I would support his request. His visit was the beginning of a great friendship for all of us. Mandela plainly liked Hillary, and I was really struck by the attention he paid to Chelsea. In the eight years I was in the White House, he never talked to me without asking about her. Once, during a phone conversation, he asked to speak to her, too. I’ve seen him show the same sensitivity to children, black and white, who crossed his path in South Africa. It speaks to his fundamental greatness.
Wednesday was a big night at the convention, with rousing speeches by Bob Kerrey and Ted Kennedy. There was a moving film tribute to Robert Kennedy, introduced by his son, Congressman Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts. Then Jerry Brown and Paul Tsongas spoke. Jerry bashed President Bush. So did Paul Tsongas, but he spoke up for Al Gore and me, too. After all he’d been through, it was a brave and classy thing to do.
Then came the big moment: Mario Cuomo’s nominating speech. He was still our party’s best orator, and he didn’t disappoint. With lofty rhetoric, stinging rebukes, and well-reasoned arguments, Cuomo made the case that it was time for “someone smart enough to know; strong enough to do; sure enough to lead: the Comeback Kid, a new voice for a new America.” After Congresswoman Maxine Waters and Congressman Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma, my other nominators, spoke, the roll was called. Alabama passed to Arkansas so that my home state could cast the first votes. Our Democratic chair, George Jernigan, who had run against me for attorney general sixteen years earlier, gave the honor to another Clinton delegate. Then my mother simply said, “Arkansas proudly casts our forty-eight votes for our favorite son and my son, Bill Clinton.” I wondered what Mother was thinking and feeling, beyond her bursting pride; whether her mind wandered back forty-six years, to the twenty-three-year-old widow who gave me life, or back over all the troubles she had borne with a bright smile to give me and my brother as normal a life as possible. I loved watching her and was grateful that someone had thought to let her start the tide rolling.
As the roll call continued, Hillary, Chelsea, and I were making our way to Madison Square Garden from our hotel and stopped inside Macy’s department store, where we gathered to watch the voting on television. When Ohio cast 144 votes for me, I crossed the majority threshold of 2,145 and was finally the official Democratic nominee. During the demonstration that followed, the three of us walked onto the stage. I was the first candidate to come to the convention before the night of my acceptance speech since John Kennedy did it in 1960. In brief remarks, I said, “Thirty-two years ago another young candidate who wanted to get the country moving again came to the convention to say a simple thank you.” I wanted to identify with the spirit of John Kennedy’s campaign, to thank my nominators and the delegates, and “to tell you that tomorrow night I will be the Comeback Kid.”
Thursday, July 16, was the final day of the convention. So far, we had had three great days, in the hall and on television. We had showcased not only our national leaders but also our rising stars, as well as ordinary citizens. We had hammered home our new ideas. But it would all count for nothing unless Al Gore and I were effective in our acceptance speeches. The day began with a surprise, as had so many days in this wild campaign season: Ross Perot withdrew from the race. I called him, congratulated him on his campaign, and said I agreed with him on the need for fundamental political reform. He declined to endorse either President Bush or me, and I went into the convention’s last night unsure whether his withdrawal would help or hurt.
After Al Gore was nominated by acclamation, he gave a rip-roaring speech, which he began by saying he’d dreamed as a boy growing up in Tennessee that he would, one day, be the warm-up act for Elvis, the nickname the staff gave me during the campaign. Al then launched into a litany of the Bush administration’s failings, saying after each one, “It’s time for them to go.” After he did it a couple of times, the delegates took over for him, sending sparks throughout the hall. Then he extolled my record, outlined the challenges we faced, and talked about his family and our obligation to leave a stronger, more united nation to the next generation. Al had given a really good speech. He had done his part. Now it was my turn.
Paul Begala wrote the first draft of the speech. We were trying to do a lot with it—biography, campaign rhetoric, and policy. And we were trying to appeal to three different groups—hard-core Democrats, independents and Republicans dissatisfied with the President but unsure of me, and people who didn’t vote at all because they didn’t think it made a difference. Paul, as always, had some great lines. And George Stephanopoulos had kept notes of the ones that had worked best on the stump during the primary campaign. Bruce Reed and Al From helped sharpen the policy section. To bring me on, my friends Harry and Linda Bloodworth Thomason produced a short film entitled “The Man from Hope.” It pumped the crowd up, and I walked onto the platform to tremendous applause. The speech started slowly, with a bow to Al Gore, thanks to Mario Cuomo, and a salute to my primary opponents. Then came the message: “In the name of all those who do the work and pay the taxes, raise the kids and play by the rules, in the name of the hardworking Americans who make up our forgotten middle class, I proudly accept your nomination for President of the United States. I am a product of that middle class, and when I am President, you will be forgotten no more.”
Next, I told the story of the people who had had the greatest impact on me, beginning with my mother, from her travails as a young widow with a baby to support to her current struggle with breast cancer, saying, “Always, always, always she taught me to fight.” I talked about my grandfather and how he taught me “to look up to people other folks looked down on.” And I paid tribute to Hillary for teaching me that “all children can learn and that each of us has a duty to help them do it.” I wanted America to know that my fighting spirit started with my mother, my commitment to racial equality started with my grandfather, and my concern for the future of all our children started with my wife. And I wanted people to know that everybody could be part of our American family: “I want to say something to every child in America tonight who is out there trying to grow up without a mother or father: I know how you feel. You are special too. You matter to America. And don’t ever let anybody tell you you can’t become whatever you want to be.”
For the next several minutes, I laid out my critique of the Bush record and my plan to do better. “We have gone from first to thirteenth in the world in wages since Reagan and Bush took office.”… “Four years ago he promised 15 million new jobs by this time, and he’s over 14 million short.”… “The incumbent President says unemployment always goes up a little before a recovery begins, but unemployment only has to go up one more person before a real recovery can begin. And Mr. President, you are that man.” I said my New Covenant of opportunity, responsibility, and community would give us “an America in which the doors of college are thrown open again to the sons and daughters of stenographers and steelworkers,” “an America in which middle-class incomes, not middle-class taxes, are going up,” “an America in which the rich are not soaked, but the middle class is not drowned either,” “an America where we end welfare as we know it.”
Then I made an appeal for national unity. To me, it was the most important part of the speech, something I had believed in since I was a little boy:
Tonight every one of you knows deep in your heart that we are too divided. It is time to heal America. And so we must say to every American: Look beyond the stereotypes that blind us. We need each other. All of us, we need each other. We don’t have a person to waste. And yet for too long politicians have told most of us that are doing all right that what’s really wrong with America is the rest of us. Them. Them, the minorities. Them, the liberals. Them, the poor, them, the homeless, them, the people with disabilities. Them, the gays.
We’ve gotten to where we’ve nearly them’ed ourselves to death. Them and them and them. But this is America. There is no them; there is only us. One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
That is our Pledge of Allegiance and that’s what the New Covenant is all about…. As a teenager I heard John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship. And then, as a student at Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by a professor named Carroll Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest nation in history because our people had always believed in two great ideas: that tomorrow can be better than today, and that every one of us has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so. That kind of future entered my life the night our daughter, Chelsea, was born. As I stood in that delivery room, I was overcome with the thought that God had given me a blessing my own father never knew: the chance to hold my child in my arms.
Somewhere at this very moment, a child is being born in America. Let it be our cause to give that child a happy home, a healthy family, and a hopeful future. Let it be our cause to see that that child has a chance to live to the fullest of her God-given capacities…. Let it be our cause that we give this child a country that is coming together, not coming apart—a country of boundless hopes and endless dreams; a country that once again lifts its people and inspires the world.
Let that be our cause, our commitment, and our New Covenant.
My fellow Americans, I end tonight where it all began for me: I still believe in a place called Hope. God bless you and God bless America.
