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On Sheltons office wall were pictures of two...
6:56 AM, Monday, February 15, 2010
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On Sheltons office wall were pictures of two great Confederate Civil War generals, Robert ELee and Stonewall JacksonWhen I saw Shelton on television as he stepped ashore, I remarked to one of my staff that America had come a long way if a man who revered Stonewall Jackson could be the liberator of Haiti
Cedras promised to cooperate with General Shelton and to leave power by October 15, as soon as the general amnesty law required by the UN agreement was passedAlthough I almost had to forcibly remove them from Haiti, Carter, Powell, and Nunn had done a courageous job under difficult and potentially dangerous circumstancesA combination of dogged diplomacy and imminent force had avoided bloodshedNow it was up to Aristide to honor his commitment of no to violence, no to vengeance, yes to reconciliationAs with so many such statements, this would prove to be easier said than done
Because the restoration of democracy in Haiti occurred without incident, it didnt turn out to have the negative impact the Democrats had fearedWe should have been in good shape going into the elections: the economy was producing 250,000 jobs a month, with unemployment dropping from over 7 percent to under 6 percent; the deficit was coming down; we had passed important legislation on crime, education, national service, trade, and family leave; and I was making headway on our foreign policy agenda with Russia, Europe, China, Japan, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, chanel cambon large tote bag Bosnia, and HaitiBut despite the record and the results, we were in trouble heading into the last six weeks of the election, for a variety of reasons: many people hadnt felt the economic improvements yet; no one believed the deficit was coming down; most people were unaware of the legislative victories and didnt know or didnt care about the foreign policy progress; the Republicans and their media and interest group allies had constantly and effectively attacked me as a wild-eyed liberal who wanted to tax them into the poorhouse and take their doctors and guns away; and the general press coverage was overwhelmingly negative
The Center for Media and Public Affairs issued a report saying that in my first sixteen months, there was an average of nearly five negative comments a night on the evening network news programs, far more than the first President Bush had received in his first two yearsThe centers director, Robert Lichter, said I had the misfortune of being president at the dawning of an age that combines attack-dog journalism with tabloid newsThere were some exceptions, of courseJacob Weisberg wrote that Bill Clinton has been more faithful to his word than any other chief executive in recent memory, but that voters mistrust Clinton in part because the media keeps telling them not to trust himJonathan Alter wrote in Newsweek, In less than two years, Bill Clinton had already achieved more domestically than John FKennedy, Gerald Ford, Jimmy wholesale gucci messenger bag Carter and George Bush combinedAlthough Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan often had their way with Congress, Congressional Quarterly says its Clinton who has had the most legislative success of any President since Lyndon JohnsonThe standard for measuring results domestically should not be the coherence of the process but how actual lives are touched and changedBy that standard, hes doing well
Alter may have been right, but if so, it was a well-kept secret
T hings grew worse as September drew to a closeActing base-ball commissioner Bud Selig announced that the players strike couldnt be resolved and he was canceling the rest of the season, and the World Series, for the first time since 1904Bruce Lindsey, who had helped to settle the airline strike, tried to resolve the standoffI even invited the representatives of the players and owners to the White House, but we couldnt settle itIf our national pastime was being canceled, things could not be going in the right direction
On September 26, George Mitchell formally threw in the towel on health-care reformSenator Chafee had continued to work with him, but he couldnt bring enough Republicans along to break Senator Doles filibusterThe $300 million that the health insurance and other lobbies had spent to stop health-care reform was well investedI put out a brief statement saying I would try again next year
Though I had felt for months that we were beaten, I was still disappointed, and I felt gucci watch uk bad that Hillary and Ira Magaziner were taking the rap for the failureIt was unfair for three reasonsFirst, our proposals were not the big governmentrun nightmare that the health-insurance companies ad campaigns had made them out to be; second, the plan was the best Hillary and Ira could do, given the charge from me: universal coverage without a tax increase; and finally, it wasnt they who had derailed health-care reformSenator Doles decision to kill any meaningful compromise had done thatI tried to cheer up Hillary by telling her that there were bigger mistakes in life than getting caught red-handed trying to provide health insurance to forty million Americans who were without it
In spite of our defeat, all the work Hillary, Ira Magaziner, and the rest of our people had done would not be in vainIn the years ahead, many of our proposals would find their way into law and practiceSenator Kennedy and Republican senator Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas would pass a bill guaranteeing that workers wouldnt lose their insurance when they changed jobsAnd in 1997, we would pass the Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP), providing health care to millions of children in the largest expansion of health insurance since Medicaid was enacted in 1965CHIP would help bring about the first decline in twelve years in the number of Americans without health insurance
There would be many other health-care victories as well: a bill allowing women to stay in the cheapest replica speedy louis vuitton real leather hospital for more than twenty-four hours after childbirth, ending HMO-ordered drive-by deliveries; increased coverage for mammograms and prostate screenings; a diabetes self-management program called the most important advance since insulin by the American Diabetes Association; large increases in biomedical research and in the care and treatment of HIV/AIDS at home and abroad; childhood immunization rates above 90 percent for the first time; and the application by executive order of a patients bill of rights guaranteeing the choice of a doctor and the right to prompt, adequate treatment for the eighty-five million Americans covered by federally funded plans
But that was all in the futureFor now, we had taken a good shellackingThats the image people would take into the elections
Near the end of the month, Newt Gingrich gathered more than three hundred Republican incumbents and candidates for a rally on the Capitol steps to sign a Contract with AmericaThe details of the contract had been percolating for some timeNewt had put them together to show that the Republicans were more than naysayers; they had a positive agendaThe contract was something new to American politicsTraditionally, midterm elections had been fought seat by seatNational conditions and a Presidents level of popularity could be a boost or a drag, but the conventional wisdom held that local factors were more importantGingrich was convinced that the conventional wisdom was pink gucci watch wrong
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