And The Beat Goes On

The book ends during the Clinton campaign. The rest of the information comes from whitehouse.gov and my own observations, which are in parentheses.

Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas in 1978. He was only thirty-two years old at the time, and he was full of plans to build up Arkansas, one of the poorest of the fifty states. His plans didn't necessarily win the favor of the people of Arkansas. Some of his proposals, especially a highway-improvement program paid for by new taxes, were controversial. More importantly, Clinton sometimes gave the impression that he was already running for President and saw his job as governor as a brief stop along the way. Thus, he was defeated in his bid for re-election in 1980. Two years later, a humbler Bill Clinton asked the people of Arkansas to give him a second chance. "I learned my lesson," he said. He won the election and went on to become one of the country's most popular and longest-serving governors.

Governor Clinton entered the 1992 presidential race as a middle-of-the-road candidate. He called for the government to invest more money in improving schools, roads, and public services. He emphasized the need for more job training so that the unemployed could find work in other industries, and he proposed a plan that would enable all Americans to have access to health insurance. At the same time, he knew that many working people thought taxes were already too high. The fear that all politicians, especially Democrats, wanted too many expensive programs had hurt his party's presidential candidates in the 1980s. Clinton promised that his proposals could be put into effect without raising taxes on the middle class. The money would come from taxing the rich, cutting defense spending, and other savings. Clinton's speeches offered something for everyone. This helped him win his party's nomination, but it also worried some voters. They wondered if he was promising too much.

One unusual feature of the 1992 campaign was that voters no longer relied as much on newspapers and network TV news for information about the candidates. Instead, they turned to cable TV and entertainment talk shows. The news media tended to put more stress on the candidates' private lives. Overall, it seemed that the candidates' appearances on entertainment shows had a positive effect. They reached many young people who had never before been excited about politics.

Al Gore's special interest was in defense and nuclear-arms control, making him a logical partner for Clinton, who had little experience in foreign affairs. Gore was also the author of a book that called for action to protect the environment. Clinton won back the support of the Democratic voters who had switched to Reagan and Bush in the 1980s. He was the first President born after WWII. Hillary Clinton was the first career woman to become First Lady. Their daughter Chelsea was born in 1980. The arrival of this young family in the White House signaled the beginning of a new generation of American politics (Blassingame, 1993).

During his administration, the U.S. enjoyed more peace and economic well-being than in previous years. He could point to the lowest unemployment rate in modern times, the lowest inflation in thirty years, the highest home ownership in the country's history, dropping crime rates in many places, and reduced welfare rolls. He proposed the first balanced budget in decades and achieved a budget surplus. Abroad, he successfully dispatched peace-keeping forces to war-torn Bosnia and bombed Iraq when Saddam stopped the United Nations inspections for evidence of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Clinton became a global proponent for an expanded NATO, more open international trade, and a worldwide campaign against drug trafficking. After the failure in his second year of a huge program of health care reform, Clinton shifted emphasis, saying that "the era of big government is over." He sought legislation to upgrade education, to protect jobs of parents who must care for sick children, to restrict handgun sales, and to strengthen environmental rules. As part of his plan to celebrate the millennium in the year 2000, Clinton called for a great national initiative to end racial discrimination.

In 1998, as a result of issues surrounding personal indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky, a young White House intern, Clinton was the second U.S. President to be impeached by the House of Representatives. He was tried in the Senate and found not guilty of the charges brought against him. He apologized to the nation for his actions and continued to have unprecedented popular approval ratings for his job as President.

Since winning the presidential election of 2000, George W. Bush worked to extend freedom, opportunity, and security at home and abroad (and to continue what his father had started, no doubt). His first initiative as President was the No Child Left Behind Act, a bipartisan measure that raised standards in schools and insisted on accountability in return for federal dollars. (It had its detractors and was met with limited success as it just wasn't practical for all school districts nationwide.) Faced with a recession when he  took office, Bush cut taxes for every federal income taxpayer, which helped set off an unprecedented 52 straight months of job creation. He also modernized Medicare by adding a prescription drug benefit, a reform that provided access to needed medicine for 40 million seniors and other beneficiaries.

The most significant event of Bush's time in office came on September 11, 2001, when terrorists killed nearly three thousand people on American soil by hijacking four commercial airline flights and crashing them into the Twin Towers, Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania that would have hit the White House had the passengers not fought back. Bush responded with a comprehensive strategy to protect the American people. He led the most dramatic reorganization of the federal government since the beginning of the Cold War, reforming the intelligence community and establishing new institutions like the Department of Homeland Security. He built global coalitions (Britain; and Pakistan who we later found out was harboring Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the September 11 and other previous attacks, and either didn't say anything or didn't know his actual whereabouts) to remove violent regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq that threatened America (maybe - it turned out that there weren't any weapons of mass destruction, but at least Saddam was guilty of other things and was put on trial, convicted, and publicly hanged), liberating more than 50 million people from tyranny.

Bush recognized that freedom and hope are the best alternative to the extremist ideology of the terrorists, so he provided unprecedented American support for young democracies and dissidents in the Middle East and beyond. In the years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States wasn't attacked on its own soil again (though we cannot be sure that it won't happen again more than a decade later).

(Barack Obama ran for the office of President on a platform of hope and change. He is the first bi-racial United States President.) His years of public service are based around his unwavering belief in the ability to unite people around a politics of purpose. In the Illinois State Senate, he passed the first major ethics reform in 25 years, cut taxes for working families, and expanded health care for children and their parents. As a United States senator, he reached across the aisle to pass groundbreaking lobbying reform and bring transparency to government by putting federal spending online. (Banks that were "too big too fail" needed to be bailed out with federal money, as did the American auto industry. Because of this and the huge deficit, this time period is known as the Great Recession. The most significant event of Obama's presidency thus far - aside from his controversial health care reform - was when he ordered SEAL Team 6 to take out Osama bin Laden, which took place a few months before the tenth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. However, even then not everyone was pleased. Then there were uprisings in the Middle East that divided nations, drove out dictators, and murdered others, Colonel Qaddafi included. This had more to do with the triumph of social media among the population of Middle Eastern countries rather than the bombardment from Britain and the U.S.)

(While no serious attempts have been made on his life, certain people have refused to believe that he was born in the United States. Someone also hacked his account on an online social network to falsely report his death. Soon after his 2008 victory over John McCain, disgruntled politicians - mostly right-wing conservative Republicans - calling themselves patriots formed a loose body known as the Tea party. They are fueled by right-wing conservative media and their own ideals about how the country ought to be run, citing the Founding Fathers as their inspiration. The Republicans in Congress have given President Obama much trouble, delaying the repeal of policies that infringe the rights of homosexuals, and even the deficit negotiations; we're trillions of dollars in debt now, and to China. Not only that, but people are also losing faith in Obama due to his bending to meet the Republicans' demands.)

(The Republicans sought to make sure that Obama would be a one-term President; they did not succeed. They were thwarted by their own in-fighting during the primaries, the flip-flopping of their presidential and vice presidential candidates on important issues, and the many gaffes of Republican nominees across the country - not that Democrats are immune from making their own gaffes or being equally as horrible in running their smear campaigns. When President Obama was first elected, a private practice doctor refused service to patients who had voted for him. Upon his re-election, the owner of a coal mine fired 160 workers because he'd wanted Mitt Romney to win. As of this writing, we will just have to see what the next four years will bring in terms of the looming fiscal cliff that Republicans are still threatening not to cooperate with fixing as well as continued terrorism and unrest in the Middle East and the increasingly devastating natural disasters affecting the entire world.)