W hile the Camp David talks were going on, positive things happened elsewhere. Charlene Barshefsky completed a sweeping trade agreement with Vietnam, and the House adopted an amendment by my longtime supporter Maxine Waters that funded a down payment on our share of the Millennium Debt Relief effort. By this time debt relief had an amazing array of supporters, led by Bono.
By then Bono had become a fixture in Washington political life. He turned out to be a first-class politician, partly through the element of surprise. Larry Summers, who knew everything about economics but little about popular culture, came into the Oval Office one day and remarked that hed just had a meeting on debt relief with some guy named Bonojust one namedressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and big sunglasses. He came to see me about debt relief, and he knows what hes talking about.
The trip to Okinawa was a big success, as the G-8 put some teeth into our commitment to have all the worlds children in primary school by 2015. I led off with a $300 million program to provide one good meal a day to nine million children, provided they came to school to get the meal. The initiative had been brought to me by our ambassador to the UN food programs in Rome, George McGovern; McGoverns old partner in pioneering food stamps, Bob Dole; and Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. I also visited the U.S. forces in Okinawa, 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 decades 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 Marthas 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, Childrens 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 Hybelss Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, near Chicago, for a conversation before several hundred people at Bills 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 years elec-tion. 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-gans 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 were 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 Americas 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 Als selection of Joe Lieberman, and spoke of our thirty-year friendship and Joes work for civil rights in the South in the sixties. As the first Jewish-American ever to be on a major partys national ticket, Joe provided clear evidence of Al Gores 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 dont 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 McDonalds, a stop I hadnt 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, Well 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 wasnt on the ballot; it was both unfair and self-defeating for voters to blame them for my personal mistakes. I knew their strategy wouldnt 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 president-elect of Mexico, I flew to Nigeria to see President Olusegun Obasanjo. I wanted to support his efforts to curb AIDS before Nigerias 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 Nigerias 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 Burundis numerous factions to sign the agreement and avoid another Rwanda. Mandela gave me clear instructions: We were doing a good cop/bad cop routine. I would give a positive speech urging them to do the right thing, then Mandela would demand that the parties sign on to his proposal. It worked: President Pierre Buyoya and thirteen of the nineteen warring parties signed the agreement. Soon all but two of them would sign. Although it was a burdensome trip, going to the Burundi peace conference was an important way to demonstrate to Africa and the world that the United States was a peacemaker. As I said to myself before we began our Camp David talks, were either going to succeed or get caught trying.
On August 30, I flew to Cartagena, Colombia, with Speaker Dennis Hastert and six other House members, Senator Joe Biden and three other senators, and several cabinet members. We all wanted to reinforce Americas commitment to President Andrs Pastranas Plan Colombia, which was intended to free his country of the narco-traffickers and terrorists who controlled about one-third of its territory. Pastrana had risked his life in an attempt to make peace, going alone to meet with the guerrillas in their lair. When he failed, he had asked the United States to help him defeat them with Plan Colombia. With Hasterts strong support, I had gotten more than $1 billion from Congress to do our part.
Cartagena is a beautiful old walled city. Pastrana took us out into the streets to meet officials who were fighting the narco-traffickers and some of the people who had been affected by the violence, including the widow of a police officer slain in the line of duty, one of hundreds killed for their honesty and bravery. Andrs also introduced Chelsea and me to an adorable group of young musicians who called themselves the Children of Vallenato, their home village in an area often ruled by violence. They sang and danced for peace in traditional native dress, and that evening in the streets of Cartagena, Pastrana, Chelsea, and I danced with them.
At the end of the first week of September, after vetoing a bill repealing the estate tax, announcing that I would defer a decision on deploying a missile defense system to my successor, and campaigning with Hillary at the New York State Fair, I went to the United Nations for its Millennium Summit. It was the largest assembly of world leaders ever gathered. My last UN speech was a brief but impassioned appeal for international cooperation on the issues of security, peace, and shared prosperity, in order to build a world that operated according to simple rules: Everyone counts; everyone has a role to play; and we all do better when we help each other.
After the speech I walked out into the hall to sit with Madeleine Albright and Dick Holbrooke to listen to the next speaker: President Mohammed Khatami of Iran. Iran had held several elections in recent years, for the presidency, for parliament, and for municipal offices. In every case the reformers had won between two-thirds and 70 percent of the vote. The problem was that under the Iranian constitution, a council of Islamic fundamentalists led by Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei held enormous power; they could nullify certain legislation and prohibit candidates from running for office. And they controlled Irans foreign intelligence operations and funded its support for terrorism. We had tried to reach out to Khatami and to promote more people-to-people contacts. I had also said that the United States was wrong to support the overthrow of an elected government in Iran in the 1950s. I hoped my gesture of respect would make more progress possible under the next President.
Kofi Annan and I hosted the traditional luncheon, and when it was over I followed my usual custom of standing by my table to shake hands with the leaders who stopped by on the way out. I thought I was at the end when I shook hands with a giant Namibian official, who towered over me. He then moved on, revealing a last greeter who had been invisible behind him: Fidel Castro. Castro stuck out his hand and I shook it, the first President to do so in more than forty years. He said he didnt wish to cause me any trouble but wanted to pay his respects before I left office. I replied that I hoped that someday our nations would be reconciled.
After the UN meetings, OPEC announced an increase in oil production of 800,000 barrels a day, Prime Minister Vajpayee of India came to Washington for a state visit, and on September 19, the Senate followed the House in approving the bill granting normal trade relations with China, thus clearing the way for its entry into the WTO. I was convinced that in time it would prove to be one of the most important foreign policy developments of my eight years.
Hillary had a good September. She won the primary on the twelfth and handily defeated Lazio in their debate moderated by Tim Russert in Buffalo. Lazio had three problems: he claimed that the still distressed economy of upstate New York had turned the corner; ran a misleading ad (for which he was called to account) that implied that Senator Moynihan was supporting him, not Hillary; and got in Hillarys face and tried to bully her into signing a pledge on campaign finance that was not credible. All Hillary had to do was keep her composure and answer the ques-tions, which she did very well. A week later, a new poll showed her leading Lazio 4839 percent, with new strength among suburban women.
On September 16, I bid an emotional farewell to a large, predominantly African-American crowd at the Congressional Black Caucus dinner, reviewing the record, making my case for Gore and Lieberman, and asking their support for well-qualified but still unconfirmed black judges. Then I threw away the script and closed with these words:
I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Toni Morrison once said I was the first black President this country ever had. And I would rather have that than a Nobel Prize, and Ill tell you why. Because somewhere, in the deep and lost threads of my own memory, are the roots of understanding of what you have known. Somewhere, there was a deep longing to share the fate of the people who had been left out and left behind, sometimes brutalized, and too often ignored or forgotten.
I dont exactly know who all I have to thank for that. But Im quite sure I dont deserve any credit for it, because whatever I did, I really felt I had no other choice.
I made the same points a few days later, on September 20, to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus dinner, and to the Bishops Conference of the Church of God in Christ, where I noted that there were only 120 days left in my presidency and that I would give them 120 hard days working with Congress and trying to make peace in the Middle East. I knew Id have an opportunity to win some more victories as Congress wound down, but I wasnt so sure about the Middle East.
Several days later my economic team was with me as I announced that median income had risen by more than $1,000 in the last year, taking it above $40,000 for the first time in our history, and that the number of Americans without health insurance had dropped by 1.7 million the previous year, the first major decline in twelve years.
On September 25, after weeks of efforts by our team to get peace talks back on track, Barak invited Arafat to his home for dinner. Near the end of the meal, I called and had a good talk with both of them. The next day both sides sent negotiators to Washington to take up where they had left off at Camp David. On the twenty-eighth, everything changed, as Ariel Sharon became the first leading Israeli politician to walk on the Temple Mount since Israel captured it in the 1967 war. At the time, Moshe Dayan had said that Muslim religious sites would be respected, and thereafter the mount was overseen by Muslims.
Arafat said he had asked Barak to prevent Sharons stroll, which was clearly intended to affirm Israels sovereignty over the site and to strengthen his hand against a challenge to his leadership of the Likud Party from former prime minister Netanyahu, who was now sounding more hawkish than Sharon. I had also hoped Barak would prevent Sharons inflammatory escapade, but Barak told me he couldnt. Instead, Sharon was forbidden to enter the Dome of the Rock, or the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and was escorted to the Mount by a large number of heavily armed police officers.
I and others on our team had urged Arafat to prevent violence. It was a great opportunity for the Palestinians, for once, to refuse to be provoked. I thought Sharon should have been greeted with flowers by Palestinian children and told that when the Temple Mount was under Palestinian control, he would be welcome anytime. But as Abba Eban had said long ago, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The next day there were large Palestinian demonstrations near the Western Wall, during which Israeli police opened fire with rubber bullets on stone throwers and others. At least five people were killed and hundreds were wounded. As the violence persisted, two vivid images of its pain and futility emerged: a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy shot in the crossfire and dying in his fathers arms, and two Israeli soldiers pulled from a building and beaten to death, with their lifeless bodies dragged through the streets and one of their assailants proudly showing his bloodstained hands to the world on television.
While the Middle East was exploding, the Balkans was getting better. In the last week of September, Slobodan Milosevic was defeated for the presidency of Serbia by Vojislav Kostunica in a campaign in which we had helped ensure that the election could not be stolen and Kostunica could get his message out. Milosevic tried to steal the election anyway, but massive demonstrations convinced him he couldnt get away with it, and on October 6, the prime mover behind the Balkan slaughters admitted defeat.
In early October, I hosted a meeting in the Cabinet Room for supporters of the debt-relief initiative. Reverned Pat Robertson was there. His strong support and that of the evangelical Christian community showed how broad and deep support for debt relief had become. In the House, the effort was being pushed by Maxine Waters, one of our most liberal members, and conservative Budget Committee chairman John Kasich. Even Jesse Helms was supporting it, thanks in no small measure to Bonos personal outreach to him. The early results were encouraging: Bolivia had spent $77 million on health and education; Uganda had doubled primary school enrollment; and Honduras was to go from six to nine years of mandatory schooling. I was aiming to get the rest of our contribution in the final budget agreement.
In the second week of the month, Hillary did well in her second, more civilized debate with Rick Lazio. I signed the China trade bill and thanked Charlene Barshefsky and Gene Sperling for their arduous trek to China to hammer out our agreement at the eleventh hour; signed into law my Lands Legacy Initiative and the new investments for Native American communities; and on October 11, in Chappaqua, met Hillary to celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. It seemed like only yesterday when we were young and just beginning. Now our daughter was almost out of college and the White House years were almost over. I was confident Hillary would win the Senate race, and optimistic about what the future held for all of us.
My brief reverie was shattered the next day, when a small boat laden with explosives blew up beside the USS Cole, in port in Aden, Yemen. Seventeen sailors were killed in what was obviously a terrorist attack. We all thought it was the work of bin Laden and al Qaeda, but we couldnt be sure. The CIA went to work on it, and I sent officials from Defense, State, and the FBI to Yemen, where President Ali Saleh had promised to cooperate fully in the investigation and in bringing the murderers to justice.
Meanwhile, I continued to push the Pentagon and the national security team for more options to get bin Laden. We came close to launching another missile strike at him in October, but the CIA recommended that we call it off at the last minute, believing that the evidence of his presence was insufficiently reliable. The Pentagon recommended against putting Special Forces into Afghanistan, with all the attendant logistical difficulties, unless we had more reliable intelligence on bin Ladens whereabouts. That left bigger military options: a large-scale bombing campaign of all suspected campsites or a sizable invasion. I thought neither was feasible without a finding of al Qaeda responsibility for the Cole. I was very frustrated, and I hoped that before I left office we would locate bin Laden for a missile strike.
After campaign stops in Colorado and Washington, I flew to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for a summit on the Middle East violence with President Mubarak, King Abdullah, Kofi Annan, and Javier Solana, now secretary-general of the European Union. All of them wanted to end the violence, as did Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who was not there but had already weighed in on the subject. Barak and Arafat were present, but might as well have been on opposite sides of the world from each other. Barak wanted the violence stopped; Arafat wanted an inquiry into the alleged excessive use of force by the Israeli military and police. George Tenet worked out a security plan with both sides, and I had to sell it to Barak and Arafat, as well as a statement to be read at the end of the summit.
I told Arafat that I had intended to present a proposal to resolve the outstanding issues in the peace talks but couldnt do so until he agreed to the security plan. There could be no peace without shutting down the violence. Arafat agreed to the plan. We then worked until early in the morning on a statement for me to issue on behalf of all the parties. It contained three parts: a commitment to end the violence; the establishment of a fact-finding committee to look into what had caused the uprising and the conduct of both sides, appointed by the United States with the Israelis and Palestinians and in consultation with Kofi Annan; and a commitment to move forward with the peace talks. It sounds simple, but it wasnt. Arafat wanted a UN committee and immediate resumption of the talks. Barak wanted a U.S. committee and enough delay to see whether the violence would subside. Mubarak and I finally met alone with Arafat and persuaded him to accept the statement. I couldnt have done it without Hosni. I had thought he was often too resistant to getting deeply involved in the peace process, but that night he was strong, clear, and effective.
When I returned to the United States, Hillary, Chelsea, and I went to Norfolk, Virginia, for a memorial service for victims of the USS Cole bombing and private meetings with their grieving families. Like the airmen at Khobar Towers, our sailors had been killed in a very different conflict from the kind they had been trained to fight. In this one, the enemy was elusive, everyone was a potential target, our enormous arsenal was not a deterrent, and the openness and information technology of the modern world were being used against us. I knew that eventually we would prevail in the struggle against bin Laden, but I didnt know how many innocent people would lose their lives before we figured out how to do it.
Two days later Hillary, Al and Tipper Gore, and I went to Jefferson City, Missouri, for a memorial service for Governor Mel Carnahan, his son, and a young aide who had been killed when their small plane crashed. Carnahan and I had been close since he endorsed me early in the 1992 campaign. He had been a fine governor and a leader in welfare reform, and at the time of his death he was in a tight race with the incumbent, John Ashcroft, in the U.S. Senate race. It was too late to put someone else on the ballot. A few days later, Jean Carnahan said that if the people of Missouri voted for her husband, she would serve. They did, and Jean served with distinction.
In the last days of October, as the presidential election came down to the wire, I signed a trade agreement with Jordans King Abdullah, continued to sign and veto bills, and campaigned in Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and New York, where I did several events for Hillary. The most fun was a birthday celebration in which Robert De Niro gave me instructions on how to talk like a real New Yorker.
Ever since the convention Al Gore had framed the election as a contest of the people versus the powerful. That it was; every conceivable conservative interest groupthe health insurance industry, the tobacco companies, the heavily polluting industries, the NRA, and many morewas for Governor Bush. The problem with the slogan was that it didnt give Al the full benefit of our record of economic and social progress or put into sharp relief Bushs explicit commitment to undo that progress. Also, the populist edge sounded to some swing voters as if Al, too, might change the economic direction of the country. Along toward the end of the month, Al started saying, Dont put the prosperity at risk. By the first of November, he was moving up in the polls, though still down by about four points.
In the last week of the campaign, at Governor Gray Daviss request, I flew to California for two days of campaigning for the ticket and our congressional candidates, did a big event in Harlem for Hillary, then on Sunday went home to Arkansas to campaign for Mike Ross, who had served as my driver in the 1982 governors campaign and was running against Republican congressman Jay Dickey.
I spent the day before the election and election day doing more than sixty radio interviews across the country urging people to vote for Al and Joe and our local Democrats. I had already recorded more than 170 radio ads and telephone messages to be dialed into homes of hard-core Democrats and minorities, asking them to vote for our candidates.
On election day, Hillary, Chelsea, and I voted at Douglas Grafflin Elementary School, our local polling station in Chappaqua. It was a strange and wonderful experience: strange because the school was the only place Id ever voted outside Arkansas, and after twenty-six years in political life, my name wasnt on the ballot; wonderful because I got to vote for Hillary. Chelsea and I voted first, then hugged each other as we watched Hillary close the curtain and cast a ballot for herself.
Election night was a roller coaster. Hillary won her election, 5543 percent, a much larger margin than she had in all the pre-election polls but one. I was so proud of her. New York had put her through the wringer, just as it had done to me in 1992. She had been up, down, and up again, but she kept her bearings and pressed ahead.
As we celebrated her victory at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City, Bush and Gore were neck and neck. For weeks everyone had known the election would be close, with many commentators saying that Gore might lose the popular vote but still win the electoral college. Two days before the election, as I looked at the map and the latest polls, I told Steve Ricchetti that I was afraid the reverse could occur. Our base voters had been activated and would turn out as eagerly as the Republicans who wanted the White House back. Al was going to win big states by large margins, but Bush was going to win more small rural states, and they had an advantage in the electoral college because every state got one electoral vote for each House member plus two extra ones for its senators. Going into election day, I still thought Al would win because he had the momentum and he was right on the issues.
Gore did win, by more than 500,000 votes, but the electoral college was in doubt. The race came down to Florida, after Gore won a narrow victory of 366 votes in New Mexico, one of several states that were closer than they would have been had Ralph Nader not been on the ballot. I had asked Bill Richardson to spend the last week in his home state, and he may well have made the difference.
Of the states I had won in 1996, Bush picked up Nevada, Arizona, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, and New Hampshire. Tennessee had been growing increasingly Republican. In 1992, 1996, and 2000, the Democratic vote had held steady at between 47 and 48 percent. The NRA also hurt Al badly there and in several other states, including Arkansas. For example, Yell County, where the Clintons had settled a century earlier, is a populist, culturally conservative county a Democrat has to win to carry the state in a tight race. Gore lost it to Bush 5047 percent. The NRA did that. I might have been able to turn it around, but it would have taken two or three days of rural work to do it, and I didnt know how big the problem was until I went home right before the election.
The gun lobby tried to beat Al in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and might have done so had it not been for a heroic effort by the local labor unions, which had a lot of NRA members themselves. They fought back by saying, Gore wont take your gun away, but Bush will take your union away! Unfortunately, in the rural areas of Arkansa............