He closed with an erudite and detailed history of the Constitutional Convention’s deliberations on the impeachment provision, saying that our framers took it from English law, which plainly covered offenses “distinctly ‘political’ against the state.” He pleaded with the Senate not to defile the Constitution, but instead to hear the American people “calling on you to rise above politics… and do your solemn duty.”
Bumpers’ speech was magnificent, by turns erudite and emotional, earthy and profound. If the Senate roll had been called at that moment, there wouldn’t have been many votes for removal. Instead, the process would drag out for three more weeks, as the House managers and their allies tried to find a way to persuade more Republican senators to vote with them. After the two sides had made their presentations, it was clear that all the Democratic senators and several Republicans were going to vote no.
While the Senate was sitting in trial, I was doing what I always did at this time of the year—getting ready for the State of the Union speech and promoting around the country the new initiatives that would be in it. The speech was scheduled for the nineteenth, the same day my defense opened in the Senate. Some Republican senators had urged me to delay the speech, but I wasn’t about to do that. The impeachment had already cost the American people lots of their hard-earned tax dollars, diverted the Congress from pressing business, and weakened the fabric of the Constitution. If I had delayed my speech, it would have sent a message to the American people that their business had been put on the back burner.
If possible, the atmosphere at this State of the Union was even more surreal than it had been the previous year. As always, I entered the Capitol and was taken to the Speaker’s quarters, which were now occupied by Dennis Hastert of Illinois, a stocky former wrestling coach who was quite conservative but less abrasive and confrontational than Gingrich, Armey, and DeLay. Before long, a bipartisan delegation of senators and representatives came to take me to the House chamber. We shook hands and talked as if nothing else in the world was going on. When I was introduced and began to walk down the aisle, the Democrats cheered loudly as most Republicans clapped politely. Since the aisle splits the Republicans and Democrats, I expected to spend the trip down to the podium shaking hands on the Democratic side and was surprised that, for whatever reason, several Republican House members held out their hands, too.
I began with a salute to the new Speaker, who had said he wanted to work with the Democrats in a spirit of civility and bipartisanship. It sounded good and he might have meant it, since the impeachment vote in the House had occurred before he became Speaker. So I accepted his offer. By 1999, our economic expansion was the longest in history, with eighteen million new jobs since I took office, real wages going up, income inequality finally going down a little, and the lowest peacetime unemployment rate since 1957. The state of our union was stronger than ever, and I outlined a program to make the most of it, beginning with a series of initiatives to create a secure retirement for the baby boom generation. I proposed to commit 60 percent of the surplus over the next fifteen years to extend the solvency of the Social Security Trust Fund until 2055, an increase of more than twenty years, a small portion of it to be invested in mutual funds; an end to the limit on what Social Security recipients could earn without penalty; and more generous payments to elderly women, who were twice as likely as men their age to live in poverty. I also proposed to use 16 percent of the surplus to add ten years to the life of the Medicare Trust Fund; a $1,000 long-term–care tax credit for the elderly and disabled; the option to let people between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five buy into Medicare; and a new pension initiative, USA Accounts, which would take 11 percent of the surplus to provide tax credits to citizens who opened their own retirement accounts, and to match a portion of the savings of workers with more modest incomes. This was perhaps the largest proposal ever made to help modest-income families save and create wealth.
I also proposed a large package of education reforms, arguing that we should change the way we spent the more than $15 billion a year of education aid to “support what works and stop supporting what doesn’t work,” by requiring states to end social promotion, turn around failing schools or shut them down, improve the quality of the teaching force, issue report cards on every school, and adopt sensible discipline policies. I again asked Congress to provide funds to build or modernize five thousand schools and to approve a sixfold increase in the number of college scholarships for students who would commit to teaching in underserved areas.
To give more support to families, I recommended a minimum wage increase, expanded family leave, a child-care tax credit, and trigger locks on guns so that children could not fire them accidentally. I also asked Congress to pass the Equal Pay and Employment Non-Discrimination acts; to establish a new American Private Investment Corporation to help raise $15 billion to create new businesses and jobs in poor communities; to enact the Africa Trade and Development Act to open more of our markets to African products; and to fund a $1 billion Lands Legacy initiative to preserve natural treasures, and a package of tax cuts and research money to fight global warming.
On national security, I asked for funds to guard computer networks against terrorists, and to protect communities from chemical and biological attacks; to increase research into vaccines and treatments; to increase the Nunn-Lugar nuclear safety program by two-thirds; to support the Wye River accord; and to reverse the decline in military spending that had begun at the end of the Cold War. Before closing, I honored Hillary for her leadership in the Millennium Project and in representing America so well all over the world. She was sitting in her box with the home-run–hitting Chicago Cubs star Sammy Sosa, who had joined her on a recent trip to his native Dominican Republic. After all she had been through, Hillary got an even bigger round of applause than Sammy. I ended “the last State of the Union address of the twentieth century” by reminding the Congress that “perhaps, in the daily press of events, in the clash of controversy, we don’t see our own time for what it truly is, a new dawn for America.”
On the day after the speech, with the highest job approval ratings I had ever had, I flew to Buffalo, with Hillary and Al and Tipper Gore, to speak to an overflow crowd of more than twenty thousand at the Marine Midland Arena. Once again, in spite of all that was going on, the State of the Union address, with its full agenda for the year ahead, had struck a responsive chord with the American people. I ended the month with a major speech at the National Academy of Sciences, outlining my proposals to protect America from terrorist attacks with biological and chemical weapons and from cyberterrorism; a trip home to Little Rock to view tornado damage in my old neighborhood, including the loss of several old trees on the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion; a visit to St. Louis to welcome Pope John Paul II back to the United States; a meeting with a large bipartisan congressional delegation in the East Room to discuss the future of Social Security and Medicare; and a memorial service for my friend Governor Lawton Chiles of Florida, who had died suddenly not long before. Lawton had given me courage for the current fight with one of his favorite sayings: If you can’t run with the big dogs, you ought to stay on the porch.
On February 7, King Hussein lost his fight against cancer. Hillary and I immediately left for Jordan with a delegation that included Presidents Ford, Carter, and Bush. I was very grateful for their willingness, on short notice, to honor a man we had all worked with and admired. The next day we walked in his funeral procession for almost a mile, attended the memorial service, and paid our respects to Queen Noor, who was heartbroken. So were Hillary and I. We had enjoyed some wonderful times with Hussein and Noor in Jordan and in the United States. I remembered with particular pleasure a meal the four of us had shared on the Truman Balcony of the White House not long before the king died. Now he was gone, and the world was a poorer place.