I agreed with many of the particulars of the contract. I was already pushing welfare reform and tougher child-support enforcement, and had long supported the line-item veto and ending unfunded mandates. I liked the family tax credits. Though several of the specifics were appealing, the contract was, at its core, a simplistic and hypocritical document. In the twelve years before I became President, the Republicans, with the support of a few Democrats in Congress, had quadrupled the national debt by cutting taxes and increasing spending; now that Democrats were reducing the deficit, they wanted the Constitution to require a balanced budget, even as they recommended large tax cuts and big increases in defense spending without saying what other spending they would cut to pay for them. Just as they had done in the 1980s and would do again in the 2000s, the Republicans were trying to abolish arithmetic. As Yogi Berra said, it was déjà vu all over again, but in a nice new package. Besides giving the Republicans a national platform for the 1994 campaign, Gingrich provided them with a list of words to use in defining their Democratic opponents. His political action committee, GOPAC, published a pamphlet entitled Language: A Key Mechanism of Control. Among the “contrasting words” Newt suggested for labeling Democrats were: betray, cheat, collapse, corruption, crisis, decay, destruction, failure, hypocrisy, incompetent, insecure, liberal, lie, pathetic, permissive, shallow, sick, traitors. Gingrich was convinced that if he could institutionalize that kind of name-calling, he could define the Democrats into a minority party for a long time.
The Democrats thought the Republicans had made a critical error in announcing the contract, and proceeded to attack it by showing the large cuts in education, health care, and environmental protection that would be necessary to fund the tax cuts, increase defense, and balance the budget. They even renamed Newt’s plan the “Contract on America.” They were absolutely right, but it didn’t work. Postelection polls would show that the public knew only two things about the contract: that the Republicans had a plan, and that balancing the budget was part of it.
Beyond attacking the Republicans, the Democrats were determined to fight the election the oldfashioned way, state by state, district by district. I had already done a lot of fund-raisers for them, but not a single one for a national campaign to advertise what we had accomplished, or what our future agenda would be in contrast to the Republican contract.
We capped off another productive legislative year on September 30, the last day of the fiscal year, by passing all thirteen appropriation bills on time, something that hadn’t happened since 1948. The appropriations represented the first back-to-back years of deficit reduction in two decades, reducing the federal payroll by 272,000, and still increasing investments in education and other important areas. It was an impressive achievement, but nowhere near as attention-grabbing as the balanced budget amendment.
I limped into October with approval ratings of around 40 percent, but good things would happen that month to improve my standing and apparently to increase the Democrats’ election prospects. The only sad development was the resignation of Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy. Janet Reno had asked for a court-appointed independent counsel to look into allegations of wrongdoing by Espy involving acceptance of gifts, such as sports tickets and trips. Judge Sentelle’s panel appointed Donald Smaltz, another Republican activist, to investigate Espy. I was heartsick about it. Mike Espy had supported me through thick and thin in 1992. He had left a safe seat in Congress, where even the white voters of Mississippi supported him, to become the first black agriculture secretary, and he had done an excellent job, including raising the standards for food safety.
The October news was mostly positive. On October 4, Nelson Mandela came to the White House for a state visit. His smile always brightened even the darkest days, and I was glad to see him. We announced a joint commission to promote mutual cooperation, to be headed by Vice President Gore and Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s likely successor. The joint commission idea was working so well with Russia that we wanted to try it in another country that was important to us, and South Africa certainly was. If Mandela’s reconciliation government succeeded, it could lift all of Africa and inspire similar efforts in trouble spots around the world. I also announced assistance for housing, electricity, and health care for South Africa’s poor, densely populated townships; rural economic initiatives; and an investment fund to be headed by Ron Brown.
While I was meeting with Mandela, the Senate followed the House in passing, with broad bipartisan support, the last important piece of my education agenda from the campaign, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The bill ended the practice of uncritically giving poor children a watered-down curriculum; too often, children from disadvantaged backgrounds were put in special education classes, not because they lacked normal learning capacity, but because they had fallen behind in poor schools and had too little support at home. Dick Riley and I were convinced that, with smaller classes and extra attention from teachers, they could catch up. The bill also contained incentives to increase parental involvement; gave federal support to allow students and parents to choose a public school other than the one to which they were assigned; and funded public charter schools designed to promote innovation and allowed to operate free of school district requirements that can stifle creativity. In just two years, in addition to the ESEA, bipartisan supporters in Congress had enacted Head Start reform; put the National Education Association goals into law; reformed the student loan program; created the national service program; passed the school-to-work program to create apprenticeships for high school graduates who don’t go on to college; and dramatically increased our commitment to adult education and lifelong learning.
The education package was one of the most important achievements of my first two years in office. Although it would increase the quality of learning and economic opportunities for millions of Americans, almost no one knew about it. Because education reforms had broad support in both parties, the efforts to pass them generated relatively little controversy, and therefore weren’t considered particularly newsworthy.
We ended the first week of the month on a high note, when the unemployment rate fell to 5.9 percent, the lowest since 1990 (down from over 7 percent when I took office), with 4.6 million new jobs. Later in the month, economic growth in the third quarter of the year was pegged at 3.4 percent, with inflation at 1.6 percent. NAFTA was making a contribution to the growth. Overall exports to Mexico were up 19 percent in just a year, with car and truck exports up 600 percent.
On October 7, Iraq massed a large number of troops just two and a half miles from the Kuwait border, raising the specter of another Gulf War. With strong international support, I rapidly deployed 36,000
troops to Kuwait, backed up by an aircraft carrier battle group and fighter planes. I also ordered an updated list of targets for our Tomahawk missiles. The British announced they would beef up their forces as well. On the ninth, the Kuwaitis moved most of their 18,000-man army to the border. The next day, the Iraqis, surprised by the strength and speed of our response, announced that they would pull back their forces, and within a month the Iraqi parliament recognized Kuwait’s sovereignty, borders, and territorial integrity. A couple of days after the immediate Iraq crisis passed, the Protestant paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland announced that they would join the IRA in observing a complete cease-fire. The good news spilled over into the third week of October. On the fifteenth, President Aristide returned to Haiti. Three days later I announced that after sixteen months of intense negotiations, we had reached an agreement with North Korea to end the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula. The agreed framework, signed in Geneva on October 21 by our negotiator, Bob Gallucci, and the North Koreans, committed North Korea to freeze all activity at existing nuclear reactors and allow them to be monitored; ship 8,000 unloaded fuel rods out of the country; dismantle its existing nuclear facilities; and ultimately account for the spent fuel it had produced in the past. In return, the United States would organize an international consortium to build light water reactors that didn’t produce usable amounts of weapons-grade material; we would guarantee 500,000 tons of heavy oil per year; trade, investment, and diplomatic barriers would be reduced; and the United States would give formal assurances against the use or the threat to use nuclear weapons against North Korea.