FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY

President Bill Clinton Remarks at HFA Fundraiser

Home of Ambassador Carl Spielvogel & Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel
November 15, 2015
PRESIDENT CLINTON: First of all, I want to thank Barbaralee and Carl for having me back
in this fabulous building, in this gorgeous apartment. I always love coming here. Id like to
thank my friend Dale Truly (ph) for being here and for the wonderful shoes that he always wears
that keep me in a good humor, even on dark days. (Laughter.) And Wallace Roney is a special
treat for me, because Im a huge jazz fan and a big fan of his. So we were just talking about all
the jazz photographs I have in my office in Harlem, and I promised him in return for those two
flourishes a good tour of them soon.
Until what happened in Paris, I was having a hard time finding my footing in this campaign,
because I watched all these Republican debates, and I thought, Im just worthless for Hillary,
because I became a grandfather this year; we had our 40th anniversary; my daughter and son-inlaw are doing great; shes got a childrens book Im not mad at anybody. (Laughter.) And after
watching the Republican debates I realized that I really had nothing to contribute to the national
debate. There was no one I wanted to insult, no one I wanted to smear, nobodys life I wanted to
distort. I got mad at what happened in Paris. And so Ill be a little serious and maybe
occasionally funny tonight.
I do want to break the iron grip women have had the role of presidential spouse. Its my own
personal civil rights struggle. (Laughter.) But I understand the very high level of frustration the
vast majority of Americans feel. Median income has not budged much since the day I left office.
Costs have gone up. Anxiety is high. Ill tell you one or two other things you ought to be mad
about the life expectancy for middle-aged, non-college-educated white Americans is going
down. Its still slightly lower than for African Americans but already higher now than for
Latinos. Why? Because in spite of the health risk that African Americans and Hispanics face,
even they are more closely connected to their churches and their communities than millions of
our fellow countrymen.
And when I watched the Democratic debate, I was once again very proud of Hillarys
performance, but aghast that it went on for an hour and a half and nobody said, What are you
going to do to bring the American dream back to these people? What are you going to do to give
them something to look forward to when they get up in the morning? Even when were right,
we seem not to think through things. I remember one of the people who came through when I
was taking pictures there said, I think its great we want to get all these people out of jail, but
what are you going to do for them when they get out? If theyve been in very long, they dont
know how to make a living; they dont know how to establish contacts; theyre not sure anybody
will hire them anyway. We have to have a transitional plan.
So let me back up and say I think there are two big issues in this election and only two. One is
embodied by what happened in Paris. We still live in an increasingly interdependent world,

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where technology liberates people to do wonderful good and terrible wrong. We live in a world
where people are searching for meaning and where young people can be convinced, apparently
no matter where they live, they should go to the Middle East and then maybe come back home
and find their meaning by committing suicide while killing as many innocent bystanders as
possible.
But we live in a world where there have, since the dawn of this new century, been a dramatic
drop in the numbers of people living in extreme poverty, where theres been a dramatic rise in the
number of girls in school and the number of women running businesses all over the world, where
the rate of infant and maternal mortality has gone down, where weve got huge numbers of
people who once faced a certain death sentence on antiretroviral medication that will let them
live with HIV and AIDS a normal and full life. Theres all this good and bad stuff going on.
And I believe that the central responsibility of every citizen of every country is to find whatever
way we can to build up positive and reduce the negative forces of our interdependence. Because
whether we like it or not, we are doomed to share the future. Whether we like it or not, borders
are going to look more like nets than walls for a very long time. Thats why I think were foolish
not to adopt a comprehensive immigration reform bill that will keep youth and diversity in our
workforce. Having lost it, I can tell you, youth matters. (Laughter.) You can laugh about it, but
if you look Im glad looking out here tonight the demographic of old, gray-haired, white guys
has not been entirely eliminated. (Laughter.)
But look, if you want to the number one domestic job in the United States and many other
countries is to restore broad-based prosperity, to create enough jobs and the right job mix so that
people who work hard and get an education have a chance to start a business, get a good job,
establish a family, raise their children in dignity, with the promise that they have a chance to
really build good lives themselves. And we do have, in the Democratic primary, an occasionally
really interesting and substantive debate about how best to do that. Thats what everybody ought
to be talking about.
The second thing we have to do is to have a world where at least were good enough to keep big
bad things from happening and then make more good than bad things happen, so that we get the
benefits of the forces of integration and minimize those that want to use them for disintegration,
so that we lift up cooperation and reduce conflict, and so that more and more people are
convinced that what we have in common is more important than our interesting differences. Its
a huge challenge.
If you look at all the people that are running for president, if you believe that the two most
important jobs are to build up the positive and reduce the negative forces that are drawing us
together and to restore broad-based prosperity, Hillary is the best qualified person to be
president. Its a good thing that shed be the first woman president. (Applause.)
And what I thought Id do tonight, just for a few minutes, is to tell you a little about what she
was like before she became our Senator from New York and Secretary of State and started
running for president. Because one of things that I have noticed that I learned first when I was
president and the Republican whip in the Senate, Alan Simpson, who was from Wyoming and a

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conservative guy with a fabulous sense of humor who came up to me one day, and I said, Alan,
you see all this Whitewater stuff and all these newspapers making a big deal out of it and the
Republicans? Do you think Hillary or I did anything wrong? And he started laughing. He
laughed out loud. He said, You have to be kidding. He said, Anybody with a second grade
education and looked at the evidence would know you didnt do anything wrong. You invested
in a land deal, lost money. The guy later goes in the S&L business. He goes broke. You never
borrowed any money. Our law firm did 20 hours worth of work. Can you believe we got $70
million worth of education of taxpayer money spent looking into that? Of course you didnt do
anything wrong. But he said, One of the things that we Republicans learned when you got in
was that we thought the press was a liberal. He said, They are. Theyre more likely to vote for
you than us, but they think like we do. I said, What do you mean? He said, We love power,
but we dont believe government can change human nature. They love power, and we both get it
the same way, by hurting you. (Laughter.)
So there is this temptation every day in the press to overlook these massive problems. I could
not believe that a Democratic Party debate lasted an hour and a half and nobody asked them,
What are you going to do about the fact that life expectancy among middle-aged, non-collegeeducated working people is going down, while they still have their children at home, because
theyre drinking more, because theyre smoking more, because they are addicted to opiates and
now cheaper street heroin raised in the Sierra Madre, the poppy heads in Mexico, harvested by
preteens and cheaper on the street now than the opiates because were beginning to enforce our
law?
So Im just heres what I want to tell you. When I met Hillary in law school, her main passion
was the legal services (inaudible). When we got out of law school, she turned down all these
fancy clerkships and stuff, big law firm jobs, went to work for the Childrens Defense Fund. She
went to Georgia and Alabama to see why teenagers were being housed in adult prisons, most of
them African American, having their lives taken away from them before they were old enough to
vote. When she came home with me to Arkansas to marry me and I was teaching in a law
school and she got a job there she set up the first legal clinic that we ever had with a judge who
was such an old-fashioned sexist that he said he wasnt sure about legal aid, he wasnt even sure
about lady lawyers, and now he had a lady lawyer running legal aid. (Laughter.) Weve come a
long way since then.
When I became governor, we had all these poor children starting school not ready for school.
She come in to me one day and says, You know theres a preschool program in Israel that was
devised for immigrants whose first language is not Hebrew or English to prepare their children to
start school. Its called, ironically for a child of the 60s, HIPPY, Home Instruction Program for
Preschool Youngsters. I think it would work here. And I said, Well what are you going to do
about it? And she said, Well, theres a woman named Avima Lombard who started it and I got
her to come over here next week to see me. Its now in 26 or 28 American states, biggest
chapter is still in Arkansas. And it lifted a huge numbers of poor African American kids out of
substandard educational achievement and by now into a middle-class life. She hadnt been
elected to anything yet.

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Then we met Muhammad Yunus, who some of you know won the Nobel Prize a few years ago
for setting up the Grameen Bank, a microcredit bank for low-income people in Bangladesh. That
bank (inaudible) guaranteed Bangladesh 6 percent growth rates during many years of this last
decade, when they had a total political paralysis and they had no functioning national
government. But so many millions and millions of people had been benefitted by this, they did
lift the economy from the ground up.
So we met Yunus. And I looked at Hillary and I said, We got all these factories that are closing
all over poor areas in rural America, and people need to be able to start their own business. We
dont have a microcredit bank. She went out and raised the money for it all from private
businesses in Arkansas. That bank is still in business today, the first rural microcredit bank in the
United States of America. She did that. She hadnt been elected to anything.
She oversaw our education reform movement at a time when our tiny state, the second poorest in
the country, with only 2.4 million people, had 379 school districts, every one their own little
fiefdom. So you never got to take physics or chemistry or a foreign language, but you did have
your own basketball team. (Laughter.) And so she put together this package of education
reform. She did so well that the grizzly old head of the education committee said he thought the
wrong one of us had been elected. (Laughter.) When we proposed this, a national expert said we
had the worst public schools in the country. When I ran for president, nine years later, the same
man said it was one of the most two most improved school systems in the entire United States.
She did that. She hadnt been elected to anything.
So when I hear these and I say, well, you change your position on this, that or the other thing. I
wish they studied science some more. In science, we think its a mark of progress when you
have evidence and you change your positions or when you just grow out of some (inaudible)
preconception. Only in politics is it supposed to be a character failure to think. (Laughter.) But
she did all this and had never been elected to anything.
Now, when I became President and we tried to reform healthcare, we couldnt get the 60 votes in
the Senate to break the filibuster, which is make no mistake about it, when you hear this
healthcare debate now, its the only reason that we got healthcare reform passed under President
Obama. He had those 60 votes. And look what he had to do to get it and how hard that was.
But at least we had 60. She just kept working. We got the Childrens Health Insurance
Program, the biggest expansion of healthcare before the Affordable Care Act since Medicare.
She didnt quit. She just kept working. She hadnt been elected to anything. She worked with
the most conservative member of the House leadership, Tom DeLay, and almost doubled the
number of children in foster care being put into permanent adoptive homes.
And when she became a Senator finally, she was elected to something she realized there was
no economic development program for upstate New York. Before Andrew Cuomo, none of our
governors, without regard to party, really took that seriously. He has. So she helped wine
growers to sell their wine in New York City restaurants for the first time. And she helped people
who were running tiny businesses to sell their products on the internet. I met a guy who was
making fishing rods. They were really good ones. And he went from three to nine or 10

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employees and quadrupled his business. And 100 percent of his new customers were in Norway
more than a decade ago, because Hillary got him into e-commerce.
Sometime between now and the time they caucus in Iowa, there will be several farmers from
Long Island ask Jay Jacobs (ph) about this who will show up in Iowa, who will go knocking
on doors and say, Look, Im a Republican farmer from New York. But nobody ever tried to
help us before. We need a president who actually knows whats going on in the real world and
tries to help us.
Now, why am I telling you this? Because no matter how many debates the Republicans have
over whatever it is theyre talking about that day, the presidency is a job. And the job requires
you to do three things: One, do your best to do what you promised to do; two, deal with the
incoming fire and try to keep big, bad things from happening; and three, imagine the future, try
to look around the corner.
One of these works at Brookhaven Labs. I said I wish we could double the budget of all the
national labs. I spent $3 billion of your money to sequence the first human genome. It has its
down to about 1,000 bucks now; itll be 500 within a year or two. And weve had more than
$900 billion of economic benefit coming into our economy because of it. You want somebody
that thinks about that. Thats the way she thinks.
So most of her life she did what I do now. She was a walking nongovernmental organization,
just trying to figure out whats wrong and figure out how to fix it. Along the way, she had
experience that some people think is disqualifying for a Democrat she actually served on the
boards of some companies that were quite successful, tried to change their environmental
policies, make them more open to hiring and promoting women, do progressive things and still
make a living. And she started her law practice trying to help children and poor people who
couldnt afford a lawyer. All along the way, shes still the same person I met 40 years ago.
And I can honestly say the most important thing when you pick a president I spend a lot of
time studying the presidencies of people who werent successful. The only other governor of a
small state that ever got elected President was Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire. He was
elected in 1852. He looked like a surefire winner. He was good-looking, smart, articulate, a
Mexican War hero, successful congressman, widely respected lawyer. On the way to his
inauguration with his wife and only child, there was a train wreck. Eleven people were hurt; the
other 10 got scratches; his son broke his neck and died. He lost a year just trying to recover
himself, and then the Union was coming apart, and the Democratic Party was coming apart with
it, and he couldnt figure out what to do.
Its important to get the right person, but the right person at the right time. Many presidents we
think werent so good might have been wildly successful at another time. Abraham Lincoln, our
greatest, might not have been so successful had he served in normal times because he was
subject to terrible bouts of depression, and he buried his propensity to depression in the blood of
the Civil War. He rode he knew somehow that he had to will himself out of his propensity to
get down, to hold the country together, to end slavery, to keep things going forward.

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So you need to think about this. If you need a president who can deal with a troubled world with
lots of problems and use all the tools of defense, diplomacy and development, with great skill
and determination, shes the most qualified person for this time. If you need a person whos
actually seen the economy from the ground up and worked in the public sector, the private sector,
and the nongovernmental sector, and who actually has specific ideas, shes the most qualified to
be president.
I was never more proud of her than last week. If there is one state the Democrats probably dont
have a chance of carrying anymore, its one I carried twice: West Virginia. The Presidents
approval rating is 22 percent there. He finally went to West Virginia because West Virginia has
the highest incidence of prescription drug and heroin abuse in the United States of America,
because there are two counties in West Virginia where the number one source of income for noncollege-educated men is a disability check. And she is the only person running who has put out a
plan for the transition we should provide to people who work in coal mines and whose jobs
depend on them, as we shut those mines, clean up our air, fight climate change and reduce our
greenhouse gas emission. So theyre Americans too; they deserve a chance to begin again.
Our country has got to begin again. Weve got to do it together. And I honestly believe that of
all the people I have ever known in my lifetime running for a job at a particular time, she is the
best suited for this time. So thanks for helping her. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
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