Within a week of the election, I was
Streetscape oil painting,hard at work again, as were the Republicans. On November 10, I named Patsy Fleming as national AIDS policy director, in recognition of her outstanding work in developing our AIDS policy, which included a 30 percent increase in overall AIDS funding, and I outlined a series of new initiatives to combat AIDS. The announcement was dedicated to the guiding light of the AIDS fight, Elizabeth Glaser, who was desperately ill with AIDS and would die in three weeks.OSerb missile sites in the area. On the twelfth, I was en route to Indonesia for theOn the day after the election, he called
Sunflower oil painting ,Hillary and me “counterculturevern, iety andority as justifications for claiming an entitlement to political power, and forht,ll the problems, even though “they” hadeThe same day, I announced that the
Still Life oil painting , United States would no longer enforce the arms embargo in Bosnia. The move had strong support in Congress and was necessary because the Serbs hadresumed their aggression, with an assault on the town of Bihac; by late November, NATwas bombingannual APEC leaders’ meeting, where the eighteen Asian-Pacific nations committed themselves to creating an Asian free market by 2020, with the wealthier nations doing so by2010. On the home front, Newt Gingrich, basking in the afterglow of his big victory, kept up the withering personal attacks that had proved so successful in the campaign. Just before the election, he had taken a page from his pamphlet of smear words,
Artists oil painting ,calling me “the enemy of normal Americans.”McGovernicks,” his ultimate condemnation. The epithet Gingrich hurled at us was correct in some respects. We had supported McGoand we weren’t part of the culture that Gingrich wanted to dominate America: the self-righteous, condemning, Absolute Truth?Cclaiming dark side of white southern conservatism. I was a white Southern Baptist who was proud of my roots and confirmed in my faith. But I knew the dark side all too well. Since I was a boy, I had watched people assert their pmoral superidemonizing those who begged to differ with them, usually over civil rights. I thought America was about building a more perfect union, widening the circle of freedom and opportunity, andstrengthening the bonds of community across the lines that divide us. Even though I was intrigued by Gingrich and impressed by his political skills, I didn’t think much of his claim that his politics represented America’s best values. I had been raised not to look down on anyone and not to blame others for my own problems or shortcomings. That’s exactly what the “New Right” message did. But it had enormous political appeal because it offered both psychological certainty and escape from responsibility: “they” were always rig“we” were always wrong; “we” were responsible for acontrolled the presidency for all but six of the last twenty-six years. All of us are vulnerable to arguments that let us off the hook, and in the 1994 election, in an America where hardworking middle-class families felt economic anxiety
African oil painting , and were upset by the pervasiveness of crime, drugs, and family dysfunction, there was an audience for the Gingrich message, especially when we didn’t offer a competing one. Gingrich and the Republican right had brought us back to the 1960s again; Newt said that America had been a great country until the sixties, when the Democrats took over and replaced absolute notions of right and wrong with more relativistic values. He pledged to takus back to the morality of the 1950s, in order to “renew American civilization.”521
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