, I take a pass.” [FEW CLAPS]

It’s wonderful not be in anymore. I can take a dive whenever I want. I can say whatever I want. [LAUGHS] Here’s what I would like to do tonight. I would like to take you on a little intellectual and emotional trip. I want you to think about this and you may get lost in your own thoughts and stop paying attention to me, and that’s okay too. If you’ll just think about the subject. Because what I want you to think about tonight is, what is the nature of the 21st Century world in which we find ourselves? What are its opportunities? What are its challenges? What are its immutable characteristics? What is the role of the United States in dealing with the challenges and opportunities? What is the role of government? And what is your role and responsibility, whether you’re in public life or you’re a private citizen?
I think in some ways, the most important kind of intelligence a public leader can have is sort of a synthesizing one, that is the ability to see disparate elements and put them in a pattern that gives people a way to understand the life that we’re living and a way to decide how he or she should act on it, from their perspective or their values, with their own ideas.

Most people describe this as the age of globalization. It’s a word I nearly never use, not because I dislike it, but because I think it has an almost exclusively economic connotation. And to be sure we have a highly globalized economy. But if you go back and read the history of the early 20th Century a hundred years ago, there were several countries, including the United States, that were nearly as trade dependent then as Europe and the US are now. And then we messed it all up in World War I and afterward.

But the difference is that the amount of interconnections today are not only greater, but they go far beyond economics. So I like to refer to this as the age of interdependence. We are bound together by trade and travel, by immigration, by culture, by technology. We know things about each other we didn’t used to know, and we cannot escape each other.

Now this interdependence can be very good, and I’ll just give you a couple of examples. When I was President and we had all that good economic growth, about 30% of our new jobs came from the expansion of trade, and those jobs paid on average 30% more than comparable jobs in non-trade-affiliated enterprises.

Another example. When I became President, there were only 50 sites on the Internet. When I left, there were 50,000,000 on something called the Worldwide Web. And when I became President, the average cell phone weighed five pounds. [LAUGHS] Today, I’m just hoping that I can figure out a way to hit the keys on the phone. They’re so small.

When the tsunami hit Southeast Asia, the miracle of technology contributed to the most unprecedented outpouring in the United States and around the world from ordinary citizens to help their fellow human beings across the globe. USA Today reported that not only had, at that time, Americans pledged or given over $700,000,000 (now probably around a billion dollars), but that about a third of American households had contributed to Tsunami Relief through their religious organizations or charities, and over half of them had given over the Internet.

In this last Presidential campaign, for the first time since money became important, really important because it costs so much money to buy advertising. For the first time, the small donors swamped the big donors in the collective impact of their gifts because both parties raised unprecedented amounts of money over the Internet through high technology.

At the end of my tenure as President in the second term, an international independent coalition of scientists succeeded in sequencing the human genome for the first time, something which will revolutionize life. Already the two main genetic markers for, that are high predictors of breast cancer have been identified. We’re closer to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Soon young mothers The young women students in this audience, when you bring your babies home from the hospital, you’ll soon have little gene cards, which will literally give you a roadmap to the strengths and weaknesses of your child’s makeup. Some of it will be scary but even with the problems, you will have a dramatically increased chance to give your child a long and healthy and happy life.

All that is really good and really exciting, but there are negatives to this age of interdependence. The best one I can think of is the one Tom became famous for analyzing and that’s 9/11. 9/11 arguably was made possible by the independent world, where 19 people, who were not from the United States, used the forces of interdependence. They used open borders, easy access to information, easy access to technology, to turn jet airplanes into massive chemical weapons to kill almost 3,000 people from 70 countries who were here grasping for the positive interdependence that is represented in the United States, and particularly in this part of our country.

Therefore, what I would say to you is that this age of interdependence, like every age that is preceded before in human history has good and bad points. The one thing that is immutable is the interdependence. We cannot escape each other. The microcosm I often cite is the Middle East. When I was President, for about seven of the eight years that I was there, we had determined progress towards peace in the Middle East. In 1998, was the only time in the history of the state of Israel In 1998, there was not a single person killed by a terrorist attack and they had a change of government there and a big election and massive land transfers, all kinds of things were going on but they were working together. There was a sense of positive interdependence. Then the Intifada started after the now-Prime Minster went upon the Temple Mount and then it intensified when Mr. Arafat (foolishly, I believe) turned down the peace proposal that I put on the table. So then we had four years of pure hell.

In the eight years I was President, fewer than 260 Israelis were killed by terrorist attacks. In the next four years, over 1,000 were. Over 4,000 Palestinians died. The average age of the Israelis was 24; the average of the Palestinians was 18. But in the last four years they were not a bit less interdependent than they were in the previous seven, when we were moving toward peace. Now we have a new chance. We have a new government among the Palestinians that express disavow of terrorism and new hope for progress. So you see positive interdependence.

Whether you agree with the wall that’s being built or not in Israel, if it’s good, it’s good because it will minimize violence to save lives on both sides while the thing’s being worked out. But you can build all the walls you want, they still won’t be able to escape each other. Whether you like the wall or not, it certainly won’t end the sense of interdependence which exists.

Now if you believe that, if you believe we live in an age that is interdependent, that has lots of good things and new dangers, then that leads you, I think, logically to what the mission of the United States should be and what our mission as citizens of our country and the world should be. We should attempt to build up the forces of positive interdependence, to reduce the forces of negative interdependence, to move from a relatively unstable situation with good and bad to more of an integrated community, both within the United States and beyond our borders, which I defined as a place where there are shared responsibilities, shared benefits and shared basic values: everybody counts, deserves a chance, has a responsibility to play a role, the competition is good but we all do better when we work together, the differences are important and make life more interesting, but our common humanity matters more. Now it seems to me that that’s the way the world should go.

So whenever anybody asks a question, “How do you feel about: any domestic proposal before the Congress, any item in a budget, any issue being debated anywhere in the state government throughout America, some subject before the United Nations?” The first question I ask myself (whatever the subject is), is “Will this help to move us from interdependence to an integrated global community? Will this advance the cause of either shared responsibilities or shared benefits? Does it reflect our shared values?” And it makes life at least manageable for me in a bewildering complicated world. That’s the prism through which I view things.

Now you don’t have to agree with my analysis, but you need one of your own. If you don’t agree with that, you need to ask yourself, “What do you think the immutable characteristics of the modern world are? How will you analyze all of the things that are flying at you from an apparently disparate position and all the complicated issues that are constantly on display in our lives?”

One of the big challenges of this exciting time is that we live in a world with so much inequality. No matter how pretty you paint the picture of the modern world, about half the people simply aren’t part of it and the statistics tell the tale. Half the world-- There’s over 6,000,000,000 people on earth today. Half the world still lives on less than $2.00 a day; a billion people live on less than $1.00 a day; a billion people will go to bed hungry tonight; a billion and a half people have no access to clean water.

When I started working on this Tsunami Relief, one of the biggest things we worried about was dysentery, cholera and other diseases spreading because even more people, millions more, would have no access to clean water. Ten million children will die this year of completely preventable childhood diseases, because the inequality in the healthcare system. 130,000,000 children this year, of school age kids, will darken a schoolhouse door. Tom and I worry about how to raise standards, how to improve the equality of education. 130,000,000 kids never see a school book, never see a school teacher. In many of the poorest places of the world, in Africa, parents still have to pay to send their kids to the public school because there are no revenues to pay for them otherwise.

And I could give you lots of other examples. The one that I care a lot about, in AIDS, is the most maddening problem of all. Here we have a disease that’s completely preventable, where there’s medicine that is almost 100% effective in blocking the transmission from infected mothers to their children, other medicine that works way over half the time to give healthy people with their HIV viruses that develop AIDS a chance to live a normal life span. And if you look at the poor countries of the world, you have 6,000,000 people at death’s door. And when I started this project on AIDS a couple of years ago, only 300,000 were getting medicine, 130,000 of them were in one country, Brazil, because the government gave it to them.

Today, our Foundation, in two years, is getting medicine to 110,000 others, in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. We’re about to go to work in Ukraine and Northwest Russia. But the fact remains that all over the world, there are people who are trying to build their future, being hobbled by a disease that shouldn’t be killing all the people that are being killed.

We made an announcement this week that we’re going to give pediatric medicine to 10,000 children this year. Last year 500,000 preteens died of AIDS, 500,000 in the world. Only 25,000 get pediatric medicine, in the whole world. Over half of them are in two countries, Brazil and Thailand, because the government gives it to them. So by committing to get the medicine to 10,000 people, we have virtually doubled the number of children getting medicine. Next year, we’ll do 60,000. It’s a maddening problem but it is a representative of the drastic inequality of the modern world.

I was meeting with the Ambassadors to the UN of the tsunami-effected countries today and I was laughing with the Indian Ambassador because they recently had an election in India. And no one predicted that the incumbent government would be voted out and that the Congress party would be returned to power in India. Why? Because the economy was booming. And it’s interesting, it’s the only election I know of where an incumbent was defeated because the economy was doing so well, and let me explain by what I mean by that.

The Indian election was a microcosm of the challenge of global interdependence. India has about a billion people. It has the largest middle-class in the world, bigger even than China’s, about 350,000,000 people in the middle-class, by international definition standards. The problem is 650,000,000 people aren’t in the middle-class and they get the same media everybody else does and they want in. They don’t live in the ambit of one of those seven big high tech centers, or the Government Center in Delhi, or in one of the big coastal trading cities that’s making money out of trade. So they put a new government in because the party that won said, “We’ll spread the prosperity. We’ll have shared benefits.”

And I was arguing today that the tsunami, the devastation of it, actually gave the new government a chance to prove their theory in the areas that had been affected, by improving the economy beyond where it had been before the tsunami hit. I’m sort of giving you this sketch of the world so you’ll kind of see the formidable challenges. It sounds so great. “We’re going to share responsibilities, share benefits.” But it’s easier said than done.

Now I think what should be done is the following, for the United States. We need a security policy. We need to fight terror and reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction. We need more institutionalized cooperation. This is the place where I’ve often been at odds with the incumbent government because I favored putting America in the International Criminal Court system, once our soldiers were protected. I favored the... [APPLAUSE]

I favored the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. I favored the International Treaty on Global Warming, the Kyoto Accord. I favored those things and... [APPLAUSE] Not because there wasn’t something wrong with every one of then, not because I thought I would agree with every decision. We established the World Trade Organization and America went in, when I was President, and they made a couple of decisions that I thought were nutty, that I didn't like and didn't think were fair to America. But I joined for the same reason you join and stay in any larger group. I thought it was better for us to be in than out. I thought we got more benefits than burdens. If you think about any voluntary unions, starting with the smallest one, a marriage, a business, a civic club. Any organization, which you join and stay in, that you could leave, you stay in, not because you agree with every decision that’s made, but because you think it’s better to stay in than to leave. Your life is enriched. You’re better off. That’s why you do it. Not because you agree with all the decisions. [LIGHT APPLAUSE]

So I will say again, I was gratified when President Bush encouraged me to take this tsunami job with the UN and said he wanted the United States to continue to support the UN and hoped that we’d be closer in his second term, because I think that it’s very important for the United States to set a good example. We can’t ask other people to abide by international rule and join international organizations unless we also do that, so think that’s important. [APPLAUSE]

The third thing I think we need is a wholesale assault on the inequalities of the world to share the benefits, and we know how to do it now. We used to be able to say, “Well, we shouldn’t Our foreign aid programs are for just throwing money at the problems. They don’t work.” And frankly, that was often true, particularly when I was growing up and coming of age in politics and a lot of our AIDS programs were designed to farther our political interests in fighting communism during the Cold War. But that’s simply not true anymore. We do know how to do this.

In 2000, for example, in my last year as President, we had unprecedented, completely bipartisan effort to relieve the debt of the poorest countries in the world if, and only if, they put all the benefits from debt relief into education, healthcare and economic development. And the benefits to these countries have been absolutely stunning. We know how to do this. And I am gratified that there seems to be more and more of a bipartisan consensus and a liberal conservative consensus that I think we should do more in AIDS and other things, which I appreciate.

It is far cheaper for us to pay America’s fair share of putting 130,000,000 kids in school, helping the kids live, who are now dying of preventable childhood diseases, finding an appropriate global response to the AIDS crisis and other healthcare crises. It’s far cheaper to do all that than to go to war anywhere. [APPLAUSE, CHEERS]

Now I say that because-- Walk through this with me. Whether you agree with what we did in Iraq or not, you should all hope that it works now, [LIGHT APPLAUSE] because they had an election. They had a bigger turnout than we had, a higher percentage of their eligible voters voted under very adverse circumstances. So whether you think we did the right thing or not, or it was all done right or not, or whatever reservations we all had, those folks showed up and they were glad to be shed of Saddam Hussein and they want to have a chance to build a future, so we should hope it works. But it’s cost over $200,000,000,000. It will soon cost us more than World War I did, in inflation-adjusted dollars. And what that means is, whether it was the right thing to do or not the right thing to do, it’s an example of the first adage we all learned in law school (those of us who went to law school that is), which is, “Hard cases make bad law,” that is, you can’t make a rule of it. This is not something we can do every day, everywhere. Whether it was right or wrong, we have--

In New Jersey, in Arkansas (where I come from), in New York, Hillary represents on the Armed Services Committee of the Senate, hears story after story after story of the military overstretch, the strains on the traditional military, the economic and personal burdens on the National Guard members and Reservists, so we have to have a strategy not only that fights our enemies, but also makes a world with more friends and fewer enemies, and it’s far less expensive. You get more hang for the buck. It doesn’t mean we won’t have to go to war again. It doesn’t mean we won’t have to have a security policy. It doesn’t mean we don’t need a smart defense and especially a smarter homeland defense system. But it means that setting aside a significant but a much smaller amount of money to pay our fair share of building a world with more shared benefits will have enormous, enormous positive repercussions.

And I will just give you one example, but it’s a stunner. On March the 8th, the former President Bush and I went to the White House to report to the President on our trip to the tsunami-affected areas and what we found and how we thought the contributions of America, the private contributions, as well as the government contributions, should be invested. And right before I went in, a man who had worked with us with the U.S. aid program gave me a poll, which had just been released in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, 200,000,000 people.

If you all remember the gripping pictures in Aichi, of the American military helicopters going to those remote areas, giving lifesaving supplies. You may not have seen, but I did personally, the American aid workers and the people from the religious organizations and the other non-governmental organizations, they are serving, just helping people, because it’s the right thing to do. There was heavy publicity in the Indonesian media about overwhelming number of ordinary Americans sending aid to the tsunami. So this was the first survey and it was a very large one done.

Before the tsunami, the positive opinion of the United States was 36%, afterward it was about 60%. The only reason cited was what the American people and their representatives had done in the tsunami. Before the tsunami, the postiive opinions of Osama bin Laden in Indonesia was 58%. After the tsunami in the poll, his positive rating was 28%. The only reason cited was our response to the tsunami. It’s easier to kick down a barn than to build one. He didn’t do anything to try to help these people after the tsunami, but a lot of ordinary people in New Jersey did and they got it. [APPLAUSE] And they knew, they knew we had no political agenda. Indonesia became the only majority Muslim country in this poll, where at least the plurality said that America should now lead the war against terror all across the world. Why? Not because of military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, but because of our tsunami aid.

So the point I’m trying to make is, if you live in an interdependent world, if you can’t slay, imprison or occupy all your adversaries, you have to take some money and some time to build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries. And when you do, you reduce the number of obligations you’ll have to use force and the times you’ll be forced to do it. You will increase the impact when you do have to use force and more people will think that it wasn’t your first choice. This is very, very important. You have no idea. If anybody in this room today gave $5.00 to any organization for Tsunami Relief, you have no idea what you did to help the image of your country around the world. It’s just because you didn’t have a political agenda. You did the right thing because you wanted to help people.

So we have to have a security policy. We have to have a policy of institutional cooperation. We have to have a policy to make more friends and fewer terrorists. We have to keep working to make America better and to realize that the decisions that we make in this country do have impacts around the world. This is about the only, the closest I want to come to politics tonight, unless you ask me about it.

You know, I never had a nickle to my name till I got out of the White House. When Tom and I were serving as Govenor, every year but the last year I was Govenor, I made $35,000 a year. I was the lowest paid Governor in America and most of my constituents thought I was getting too much. [LAUGHS]

So then I get out and I start making all this money and Low and behold, in 2001, they throw this big tax cut at me, before our country knows what our income, our expenses or our emergencies are going to be. It turns out the economy goes down so our income’s lower. We have a huge emergency in 9/11, which further depressed our income and necessitated greater expenditures for Homeland Security and for military and we go from a projected surplus of $5.8 trillion dollars over the next decade to a big projected deficit. And then in 2002, they do it all over again and give me another tax cut. And in 2003, they do it again. In 2004, they did it again. And in 2005, they’re debating a budget resolution for another $100,000,000,000 in tax cuts. It sounds so great, but what it means is, here we are the biggest, strongest, richest country in the world telling the world, “We expect you to loan us the money to pay for our government because our people are too selfish to pay for it.” [APPLAUSE] That’s what it says. And “You have to loan us the money.”

Just lest you think I’m kidding, let me tell you how we pay for it. When you see that we’ve got a $400,000,000,000 a year defict, that’s not true. The real operating deficit is about $550,000,000,000, if it’s 450, because we take $150,000,000,000 off the top that we’re paying in Social Security taxes every year that are not being paid out in benefits. Then we put a certificate now in the Social Security Trust Fund and the government has to pay that back some day. But when we have to pay it back, we’ll either have to devastate whole the rest of the government or have a huge tax increase and all those bonds have to be paid back. We stopped doing that in the second term. We finally got rid of the deficit. Then we got rid of the Social Security deficit and we paid down about $600,000,000,000 of the national debt. And I think [APPLAUSE]

My own view is that-- I knew we couldn’t keep doing that forever. Something would happen to the economy. Some emergency would arise, but if we kept that fundamental structure, we still had the lowest tax burden (federal, state and local, of any rich country in the world, except Japan, which is about the same as ours. And we would have been out of debt in this country by somewhere between 2011 and 2015, depending on how the economy developed, and we would have had the money from savings, since we wouldn’t have to pay interest on the debt. That could have been used to completely alleviate the Social Security crisis. So that’s what I had hoped would happen.

Now I don’t really believe that you’re better off because somebody like me got four tax cuts and apparently is about to get a fifth. You should know that Then we’ve got to go get that $400,000,000,000 and we have a huge trade deficit, and we have to cover that. So every single day, the United States Government goes into the international financial markets and sells its bonds, which is a fancy way of saving “borrows money at interest” and who’s loaning us the money to cover Bill Clinton’s tax cut? Primarily the Chinese, and the Japanese, and the Korean governments, and the Saudis.

Now China’s got a per capita income of something like $1,500 a person and they’re growing like crazy. And we have this huge trade deficit and they’re loan us the money to keep our dollar up, so we can afford to buy their imports. And maybe you think this can go on forever, but I don’t. And I don’t think it’s a good idea. Last year, funding our budget and trade deficits, took 80% of the net savings of the entire world. We are about 4% of the world’s population. We produce about 20% of the world’s wealth. So you might argue that, “Well, okay, we’re entitled to 20% of the world’s savings.” Maybe for a good investment opportunity, maybe 25 or 30, but 80% to cover these tax cuts, because politicians think it’s cancerous to talk about taxes, and always good politics to talk about tax cuts? It may be, but the truth is, folks, every year you demand more government than you’re willing to pay for. So we go borrow money from people that are poorer than we are, in worse shape than we are, and mortgage our children’s future to them to cover our unwillingness to pay for what we’re doing today, and I don’t think it’s right.

Keynesian economics, a lot of the people who do this today say, “Well, we’ll just do what the liberal Democrats did in the 60’s.” And the truth is, I thought they were wrong then. That’s not quite true. John Maynard Keynes believed that we should run deficits when there is a recession to stimulate the economy. And when the economy is growing, we should balance the budget or run surpluses. That’s what Keynesian economics really is. This idea that it doesn’t matter whether you run deficits and borrow money from now to kingdom come is just crazy.

And I can tell you that if any other country in the world, any other country, followed our budget policies, they would last about a nanosecond before their markets would crash. People would stop investing in them. People would stop supporting their security. Mexico and Brazil would be indentured servants to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund for the next decade, if they did what we did. So you’ve got to decide whether you think that’s okay. But when you want us to help other countries, you want us do all this, remember, you have to add up all the good things we do and then count against that all the money we take away from the rest of the world to finance our deficits, and you should ask yourself if that’s a bill you really want to saddle your kids with. That’s why it costs you more to go to Europe today, by the way. That’s why the value of the American dollar has dropped 30% because they don’t run those kind of deficits and they’re worried about it.

So the reason I’m making this point, to ask you to evaluate every single debate over the budget and social policy in America through this prism. If we want to lead the world to greater interdependence, we have to set a good example and we have to keep making a more perfect union here at home, And I think having 4,000,000 people lose their health insurance and more people in poverty and concentrating more wealth in people like me, who ought to feel privilege is not the right thing to do.

I had a roommate that I lived with for four years in college. He’s a pilot. He was raised in a conservative Republican family in New York. He’s an Irish-Catholic conservative. His father was a member of the conservative party because he thought the Republicans were too liberal. [FEW LAUGHS] We had wonderful debates over Civil Rights and things like that in the 1960’s. When walked into my first freshman dorm room, there was a GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT sticker on my door. I thought, “God, I left Arkansas to get away from all that.” [LAUGHS] There I was.

This guy is like a brother to me. When we graduated from college, he became a Marine pilot in the Vietnam era. Both his sons are Marine Corp officers, both have served in Iraq and risked their lives for you and me. And I think it’s amazing, given what I know about the strains on these military families, the Guardsman and the Reservists. The people in my income group are the only people in America that have not been asked to contribute one red cent to the war on terror, [APPLAUSE] to the welfare of our men and women in uniform, and to their future. [APPLAUSE CONTINUING]

You know, I should not have been given a pass on that. And most people I know in my income group, Republicans and Democrats agree with me, so you have to think about that. But the larger point is, whether you think I’m right about this or not, time will tell. We’ll see, if we can run this string out forever, and we’ll know eventually whether I’m right or the administration’s economists are right. But whoever’s right, we can’t hope to lead an interdependent world unless we keep making it a more perfect union here at home.

I want to make two other brief points. The great thing about the modern world is you can make a positive difference, whether you agree with your government or not, that the power of technology and two other developments have changed the landscape of the world.

In the 1990’s, two things happened while I was President, for which I had no responsibility. I’m claiming no credit. I was fortunate to be President at the moment in history when they occurred. The first was that for the first time in history, more people lived under governments that they voted in than under dictatorships. It had never happened in all of human history. And that doesn’t count China, which has a quarter of the world’s population and they’re still not a democracy, although they have legitimate village elections in 900,000 Chinese villages.

The second thing that happened was the explosion of non-governmental citizens’ organizations working to make their societies and other societies a better place. Over 33,000 foundations in America. A lot of families have Foundations. The big ones, like the Gates Foundation (the biggest in the world, and a great one). He does great work, Bill Gates, in Africa and India and other places. Or small ones, like the one I work with in India, the Self-Employed Women’s Association, where these women get together and make sure they give micro-credit loans to buy another cow or start a new sewing operation. They step by step revolutionize village economic life. There’s never been anything like this in all of human history, this so-called Non-Governmental (or NGO movement) where just organizations of people in many poor countries have worked together to galvanize support. There were literally hundreds of them in the tsunami-affected areas, reinforcing what the governments were doing, what the American government was doing, what the UN was doing, what the World Bank could do. It was stunning.

One day I-- I remember back in 2001, when I got my Foundation started. I was shaving one day, like Vernon Dolkey, and I looked in the mirror and I said, “My God, I have become an NGO.” [LAUGHS] That’s what my Foundation is. So we work on AIDS, and we work on Tsunami Relief, and we work on bringing economic opportunity to poor communities. But what I want to say to you is you can do something. You can do something in-- You have hundreds of choices, but I urge you to do something.

I was gratified that so many young Americans voted in this last election, registered and voted. I hope you will continue to be good citizens. I hope you will vote and register and be active. Some of you will run for office and serve in public life some day, but all of you can be active as citizens in a Non-Governmental Organization. And you have to understand that you have an opportunity at this point in history that no generation of people in the entire history of the world has ever had because of technology and travel, have a positive impact, whether it’s in your own community or all the way across the world. And if you believe the world should move from interdependence to an integrated community, then you have a responsibility to find some way to serve.

Why do I think this is right? In the Metropolitan section of The New York Times today, there was a story from Penn State University about a Professor that was arranging DNA tests for his students. Did you see it? There’s a picture of this African-American student, a young guy with long hair and a moustache. He does the DNA test and finds out he’s 48% white. [LAUGHS] And he said, “Gosh, I thought I knew who I was.” [LAUGHS]

What’s that got to do with all this? When the human genome was sequenced, an astonishing set of discoveries flowed that are still not widely understood. First of all, it was demonstrated that human beings genetically are over 99.9% the same. Secondly, and more amazingly, it was demonstrated that if you take groups of let’s say Americans by race and ethnicity. If you take Serbian Americans, Latin Americans, African Americans, Irish Americans, that the genetic difference of individuals within each group will be greater than the group differences from group to group.

And then a lot of then surprising anomalies developed. It turns out there is a tribe of small Heretofore not very well studied, tribe of Africans in North Africa, who have the same genetic makeup as a small sect of Jews that’s been heavily inbred for hundreds and hundreds of years. Nobody knows why. And they share characteristics that no other people on earth share.

For all of human history, people have had to define themselves not only by what they were, but mostly by what they weren’t. So people come out of caves and form clans for their families to protect each other and they’re always looking at the other, people who aren’t a part of their clans. Then slowly the circle of interdependence widens, all the way throughout history. And simultaneously, sadly, the capacity of people who, to destroy others outside that circle increases.

So in World War I, World War II and the Cold War, you had vast blocks of people who felt interdependent across lines that used to divide people and they had the capacity to destroy each other, and a lot of people got killed in the 20th Century. I think parenthetically you should be pretty optimistic about the future because-- The terrorism’s scary but you go back and look at how many people died in the 20th Century. I think it is unlikely that the 21st Century will be as foolish as the 20th Century was.

Anyway, we never had a chance to build a global community of, that was really integrated, where we had shared benefits and shared responsibilities. After World War II, we had the Cold War. We didn’t have a chance to even start working on this really till 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Even then there were a few holdouts. Then a lot of old ethnic, religious and racial conflicts spurted up around the world.

But if you look at the long arch of human history, I think the world’s doing pretty well, and there’s a big difference between the trend lines and the headlines, because in the trend lines, we’ve been reconciled to Russia and largely reconciled to China, and I hope we can continue it. We’ve seen more than half the people living in Democracies and now seeing it spread into the Middle East. We see people at least trying to work on these problems that we share in common like global warming and the proliferation of dangerous weapons. And we see an unprecedented diversity in America and more and more contact between people of difference races and religions and ethnic groups, and it’s because we are more and more free to define ourselves in broader terms, not just in terms of who we are, but in terms of who we are and we’d like to be. So I think that we really have no choice but to keep moving toward this integrated society.

I spend quite a bit of time in Africa now working on AIDS. I’ve learned a lot there from people who don’t have very much in material terms and I’ve been reminded all over again that there’s really nothing new under the sun. But there is a tribal greeting, which is traditionally given among many tribes that leave in the hill country of Central Africa. If you meet people walking along a trail and you say “hello” to them or “good morning.” Instead of saying “hello” or “good” back, or “good morning” back, the proper response translated in English is this, “Hello.” The response is “I see you.” You think about that. How many people do we pass every day that we don’t see? How many people’s plight have we read about every day that we don’t see? How many people that affect our children’s future do we still not see?

I feel good about the future in spite of all the problems, because I don’t think we have any choice but to keep moving from interdependence to integrated communities, and because it is self-evidently the right thing to do. I hope that you agree. Thank you very much. [CHEERS, APPLAUSE]

QUESTION & ANSWER SESSION

TOM KEAN: President Clinton has agreed to answer a few questions and some have been submitted and I will relay them on to him. The first question is, “We in the audience watched coverage of Pope John Paul II’s funeral last week. You were there. Could you tell us a bit about your impressions of him and that event?”

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, first of all, it was astonishing, certainly one of the largest funerals in all of history. There were somewhere between one to two-and-a-half million people in the streets of Rome. Many Italians waiving their flags. Many Pole’s raising their flags. Many people from other countries. There was an astonishing outpouring of world leaders and I was gratified when President Bush had me go along with the American delegation.

I think it showed the response, what I consider to be the fundamental greatness of the Pope. One of my encounters with him occurred not far from here, at the Newark Cathedral. We visited He came in and we met in the basement of the Cathedral, in a nice little room. We had a great visit. And he said I had to excuse him. He spirited out the side door, was driven two or three miles down the way, so he could drive in through the crowd in the Pope Mobile and drive people into a frenzy. [LAUGHS]

John Paul was a holy man but he was also a great politician. [LAUGHS] So I was sitting up in the front pew with Hillary and some leaders of Newark’s Catholic community and all of a sudden the doors of the great cathedral flung open and the Pope started walking down the aisle. He was splendid in white, with his hands out like this, shaking hands with everybody along the way. And I noticed that there was a group of nuns across the aisle from me screaming like teenagers at a rock concert [LAUGHS] standing on the pews. [LAUGHTER] So I said to the, my host, who was sitting with me. I said, “You know, I hate to run against him for Mayor.” [LAUGHS] And he replied, he said, “You have no idea how good a politician he is. Those nuns are Carmelites, some of them have not been outside in 20 years [LAUGHS] so he knows what he’s doing.”

I say that because I had great admiration and affection for him in spite of our political differences. Most of the American press, you know, understandably focused on the social positions of the church and basically disagree with the Democratic party, the majority position on abortion and the Republican party majority position and maybe the Democrats too, on capital punishment, on the fact that the Pope centralized authority in the church and the Vatican more than had previously been the case. My Catholic friends in the audience can debate one way or the other whether they thought this was right or not, as my Catholic friends around America do.

He had the essential element of greatness. And in my lifetime, as an admiring non-Catholic, that is I went to Catholic grade school for a couple of years. I went to Georgetown University and I’ve always been fascinated with the Catholic church. In my lifetime, there have been two great Popes, John XXIII and this Pope. And this Pope had something, never mind his politics. He had something that all great leaders have to have, ordinary people believe he cared about them and he was pulling for them. He reached out to the Orthodox Christian community and his funeral ended with the chanting of the Greek Orthodox. It was overwhelming.

He reached out to the Jewish community. He went to Israel and the only two people he mentioned in his Will were Cardinal Ratzinger and the Chief Rabbi of Rome. He reached out to Islam. In Africa, he even reached out to religious leaders of the traditional tribal animus religions seeking common spiritual ground.

He reached out to young people, even when he was very old because he knew that his movement could not be sustained, the Catholic church, without more young people. And he spoke out about the crass of imperialism of the modern world in a way I think everybody identified with, because nearly nobody really believes their life can be measured in what they have, as opposed to who they are. And I think it made him very great because whether you agreed with him or disagreed with him, you always knew he did what he thought was right. He always made his position clear and ordinary people really thought he cared about them. They thought they manifested God’s love in his life for them.

It was an amazing thing. I feel profoundly grateful that I was able to be there, and even more grateful that I was able to be around him several times and-- I saw his concern. He called me one time on the phone, just out of the blue to ask me when we were going into Bosnia, to talk about that, because he knew that I was trying to get the European countries to agree to use force against Melosovic to end the war in Bosnia, and he knew And most of the Bosnians who were being repressed were Muslims, only a handful were Roman Catholic. So that’s what I think about him and I was really grateful to be at that funeral. I appreciate that the President asked me to go along. [APPLAUSE]

TOM KEAN: The next question, you somewhat answered, I think, in some of your remarks. “How do we make American domestic policy fair? How do we insure that taxes or equitable healthcare is of consistent quality and education is really preparing all our students for success?”

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Order breakfast. [APPLAUSE, CHEERS]

Well, let me start by saying-- I think we need leadership in both parties to say that no one should pay any taxes that are unnecessary, but that it’s just wrong when you’ve got a reasonable amount of economic growth to built in a permanent structural deficit because you think the rest of the world has to cover it, because if they don’t cover it, then America’s economy would collapse. Either our dollar would drop so low we couldn’t afford to buy anybody’s imports into our country. Our interest rates would go so high, we’d be spending all of our money on credit. I mean, that’s what would happen. The reason we don’t have much higher interest rates, or a much weaker dollar, so that every import costs a fortune, is because other people are buying our debt. So I don’t think that’s fair.

We need to have an explicit debate about it. The President honestly believes that it was fair for the top 1% of the people to get to half the tax relief because we were paying most of the taxes. I think we pay most of the taxes because that’s where the money is. Willie Lohman(?) said he robbed banks because that’s where the money was.

When I was President, I was looking at various tax reform proposals and we discovered we cold eliminate 50% of the people from the federal income tax, the bottom 50%, and it was only 10% of the receipts. So nobody makes me live in America. I could live somewhere else. And if I live here, you know, I-- Look, I live in New York, which has higher taxes than New Jersey, and I live in a place with very high property taxes because the schools are good, and my daughter’s 25. But I’m glad they asked me to support those schools, for the privilege of living in that community. [APPLAUSE] I just have a different view of this.

I think what happens is, we’ve gotten-- We don’t trust you, because you don’t trust us, because every time a politician talks about taxes, you think he’s trying to get in your pocket, to do something that you may not want done. And the more trouble middle class people have, you know, paying their bills and making their credit card payments and feeling the pressure to file for bankruptcy and all that The more anxiety that builds up, the more people hate to talk about this. But you know, we have to have a conversation about this. If you want a fairer tax system, we have to have a conversation about it.

Most of my friends that I see regularly in New York, who are extremely wealthy and who are Republican, do not believe they should have gotten all these tax cuts. This is much more, more than a traditional party divide. This is more the sort of neo-conservative economic orthodoxy playing into middle class economic insecurity to make a political [APPLAUSE] statement. But I don’t think we can change it by being afraid of it or hiding it. We ought to just have an honest, natural conversation about what we expect the government to do, how much it costs and how it’s going to be paid for. And until we’re prepared to do that, then most politicians just choke and try to kick the can down the road and we get in these deep old holes. Then you dig out of one (like I had to try to dig us out) In the 12 years of ‘81-’93, we quadrupled the national debt, and we’re going to do more that this time. We quadrupled the national debt from 1981 to 1993, so when I became President, I had to dig us out of the hole and my party lost the Congress and never got it back, in part because we just sucked it up and did what had to be done. We said, “If we’re going to have this much government, we ought to pay for it.” And we did it by [APPLAUSE]-- We did half with tax increases and half with spending cuts. And then the economy took off, interest rates dropped, investments soared and the rest of history. I still believes it really matters, so for whatever it’s worth, that’s what I think we ought to do.

On healthcare, we still don’t have a debate, in my opinion, that is both honest and informed, and it’s a mind-boggingly complicated thing. But I’ll just tell you a few things. Every other advanced country in the world provides some sort of health insurance for all its people except the United States. Nobody spends over 10 or 11% of GDP on healthcare. The Swiss and the Canadians spend the most, but for us, we’re at 15%. 4% of the gross domestic product in a What is it a $8 Trillion dollar economy? Whatever the size of our economy? That’s real money, folks. 1% of our gross domestic product is a lot of money.

We are the only country that finances healthcare. We’re not Germany finances healthcare with a combination of government funding and private health insurance and some other countries do. But we are the only country that has a health insurance system that is bewilderingly complex, where some people don’t have it, some people do. Some people are in very small groups, some people are in big groups. The administrative costs of our system, the paperwork in both health insurance offices, the doctors’ offices, hospitals. In the aggregate, the administration cost of our system is approximately 25% of all expenditures. And if you take a program like Medicare and Medicaid, which have their own cost problems, but their administrative costs are under 5%. Medicare’s about 3 1/2; Medicaid’s is less, or vice-versa, whichever. Anyway, they’re both way under 5%. That’s a massive amount of money we’re just throwing away because of the way we have chosen to finance this system. Just money that’s just gone that could be more than enough to provide basic insurance to everybody.

I personally don’t agree with the senior citizens’ drug bill that passed. I have conservative and liberal objections to it. I think it costs way too much money to do too little. I think it was And now everybody’s scared to touch it for afraid they’ll be demonized about it, but the bill was not well conceived and wastes tons of taxpayers’ money and will contribute to medical inflation and drug costs while benefiting only a minority of our seniors who didn’t have any health before. So I think we have got to be honest about this. We can’t The Republicans have got to know, that at least there’s some of us Democrats, that won’t say they’re heartless if they talk about ways to save money. And the Democrats have got to know that there are some Republicans that won’t say they’re heartless, or crazy if they talk about how to change the system, and we’re not trying to get a government takeover.

There is no proposal, nor has there been one in 20 years, that would have the government assume control over the delivery of healthcare by the private medical profession. But all I know is, where you have centralized systems and cost control It’s like at the Mayo Clinic, you get very high quality care for a lower cost because they have almost no administrative costs compared to the way it’s delivered everywhere else, so that’s how to get that.

Education is a different problem. Tom and I, I think, will more or less agree on this. There is not a single problem in public education today that has not been solved somewhere by somebody. He and I have been in schools I’ve been in schools in inner I went to a school in inner-city Chicago, a junior high school, when I was running for President, with a Principal from the Mississippi Delta in Arkansas named Ollie MacLamore(?). A junior high school in the neighborhood in Chicago, that at that time had the highest murder rate in Illinois. There was a zero dropout rate. There were zero weapons in the school and they scored above the State average on all the tests. They had 150 mothers and 75 fathers every week volunteering in the schools. They had a school uniform policy. They had a defined culture. I went into the school. It was 96% black, a junior high school, in Washington, DC, that 3 out of 4 years, in the mid-80’s when Tom and I were working at the Education Commission of the States, sent a team to the final four of the National High School Mathematics Championship. And the school was built when Ulysses Grant was President. You could walk in there tomorrow and sit down on the floor and have breakfast. It was sparkling.

The maddening thing about American public education, which is why some people favor vouchers and almost everybody favors a broader school choice and some sort of charter school plan. Is that the system does not reward the replication of excellence, and does not punish the refusal to do so. In my [APPLAUSE] And I’ll make this one last statement.

When I was President, the State that showed the greatest gains (it doesn’t mean they had the best education), but the greatest gains in standardized tests, from when I (just in the eight years I served) was North Carolina, when our friend Jim Hunt was the Governor. North Carolina had a simple system that said to First, they had a massive preschool education program. They had rigorous controls over class sizes in the early grades. But they had a system, which basically identified all schools every year and said if you were under-performing, you had two years to turn your school around or they shut it down and put it under new management, and they did it over and over again. They didn’t have a voucher program because they concluded, quite apart from the political and philosophical base, that the cost of vouchers per student, that you would not help enough people with the vouchers to justify the diminution for quality for all the kids that would still be stuck in the public schools. But they got the effect of it by rigorously enforcing this system. We got the money to do that in several hundred schools when I was President. I’m sorry to say I don’t know what’s happened to the program since I left. I don’t know if it’s still there, if they’re doing more of it or what.

But the fundamental problem in public education is you’ve got a good Principal, a good culture, the teachers will do the job, the kids can learn. But there is no system that either rewards excellence by replicating it or punishes the abject hard-headed refusal to replicate it. And the reason the voucher movement got steam is the public schools have a monopoly on revenues and customers. But it’s really The preliminary is that’s really not the answer. Basically you’ve got to do something like what the Pentagon does.
The military is the best replicate of excellence in education and training of any institution with which I am familiar. They believe leadership can be taught. They believe skills can be learned. They believe education is a lifetime endeavor and they know how to replicate excellence. We have never learned to do it in public schools. If we ever learn to do it, we’ll have the best schools in the world. Because I’m telling you, in the most objective circumstances--

I’ll give you one more. Frederick Douglas Academy, in Harlem, less than a mile from my office in Harlem, I visited two years ago. And The Gap and one other store had sponsored a store where they sold clothes for the school uniform program, in the store. And the kids could earn money by working in the store. If they came from poor families, they could buy a certain amount of clothes for their families in the store and they worked on this, building a very defined school culture.

There was a 98% high school graduation rate in this school that was virtually all African-American with a lot of low income people. No income screening, no grade screening you get in high school. A 91% college going rate and almost all the kids who went to college graduated and the test scores of the New York Regent’s Exam of the seniors at the Frederick Douglas School was above the statewide average. So that’s good. I can tell you these stories to make you feel good but it ought to make you mad. Because when you see that it can be done, it ought to make you mad that it isn’t everywhere.

I’ve been to schools in New Jersey succeeding with huge numbers of immigrants, against all the odds, with all kinds of innovative strategies to involve parents, even parents whose first language is not English, parents who barely speak English, or can’t. It happens, but it’s not replicable. And I consider it sort of the great The two great frustrations of my long, enriched life in politics on the domestic side, were that I could never fix the system of healthcare finance, so we’re wasting money and covering too few; and I could never devise the system, statewide or nationally, to figure out how to replicate excellence. If we do those two things, it would unleash a new burst of energy, economic growth and strength in America that would carry us well into the next 20 or 30 years. [APPLAUSE]

TOM KEAN: Mr. President, recently the world saw wonderful images of you and your predecessor, President George H.W. Bush, working together to aid victims of the recent tsunami. Now you two ran against each other. Can you tell us about that relationship?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I’m going to embarrass you now. I owe Tom Kean a lot of things, but he was never better to me than when he was picked to be the He either gave the Key Note Speech or nominated President Bush in ’92. Which one? He gave the Key Note Speech. So he’s the Key Noter, for the Convention that’s going to dismember me. [LAUGHS] So they interview Kean before the Convention, the Republican Convention. They say, “Well, you served with Bill Clinton, what do you think about him?” Do you know what he said? He said, “Both parties nominated are best.” What a class act. [APPLAUSE] Unbelievable. I thought to myself, “I hope Jessie Helms never sees Tom in a dark alley, he’ll be in trouble. He’ll never come out of it.” [LAUGHS]

Look, former President Bush and I have been friends since 1983. I was reelected Governor in ’82. He was the Vice President. He hosted the Governors when we met in Portland, Maine. He asked us down to Kenny(?) Bumpport(?), to his house. And I decided I liked him when I took my 3-year-old daughter up to the Vice President of the United States there at his The Vice President’s mother was still living then. And the grand dame and her family and they had, all the Bushes were there. And I took Chelsea up and I said, “Chelsea, I want you meet Vice President Bush.” And she shook his hand, and she said, “Hello. Where’s the bathroom?” [LAUGHS] And George Bush, the Vice President of the United States, took my daughter by the hand to the bathroom. [LAUGHS] He had five kids. He knew what was what. [LAUGHS] And what was important.

I always liked him. When he was President in 1989, he called the Governors together to write the National Education goals and I was the Senior Governor in the country then and the designated Democrat to work with the White House and the Republican Governors to write the goals.

I always had a good relationship with him. We had a profound difference about what should be done with the economy and on social policy in 1992, everything from the Brady Bill, and the Family Medical Leave Law, to basically, in the larger sense, the economic policy and educational policy, and so I ran. But I never disliked him personally. I admired him. He was the youngest man shot out of the sky in World War II, and nobody should ever forget that, even the hardcore Democrats here. He served his country for a lifetime and I was thrilled to be asked to do this job with him. We’re having a really good time. We still are. [APPLAUSE]

TOM KEAN: Mr. President, because of the time, this will have to be the last question.

I might say, by the way, that you probably ought to know that the President has donated any proceeds that he was going to get from this evening to the fight against AIDS, his Foundation. [CHEERS, APPLAUSE]
The last question we have Mr. President is, as you may know, I’ll be leaving my own presidency here at Drew this year. I’m worried now about the transition. [LAUGHS] Could you speak about how you personally would advise, or how you personally handled the transition? It must have been difficult.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, the first thing is I was totally disoriented because every time I walked in a room, no one played a song anymore. [LAUGHS] I didn’t even know where I was for the first two or three months. It was terrible. [LAUGHS] Then there’s taking the shuttle. [LAUGHS]

Actually let me just say this. I’ll give you a serious answer to this. I knew when I got elected that I couldn’t stay more than eight years if I were lucky, and that the minority of our Presidents had gotten a second term. That’s all I could do. That’s what the Constitution said. It’s a good thing we have the 22nd Amendment or I would have run till they either threw me out or they carried me out probably, so it’s a good thing they have it. [CHEERS, APPLAUSE]

But, you know, I think-- It’s really interesting to see All the times the political writers write about it, they act like every ex President is totally miserable. You know, you’re not flying on Air Force One, you’re not living in the White House, you’re not going in the Oval Office. I treasured every day. I loved it. Even the bad days were great. There was always something you could do, and I loved it. I also like, you know, being able to go to dinner with my daughter in New York when I want to; being able to go movies with my friends and being able to take a day off and read a book if I take a notion; and having a more balanced life. I like it that when I went to the Pope’s funeral with President Bush, he had an official schedule. I kept most of his official meetings with him. But afterward, he had to go do something as President and I got to go have dinner with the President of the Ukraine. He’s an old friend of mine, which I wouldn’t have been able to do probably if I had still been in the White House.

You know, I think it is-- We should all be grateful for the opportunities that we have in life. When they go away, we ought to look for other ones. And the only thing I said about you, Tom, is not only Even though you’re older than me, you look younger, as I said. You’re in good shape and I know what you’re going to do because you told me before we came out here.

I think that people like you and I have an obligation to work as long as we can get around. When we-- [APPLAUSE] And by the way, it’s good. We all have to sort of reconceive aging. You know, the fastest growing group of Americans percentage-wise are people over 80. So if we all quit at 55, or 62, or even 65 We may quit our jobs but we can’t quit living. We can’t quit giving because if we do, our brains won’t work very well. Then our bodies will follow and then we might live to be 90 but we’ll just be a burden. And so we’ve got to keep going as much as we can. I’m about to go celebrate my step-father’s 90th birthday, and he just broke his hip and got it fixed and we’re going to Las Vegas to celebrate his birthday on his broken hip. [LAUGHS, APPLAUSE]

When we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, all these guys that parachuted into Normandy wanted to go again, and one of them was 83 years old. And I actually had to personally approve, in the White House, their jumping out because the Pentagon was so terrified of liability. [LAUGHS] This nice young man comes to see me with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the younger officer says, “Mr. President, these people could get killed. They could break their legs. They could break their hips.” I said-- And I asked this guy, I said, “Did you serve in the Gulf War, in ‘91?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you proud of it?” He said, “I sure am.” I said, “What they did 50 years ago, was the greatest thing in their lives.” I said, “Son, we’re all going to die some way. What a way to go! Let them jump! Let them jump!” [LAUGHS, APPLAUSE] You know? And they jumped. The 83-year-old guy got off without a scratch and one guy that was about 75 broke a leg. That’s all we had, of all the people that jumped.

President Bush jumped out of a plane for his 75th birthday; he jumped out for his 80th birthday; he’s going to jump out for his 85th birthday. I think we have to reconceive our lives and we can’t be imprisoned by something we did before. I think it’s hardest actually for athletes and even harder for rock stars. Everybody that, you know, becomes famous and rich when they’re young they do something that, by definition, that can’t last. Life goes on and every time a door closes, another one opens.

I never-- If anybody told me, when I left the White House, that within four years we’d be keeping over 100,000 people alive with the least expensive AIDS medicine on earth and I’d be over there working on the Tsugami Relief, I wouldn’t have believed it. But there’s always something to do. I’m confident that President Kean will find something to do, although I do think you should make him come back here and teach on a regular basis, because I [CHEERS, APPLAUSE]

I will leave you with this thought. You can tell, that not only do we like each other. We like being in a politics. I love politics. I like political fights. I like winning. I hated losing. I got beat and I got elected. I tried it both ways. I have strong convictions that I don’t mind debating, but it was a wonderful life. And I’m really worried that kind of the way the politics was covered and the personal bitterness that had crept into our national life might drive more and more young people away from the idea that they would ever present themselves for public office, or feel that it was worth working in campaigns and working for elected officials. And I just don’t believe that. I still think it is as noble and as good a work as can be done. I wouldn’t give up the life I had for anything on earth.

So I’ve got a good life now and I hope my best years are ahead. But for those of you who are still young, you should believe your political system. It’s no accident we’re still around here. It’s the oldest democracy in human history. The founders were smart people and good people participated the whole time. And more than half the time, more than half the people are right, on more than half the big issues, otherwise we wouldn’t be where we are. So be of good cheer. There’ll always be something to do. Thank you and good bye. [CHEERS, APPLAUSE]