The same day

The same day, I announced that the United States would no longer enforce the arms embargo in Bosnia. The move had strong support in Congress and was necessary because the Serbs had resumed their aggression, with an assault on the town of Bihac; by late November, NATO was bombing Serb missile sites in the area. On the twelfth, I was en route to Indonesia for the annual 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 by 2010.
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,cheap jeremy scott adidas wings, calling me the enemy of normal Americans. On the day after the election, he called Hillary and me counterculture McGovernicks, his ultimate condemnation.
The epithet Gingrich hurled at us was correct in some respects. We had supported McGovern, and we werent part of the culture that Gingrich wanted to dominate America: the self-righteous, condemning, Absolute Truthclaiming 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,north face outlet. Since I was a boy, I had watched people assert their piety and moral superiority as justifications for claiming an entitlement to political power, and for demonizing 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, and strengthening the bonds of community across the lines that divide us.
Even though I was intrigued by Gingrich and impressed by his political skills, I didnt think much of his claim that his politics represented Americas best values. I had been raised not to look down on anyone and not to blame others for my own problems or shortcomings. Thats 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 right, we were always wrong; we were responsible for all the problems, even though they had controlled 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 and were upset by the pervasiveness of crime, drugs, and family dysfunction, there was an audience for the Gingrich message, especially when we didnt 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 take us back to the morality of the 1950s, in order to renew American civilization.
Of course there were political and personal excesses in the 1960s, but the decade and the movements it spawned also produced advances in civil rights, womens rights, a clean environment, workplace safety, and opportunities for the poor. The Democrats believed in and worked for those things. So did a lot of traditional Republicans, including many of the governors Id served with in the late 1970s and 1980s. In focusing only on the excesses of the 1960s, the New Right reminded me a lot of the carping that white southerners did against Reconstruction for a century after the Civil War. When I was growing up, we were still being taught how mean the Northern forces were to us during Reconstruction, and how noble the South was, even in defeat,HOMEPAGE. There was something to it, but the loudest complaints always overlooked the good done by Lincoln and the national Republicans in ending slavery and preserving the Union. On the big issues,Moncler Jackets For Men, slavery and the Union, the South was wrong.