of college and a $10,000 tuition tax deduction for all higher education after high school; a “GI Bill” for America’s workers to give a skill grant to adults who needed further training; and a plan to connect every classroom and library to the Internet by 2000.
I told the Congress and the American people that one of America’s greatest strengths in the Cold War had been a bipartisan foreign policy. Now, with education critical to our security in the twenty-first century, I asked that we approach it in the same way: “Politics must stop at the schoolhouse door.”
I also asked the Congress to support the other commitments I had made to the American people in my campaign: the expansion of the family leave law; a large increase in AIDS research to develop a vaccine; an extension of health insurance to the children of low-income working people who couldn’t afford it on their own; a comprehensive assault on juvenile crime, violence, drugs, and gangs; a doubling of the number of empowerment zones and the number of toxic waste sites cleaned up; and the continued expansion of community service programs.
In foreign policy, I asked for support for the expansion of NATO; the North Korean nuclear agreement; the extension of our Bosnian mission; our increasing engagement with China; “fast track” authority in trade negotiations, which requires Congress to vote on trade agreements up or down without amendments; a weapons modernization program at the Pentagon to meet new security challenges; and ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which I thought would go a long way toward protecting America from terrorist attacks with poison gas.
In the speech, I tried to reach out to Republicans as well as Democrats, telling them that I would defend any member’s vote on the right kind of balanced budget and quoting a scripture verse, Isaiah 58:12: “thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.” In one way or another, that’s what I had been trying to do for most of my life.
The media’s limited appetite for policy, compared with breaking scandal, became humorously apparent near the end of my speech. I had what I thought was a fine closing: I pointed out that “a child born tonight will have almost no memory of the twentieth century. Everything that child will know about America will be because of what we do now to build a new century.” I reminded all who were listening that there were just over a thousand days until that new century, “a thousand days to build a bridge to a land of new promise.” While I was making my pitch, the networks split the television screen so that viewers could also watch the jury render its verdict in the civil suit against O. J. Simpson over the murder of his wife, a suit brought after the jury in the criminal case failed to convict him. The television audience heard the civil jury rule against Simpson and my exhortations about the future simultaneously. I felt fortunate that I wasn’t cut off completely, and that the public response to the speech was still positive.
Two days later I presented my budget plan to Congress. The budget brought America into balance in five years; increased investment in education by 20 percent, including the largest increase in college aid in fifty years since the GI Bill; cut spending in hundreds of other programs; provided targeted middleclass tax relief, including a $500-per-child tax credit; secured the Medicare Trust Fund, which was about to go broke, for ten years; provided health insurance to five million uninsured children, respite care for families caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s, and, for the first time, mammograms for older women under Medicare; and reversed the downward spiral in international affairs spending so that we could do more to promote peace and freedom and to fight terrorism, weapons proliferation, and narco-trafficking. Unlike two years earlier, when I had forced the Republicans to make their harsh budget proposals public before coming forward with my own, I went first. I thought it was the right thing to do, and also good politics. Now when the Republicans presented their budget, with its bigger tax cuts for upper- income people, they would have to cut back on my education and health-care proposals to pay for them. This wasn’t 1994; the public had figured things out, and the Republicans wanted to get reelected. I felt sure that, within a few months, Congress would pass a balanced budget that would be pretty close to my plan. A couple of weeks later, another attempt to pass the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution failed in the Senate as Senator Bob Torricelli of New Jersey decided to vote against it. It was a courageous vote. New Jersey was an anti-tax state, and Bob had voted for the amendment as a congressman. I hoped that his bravery would get us past the posturing and on to the business of actually balancing the budget.
In mid-month we got another economic boost when American-led negotiations in Geneva produced an agreement to liberalize world trade in telecommunications services, opening 90 percent of the markets to U.S. firms. The negotiations were launched by Al Gore and conducted by Charlene Barshefsky. Their work was certain to bring new jobs and services at lower prices to Americans, and to spread the benefits of new technologies across the world.
Around this time I was in Boston with Mayor Tom Menino. Crime, violence, and drug use were going down in America, but they were still on the rise among people under eighteen, though not in Boston, where no child had died from gun violence in eighteen months, a remarkable achievement for a large city. I proposed child trigger locks on guns to prevent accidental shootings, a massive anti-drug advertising campaign, required drug tests for young people seeking driver’s licenses, and reforms in the juvenile justice system, including the kind of probation and after-school services that Boston had implemented so successfully.
There were some interesting developments in Whitewater World in February. On the seventeenth, Kenneth Starr announced he would leave his post on August 1 to become dean of the Pepperdine University Law School in southern California. He had obviously decided that Whitewater was a dry hole and this was a graceful way out, but he received heavy criticism for his decision. The press said it looked bad because his Pepperdine position had been funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, whose funding of the Arkansas Project was not yet public knowledge, but who was widely recognized as an extreme rightwinger with an animus toward me. I thought their objection was flimsy; Starr was already earning lots of money representing political opponents of my administration while serving as independent counsel, and he would in fact reduce his conflicts of interest by going to Pepperdine. What really rocked Starr was all the heat he got from the Republican right and the three or four reporters who were deeply vested in finding something we’d done wrong, or at least in continuing the torment. By then, Starr had already done a lot for them: he had saddled a lot of people with big legal bills and damaged reputations, and, at enormous cost to taxpayers, had managed to drag the investigation out for three years, even after the RTC report said there was no basis for any civil or criminal action against Hillary and me. But the right wing and the Whitewater press knew that if Starr quit, it was a tacit admission that there was “no there there.” After they beat him up for four days he announced he would stay on. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The press was also still writing about fund-raising in the 1996 campaign. Among other things, they were agitated that I had invited people who had contributed to my campaign in 1992 to spend the night at the White House, even though, as with all guests, I paid for the costs of meals and other refreshments. The implication was that I had been selling overnights in the White House to raise money for the DNC. It was ridiculous. I was an incumbent President who led in the polls from start to finish; raising money was no problem, and even if it had been, I would never have used the White House in that way. At the end of the month, I released a list of all overnight guests in the first term. There were hundreds of them, about 85 percent of whom were relatives, friends of Chelsea’s, foreign visitors and other dignitaries, or people whom Hillary and I had known before I started running for President. As for my supporters from ’92 who were also my friends, I wanted as many of them as possible to have the honor of spending the night in the White House. Often, given the long hours I worked, the only time I had to visit with people in an informal way was late at night. There was never a single case when I raised money because of this practice. My critics seemed to be saying that the only people who shouldn’t be overnight guests were friends and supporters. When I released the list, many people on it were questioned by the press. One reporter called Tony Campolo and asked if he’d given me a contribution. When he said he had, he was asked how much. “I think $25,” he said, “but it might have been $50.” “Oh,” the reporter replied, “we don’t want to talk to you,” and hung up.
The month ended on a happy note, as Hillary and I took Chelsea and eleven of her girlfriends to dinner at the Bombay Club restaurant in Washington for her seventeenth birthday, and later to New York to see some plays, and Hillary won a Grammy Award for the audio version of
