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The Republicans had convinced many Americans that the Democrats and I were too liberal and too tied to big government, but time was on my side for three reasons: because of our economic plan, the deficit would keep coming down and the economy would continue to improve; the new Congress, especially the House, was well to the right of the American people; and, despite their campaign promises, the Republicans would soon be proposing cuts in education, health care, and aid to the environment to pay for their tax cuts and defense increasesIt would happen because thats what ultra-conservatives wanted to do, and because I was determined to hold them to the laws of arithmetic

W ithin a week of the election, I was hard at work again, as were the RepublicansOn November 10, I named Patsy Fleming as national AIDS policy director, in recognition of her outstanding work in developing our AIDS policy, which included a 30 percent increase in overall AIDS funding, and I outlined a series of new initiatives to combat AIDSThe announcement was dedicated to the guiding light of the AIDS fight, Elizabeth Glaser, who was desperately ill with AIDS and would die in three weeks

The same day, I announced that the United States would no longer enforce the arms embargo in BosniaThe move had strong support in Congress and was necessary because the Serbs had resumed their aggression, with an assault on the town of Bihac; by late November, NATO was bombing Serb missile sites in the areaOn the twelfth, I was en route to Indonesia for the annual APEC leaders meeting, where the eighteen Asian-Pacific chanel black wallet nations committed themselves to creating an Asian free market by 2020, with the wealthier nations doing so by 2010

On the home front, Newt Gingrich, basking in the afterglow of his big victory, kept up the withering personal attacks that had proved so successful in the campaignJust before the election, he had taken a page from his pamphlet of smear words, calling me the enemy of normal AmericansOn the day after the election, he called Hillary and me counterculture McGovernicks, his ultimate condemnation

The epithet Gingrich hurled at us was correct in some respectsWe had supported McGovern, and we werent part of the culture that Gingrich wanted to dominate America: the self-righteous, condemning, Absolute Truthclaiming dark side of white southern conservatismI was a white Southern Baptist who was proud of my roots and confirmed in my faithBut I knew the dark side all too wellSince I was a boy, I had watched people assert their piety and moral superiority as justifications for claiming an entitlement to political power, and for demonizing those who begged to differ with them, usually over civil rightsI thought America was about building a more perfect union, widening the circle of freedom and opportunity, and strengthening the bonds of community across the lines that divide us

Even though I was intrigued by Gingrich and impressed by his political skills, I didnt think much of his claim that his politics represented Americas best valuesI had been raised not to look down on anyone and not to blame others for my own problems or shortcomingsThats exactly what the New Right chanel cambon handbag message didBut it had enormous political appeal because it offered both psychological certainty and escape from responsibility: they were always right, we were always wrong; we were responsible for all the problems, even though they had controlled the presidency for all but six of the last twenty-six yearsAll of us are vulnerable to arguments that let us off the hook, and in the 1994 election, in an America where hardworking middle-class families felt economic anxiety and were upset by the pervasiveness of crime, drugs, and family dysfunction, there was an audience for the Gingrich message, especially when we didnt offer a competing one

Gingrich and the Republican right had brought us back to the 1960s again; Newt said that America had been a great country until the sixties, when the Democrats took over and replaced absolute notions of right and wrong with more relativistic valuesHe pledged to take us back to the morality of the 1950s, in order to renew American civilization

Of course there were political and personal excesses in the 1960s, but the decade and the movements it spawned also produced advances in civil rights, womens rights, a clean environment, workplace safety, and opportunities for the poorThe Democrats believed in and worked for those thingsSo did a lot of traditional Republicans, including many of the governors Id served with in the late 1970s and 1980sIn focusing only on the excesses of the 1960s, the New Right reminded me a lot of the carping that white southerners did against Reconstruction for a century after the Civil WarWhen I was growing up, we were chanel logo necklace still being taught how mean the Northern forces were to us during Reconstruction, and how noble the South was, even in defeatThere was something to it, but the loudest complaints always overlooked the good done by Lincoln and the national Republicans in ending slavery and preserving the UnionOn the big issues, slavery and the Union, the South was wrong

Now it was happening again, as the right wing used the excesses of the sixties to obscure the good done in civil rights and other areasTheir blanket condemnation reminded me of a story Senator David Pryor used to tell about a conversation hed had with an eighty-five-year-old man who told him he had lived through two world wars, the Depression, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and all the other upheavals of the twentieth centuryPryor said, You sure have seen a lot of changesYeah, the old man replied, and I was against every one of them!

Still, I didnt want to demonize Gingrich and his crowd as they had done to usHe had some interesting ideas, especially in the areas of science, technology, and entrepreneurialism, and he was a committed internationalist in foreign policyAlso, I had thought for years that the Democratic Party needed to modernize its approach, to focus less on preserving the partys industrial-age achievements and more on meeting the challenges of the information age, and to clarify our commitment to middle-class values and concernsI welcomed the chance to compare our New Democrat ideas on economic and social problems with those embodied in the Contract with AmericaPolitics at its best is about the omega quartz competition of ideas and policy

But Gingrich didnt stop thereThe core of his argument was not just that his ideas were better than ours; he said his values were better than ours, because Democrats were weak on family, work, welfare, crime, and defense, and because, being crippled by the self-indulgent sixties, we couldnt draw distinctions between right and wrong

The political power of his theory was that it forcefully and clearly confirmed the negative stereotypes of Democrats that Republicans had been working to embed in the nations consciousness since 1968Nixon had done it; Reagan had done it; and George Bush had done it, too, when he turned the 1988 election into a referendum on Willie Horton and the Pledge of AllegianceNow Newt had taken the art of reverse plastic surgery to a whole new level of sophistication and harshness

The problem with his theory was that it didnt fit the factsMost Democrats were tough on crime, supported welfare reform and a strong national defense, and had been much more fiscally responsible than the New Right RepublicansMost were also hardworking, law-abiding Americans who loved their country, worked in their communities, and tried to raise their children wellNever mind the facts; Gingrich had his story line down pat, and he applied it every chance he got

Soon he would charge, without a shred of evidence, that 25 percent of my White House aides were recent drug usersThen he said that Democratic values were responsible for the large number of out-of-wedlock births to teen mothers, whose babies should be taken away from them and put into fendi replica spy bag orphanages