I spent much of the rest of October dealing with the aftermath of Somalia and fending off efforts in Congress to limit my ability to commit American troops to Haiti and Bosnia.
On the twenty-sixth we finally celebrated a light moment, Hillarys first birthday in the White House. It was a surprise costume party. Her staff had arranged for us to dress up like James and Dolley Madison. When she got back from a long day of health-care work, she was led upstairs in a totally dark White House to find her costume. She came downstairs, looking wonderful in her hoop skirt and wig, to find me in white wig and colonial tights, and several of her staff dressed up like her in all her manifestations, with different hairdos and in different roles, from pushing health care to making tea and cookies. With my hair going white anyway, my wig looked good, but I looked ridiculous in the tights.
The next day, dressed in normal clothes, Hillary and I personally delivered our health-care legislation to Congress. Hillary had been briefing members of Congress from both parties for weeks and getting rave reviews. Many House Republicans had praised our efforts, and Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island, who represented the Senate Republicans, said that while he disagreed with parts of our plan, he thought we could work together to produce a good compromise. I was beginning to believe we might actually have an honest debate that would produce something close to universal coverage.
Our critics had a field day with the bills length, 1,342 pages. Every year Congress passes bills more than a thousand pages long dealing with less profound and complex subjects. Moreover, our bill would have eliminated far more pages of laws and regulations than it proposed to add. Everyone in Washington knew that, but the American people didnt. The bills length gave credibility to the effective ads the health insurance companies were already running against the plan. They featured two actors as a normal-looking couple named Harry and Louise, who talked wearily about their fears that the government was going to force us to pick from a few health plans designed by government bureaucrats. The ads were completely misleading but clever and widely seen. In fact, the bureaucratic costs imposed by the insurance companies were a big reason Americans paid more for health care but still didnt have the universal coverage that citizens in every other prosperous nation took for granted. The insurance companies wanted to keep the profits of an inefficient and unfair system; tapping into the well-known skepticism of Americans about any major government action was the best way to do it.
In early November, Congressional Quarterly reported that I had enjoyed a higher success rate with Congress than any President in his first year since President Eisenhower in 1953. We had passed the economic plan, reduced the deficit, and implemented many of my campaign promises, including the EITC expansion, the empowerment zones, a capital gains tax cut for small business, the childhood immigration initiative, and student-loan reform. Congress had also approved national service, the Russian aid package, the motor voter bill, and the family leave law. Both houses of Congress had passed versions of my crime bill, which would begin funding the 100,000 community police officers I had promised during the campaign. The economy had already produced more private-sector jobs than had been produced in the previous four years. Interest rates were still low, and investment was up.
Al Gores campaign mantra was coming true. Now everything that should be up was up and everything that should be down was down, with one big exception. Despite the successes, my approval ratings were still low. On November 7, in a special Meet the Press interview I did with Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw on the shows forty-sixth anniversary, Russert asked me why my ratings were down. I told him I didnt know, though I had a few ideas.
A few days earlier I had read a list of our accomplishments to a group from Arkansas who were visiting the White House. When I finished, one of my home staters said, Then there must be a conspiracy to keep this a secret; we dont hear about any of this. Part of the fault was mine. As soon as I finished a task, I moved on to the next one, without doing a lot of follow-up communications. In politics, if you dont toot your own horn, it usually stays untooted. Part of the problem was the constant intrusion of crises like Haiti and Somalia. Part of it was the nature of the press coverage. The haircut, the Travel Office, and stories about the White House staff and our decision-making process were, I believed, either wrongly or overly reported.
A few months earlier, a national survey had shown that I had received an unusually high amount of negative press coverage. I had brought some of it on myself in mishandling press relations early. And maybe the press, which was so often called liberal, was in fact more conservative than I was, at least when it came to changing how things were supposed to work in Washington. Certainly they had different notions of what was important. Also, most of the people covering me were young, trying to build their careers in a system of twenty-four-hour news coverage where every story was expected to have a political edge and there were no kudos from colleagues for positive stories. This was almost inevitable in an environment where the print and network news media faced more competition from cable channels and where the lines between traditional press, tabloids, partisan publications, and political talk shows on TV and radio were being blurred.
The Republicans also deserved a lot of credit for the fact that my poll ratings were worse than my performance: they had been effective in their constant attacks and negative characterizations of the health-care and economic plans, and they had made the most of my mistakes. Since I had been elected, Republicans had won special U.S. Senate elections in Texas and Georgia, governors races in Virginia and New Jersey, and the mayoral races in New York and Los Angeles. In each case, the outcome was determined by decisive local factors, but I sure didnt have much positive influence. People didnt yet feel the economy getting better, and the old anti-tax, anti-government rhetoric still had a lot of juice. Finally, some of the things we were doing that would help millions of Americans were either too complex for easy consumption, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, or too controversial to avoid being politically damaging, even when they were good policy.
November offered two examples of sound policy and questionable politics. After Al Gore plainly bested Ross Perot in a heavily watched TV debate on NAFTA, it passed the House, 234200. Three days later the Senate followed suit, 6138. Mark Gearan reported to the press that Al and I had called or seen two hundred members of Congress, and the cabinet had made nine hundred calls. President Carter also helped, calling members of Congress all day long for a week. We also had to make deals on a wide range of issues; the lobbying effort for NAFTA looked even more like sausage making than the budget fight had. Bill Daley and our whole team had won a great economic and political victory for America, but like the budget, it came at a high price, dividing our party in Congress and infuriating many of our strongest supporters in the labor movement.
The Brady bill also passed in November, after the Senate Republicans backed off a filibuster inspired by the National Rifle Association. I signed the bill, with Jim and Sarah Brady in attendance. Ever since John Hinckley Jr. shot Jim in Hinckleys attempt to assassinate President Reagan, Jim and Sarah had crusaded for sensible gun-safety laws. They had worked for seven years to pass a bill requiring a waiting period for all handgun purchases so that the buyers backgrounds could be checked for criminal or mental-health problems. President Bush had vetoed an earlier version of the Brady bill because of the intense opposition of the NRA, which said it infringed on the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. The NRA believed the brief waiting period was an unacceptable burden on lawful gun buyers and declared that we could achieve the same result by increasing the penalties for illegally buying guns. Most Americans were for the Brady bill, but once it passed, it was no longer a voting issue with them. By contrast, the NRA was determined to defeat as many members of Congress who voted against them as possible. By the time I left office, the Brady background checks had kept more than 600,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers from buying handguns. It had saved countless lives. But, like the budget, it exposed many of those brave enough to vote for it to harsh attacks, which were effective enough to drive several of them from office.
Not everything positive I did was controversial. On the sixteenth, I signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was intended to protect a reasonable range of religious expression in public areas like schools and workplaces. The bill was designed to reverse a 1990 Supreme Court decision giving states more authority to regulate religious expression in such areas. America is full of people deeply committed to their very diverse faiths. I thought the bill struck the right balance between protecting their rights and the need for public order. It was sponsored in the Senate by Ted Kennedy and Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, and passed 973. The House adopted it by a voice vote. Though the Supreme Court later struck it down, I remain convinced it was a good and needed piece of legislation.
I always felt that protecting religious liberty and making the White House accessible to all religious faiths was an important part of my job. I assigned a member of the White House public liaison staff to be our bridge to the religious communities. I attended every one of the National Prayer Breakfasts that are held each year as Congress begins its work, speaking and staying for the entire event so that I could visit with the people of different faiths and political parties who came to pray for Gods guidance in our work. And every year when Congress resumed after the August recess, I hosted an interfaith breakfast in the State Dining Room that allowed me to hear the concerns of religious leaders and share mine with them. I wanted to keep open the lines of communication to them, even those who disagreed with me, and work with them whenever I could on social problems at home and humanitarian problems around the world.
I believe strongly in separation of church and state, but I also believe that both make indisputable contributions to the strength of our nation, and that on occasion they can work together for the common good without violating the Constitution. Government is, by definition, imperfect and experimental, always a work in progress. Faith speaks to the inner life, to the search for truth and the spirits capacity for profound change and growth. Government programs dont work as well in a culture that devalues family, work, and mutual respect. And its hard to live by faith without acting on the scriptural admonitions to care for the poor and downtrodden, and to love thy neighbor as thyself.
I was thinking about the role of faith in our national life in mid-November when I traveled to Memphis to address the convocation of the Church of God in Christ at Mason Temple Church. There had been a number of news reports about the rising tide of violence against children in African-American neighborhoods, and I wanted to discuss with the ministers and laypeople what we could do about it. There were obvious economic and social forces behind the disappearance of work in our inner cities, the breakdown of the family, the problems in schools, and the rise of welfare dependency, out-of-wedlock births, and violence. But the crushing combination of difficulties had created a culture that accepted as normal the presence of violence and the absence of work and two-parent families, and I was convinced that government alone could not change that culture. Many black churches were beginning to address these issues, and I wanted to encourage them to do more.
When I got to Memphis, I was among friends. The Church of God in Christ was the fastest-growing African-American denomination. Its founder, Charles Harrison Mason, received the inspiration for his churchs name in Little Rock, on a spot where I had helped lay a plaque two years earlier. His widow was in the church that day. The presiding bishop, Louis Ford of Chicago, had played a leading role in the presidential campaign.
Mason Temple is hallowed ground in the history of civil rights. Martin Luther King Jr. had preached his last sermon there, on the night before he was killed. I evoked the spirit of King and his uncanny prediction that his life might not last much longer to ask my friends to examine honestly the great crisis of the spirit that is gripping America today.
Then I put away my notes and gave what many commentators later said was the best speech of my eight years as President, speaking to friends from my heart in the language of our shared heritage:
If Martin Luther King were to reappear by my side today and give us a report card on the last twenty-five years, what would he say? You did a good job, he would say, voting and electing people who formerly were not electable because of the color of their skin. . . . You did a good job, he would say, letting people who have the ability to do so live wherever they want to live, go wherever they want to go in this great country. . . . He would say you did a good job creating a black middle class . . . in opening opportunity.
But, he would say, I did not live and die to see the American family destroyed. I did not live and die to see thirteen-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down nine-year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not live and die to see young people destroy their own lives with drugs and then build fortunes destroying the lives of others. That is not what I came here to do. I fought for freedom, he would say, but not for the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandon, not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers of the children walk away from them and abandon them as if they dont amount to anything. I fought for people to have the right to work but not to have whole communities and people abandoned. This is not what I lived and died for.
I did not fight for the right of black people to murder other black people with reckless abandon. . . .
There are changes we can make from the outside in; thats the job of the President and the Congress and the governors and the mayors and the social service agencies. And then theres some changes were going to have to make from the inside out, or the others wont matter. . . . Sometimes there are no answers from the outside in; sometimes all the answers have to come from the values and the stirrings and the voices that speak to us from within. . . .
Where there are no families, where there is no order, where there is no hope . . . who will be there to give structure, discipline, and love to these children? You must do that. And we must help you.
So in this pulpit, on this day, let me ask all of you in your heart to say: We will honor the life and the work of Martin Luther King. . . . Somehow, by Gods grace, we will turn this around. We will give these children a future. We will take away their guns and give them books. We will take away their despair and give them hope. We will rebuild the families and the neighborhoods and the communities. We wont make all the work that has gone on here benefit just a few. We will do it together, by the grace of God.
The Memphis speech was a hymn of praise to a public philosophy rooted in my personal religious values. Too many things were falling apart; I was trying to put them together.
On November 19 and 20, I went back to putting things together, flying to Seattle for the first-ever leaders meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organization. Before 1993, APEC had been a forum for finance ministers to discuss economic issues. I had suggested that the leaders themselves should meet every year to discuss our common interests, and I wanted to use our first meeting, on Blake Island, just off the coast of Seattle, to pursue three objectives: a free-trade area covering the Americas and the Asian Pacific nations; an inf............