1. BILL CLINTON & THE NEW MILLENNIUM
PART 3….
1993-2001

2. LEARNING GOAL
 CRN BENCHMARK 14.11.3 S- Identify the details and evaluate
the proposed resolutions in the contemporary debate over the
critical social issues of today:
 Gay rights
 Government “Safety Net” Programs – health care, welfare

3. Presidential Campaign
Debate, 1992. George Bush,
Ross Perot, and Bill Clinton
squared off at the University
of Richmond [Virginia] on
October 16th, 1992. The
telegenic Clinton handily
dominated the televised
debates, especially in the
“talk-show” format used on
this occasion.

4. BILL CLINTON: THE FIRST BABY-
BOOMER PRESIDENT
 For the election of 1992, the
Democrats chose Bill Clinton as
their candidate (despite
accusations of womanizing and
draft evasion) and Albert Gore,
Jr. as his running mate.
 The Democrats tried a new
approach, promoting growth,
strong defense, and anticrime
policies, while campaigning to
stimulate the economy.

5. CLINTON WINS IN 1992
 The Republicans dwelled on
"family values" and selected
Bush for the presidency and J.
Danforth Quayle for the vice
presidency.
 Third party candidate, Ross
Perot entered the race and
ended up winning 19,237,247
votes, although he won no
Electoral votes.
 Clinton won the election of
1992, by a count of 370 to 168
in the Electoral College.
 Along with the presidency,
Democrats also gained control
of both the House and the
Senate.

6. ELECTION OF 1992

7. WOMEN ON THE RISE
 Presidency Clinton placed in
Congress and his
presidential cabinet
minorities and more
women, including the first
female attorney general,
Janet Reno, Secretary of
Health and Human Services,
Donna Shalala, and Ruth
Bader Ginsburg in the
Supreme Court

8. DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL
 Upon entering office, Clinton
called for accepting
homosexuals in the armed
forces, but he had to settle
for a "don't ask, don't tell"
policy that unofficially
accepted gays and lesbians.

9. SEXISM
 Clinton appointed his wife,
Hillary Rodham Clinton, to
revamp the nation's health
and medical care system.
 When the plan was revealed
in October 1993, critics
blasted it as cumbersome,
confusing, and stupid.
 The previous image of Hillary
as an equal political partner
of her husband changed to a
liability.

10. A FALSE START FOR REFORM
 In 1993, Clinton passed the
Brady Bill, a gun-control law
named after presidential aide
James Brady, who had been
wounded in President
Reagan's attempted
assassination.
 By 1996, Clinton had shrunk
the federal deficit to its
lowest levels in ten years.
 In July 1994, Clinton
convinced Congress to pass
a $30 billion anticrime bill.

13. DOMESTIC TERRORISM
 On February 26, 1993, a radical
Muslim group bombed the World
Trade Center in New York, killing
six people.
 On April 19, 1993, a fiery standoff
at Waco, Texas between the
government and the Branch
Davidian cult took place; it ended
in a huge fire that killed 82
people.
 On April 19, 1995, Timothy
McVeigh bombed a federal
building in Oklahoma, killing 169
people. By the time all these
events had taken place, few
Americans trusted the
government.

14. Bombing of Federal Building in Oklahoma City, 1995. A Truck bomb
killed 168 people in this federal office building in the worst act of terrorism
in the United States until September 11th, 2001. Convicted in 2001 for the
attack, antigovernment militant Timothy McVeigh became the first person
executed by the federal government in nearly 40 years.

15. THE POLITICS OF DISTRUST
 In 1994, Newt Gingrich led Republicans on a sweeping attack of
Clinton's liberal failures with a conservative "Contract with
America." (promised an all-out assault on budget feficits and
radical reductions in welfare programs)
 That year, Republicans won eight more seats in the Senate and
53 more seats in the House, where Gingrich became the new
Speaker of the House.
 The Republicans, however, went too far, imposing federal laws
that put new obligations on state and local governments without
providing new revenues.
 Clinton tried to fight back, but the American public gradually grew
tired of Republican conservatism; Gingrich's suggestion of
sending children of welfare families to orphanages, and the 1995
shut down of Congress due to a lack of a sufficient budget
package aided to this public disliking.

16. WELFARE REFORM BILL
 1996- Congress achieved a major
conservative victory when it
compelled a reluctant Clinton to
sign the Welfare Reform Bill
 The legislation made deep cuts in
welfare grants and required ab;le-
bodied welfare recipients to find
employment.
 Part of Clinton’s campaign platform
in 1992, the reforms were widely
seen by liberals as an
abandonment of key New
Deal/Great Society provisions to
care for the impoverished.

17. THE ELECTION OF 1996
 In the election of 1996,
Clinton beat Republican Bob
Dole. Ross Perot, the third
party candidate, again
finished third.
 Senator Bob Dole was a
decorated WWII veteran
 Clinton’s healthy economy
and artful trimming to the
conservative wind, breezed
to an easy win

19. CLINTON SIGNS DOMA
 The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is
a United States federal law that restricts
federal marriage benefits and required
inter-state marriage recognition to only
opposite-sex marriages in the United
States.
 The law passed both houses of
Congress by large majorities and was
signed into law by President Bill Clinton
on September 21, 1996.
 Section 3 of DOMA codifies the non-
recognition of same-sex marriages for
all federal purposes, including
insurance benefits for government
employees, Social Security survivors'
benefits, immigration, and the filing of
joint tax returns.

20. PROBLEMS ABROAD
 Clinton sent troops to Somalia, but eventually withdrew them.
 He also got involved with the conflicts in Northern Ireland, but to no
positive effect.
 Before serving as presidency, Clinton denounced China's abuses of
human rights and threatened to punish China.
 However, as president, Clinton discovered that trade with China was
far too important to "waste" over human rights.
 Clinton committed American troops to NATO to keep the peace in the
former Yugoslavia and sent 20,000 troops to return Jean-Bertrand
Aristide to power in Haiti.
 Clinton stood on the sidelines in 1994 when catastrophic ethnic
violence in Rwanda resulted in the deaths of half a million people.

21. NAFTA AND THE WTO
 He fully supported the North
American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) that made
a free-trade zone surrounding
Mexico, Canada, and the U.S.
 He then helped to form the
World Trade Organization, the
successor to the General
Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT).
 He also provided $20 billion to
Mexico in 1995 to help its
faltering economy.

22. Protesting NAFTA, 1993. These members of the Teamsters, Union feared that the
adoption of the North American Free Trade Agreement would mean the replacement
of high-paying American jobs with low-wage, nonunion Mexican labor. More than a
decade later, the treaty still rankled. Policymakers disagreed about whether NAFTA
had been damaging to American workers. In the 2008 election, the Republicans
endorsed it, while the Democrats attacked it.

23. PROBLEMS IN BOSNIA
 As vicious ethnic cleansing occurred in
Bosnia, Washington committed
American troops to a NATO
peacekeeping contingent in late 1995
 The events in Srebrenica in 1995
included the killing of more than 8,000
Bosnian Muslim men and boys, as well
as the mass expulsion of another
25,000–30,000 Bosnian Muslim
civilians, in and around the town of
Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
committed by units of the Army of the
Republika Srpska (VRS) under the
command of General Ratko Mladić.
 NATO’s expansion to include Poland,
Hungary and the Czech Republic in
1997 + the events in Bosnia failed to
pacify the Balkans

24. PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST?
 Clinton presided over the 1993 reconciliation meeting between Israel's
Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Yasir Arafat at the White House.
 The OSLO I Accords was an attempt in 1993 to set up a framework that
would lead to the resolution of the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It
was the first face-to-face agreement between the government of Israel
and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)
 Two years later, though, Rabin was assassinated, ending hopes for
peace in the Middle East.
 The assassin, a religious Zionist named Yigal Amir, strenuously opposed
Rabin's peace initiative and particularly the signing of the Oslo Accords.

25. Intifada Against Israeli Control, 1994. Beginning in 1987, Palestinians living in
the Israeli-controlled territories of the West Bank and Gaza rose up in protest. As
the stalemate dragged on, the likelihood of Middle East peace receded, despite
repeated international diplomatic efforts to reach a settlement. These young
Palestinians in East Jerusalem wave Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) flags

26. A SEA OF TROUBLES
 The end of the Cold War left the U.S. probing for a diplomatic
formula to replace anti-Communism, revealing misconduct by the
CIA and the FBI.
 Political reporter Joe Klein wrote Primary Colors, mirroring some
of Clinton's personal life/womanizing.
 Clinton ran into trouble with his failed real estate investment in the
Whitewater Land Corporation.
 In 1993, White House councilman, Vincent Foster, Jr. apparently
committed suicide, perhaps overstressed at having to (possibly
immorally) manage Clinton's legal and financial affairs.
 As Clinton began his second term, the first by a Democratic
president since FDR, there were Republican majorities in both
houses of Congress.

27. SCANDAL- WHITEWATER
 From the beginning of his
presidency, critics brought
charges of philandering to
illegal financial transactions to
Clinton
 Allegations of corruption
stemmed from Whitewater- a
failed real estate investment
from which the Clintons [while
he was gov. of Arkansas] were
alleged to have illicitly profited.
 The accusations prompted the
appointment of a special
federal prosecutor, though no
indictments

28. MONICA LEWINSKY- 1998
 January 1998- revelation that
Clinton had engaged in a
sexual affair with a young
White House intern, Monica
Lewinsky, and then blatantly
lied about it while testifying
under oath in another
woman’s [Paula Jones] civil
suit accusing him of sexual
harassment
 Caught in a bold lie, the
president made a humiliating
confession, but political
opponents smelled blood.

29. SEXUAL POLITICS
 September 1998- the special
prosecutor investigating
Whitewater who had broad
powers to investigate any
evidence of presidential
malfeasance, presented a
stinging report, including lurid
sexual details, to the
Republican-controlled House
of Representatives.
 The report presented eleven
possible grounds for
impeachment, all related to
lying about the Lewinsky
Affair.

30. PRESIDENTIAL IMPEACHMENT
 For his “little white lie,” Clinton was
impeached by the House (only the
2nd president to be impeached,
behind Andrew Johnson right after
the Civil War).
 However, Republicans were
unable to get the necessary 2/3
super-majority vote in the Senate
to kick Clinton from the White
House.
 Clinton fulfilled his final years as
president, but did so with a
tarnished image and his place in
history assured.
 His actions saw Americans lean
toward the realization that
character indeed must really matter
after all.

31. The Legacy of
Impeachment. Time
magazine’s cartoonist
asked how future
generations would judge
the Clinton impeachment
episode- and how it might
be treated in history
textbooks.

32. CLINTON’S LEGACY
 Clinton’s legacy is mixed, beyond the
obvious stain of impeachment
 Sound economic policies encouraged
growth and trade in a rapidly
globalizing post-Cold War world
 Yet, as a “New Democrat”, Clinton did
more to consolidate than to reverse
the Reagan-Bush revolution against
New Deal liberalism that for ½ a
century had provided the Democratic
party a compass
 He replenished the sad reservoir of
public cynicism about politics that
Vietnam and Watergate had
generated before

34. LEARNING GOAL:
 What event or trend during the Clinton administration do you think
will have the most lasting impact on the United States? Why?