thanked Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori for letting them be stationed there, and pledged to reduce the tensions our presence had caused. It was my last G-8 summit, and I was sorry to rush through it to get back to Camp David. The other leaders had been very supportive of my initiatives over eight years, and we had accomplished a lot together. Chelsea traveled to Okinawa with me. One of the best things about the year for both Hillary and me was that Chelsea was home for the last half of it. She had amassed far more credits in her first three years at Stanford than she needed to graduate so that she could spend the last six months in the White House with us. Now she would be dividing her time between campaigning for her mother and helping me with events in the White House and going with me on foreign trips. She did a great job on both counts, and her presence made life much better for her parents.
At the end of the month I resumed my battle with the Republicans over tax cuts. They still wanted to spend a decade’s worth of projected surpluses on them, claiming that the money belonged to the taxpayers and we should give it back to them. It was a persuasive argument except for one thing: the surpluses were projected and the tax cuts would take effect whether the surpluses materialized or not. I attempted to illustrate the point by asking people to imagine that they had gotten one of those heavily advertised letters from well-known TV personality Ed McMahon that started with, “You may have already won $10 million.” I said that the people who would spend $10 million upon receiving that letter should support the Republican plan; everyone else should “stick with us and keep the prosperity going.”
August was a busy month. It began with the nomination of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in Philadelphia. Hillary and I went to Martha’s Vineyard for a couple of fund-raisers for her, then I flew to Idaho to visit firefighters who were fighting a large and dangerous forest fire. On the ninth, I awarded the Medal of Freedom to fifteen Americans, including the late senator John Chafee, Senator Pat Moynihan, Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Edelman, AIDS activist Dr. Mathilde Krim, Jesse Jackson, civil rights lawyer Judge Cruz Reynoso, and General Wes Clark, who had ended his brilliant military career by commanding our arduous campaign against Milosevic and his ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
Amid a blizzard of political events, I did one completely nonpolitical one: I went to my friend Bill Hybels’s Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, near Chicago, for a conversation before several hundred people at Bill’s ministers’ leadership conference. We talked about when I decided to go into politics, where my family went to church and what it meant to me, why so many people still believed I had never apologized for my misconduct, how I used polls, what the most important elements of leadership were, and how I wanted to be remembered. Hybels had an uncanny way of stripping things down to basics and getting me to discuss things I normally would not talk about. I enjoyed taking a few hours away from politics and work to think about the inner life that politics often crowds out.
On August 14, opening night of the Democratic convention, Hillary gave a moving expression of thanks to the Democrats for their support and a mighty declaration of what was at stake in this year’s election. Then, after my third convention film produced by Harry and Linda Thomason, which outlined the accomplishments of our eight years, I was brought onstage to thunderous applause and inspirational music. When the noise died down, I said that the election was about one simple question: “Are we going to keep this progress and prosperity going?”
I asked the Democrats to make sure we applied President Rea-gan’s 1980 standard for whether a party should continue in office: “Are we better off today than we were eight years ago?” The answer proved that Harry Truman was right when he said, “If you want to live like a Republican, you better vote for the Democrats.” The crowd roared. We were better off, and not just economically. Jobs were up, but so were adoptions. The debt was down, but so was teen pregnancy. We were becoming both more diverse and more united. We had built and crossed our bridge to the twenty-first century, “and we’re not going back.”
I made the case for a Democratic Congress, saying that what we did with our prosperity was just as sure a test of America’s character, values, and judgment as how we had dealt with adversity in the past. If we had a Democratic Congress, America would already have the Patients’ Bill of Rights, a minimum wage increase, stronger equal-pay laws for women, and middle-class tax cuts for college tuition and long-term care.
I praised Hillary for thirty years of public service and especially her work in the White House for children and families, and said that just as she had always been there for our family, she would always be there for the families of New York and America.
Then I argued for Al Gore, emphasizing his strong convictions, good ideas, understanding of the future, and fundamental decency. I thanked Tipper for her mental-health advocacy and applauded Al’s selection of Joe Lieberman, and spoke of our thirty-year friendship and Joe’s work for civil rights in the South in the sixties. As the first Jewish-American ever to be on a major party’s national ticket, Joe provided clear evidence of Al Gore’s commitment to building One America.
I ended the speech with personal thanks and a personal plea:
My friends, fifty-four years ago this week I was born in a summer storm to a young widow in a small southern town. America gave me the chance to live my dreams. And I have tried as hard as I knew how to give you a better chance to live yours. Now, my hair is a little grayer, my wrinkles are a little deeper, but with the same optimism and hope I brought to the work I loved so eight years ago, I want you to know my heart is filled with gratitude.
My fellow Americans, the future of our country is now in your hands. You must think hard, feel deeply, and choose wisely. And remember… keep putting people first. Keep building those bridges. And don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.
The next day Hillary, Chelsea, and I flew to Monroe, Michigan, for a “passing the torch” rally with Al and Tipper Gore. A good crowd in a battleground state sent Al off to Los Angeles to claim the nomination and become the leader of our party, and me to the local McDonald’s, a stop I hadn’t made in years.
The Bush-Cheney ticket had settled on a two-pronged campaign message. The positive argument was “compassionate conservatism,” giving America the same good conditions we had provided, but with a smaller government and a bigger tax cut. The negative one was that they would elevate the moral tone and end bitter partisanship in Washington. That was, to say the least, disingenuous. I had done everything I knew to reach out to the Republicans in Washington; they had tried to demonize me from day one. Now they were saying, “We’ll stop misbehaving if you give us the White House back.”
The morality argument should have had no resonance, unless people believed Gore had done something wrong, especially with the super-straight Lieberman on the ticket. I wasn’t on the ballot; it was both unfair and self-defeating for voters to blame them for my personal mistakes. I knew their strategy wouldn’t work unless the Democrats accepted the legitimacy of the Republican argument and failed to remind voters of the impeachment fiasco and how much more damage the right wing could inflict if they controlled both the White House and the Congress. An NRA vice president had already boasted that if Bush were elected, the NRA would have an office in the White House.
After our convention, the polls showed Al Gore had come from behind to hold a narrow lead, and I accompanied Hillary to the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York for a couple of days of vacation and campaigning. She was running a different race from the one she had begun. Mayor Giuliani had withdrawn, and her new opponent, Long Island congressman Rick Lazio, presented a new challenge: he was attractive and smart, a less polarizing figure who was nevertheless more conservative than Giuliani. I ended the month with two short trips. After meeting in Washington with Vicente Fox, the presidentelect of Mexico, I flew to Nigeria to see President Olusegun Obasanjo. I wanted to support his efforts to curb AIDS before Nigeria’s infection rates reached the levels of southern African nations, and to highlight the recent passage of the African trade bill, which I hoped would help Nigeria’s struggling economy. Obasanjo and I attended a gathering on AIDS at which a young girl spoke of her efforts to educate her schoolmates about the disease, and a man named John Ibekwe told the gripping story of his marriage to a woman who was HIV-positive, his becoming infected, and his frantic search to get the medicine for his wife that would enable their child to be born without the virus. Eventually John succeeded, and little Maria was born HIV-free. President Obasanjo asked Mrs. Ibekwe to come up onstage, where he embraced her. It was a touching gesture and sent a clear signal that Nigeria would not fall into the trap of denial that had contributed so much to the spread of AIDS in other countries. From Nigeria, I flew to Arusha, Tanzania, to the Burundi peace talks, which Nelson Mandela had been chairing. Mandela wanted me to join him and several other African leaders for the closing session to exhort the leaders of Burundi’s numerous factions to sign the agreement and avoid another
