On December 9, I was in Miami to open the Summit of the Americas, the first meeting of all the hemisphere’s leaders since 1967. The thirty-three democratically elected leaders of Canada, Central and South America, and the Caribbean were there, including forty-one-year-old President Aristide of Haiti and his neighbor, President Joaquín Balaguer of the Dominican Republic, who was eighty-eight years old, blind, and infirm, but mentally still sharp as a tack.
I had initiated the summit to promote a free trade area in all the Americas, from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego; to strengthen democracy and effective government throughout the region; and to show that America was determined to be a good neighbor. The gathering was a big success. We committed ourselves to establishing a free trade area of the Americas by 2005, and left feeling that we were going into the future together, a future where, in the words of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, “There is no such thing as a lone struggle, no such thing as a lone hope.”
On December 15, I gave a televised address to outline my proposals for middle-class tax cuts in the coming budgets. The move was opposed by some people in the administration and criticized by some in the media as an attempt to copy the Republicans, or as a belated attempt to return to a 1993 campaign promise the voters had punished me for not keeping. For both policy and political reasons, I was trying to get back in the tax-cut hunt with the Republicans before the new Congress convened. The GOP contract contained tax proposals that I thought were unaffordable and too heavily tilted to upper-income Americans. On the other hand, the United States was still suffering from two decades of middle-class income stagnation, the main reason people hadn’t felt the economy improving. We had made a dent in the problem by doubling the Earned Income Tax Credit. Now the right kind of tax cuts could raise middle-class incomes without derailing deficit reduction or our ability to invest in the future, and would fulfill my 1992 campaign commitment.
In the speech, I proposed a Middle-Class Bill of Rights, including a $500 child tax credit for families with incomes of $75,000 or less; tax deductibility for college tuition; expanded Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs); and the conversion of the funds the government was spending on dozens of jobtraining programs into cash vouchers that would go directly to workers so they could choose their own training program. I told the American people that we could finance the tax package through further cost savings from Al Gore’s Reinventing Government initiative and still keep reducing the deficit. Just before Christmas, Al Gore and I announced the designation of the first cities and rural communities as “empowerment zones,” making them eligible, under the 1993 economic plan, for tax incentives and federal funds to spur job development in places that had been left behind in previous recoveries. December 22 was Dee Dee Myers’s last day as press secretary. She had done a good job under difficult circumstances. Dee Dee had been with me in the snows of New Hampshire. Since then we had weathered a lot of storms and played countless games of hearts together. I knew she would do well when she left, and she did.
After our annual New Year’s trip to Renaissance Weekend, Hillary and I took a couple of extra days off to go home, so that we could see her mother and Dick Kelley, and I could go duck hunting with friends in eastern Arkansas. Every year, when the ducks fly south from Canada for the winter, one of the two main flyways is down the Mississippi River. Many of them land in the rice paddies and ponds of the Arkansas Delta, and over the last few years several farmers had established duck hunting camps on their land, both for their own enjoyment and to supplement their incomes.
It’s wonderful seeing the ducks fly at morning light. We also saw large geese high overhead, flying in perfect V formation. Only two ducks came down within shooting range that cloudy morning, and the guys who were with me let me shoot them both. They had more days to hunt than I did. I pointed out to the reporters who were along that all our guns were protected by the crime bill and that we didn’t need assault weapons to bag the ducks, including one I got with a lucky shot from about seventy yards. The next day Hillary and I attended the dedication of William Jefferson Clinton Elementary Magnet School in Sherwood, just outside North Little Rock. It was a beautiful facility, with a multi-purpose room named for my mother and a library named for Hillary. I confess that I liked having my name on a new school; no one owed more to his teachers than I did.
I needed that trip home. I had worked like a dog for two years. I had gotten so much done, but often “couldn’t see the forest for the trees.” The coming year was going to present a new set of challenges. To meet them, I needed more chances to recharge my batteries and water my roots. As I returned to Washington, I was looking forward to watching the Republicans try to keep their campaign promises, and to the battle to preserve and fully implement all the legislation enacted the previous two years. When Congress passes a new law, the work of the executive branch has just begun. For example, the crime bill provided funding for 100,000 new police in our communities. We had to set up an office in the Justice Department to distribute the funds, establish criteria for eligibility for them, create and administer an application process, and monitor how the money was spent, so that we could make progress reports to Congress and the American people.
On January 5, I had my first meeting with the new congressional leaders. Besides Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich, the Republican team included Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, and two Texans, Congressman Dick Armey, the House majority leader, and Congressman Tom DeLay, the House majority whip. The new Democratic leaders were Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Congressman Dick Gephardt, as well as the Senate Democratic whip, Wendell Ford of Kentucky, and his counterpart in the House, David Bonior of Michigan.
Though the meeting with the congressional leaders was cordial, and there were some areas of the GOP contract on which we could work together, I knew there was no way we could avoid several heated struggles over important matters about which we had honest differences. Clearly, I and my entire team would have to be very focused and disciplined, in both our actions and our communications strategy. When a reporter asked me whether our relations would be marked by “compromise or combat,” I responded, “My answer to that is, Mr. Gingrich will whisper in your right ear and I will whisper in your left ear.”
When the congressmen left, I went into the press room to announce that Mike McCurry would be the new press secretary. Until then, Mike had been Warren Christopher’s spokesman at State. During the presidential campaign, as press secretary for Senator Bob Kerrey, he had taken some pretty hard shots at me. I didn’t care about that; he was supposed to be against me in the primary season, and he had done a good job at State explaining and defending our foreign policy.