San jose california mortgage loan

September 23, 2000

Thank you very much. Well, I never, in my wildest dreams, thought I would be introduced by a Japanese-American wearing cowboy boots. [Laughter] I mean, you're the walking embodiment of one America right there. [Laughter] I love it. Good for you. Look, we've got to have a little fun. It's too nice. You know, we're all having a good time.

I want to thank Jessie and Surinder and the Singh family for welcoming us to their beautiful home, and for so conveniently having such a nice deck so we can all gather. Let's give them all a hand. [Applause] That's really great that they had us. Thank you.

I want to thank Secretary Mineta and his wonderful wife for flying out here with me today so he could be here with Mike. You should be very proud of Norm Mineta. He's doing a good job at the Commerce Department; he did a great job for you.

And I want to thank your Representatives who are here. They are some of the best in the Congress, some of the best I've ever seen, and you're very fortunate. I want to thank Anna Eshoo and Zoe Lofgren and Sam Farr. And Paul Pelosi, thank you for coming today. And we look forward to Nancy's continued progress. And I thank Senator Liz Figueroa for coming here. Thank you very much.

I want to thank all of you for coming, and I'd like to say, before I get into any substantive remarks, how profoundly grateful I am to the people of this State, and particularly the people of this community for over 8 years now--partnership and friendship and support for me and the Vice President and our administration. Some of you in this audience were here the very first time I came to Silicon Valley a long time ago, and I am very grateful to you.

I am also grateful because this has been my daughter's home for 3 years now. And I wonder if we'll ever get her back from here. [Laughter]

I wanted to be here today because I like Mike Honda, and I admire him, and I strongly support him, and because the stakes in this particular race are quite high.

I've done everything I could do in the last 8 years to show that a Democrat could be pro-business and pro-labor, pro-growth and pro-environmental protection, for a high-tech future and the preservation of traditional American values. And that's what I think he represents. And I can't tell you how important I think it is for Mike and so many of our other good candidates here--I'm going to southern California to help some more of them tonight--to win these House races.

I think it's very important that the American people decide what they think this election's about. I've often found in politics that what people think the election's about determines for whom they vote and how it comes out. And if somebody were to say, "Vote for me because I think Bill Clinton's been a great President, and I won't change anything," I'd vote against that person, because the world is changing.

The question is not whether we're going to change, but how we're going to change and whether we're going to use this moment of incredible prosperity and social progress to meet big challenges and seize big opportunities or whether we're going to be sort of distracted and take some of the siren songs that are being sung in this election.

You know, anybody in this audience that's over 30 years old can remember at least once in your life when you made a mistake, not because things were going so poorly but because things were going so well you thought you no longer had to concentrate. If you live long enough, you'll make one of those mistakes. I see a lot of people nodding their heads. [Laughter].

It is sometimes more difficult to make a good decision in good times than it is in tough times. I mean, I know the people took a big chance on me in California in 1992. I can only imagine how many people on election day in 1992 walked into the ballot box and said, "Should I really vote for this guy? He's only 46. His opponent says he's only the Governor of a small southern State." I was so naive, I thought it was a compliment, and I still do. [Laughter] So people think, "You know, this is a big chance." But now, give me a break. Look at what California was going through in '92. It wasn't that big a chance. We had to do something different.

Now there is a sense of well-being, a sense of progress, a sense of possibility, a sense of confidence. But it's easy for people to lose their concentration. And I'm telling you, in my lifetime, our Nation has never had both the opportunity and the obligation to build the future of our dreams for our children and to fulfill our responsibilities around the world that we have today.

And I have so much greater appreciation than I ever did before I became President of the importance of every single seat in the House, every single seat in the Senate. Our economic plan in 1993 passed by a single vote. Everybody in the other party said it would bring on another recession, lead to a big increase in unemployment. As I said in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, time has not been very kind to their prediction.

But we turned the country around, and Al Gore now says the best is still out there. Now, a lot of people just think that's campaign rhetoric. I believe that. I really believe the best is still out there. But we have to decide. We have to decide that we'll meet the challenge of the aging of America so that when all of us baby boomers retire and there's only two people working for every one person on Social Security and Medicare, we won't bankrupt our' children and their ability to raise our grandchildren.

We have to decide to talk about what Mike did, that we are going to give a world class education to the largest and most racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse group of schoolchildren in the history of the United States. But it's not like we don't know how to do it.

There are schools all over this State succeeding against all the odds. When I started working on school reform 20 years ago and Hillary and I started trying to rewrite the standards when I was Governor 17 years ago, people sort of had a hunch about what would work. We know now.

And you can see it in a lot of your most successful charter schools in California. You can see it in a lot of the other public schools. I was in a school in Harlem the other day where, 2 years ago, 80 percent of the children were doing math and science and reading in an elementary school below grade level--80 percent--by any measure, a failing school. Two years later 74 percent of the kids are doing math and reading at or above grade level--in only 2 years.

Look, we can make public schools work, but we need smaller classes, modern facilities, Internet connections, well-trained teachers, high standards, and if the schools that are failing don't turn around, they have to be put under new management and change.

This is not rocket science. We now know how to do this. But we have to decide to do it. We have to make a decision. We have to make a decision. We like running a surplus instead, of a deficit and having low interest rates--big decision in this election.

We could get this country out of debt in 12 years for the first time since 1835, when Andrew Jackson was President. Now, what difference does it make here? This area got about 30 percent of all the venture capital invested last year in the United States.

I received a study from my economic advisers a month ago that said if the Vice President was elected and had the support of Congress to stay on the path of paying down the debt as opposed to adopting the tax cut proposals of his opponent, plus privatization of Social Security, which costs another $1 trillion over the next 10 years, and will take us back to deficits, it will keep interest rates a percent lower.

One percent lower interest rates means $390 billion in lower home mortgage payments--$390 billion--$30 billion in lower car payments, $15 billion in lower college loan payments, or a $435-billion and--what does that mean--$435 billion tax cut, keeping interest rates lower. We have to decide. Are we going to do that, or are we going to go back to the way we used to run our budget?

We have to decide whether we believe we can grow the economy and improve the environment or whether it's too much trouble, we don't want to take the chance, and so we're going to relax all these environmental regulations, repeal my order setting aside $43 million roadless acres in the national forests, undo some of the national monuments I've set aside.

These are specific, clear choices. We have to decide whether we believe that we can have a health care system we can afford where medical professionals still called the shots instead of allowing people who don't have medical training to make these decisions. That's what the fight over the Patients' Bill of Rights is all about. It's a decision we have to make.