As good as Mandela was, the Reverend Bernice King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter, stole the show. She said that even great leaders sometimes commit grievous sins; that King David had done something far worse than I had in arranging the death in battle of Bathsheba’s husband, who was David’s loyal soldier, so that David could marry her; and that David had to atone for his sin and was punished for it. No one could tell where Bernice was going until she got to the closing: “Yes, David committed a terrible sin and God punished him. But David remained king.”
Meanwhile, I kept working, pushing my proposal for school modernization and construction funds in Maryland, Florida, and Illinois; talking to the National Farmers Union about agriculture; giving an important address on modernizing the global financial system at the Council on Foreign Relations; meeting with the Joint Chiefs on the readiness of our armed forces; drumming up support for another minimum wage increase at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union; receiving the final report of the President’s Advisory Commission on Race from John Hope Franklin; holding a dialogue with Tony Blair, Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, and President Peter Stoyanov of Bulgaria on the applicability to other nations of the “Third Way” philosophy Tony and I had embraced; having my first meeting with the new Japanese prime minister, Keizo Obuchi; bringing Netanyahu and Arafat to the White House in an attempt to get the peace process going; and appearing at more than a dozen campaign events for Democrats in six states and Washington, D.C. On September 30, the last day of the fiscal year, I announced that we had run a budget surplus of about $70 billion, the first one in twenty-nine years. Although the press was focused on little besides the Starr report, there were, as always, a lot of other things going on, and they had to be dealt with. I was determined not to let the public’s business grind to a halt and was gratified that the White House staff and cabinet felt the same way. No matter what was in the daily news, they kept doing their job. In October the House Republicans, led by Henry Hyde and his colleagues on the Judiciary Committee, continued to push for my impeachment. The committee Democrats, led by John Conyers of Michigan, fought them tooth and nail, arguing that even if the worst charges against me were true, they didn’t amount to the “high crimes and misdemeanors” the Constitution required for impeachment. The Democrats were right on the law, but the Republicans had the votes; on October 8 the House voted to open an inquiry into whether I should be impeached. I wasn’t surprised; we were just a month away from the midterm elections and the Republicans were running a single-issue campaign: get Clinton. After the election I believed the moderate Republicans would look at the facts and the law and decide against impeachment in favor of a resolution of censure or reprimand—which is what Newt Gingrich had received for false statements and apparent violations of the tax laws. Many of the pundits were predicting disaster for the Democrats. The conventional wisdom was that we would lose twenty-five to thirty-five seats in the House and four to six seats in the Senate because of the controversy. It seemed a safe bet to most people in Washington. The Republicans had $100 million more than the Democrats to spend, and more Democrats than Republicans were up for reelection in the Senate. Among the contested Senate seats, the Democrats seemed sure to pick up the one in Indiana, where the candidate was Governor Evan Bayh, while Ohio governor George Voinovich seemed certain to win the seat being vacated by John Glenn for the Republicans. That left seven seats up in the air, five currently held by Democrats and only two by Republicans.
I disagreed with the conventional wisdom for several reasons. First, a majority of Americans disapproved of the way Starr was conducting himself, and resented the fact that the Republican Congress was more interested in hurting me than in helping them. Almost 80 percent disapproved of the release of my grand jury videotape, and overall approval of the Congress had dropped to 43 percent. Second, as Gingrich had shown with the “Contract with America” in 1994, if the public believed one party had a positive agenda and the other didn’t, the party with the plan would win. The Democrats were united with a midterm program for the first time ever: save Social Security first before spending the surplus on new programs or tax cuts; put 100,000 teachers in our schools; modernize old schools and build new ones; raise the minimum wage; and pass the Patients’ Bill of Rights. Finally, a sizable majority of Americans were opposed to impeachment; if Democrats ran on their plan and against impeachment, I thought they might actually be able to win the House.
I did some political events at the beginning and end of October, most of them near Washington, in settings designed to emphasize the issues our candidates were stressing. Otherwise, I spent most of the month on the job. There was plenty of work to do, by far the most important of which involved the Middle East. Madeleine Albright and Dennis Ross had been laboring for months to get the peace process back on track, and Madeleine had finally gotten Arafat and Netanyahu together when they were in New York for the UN General Assembly session. Neither of them was ready to take the next steps or to be seen by his own constituents as compromising too much, but both were concerned that the deteriorating situation could easily get out of hand, especially if Hamas launched a new round of attacks. The next day, the leaders came down to Washington to see me, and I announced plans to bring them back to the United States within a month to hammer out an agreement. In the interim, Madeleine went to the region to see them. They met on the border between Israel and Gaza, then Arafat took them to his guest house for lunch, making the hard-liner Netanyahu the first Israeli prime minister to go into Palestinian Gaza.
Months of work had gone into preparation of the summit. Both parties wanted the United States to work with them on the hard decisions and believed that the high drama of the event would help them sell those decisions back home. Of course, in any summit there’s always a risk that the two sides won’t be able to reach an agreement, and that the high-profile effort will damage all involved. My national security team was worried about the possibility of failure and its consequences. Both Arafat and Netanyahu had staked out tough positions in public, and Bibi had bolstered his rhetoric by naming Ariel Sharon, the most hardline of the prominent Likud leaders, foreign minister. Sharon had referred to the 1993 peace agreement as “national suicide” for Israel. It was impossible to know whether Netanyahu had given Sharon the portfolio to have someone to blame if the summit failed or to provide himself cover on the right if it succeeded.