We need to identify these new technology investment opportunities that the private sector cannot afford to adequately invest in now, as we tried to do every year I was president and invest in them big time because we always get more than our money back.

Let me just mention a couple of other things. I think we need real corporate accountability. We have this bill that the Congress passed that the Democrats initiated on corporate accountability that all the Republicans opposed until the public opinion had moved so far, they turned on a dime and voted for it.

I admire that really. They had a lot of political discipline to pull themselves out of that hole they were in. But now they're holding back the money necessary to implement the bill. So, the Democrats ought to be demanding the release of the implementing funds. At the same time, we, especially the DLC, ought to be talking about not killing the goose that laid the golden egg. A lot of good things happened in the '90s. A lot of these companies did a good job, including with their stock options. But there's more than one way to do it. What if a company gives stock options that you have to exercise over a long period of time to build employee loyalty and the strength of the company? That's very different than somebody just taking the money and running because they knew something about the company that the other shareholders and the employees don't, leaving everybody else high and dry. So, we've got to be pro business and pro accountability. We've got to be pro growth for business and for the people, who work and invest in these companies.

So, we need to say what we're after is the abuses but we want to hold up the entrepreneurial giants that made this economy go in the 1990s. And we can do it in a balanced way that 90 percent of the American people will approve of and will generate a lot of support for the Democratic Party. Most people out there in business are good honest people and they're more horrified than most of the rest of us are by some of the things that were done. I know people in Silicon Valley, who started companies, who ate their losses knowingly because they couldn't bear to think that they'd walk off with the money that they could have gotten because they knew their companies were getting in trouble and they would never have gotten in any hot water with the SEC. They ate their losses because they believed in what they were doing. They thought their companies would come back and they would not abandon their employees and their other stockholders. So, we need to hold these people up, even as we're demanding more accountability.

One other thing. I think there needs to be a serious analysis of the impact of this economic downturn on the way welfare reform works. And we need to ask ourselves, do we need to provide more incentives than we are presently providing to help poor people, who fall into the cracks? Is there something we should do to give them some bridging support? The DLC supported welfare reform. We believed in it. It has worked superbly but we all said the real test of welfare reform would be the first economic downturn.

So, we need an honest analysis. What's happened to poor people in this downturn? Who lost their welfare benefits in this downturn? Is there something else we should be doing? And if there is, we ought to do it. Nobody will object to it as long as it's fair and it's still focused on work and the objective of giving the dignity of work to poor families.

Beyond the security and the economic issues, I think we need to get back to invigorating our work and family agenda. The thing that made the Democratic Party's program effective, with a lot of middle class and people in the new economy of the 1990s was that we said, we're the party that's pro-family and pro-work. We know most parents are working. That's why we're for family leave. That's why we were for the children's health insurance program. I think we ought to look at ways we can expand family leave, ways that we can help support flex times for all these mothers and fathers who work in office parks. I think we ought to look at whether there are things we can do to make certain basic health insurance packages more affordable with all these people who are losing their health insurance. And there are lots of other issues there.

This is an opportunity and a responsibility I think the DLC ought to shoulder. I still have more people come up to me and talk to me about the family leave law than anything else I did as president. If you really talk to people about what they're worried about, most of them are worried that their kids will have to support them in retirement and won't be able to support their grandkids. That's a whole subject we could talk about for an hour. This is something that the DLC and the Democratic party ought to be in the forefront of. You cannot have a successful society if people don't think they can work and raise their children and do a good job of both. And there are a whole range of issues we need to be working on there.

The next point I'd like to make is that I think we have to face honestly some long-term reform issues. Maybe there ought to be a special commission the Democrats put together with people beyond our elected officials. When I left office, there was enough money to keep Social Security going till 2053, enough money to keep Medicare going till 2027, through half the life of the baby boomers. I don't know what the latest numbers are going to show but they won't be good. If we don't modify the tax cut to have more tax cuts now but we reinstate fiscal responsibility over the long run, we're going to be in real trouble there. So, what's our option? If you don't like privatizing Social Security and I don't like it very much, but you want to do something to try to increase the rate of return, what are your options? Well one thing you could do is to give people one or two percent of the payroll tax, with the same options that Federal employees have with their retirement accounts; where you have three mutual funds that almost always perform as well or better than the market and a fourth option to buy government bonds, so you get the guaranteed Social Security return and a hundred percent safety just like you have with Social Security.

You can't just attack the other guy's ideas unless you have something to say. The same thing is true with health care. You know, the victors always get to write history, so they performed reverse plastic surgery on my health care proposal. The real thing that was wrong with health care is I should have resisted the people in my party, who said we had to present a plan and I should have given some general principles and let Congress write one because the Republicans had the filibuster and we were never going to pass any health care plan. Senator Dole said, no go ahead and send a plan and then we'll write one together. Then somebody told him that was no way to get elected president, so we never got anything done. But it I would remind you when I proposed my plan, most of the experts said, it's not too complicated and it's a moderate plan. Then the health insurance companies didn't like it, so by the time they got through advertising against it, it was really an ugly thing.

The fundamental thing I tried to deal with is this: we spent over 14 percent of our GDP on healthcare. You can't provide the quality health care we provide with all the technology if you don't spend about 11 percent. Even the Canadians spend ten and they've got backups. So, we have to spend that much. The problem is we spent over 3 percent of that 14 percent of our GDP on administrative costs. It's a huge amount of money. Administrative costs of Medicare by comparison are 1 percent. Two percent of our gross domestic product is a huge amount of money. If we could figure out how to reconcile the various interests in America and free up some of that money, we could provide health insurance to uninsured people at a cost we could support without gagging.

That's a discussion for another day, but we Democrats and especially the DLC ought to be on the side of thinking about ways to stop all these people from losing their health insurance because in times like this, employers on the margin find it more and more impossible to pay health insurance premiums. We got all the savings we could out of managed care, then natural inflation sort of took over again. So you got a lot of people left out in the cold again. We have a responsibility here. The last point I'd like to make, one I was glad to see made in Al and Bruce's memo, is that we have to do some more things to support a spirit of community in America. Let me just mention a couple. One is the president says that he wants more people to work in communities to strengthen homeland security. Senator Bayh has got a proposal on that. We ought to take the president up on it and do it. That's our deal.

The Democrats ought to have a proposal that gets Americans of all ages involved in serving in our communities. We also could expand the Peace Corps again. We could do a lot of things consistent with our security interests that would give more people a chance to serve. I think we should challenge everybody to give something. I don't want to attack people who have a lot of money. I think we ought to hold up all the people who are in the maximum income group, who would tell us it's a bad idea to continue this tax cut for us. And who would tell us it would be a terrible thing for philanthropy in America if we got rid of the estate tax completely?

You know it's interesting. Bill Gates, who has given away more money and got more than anybody I know, is against repealing the estate tax. Warren Buffet is against repealing the estate tax. We ought to do this in a positive way and say, look, we need more philanthropy, more people investing in health clinics in America, investing in helping our schools modernize their equipment, investing in these kinds of things.

Another thing I would say is sort of heresy. I would like to see the DLC initiate a dialogue with conservatives all across America who aren't interested in the politics of personal destruction. Most conservatives are conservative in theory but operationally progressive if they know and understand what the issue is and they don't feel like it's a threat to their values. And I think we ought to have conversations, not screaming matches on radio and television talk shows, conversations about why the Brady Bill is not a threat to the right of people to go hunting, about why being pro choice is not the same thing as thinking there ought to be more abortions in America, about why being for basic civil rights for gay people is in the best American tradition and doesn't have anything to do with somebody's religious or personal convictions. We ought to talk and, and we ought to listen. Look, the agents of change lose when there's no dialogue. When people are screaming at each other and they're mad and they're scared, we lose. When people are talking and listening and thinking, we win. And I think we ought to reach out and have a genuine organized, disciplined dialogue.

The last point I want to make is we've got to be strong. When we look weak in a time where people feel insecure, we lose. When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody, who's weak and right. When I went in to Bosnia or Kosovo, and some Republican leader criticized me, if I had run ads in his state against him, the Republicans would have shut down the operations of the Senate until we stopped. What was done to Tom Daschle was unconscionable, but our refusal to stand up and defend him in a disciplined way was worse. We should not demonize them. That's not who we are. Are we comfortable with that? But we should defend ourselves. You just remember that when people are insecure, they'd rather have somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right.

Finally, a word about the basic things. We win with vision, values and ideas. What should our vision of the 21st century be? A global community of people committed to people and prosperity, freedom and security. What's the basic value? Our differences are interesting but in an interdependent world, our common humanity matters more. Everybody counts, everybody deserves a chance, everybody has got a responsible role to play; we all do better when we work together. What's the strategy? Just what I said: a security strategy; a positive strategy to make a world with more friends and fewer enemies; institutional cooperation through the U.N., the World Trade Organization, and I believe, cooperation against climate change, for a comprehensive nuclear test ban, for a biological weapons convention. I'm even satisfied that the criminal court presents no threat to our soldiers.

So, I'm for all that and I don't think you can just ask people to cooperate when it suits you. There were times when the World Trade Organization issued decisions I thought were nuts. But I thought we were better off in than out. If people only cooperated when it suited them, there would be no marriages. There were would be no sports teams. There would be no successful business partnerships. There would be no nothing. We live in an interdependent world. In the '90s, we got the benefits of it. On September the 11th, it hit us right upside the head. In both cases, the same forces were at work: open borders, easy travel, access to information and technology, what's the difference? The downside happens in an interdependent world when people don't have shared values, shared benefits, and shared responsibilities. That's the world we've got to make.

To do it, we have to keep making America better. That's our job. I think you ought to be optimistic. And I think you ought to be strong. Of course it is hard. Machiavelli said there is nothing so difficult in human affairs as to change the established order of things. The people who have fought throughout history for peace and progress have had a hard time. It cost Lincoln his life. FDR, destroyed his health. Gandhi, President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, all killed. Sadat and Rabin died in the Middle East, killed by their own people, who were against the kind of progress and peace they sought to achieve. Mandela spent 27 years in jail because he thought the majority ought to have something to say about how the people of South Africa lived and ordered their affairs. Look, this is hard.

Martin Luther King said the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. The people, who want to be the benders toward justice have the harder burden. You chose to be Democrats. Nobody made you. You made this decision. And most of us are still here because we like being here. So we lost a couple of elections. Big deal. Compared to the sacrifices others have made to be agents of constructive change, so what? So I say, take a deep breath. Decide what you believe. Rear back and go on.

Thank you very much.

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