Later in the month, when the budget agreement was brought to a vote in a resolution, 64 percent of the House Democrats joined 88 percent of the House Republicans in voting for it. In the Senate, where Tom Daschle was supporting the agreement, Democrats were in favor of the agreement even more strongly than Republicans, 82 to 74 percent.
I took some criticism from Democrats who objected to the tax cut or to the fact that we were making the agreement at all. They argued that if we did nothing, the budget would be balanced the next year or the year afterward anyway because of the 1993 plan only Democrats had voted for; now we were going to let Republicans share the credit. That was true, but we were also going to get the biggest increase in higher education aid in fifty years, health care for five million kids, and middle-class tax cuts I supported. On the fifth, Mexican Independence Day, I left for a trip to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Little over a decade earlier, our neighbors had been plagued with civil wars, coups, dictators, closed economies, and desperate poverty. Now every nation in the hemisphere except one was a democracy, and the region as a whole was our largest trading partner; we exported twice as much to the Americas as to Europe and almost 50 percent more than to Asia. Still, there was too much poverty in the region, and we had serious problems with drugs and illegal immigration. I took a number of cabinet members and a bipartisan congressional delegation to Mexico with me as we announced new agreements designed to reduce illegal immigration and the influx of drugs across the Rio Grande. President Zedillo was an able, honest man with a strong supporting team, and I was sure he would try his best to deal with these problems. While I knew we could do better, I doubted there was a completely satisfactory solution to either of the two problems. There were a number of contributing factors to take into account. Mexico was poorer than the United States; the border was long; millions of Mexicans had relatives in our country; and many illegal immigrants came to the United States looking for work, often at low-paying, demanding jobs most Americans didn’t want to do. As for drugs, our demand was a magnet for them, and the drug cartels had a lot of money with which to bribe Mexican officials and plenty of hired guns to intimidate or kill those who didn’t want to cooperate. Some Mexican border police were offered five times their annual salary to look the other way on just one drug shipment. One honest prosecutor in northern Mexico had been shot more than one hundred times right in front of his house. These were tough problems, but I thought the implementation of our agreements would help.
In Costa Rica, a beautiful country with no permanent military organization and perhaps the most advanced environmental policy in the world, President José María Figueres hosted the Central American leaders for a meeting that focused on trade and the environment. NAFTA had inadvertently hurt Central America and the Caribbean nations by putting them at a competitive disadvantage with Mexico in trading with the United States. I wanted to do what I could to rectify the inequity. The next day I made the same point in Bridgetown, Barbados, where Prime Minister Owen Arthur hosted the first meeting ever held between a U.S. President and all the leaders of the Caribbean nations in their own territory. Immigration was also a big issue at both meetings. Many Central Americans and people from the Caribbean nations were working in the United States and sending money back home to their families, providing a major source of income in the smaller nations. The leaders were worried about the antiimmigration stance Republicans had taken and wanted my assurances that there would be no mass deportations. I gave it to them, but also said we had to enforce our immigration laws. At the end of the month I flew to Paris for the signing of the NATO-Russia Founding Act. Yeltsin had kept his Helsinki commitment: NATO’s Cold War adversary was now its partner. After a stop in the Netherlands to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Marshall Plan, I flew to London for my first official meeting with the new British prime minister, Tony Blair. His Labour Party had won a big victory over the Tories in the recent election as a result of Blair’s leadership, Labour’s more modern and more moderate message, and the natural ebbing of support for the Conservatives after their many years in power. Blair was young, articulate, and forceful, and we shared many of the same political views. I thought he had the potential to be an important leader for the UK and all of Europe, and was excited about the prospect of working with him.
Hillary and I went to dinner with Tony and Cherie Blair at a restaurant in a restored warehouse district on the Thames. We felt like old friends from the start. The British press was fascinated by the similarity in our philosophies and politics, and the questions they asked seemed to have an impact on the American press traveling with me. For the first time, I had the feeling that they were beginning to believe there was something more than rhetoric to my New Democrat approach.
On June 6, my mother’s birthday, I gave the commencement address at Chelsea’s graduation ceremony at Sidwell Friends School. Teddy Roosevelt had spoken to the Sidwell students almost a century earlier, but I was there in a different role, not as a President but as a father. When I asked Chelsea what she wanted me to say, she replied, “Dad, I want you to be wise, briefly,” then added, “The girls want you to be wise; the boys just want you to be funny.” I wanted the speech to be my gift to her, and I was up until three in the morning the night before the commencement writing it out, over and over again. I told Chelsea and her classmates that on this day their parents’ “pride and joy are tempered by our coming separation from you… we are remembering your first day in school and all the triumphs and travails between then and now. Though we have raised you for this moment of departure and we are very proud of you, a part of us longs to hold you once more as we did when you could barely walk, to read to you just one more time Goodnight Moon or Curious George or The Little Engine That Could. ” I said that an exciting world beckoned and they had almost limitless choices, and I reminded them of Eleanor Roosevelt’s adage that no one can make you feel inferior without your permission: “Do not give them permission.”
When Chelsea walked up to get her diploma, I hugged her and told her I loved her. After the ceremony several parents thanked me for saying what they were thinking and feeling, then we went back to the White House for a graduation party. Chelsea was touched to see the entire residence staff gathered to congratulate her. She had come a long way from the young girl with braces we had brought to the White House four and a half years earlier, and she had only just begun.