The Xenophile Historian

1933 to 2009

	First, an Explanation of the Title
	The New Deal
	New Deal II
	Getting Out of the Depression--The Hard Way
	The Gathering Storm
	Pearl Harbor
	World War II

	The Country Boy From Missouri
	Enter the Cold War
	China, Korea, and the Pumpkin Papers
	"I Like Ike"
	Life in the 1950s

	The "New Frontier"
	Who Really Killed JFK?
	The "Great Society"
	Nixon Returns
	"All the President's Men"

	Years of "Malaise"
	The Reagan Renaissance
	George Bush the Elder
	Clintonism

	The Clinton Scandals
	Islamism on the Move
	The Battle of the Ballots
	George Bush the Younger
	Angry Democrats, Drifting Republicans
	An Election Like No Other
	Go to Page Navigator

	The American People Today
	Going South (and West)
	The Grey Generation
	The New Americans
	The Browning of America
	The Incredible Expanding Government
	Federal Spending
	Federal Agencies
	Taxes and Regulation
	The Cabinet
	From History to Current Events

For the 1996 presidential election, Bill Clinton faced no significant Democratic opposition. At least ten Republicans ran, but the favorite from the start was the Senate Majority Leader, Robert "Bob" Dole. Dole has been Gerald Ford's vice presidential choice in the 1976 election, and ran for the top position twice already (in 1980 and 1988), so he had plenty of name recognition.

While Dole was fighting his rivals for the GOP nomination, Clinton was raising funds and producing TV ads that contrasted the age of the two candidates (Clinton was 50, Dole was 73). Against this, Dole could only muster character-related issues; e.g., he was a World War II hero who nearly died from wounds suffered by machine gun fire in Italy. It was also revealed that much of the money spent by the Clinton campaign came from foreign, illegal sources, like the Chinese government and a wealthy Indonesian businessman. But the voters didn't care, because the economy was doing just fine, and most of the outside world was relatively quiet. Indeed, at times it seemed that Dole and the Republicans didn't seriously expect to win, because they campaigned halfheartedly. Dole, for instance, was viewed as a "hatchet man" when he ran for vice president in 1976, but twenty years later he was more than a little mellowed out. Sure enough, Clinton was reelected; he still did not get a majority of the popular vote, but with 49.24%, he did better than he had the first time.

So far we haven't talked much about the Clinton scandals, in order to cover Bill Clinton's domestic and foreign policies quickly. However, they were a problem all through his time in the White House. To start with, because of his "I did not inhale" statement during the 1992 campaign, the voters knew they had elected somebody who was not fully honest.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ His staff had serious problems too; according to the Secret Service, at least forty White House aides were on drugs. The firing of seven employees of the White House Travel Office for no apparent reason became Travelgate, the first major scandal of the Clinton administration (May 1993). Similar question were asked about Filegate, a 1996 incident in which the private FBI files of 400 to 900 Republicans were delivered to the White House. And then there was Whitewater, a catch-all name for interconnected scandals involving a failed savings and loan association, a real estate development project that lost money, and other questionable investments involving the Clintons and their friends in Arkansas. The Justice Department appointed an independent counsel to investigate the suspicious death of Vince Foster, a lawyer working for the Clintons who apparently committed suicide on July 20, 1993. This investigation spread to look at the whole Whitewater affair, and over the next five years the counsel, led by Kenneth Starr, got fourteen convictions; this was also the only time when a first lady was called to testify before a grand jury. In the end both Bill and Hillary were acquitted, though. Finally, as mentioned earlier, Bill Clinton and Al Gore had the habit of taking campaign contributions from anyone.⁽¹⁰¹⁾ Altogether, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported during Bill Clinton's first term that ethics investigations of the Clintons and their aides were costing taxpayers more than $1 million per month.

Most voters did not find these scandals very interesting. As with the government shutdown, Clinton came out ahead, thanks to his ability to charm the voters and the media. In response to the investigations, the White House launched an unprecedented attack on Kenneth Starr, using Clinton's most fervent supporter, James Carville, to vilify him, claiming that Starr was conducting the investigations solely for partisan political purposes. Starr could not defend himself because he was forbidden by law to reveal the substance of his investigation. Nixon, Reagan and Bush had never done any such thing against the special prosecutors they faced (Nixon only fired Archibald Cox, remember).

Whereas money scandals are often boring, sex scandals can get everyone's attention. That applied here; when it came to the women, Bill Clinton was too much like his role model, JFK. One of Clinton's aides began keeping lists of Bill's girlfriends in 1988, and counted twenty-six who might some day give him political problems. Indeed, after he became president, there was a steady stream of what were called "bimbo eruptions," women popping up and claiming that they had affairs with Clinton when he was governor, or that he had made sexual advances on them. We already mentioned one of the women, Gennifer Flowers. Others included Juanita Broderick, Dolly Kyle Browning, Beth Gladden Coulson, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Connie Hamzy, Marilyn Jo Jenkins, Paula Corbin Jones, Sheila Lawrence, Sally Perdue, Marsha Scott, and Kathleen Willey. Listing the allegations they made is beyond the scope of this work; if you need to know what they are, look them up.

The only one of the above whose charge could stick was Paula Jones; she filed a lawsuit accusing Clinton of sexual harassment in 1991. This gave the Democrats a real dilemma; over the past decade, by defining "sexual harassment" to mean whatever their feminist supporters said it was, they had turned the charge into a weapon to use against Republicans (it almost caused the rejection of one of Bush's nominees to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas). Now the charge was being used against their guy! Clinton's lawyers tried to have the case postponed until after he left office, claiming that this should not be done to a commander in chief on "active duty." A federal appeals court, however, ordered the lawsuit to proceed; the case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously the same way. But before the trial could begin, the case was dismissed, on the grounds that Jones had failed to prove any damages as a result of the harassment. In 1998 Clinton agreed to an out-of-court settlement of $850,000, the amount Jones had originally claimed, so he could move on with his life, as one of his lawyers put it.

One "bimbo eruption" nearly derailed the Clinton presidency, because it involved an affair that happened in the White House, not in Arkansas. This was with Monica Lewinsky, who was twenty-one years old when Clinton met her in 1995. At first she was an unpaid White House intern, and she claimed she had her first sexual encounter with the president in November 1995; eleven days later, she was on the payroll. In 1996 she was transferred to the Pentagon, but Clinton continued to see her. In her testimony she claimed a total of nine sexual encounters, running from 1995 to 1997. On one occasion, she claimed that the president used her as a humidor (I'll leave to your imagination what he did with the cigar before he smoked it), while another encounter produced a stained blue dress. A co-worker, Linda Tripp, persuaded Lewinsky not to dry-clean the dress. Tripp began recording her conversations with Lewinsky in September 1997, and in January 1998, after Lewinsky submitted an affidavit in the Paula Jones case denying any physical relationship with Clinton, Tripp gave the tapes to Kenneth Starr, and he expanded his investigation to include Lewinsky and her possible perjury in the Jones case; later he would regret doing that, because of the uproar it caused and the results.

The rest of the country also heard about Monica Lewinsky in January 1998. The changing role of the media was shown by where the story first appeared; the Drudge Report, a conservative news website, ran it, while Newsweek Magazine sat on it. Four days later, The Washington Post became the first body in the mainstream media to run the story. Forced to speak out about it, Clinton held a press conference, with Hillary standing nearby, and gave one of the most famous quotes of his presidency: "I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." For the next six months, Americans debated whether the affair had occurred and if Clinton had lied about it, until Lewinsky turned over the stained dress to Starr's investigators. The threat that DNA testing would be done on the dress was enough to make Clinton come clean (no pun intended). On August 17, 1998, he recorded a grand jury testimony, and made a nationally televised speech, admitting in both that he had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky that was "not appropriate." Regarding his previous statements, Clinton said they weren't really lies because he did not believe oral sex fit the definition of sex, and for his previous claim of "There's nothing going on between us," Clinton gave the grand jury a classic example of legal semantics:

"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the--if he--if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not--that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement....Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true."

Clinton, the Democrats, and his supporters managed to persuade most of the American people that he was in trouble for having sex, not because he lied under oath. When the truth came forth, they classified Clinton's lies in the following categories:

1. Deceptive but not perjurious.
2. Perjurious but "only about sex."
3. Seriously perjurious but not "rising to the level of an impeachable offense."
4. Maybe impeachable, but they should be excused anyway, because Clinton's removal from office would be a victory for the "vast right-wing conspiracy." (See also footnote #118.)

The difference between this impeachment and the one of 1868 was pure politics. Andrew Johnson was innocent but unpopular, while Clinton was guilty but popular, and everybody knew it. The economy was doing great, too: both inflation and unemployment were at their lowest in recent history, and at the time of the impeachment, gasoline prices were at their lowest point since 1986. Consequently Clinton enjoyed an approval rating of more than 60% in the polls, despite his failings, and most senators did not want to be seen as opponent of someone that popular. Finally, Democrats didn't want to vote against one of their own, while Republicans didn't want to remove Clinton if it made Al Gore president before he ran in the 2000 election. The result was that whereas Johnson was saved by one senator voting his conscience, Clinton was acquitted with several votes to spare; 67 guilty votes were needed to remove him from office, but only 45 senators voted guilty on the charge of perjury, and 50 voted guilty on the obstruction of justice charge.

In April 1999 a judge added injury to the impeachment insult by ordering Clinton to pay additional fines, $1,202 to the court and $90,000 to Paula Jones' lawyers, for giving dishonest and misleading answers about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. This was the only time a sitting president has been found in contempt of court.

After the impeachment, Clinton was obsessed with his legacy, and he spent the rest of his second term looking for a way to make Americans remember him for something besides sex. Consequently he pushed hard to bring about a solution to the Arab-Israeli Conflict, figuring that a Nobel Peace Prize would be the perfect award to cap his career. During his first term he presided over the meetings between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization that led to the Oslo Accords; now during his second term he arranged a similar summit meeting, which produced the Wye River Memorandum. When he found the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, not willing to compromise with Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasir Arafat, he sent James Carville to Israel, and Carville successfully campaigned in the election that replaced Netanyahu with Ehud Barak. Then came the meetings at Camp David in July 2000, where hopes were high for a repeat of the treaty Jimmy Carter had negotiated there, twenty-two years earlier. Barak laid out the best possible offer he could give, but Arafat had the mentality of a terrorist, not a statesman, so he rejected it, rather than renounce terrorism and become just another head of state.⁽¹⁰²⁾ That ended Clinton's chances, because by then it was too close to the end of his presidency to produce and negotiate over another peace proposal. Later on he must have wondered how Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize, when they did less to earn it than he did (Obama got it because his name wasn't George W. Bush). Well, at least he got his wish to lead America into the new millennium; he was president when the twenty-first century began.

Clinton, Arafat and Barak at Camp David.

Islamism on the Move

Some Moslems believed that the cause of their failure was unfaithfulness to the teachings of Islam; they thought that if they returned to observing those teachings the way Mohammed and his first followers had done, Allah would restore their fortunes and give them dominion over the earth. These fundamentalists have always been around, but for most of the twentieth century they were definitely in the minority; fundamentalist movements like the Wahhabiyah (Saudi Arabia), the Sanussi Brotherhood (Libya) and the Moslem Brotherhood (Egypt) limited their activities to the countries they were based in. Westerners who paid attention to the Middle East saw the most important countries run by leaders with a progressive vision, especially Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Iran under the Pahlavi Shahs, and Israel with its parliamentary government. Because of this, they reasoned that a modernized Middle East would resemble the West, combining democracy and capitalism with a superficial Islamic culture. However, two previously mentioned events, both happening in the 1970s, would send the Arabs, Iranians and Turks on a different course. The first was rising oil prices, which transferred billions of dollars from the West to countries that were not very friendly to it. The Saudis in particular would use oil money to spread their Wahhabi sect in two ways: by financing terrorist groups like the PLO, and by supporting mosques abroad. The second event was the Iranian Revolution, which brought the Shiites into the game; in fact, for all of the 1980s, the Shiites were more zealous promoters of Islam than the Sunnis.

The success of the Iranian Revolution and the war in Afghanistan encouraged the formation of new Sunni fundamentalist groups in the late 1980s: the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, Hamas among the Palestinians, the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan--and Al Qaeda. At first the USSR was the main enemy for these groups, but after the Soviets got out of Afghanistan, they turned their attention back to the West. When American troops set up bases in Saudi Arabia to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqis, the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, saw their presence as a violation of Islam's holy land, even though the soldiers did not go near Mecca or Medina. It did not matter that he and the United States had been on the same side in Afghanistan, nor did it matter that in the Persian Gulf, the Americans were again on the side of a Moslem faction (and would also be in Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo).

In 1992 bin Laden launched his first attack, setting off a bomb in a Yemen hotel that American servicemen used on their way to Somalia; no Americans were hurt, though. This was quickly followed by the detonation of a car bomb in the garage of one of the World Trade Center towers, in New York City (February 26, 1993). Six people were killed and more than a thousand injured, but the intended goal--to make one WTC tower crash into the other and bring both down--did not happen. The perpetrator of the plot, Ramzi Yousef, managed to escape until 1995, when he was apprehended in Pakistan and sent back to the United States. Clinton's response was to treat this act of terrorism the same way as any other crime; agents from the ATF, FBI and the New York Police Department were sent to the scene, and the court system tried Yousef and his accomplices, but the military was not used, and except for some rumors of Iraqi involvement, no attempt was made to find out if any foreign government was responsible. Most Americans responded likewise. We noted earlier that Americans took a vacation from foreign news during the 1990s, and as vicious as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was, it wasn't bad enough to keep their interest for long.⁽¹⁰³⁾

Likewise, there was no US reaction when a car bomb killed five Americans in Saudi Arabia in 1995, or when a truck bomb killed nineteen US servicemen in 1996 (the Khobar Towers bombing). An otherwise unknown group called Islamic Movement for Change claimed responsibility for the first attack, while Hezbollah, the pro-Iranian militia in Lebanon, is suspected of being behind the second one. As for bin Laden, he had been expelled from Saudi Arabia, and was living in Sudan. Because the United States had imposed terrorism sanctions on Sudan, Sudanese officials made an offer; in return for having the sanctions lifted, they would arrest bin Laden and hand him over to either the Americans or the Saudis. Washington wasn't interested, and Clinton said he had no good reason to hold bin Laden as long as he had not committed a crime against the US. Instead, he told the Saudis to take bin Laden, but they didn't want him, either, so the Sudanese simply asked bin Laden to leave, and he went to Afghanistan. Mansoor Ijaz, the Pakistani-American businessman who had been the go-between in these meetings, later claimed there had been more than one offer of bin Laden, the last one made in July 2000, but Clinton rejected them all.

Osama bin Laden struck again in August 1998, this time setting off truck bombs simultaneously at the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Most of the victims were Africans; of the 225 killed, just twelve were Americans; more than 4,000 were wounded, too. With these attacks, most American heard about bin Laden and Al Qaeda for the first time. Twenty-one people were subsequently identified and indicted for their role in the attacks, but casualties on this scale demanded military retaliation, so Clinton ordered "Operation Infinite Reach," a wave of cruise missile strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan. Aside from boosting Clinton's poll ratings and American morale, the strikes did not accomplish anything. In Afghanistan they hit campsites that had already been abandoned, while the supposed "chemical weapons" plant the missiles destroyed in Sudan turned out to be a pharmaceuticals factory, where 50 percent of the nation's drugs had been manufactured; no evidence of chemical weapons was found there. This, and America's military action against the Serbs in the Balkans, convinced bin Laden that the Americans would only fight back with aircraft and missiles, so he planned more terrorist attacks.

In 1997 a movie called "Wag the Dog" told a story about a president of the United States starting a war to distract the attention of the public from his own sex scandal. One year later, reality imitated fiction. Twice in 1998, tensions between the US and Iraq were so high that another war was considered likely. The first time was in February, shortly after the news about Monica Lewinsky broke out, and the second time was near the end of the year, while impeachment proceedings were going on. What's more, the strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan occurred right when Clinton was forced to admit that the encounters with Lewinsky had happened. Nobody had accused other presidents of starting wars for personal gain; it says something that only Clinton's behavior (and timing) could make the absurd premise of "Wag the Dog" plausible.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾

The most important thing to remember about an asymmetrical war, like the one between the US and Islamic terrorists, is that the terrorists only need to be successful once, while the opposing conventional force has to stop them every time to be considered effective. And the current conflict relies heavily on intelligence services like the CIA, much of the activity has to be kept secret, and may never be known. Hence, we can't tell which terrorist attacks, if any, were thwarted during the next two years after the embassy bombings. The next one that succeeded came on October 12, 2000, when an American destroyer, the USS Cole, stopped in Aden, Yemen, to refuel. Two terrorists steered a rubber raft full of explosives alongside the Cole and detonated it, killing seventeen American servicemen as well as themselves. Once more, Clinton did nothing, because he only had three months left to his second term, and conveniently passed the problem on to George W. Bush. However, Bush did not do anything about it, either; instead he concentrated his attention on the economy. The lack of a sufficient American response to all these provocations guaranteed that sooner or later, bin Laden would go for a really big target. As the 9/11 Commission put it a few years later, the terrorists were at war with the US before the US was at war with them.

The Battle of the Ballots

While the Clintons were in the limelight, the Republicans built their first political dynasty. Two sons of former President Bush went into politics, and did very well for themselves. George W. Bush ("Dubya"), had previously managed a major league baseball team, the Texas Rangers; in 1994 he beat the incumbent governor, Ann Richards⁽¹⁰⁶⁾, and became the governor of Texas. His brother Jeb Bush lost the gubernatorial race in Florida during the same year, but tried again in 1998, and won. Because both of those states had grown rapidly in recent years (see "The American People Today"), this meant that as the twentieth century ended, one American in eight had a Bush for a governor. Moreover, both George and Jeb did well running their states, meaning that they would be considered as future candidates for senator or president.

The Democrats saw Vice President Gore as the heir of the Clintons, and only a former senator, Bill Bradley of New Jersey, ran against him; Al Gore beat Bradley without much fuss. The Republican primary campaign was more complicated, with no less than eleven candidates running, but George W. Bush was favored from the start, and he knocked out his rivals one by one. The only candidate that gave him much of a challenge was Arizona Senator John McCain. McCain had a compelling story from his days before entering Congress; as a navy pilot in the 1960s, he was shot down over North Vietnam. Captured by the North Vietnamese, they refused to treat his injuries, interrogated and tortured him. When McCain's father, a four-star admiral, became commander of all US forces in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese offered to release him, but McCain refused to leave while the men who had been captured before him were still being held. Consequently he spent most of the war in captivity.⁽¹⁰⁷⁾

McCain won the New Hampshire primary, but he never had enough delegates to pull ahead of Bush. After losing the South Carolina primary, McCain criticized Bush for accepting the endorsement of Bob Jones University, a Christian college known for its policy banning interracial dating, and then he attacked two famous evangelical leaders, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, calling them "agents of intolerance." If McCain was trying to portray himself as a moderate or centrist, it backfired; those speeches alienated the "religious right" wing of the Republican Party, and Bush secured the GOP nomination.

Next came the choosing of vice presidential candidates, and some interesting thinking went into the choices for 2000. Gore chose Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman for his veep; this was the first time either major party had nominated a Jew to run either for president or vice president. Meanwhile, Bush asked Dick Cheney, who had been Secretary of Defense under his father, to find a running mate for him, but later decided that Cheney himself was the best man for the job. Gore-Lieberman was a classic case of creating a balanced ticket; Lieberman came from a Northern State, while Gore was a Southerner, and Lieberman was strong on moral issues, an area in which both Clinton and Gore were lacking. By contrast, Bush was so confident that he didn't feel the need to balance his ticket; Cheney was not only much like him, he currently lived in Wyoming, a state that has too few voters to decide an election.

The fall campaign was mainly a referendum on the Clinton administration, with Gore promising more of the good times that marked the 1990s, and Bush promising to restore "honor and dignity" to the White House. However, Election Night (November 6, 2000) gave an unexpected result--the closest election since 1800. In the popular vote, Gore was ahead of Bush by half a million, just half a percentage point. The electoral totals, however, showed Bush with 271 and Gore with 267; Bush had a popular minority, but an electoral majority. Several states were extremely close, but Florida got the most attention, because when the votes were counted, there was such a razor-thin difference that the networks couldn't agree on who got that state; moreover, not all of the absentee ballots were in. Most important of all, 25 electoral votes were at stake here, so whoever won Florida would win the election.

By Florida law, a statewide recount was required for a case like this. However, Florida's Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, announced she would reject any revised totals from those counties if they were not turned in by November 14, the statutory deadline for amended returns. The Florida Supreme Court extended that deadline to November 26. In Palm Beach County, a charge went forth that voters were confused by the so-called "butterfly ballots," punch cards which put the names of candidates in two columns flanking one column where the hole was supposed to be punched; the accuser claimed that many who voted for Pat Buchanan (see footnote #89) thought they were voting for Gore. The result was that a hand recount of the ballots was done in Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia Counties, where Gore had won but the results were turned in late. Teams of lawyers from both the Bush and Gore campaigns descended upon Florida, to make sure no frauds would be committed in the recounts. On November 26, the state canvassing board certified Bush the statewide winner by 537 votes (a margin of 0.0092% out of 5.9 million votes cast). Naturally, Gore protested, and the Florida Supreme Court, which favored Gore, ordered a recount of more than 70,000 ballots that had been rejected by machine counters, because they weren't filled out properly. Now the poll workers were reduced to the ludicrous situation of studying the rejected ballots, to interpret what a voter meant if he had left a "dimpled chad," "hanging chad," or "pregnant chad," instead of punching a clean hole through the card.

Two funny pictures of poll workers reading the ballots.

Looking back, it is still amazing how close the 2000 election was. Consider the small factors that could have changed the results--and the course of history:

1. If absentee ballots from soldiers stationed overseas hadn't been thrown out, Bush's margin of victory in Florida would have been wide enough to avoid a court battle. Nationwide, he might have even had a majority of the popular vote.
2. In heavily Republican Seminole County, where the author lived at the time, a lawyer proposed discarding 15,000 absentee ballots, on a charge of irregularities in how they were sent in. If that had been done, Gore would have won the state easily.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾
3. If Gore hadn't been declared the winner by the TV networks while the polls were still open in eleven (largely Republican) Florida counties, thereby persuading hundreds, if not thousands, to go home without voting, Bush would have won the state by a margin beyond dispute.
4. If Ralph Nader hadn't run as the Green Party candidate, his voters would have gone Democratic, and Gore would have carried Florida. Many liberals called Nader a spoiler for this, and refused to vote for him when he ran again in 2004 and 2008.
5. Likewise, if Pat Buchanan and Harry Browne (the Libertarian candidate) hadn't run, Bush would have come out ahead in the popular vote.
6. If Elian Gonzalez, the "littlest defector," hadn't been taken by federal authorities in April (see footnote #91), Miami's Cuban-Americans would have given Gore enough votes to prevail over the rest of the state.
7. If convicted felons, a group that tends to favor Democrats, were allowed to vote in Florida (they are in some other states), again Gore would have carried Florida, and won the election.
8. If millions of potential Democratic voters hadn't been aborted since 1973, when abortion was legalized by the Supreme Court, Gore would have won Florida by an estimated 45,000 votes (see what I wrote on the Roe Effect for details).
9. If Tennessee, Gore's home state, hadn't voted for Bush, Gore would have been able to win the election without Florida.

In Washington, the Clintons didn't go away quietly. Hillary ran for Senator of New York, though she hadn't lived in New York before, and New Yorkers have a reputation for looking down their noses at Southerners, especially those from Arkansas. Moreover, everyone knew that she wanted the job to use New York as a springboard for a future run at the presidency. Despite all that, the Clintons were so popular that she won easily.

The last days of the Clinton presidency were the least dignified of any administration. On his last full day in office, Bill issued 140 pardons and commutations to convicted felons and indicted felons in exile. It is customary for an outgoing president to pardon those which he feels do not deserve the accusations/convictions imposed on them, but Clinton pardoned more than any other, leading to one more controversy about his actions. Then on January 20, 2001, their staff looted, vandalized and destroyed government property in the White House, acting like tenants trashing an apartment on the day they are supposed to leave. It was a similar story with Air Force One, where they made off with china, silverware, linen, towels, ash trays, soap, pens, and flight manuals. In fact, the Clintons didn't leave the White House for the last time until after George W. Bush had been sworn in as the new president. One estimate immediately afterwards put the damage to the White House and Air Force One at $200,000. Because they were now New Yorkers, the Clintons did not go back to Arkansas; they bought a house in Chappaqua, NY instead. Hillary went to assume her new Senate seat on Capitol Hill, while Bill got himself an office in Harlem, because during his second term he came to be known as the "first black president."⁽¹⁰⁹⁾

George Bush the Younger

George Walker Bush.

• Lowered the top income tax rate on all taxpayers from 39.6 percent to 35 percent, and introduced a 10-percent bracket.
• Lowered taxes on business investments, especially on dividends and on capital gains.
• An increased child tax credit, from $500 to $1,000 per child.
• Eliminated the marriage penalty, which made married couples pay higher taxes than singles earning the same income.
• A phased-in repeal of the detestable estate tax, also called the "death tax," by 2010.

• Carter = 4.2%
• Reagan, first term = 3.5%
• Reagan, second term = 1.8%
• George Bush the Elder = 1.9%
• Clinton, first term = 1.0%
• Clinton, second term = 1.9%

• George Bush the Younger, first term = 4.4%
• George Bush the Younger, second term = 3.75%

A lot of the above spending went to the military; military spending always goes up under the Republicans, and under Bush it increased by 66 percent. However, non-defense spending also increased at a hefty 23 percent during the Bush years. That came about due to efforts by Bush to mend relations with the Democrats, by agreeing to some of their proposals (it didn't work, though, as you'll see in the next section). The domestic spending included hundreds of billions more for Medicare, to cover drug prescriptions, the largest agriculture subsidy in history, a generous education program ("No Child Left Behind"), and continuing Clinton's Americorps program. Probably the most notorious bill was the 2005 highway spending bill, which cost $286.5 billion and was loaded with 6,371 pet projects. Bush passed it after the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" appropriation ($460 million for two bridges in Alaska, one of them connecting the mainland with an island that only has 50 inhabitants) was removed. By contrast, when Ronald Reagan vetoed a highway bill in 1987, one that cost nearly $88 billion and earmarked money for only 157 projects, he said, "I haven't seen this much lard since I handed out blue ribbons at the Iowa State Fair." To sum it up, Bush found it extremely difficult to say no; he didn't veto any bill until July 2006, when he got one requesting funding for embryonic stem-cell research.

Bush probably did not expect to become a wartime president. When he took office there was no international crisis; the wars in the former Yugoslavia were over, Saddam Hussein was contained in Iraq, the nasty war in the Congo wasn't getting much outside attention, and the only trouble spot that looked very threatening was Israel (the Palestinians had just started their second Intifada). Thus, when he wasn't busy mending the economy, Bush nudged the Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate some more, in effect picking up in the Middle East where Clinton left off.

That was the situation until September 11, 2001, when the United States got a rude awakening into the twenty-first century. On that day, nineteen Arab terrorists hijacked four airliners and flew them to New York City and Washington, D.C. The two planes that went to New York crashed into the World Trade Center towers and caused their collapse, succeeding where Ramzi Yousef had failed eight years earlier. The third plane hit the Pentagon, while the passengers on the fourth plane overpowered the hijackers and it crashed in rural Pennsylvania, instead of striking the White House or the Capitol. 3,025 Americans were killed on that day, as a result of history's worst terrorist attack. President Bush was visiting an elementary school in Sarasota, FL when he heard the news; both he and Vice President Cheney were rushed away to shelters in secret locations, on the chance that more terrorists were ready to act.

Before September 11, Americans were still divided over whether Bush had really won the 2000 election; now they briefly rallied behind him as he declared a state of national emergency. So did most foreign governments, starting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Congress passed a $40 billion emergency spending bill, and a $20 billion bail out for the airline industry, which suffered terribly in the months that followed. It also passed the Patriot Act to coordinate information between different law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and to make it easier to investigate individuals suspected of terrorist activities. This was similar to the special powers Lincoln and FDR demanded to prosecute the wars of their times, but the Patriot Act has been controversial nonetheless; several political groups and communities are concerned that it might become a permanent restriction on civil liberties. Finally, the Department of Homeland Security was created to strengthen the nation's nonmilitary defenses.⁽¹¹²⁾ In these activities Bush was completely successful; there was no successful terrorist attack on US soil for the rest of Bush's presidency, though Al Qaeda and other extremist groups tried more than once.

It didn't take long for the FBI and the CIA to identify Osama bin Laden as the most likely perpetrator, and he was currently in Afghanistan. In 2001 more than 90 percent of Afghanistan was controlled by the Taliban, a radical Sunni movement, so Bush demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden and any other Al Qaeda leaders they might have, and close down Al Qaeda's camps. The Taliban refused, claiming that bin Laden was their guest and that there was no evidence linking him to the September 11 attacks. On October 7, 2001, American and British warplanes and cruise missiles began attacking military targets in Afghanistan. By using the Northern Alliance, the coalition of groups in northern Afghanistan opposed to the Taliban, as the ground force, the Americans and British were able to put together a winning team. November and early December saw the Taliban abandon every city in the country, fleeing to the caves and mountains along the Pakistan border.⁽¹¹³⁾

Troops from NATO came to assist in peacekeeping, while the United States helped the Northern Alliance set up a new government for Afghanistan, and moved captured Al Qaeda members to a holding facility at Guantanamo Bay, the US base in Cuba. However, the Taliban were able to regroup, and they launched a new guerrilla war not only in Afghanistan, but also in the nearest part of Pakistan. US and NATO forces are much better suited for a conventional war of movement than for counterinsurgency operations, so a long struggle followed. For the Americans and Europeans, Afghanistan has not been as bloody as it was for the Russians in the 1980s, but still there is no end to the conflict in sight.

Part of the reason for the prolonged fight is because Afghanistan stopped being the main front in what was now called the "War on Terror." In his 2002 State of the Union speech, Bush said that the world's three most dangerous countries were Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and he called them an "Axis of Evil." Of the three, Iran was too large and too difficult to invade without the support of the local population, and while North Korea announced in 2002 that it was going to build nuclear weapons, nobody knew how far along it was in doing it, so Iraq became the most likely second front in the war. For the rest of 2002 and the first three months of 2003, Bush and his Secretary of State, Colin Powell, made the case for removing Iraq's Baathist regime, because Saddam Hussein wanted nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, together called "weapons of mass destruction." In the 1980s, Hussein had used poison gas against Iranians and Kurds, so there was little doubt he would use such weapons again, if given the chance. Moreover, he was not cooperating with the inspectors who were supposed to make sure he complied with the UN Security Council's resolutions. After the 2003 war, not enough evidence turned up to convince everyone that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but he acted like he was hiding them anyway (he may have sent them across the border into Syria).

On March 20, 2003, the United States led a "Coalition of the Willing" (mainly Britain and Australia, but twenty-eight other countries also provided token support) in an invasion of Iraq from Kuwait. It was a brilliant success, and the supposedly battle-hardened Iraqi forces offered little resistance. Baghdad fell on April 9, and Tikrit, the last city held by the Baathists, was captured on April 14, just twenty-five days after the campaign began. On May 1 President Bush flew to an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, to make his "Mission Accomplished" speech. Saddam Hussein's bloodthirsty sons were killed in a shootout in July, and Saddam himself was captured in December. Then the hard part of the job began.

The Americans wanted to leave Iraq in better shape than they found it, and the experience in Somalia from a decade earlier showed how tough that can be. The country's infrastructure had run down since the 1991 Gulf War, and the Baathist police and armed forces had been disbanded; all that would have to be replaced. In addition, Iraq would need a government that wasn't a threat to foreigners or its own people, and its oil wells needed to be repaired/turned on again. Power began to be turned over to a provisional Iraqi government in June 2004, and in 2005 it held elections twice, first to elect a 275-member legislature that would write a constitution, then to elect a more permanent government.

The problem with Iraq was that it had to be pacified if the building projects and the reforms were going to last, and as soon as the conventional fighting ended, an "insurgency" began against the occupation force and the Iraqis it recruited. Former Baathists, unemployed soldiers, terrorists from Al Qaeda and related groups, and the Mahdi Army (a Shiite faction), ambushed soldiers, or blew them and their vehicles up with roadside bombs. This was especially the case around the Sunni-populated cities of Baghdad, Tikrit and Fallujah; whereas the Kurds and most of the Shiites supported the coalition because they would gain power under the new government, the Sunni Arabs could only lose, because under Saddam Hussein they had controlled everything. Eventually more than 4,000 Americans would be killed in Iraq by "insurgents"--that's thirty times as many casualties as what was suffered in the 2003 invasion. Soon folks back in the United States were claiming that the troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq were stuck in a Vietnam-style quagmire, and Nevada Senator Harry Reid (see the next section) went so far as to declare that "the war is lost."

All things considered, Iraq appeared to become a terrorist magnet after 2003. A lot of the terrorists who hated the West went to Iraq to attack coalition troops; while that didn't make the mission in Iraq any easier for the troops, it must have helped to ensure that the events of 9/11 would not be repeated. Moreover, because most of Iraq is a flat desert, there are few places for terrorists to hide, except in the cities. The result was that even in the worst of times, enemy casualties were far worse than what the coalition suffered; in 2007 the author estimated that the Americans killed five to eight "insurgents" for every American lost. However, Americans do not have the patience and stamina for long wars (see my 2007 essay on that, Couch Potato Warriors), so this situation could not go on forever. The Iraqi phase of the war had never been as popular as the Afghan phase, and when the weapons of mass destruction did not turn up, demonstrators against the war shouted slogans like "Bush lied, people died" and "No blood for oil."⁽¹¹⁴⁾

The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, took much of the blame for not winning the war quickly, so on the day after the 2006 elections he was replaced. Bush also got a new commanding general, David Petraeus, and in January 2007 Bush authorized the sending of 20,000 more soldiers and Marines to Iraq. This "surge," as it was called, did the trick, breaking resistance and reducing sectarian violence. Moreover, Al Qaeda had alienated the Iraqis by this time; because they lost too many members when they attacked coalition troops, gradually they switched to attacking foreign civilians, then newly trained Iraqi soldiers and policemen, and finally Iraqi civilians. Thus, by 2007 even the Sunnis had turned against the foreign terrorists, who they now considered to be worse than the Americans, and worked out an arrangement to share oil revenues with the largely Shiite-dominated government. The improving situation on the ground allowed the coalition to start turning over defense responsibilities to the Iraqis, so by the end of Bush's presidency the Iraqi front was winding down; because he handled the surge so well, General Petraeus was promoted to command both the Iraqi and Afghan theaters of the war. If nothing unforeseen happens, the rest of the Americans in Iraq will come home by 2011, except for a few permanently stationed in the newly built US bases.

Besides Afghanistan and Iraq, there are quite a few other theaters for the current war, because terrorists can be active almost anywhere. In most of these cases Americans did not fight the terrorists directly, but gave economic and military aid to the nearest government, and helped train the local troops. Here is a short list of the other countries that fought Islamic terrorism:

• Algeria
• Georgia
• Indonesia
• Israel
• Lebanon
• Pakistan
• Philippines
• Somalia
• Spain
• Thailand

Angry Democrats, Drifting Republicans

If you read Kerry's biography, you might get the impression that his main goal in life was to become president by imitating John F. Kennedy. Both had the same initials, for a start, and both were Irish Catholics.⁽¹¹⁵⁾ After four years of college at Yale, he enlisted in the Navy, and in 1968 was sent to Vietnam as the commander of a fast patrol craft or "swift boat." He stayed there for four months, and by then he earned three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star. Most veterans who earn those kinds of decorations are considered scarred for life, and though that wasn't the case with Kerry, naval regulations called for him to be transferred to a non-combat assignment, so he returned to the United States, with a military record much like Kennedy's. After that he joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) movement, accused other veterans of committing atrocities in testimony before Congress, and spent the rest of the war making media appearances and taking part in antiwar demonstrations. Then he went into politics, and got elected as senator in 1984. He also did very well when it came to marriage. His second wife, Maria Teresa Thierstein Simões-Ferreira Heinz, was the widow of another senator, Pennsylvania's John Heinz, and heiress to the Heinz ketchup corporation; that marriage made Kerry the richest member of the Senate.⁽¹¹⁶⁾

After he was nominated, however, Kerry turned out to be as flawed a candidate as Dean. Most of the other Swift Boat veterans refused to support him, because of his antiwar conduct in the early 1970s, and allegations that his Purple Hearts were given for superficial injuries, which might even have been self-inflicted. And though he had been in the Senate for nearly twenty years, he had terribly little to show for that tenure; during a debate with Bush, Kerry couldn't name any landmark bills he had sponsored. Furthermore, Kerry put his foot in his mouth more than once, by making stupid statements. The worst remark involved an $87 billion appropriation for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; Kerry explained his stand on the bill by saying, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." (see also footnote #109) As for campaign strategy, the Democrats seemed to think that raw Bush hatred would be enough to put them over the top; on the issues, it never was clear what Kerry stood for, except that he opposed whatever Bush was for.

The mainstream media tried to help Kerry; a survey of 2004 news stories revealed that three fourths of the stories about Bush portrayed him in a negative light, and movie director Michael Moore made a documentary slamming Bush called "Fahrenheit 911." Apparently Bush's opponents forgot that Republicans played the Clinton hatred card in 1996, and lost anyway. One media effort backfired: CBS News announced that it had memos from the early 1970s, when Bush was in the National Guard, showing that his performance as a guardsman was only mediocre. Over the next few days several bloggers proved the memos were fakes, resulting in the downfall of CBS news anchor Dan Rather. Finally, comparisons of Kerry with the other JFK didn't work because the Kennedy charm had faded; the candidate who is called "Kennedy-esque" always loses (that had happened to Gary Hart in the 1980s).

"Rathergate," the scandal involving the CBS memos,
was a victory of the new media over the old.

At all levels, the government response to Katrina was lethargic, unprepared, and to some, even uncaring. Two days before the storm hit, President Bush called the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, and told him to evacuate the city. Nagin hesitated, thinking the federal government would come to save the day, while Washington thought Nagin would make the first move; consequently not enough people were evacuated in time. Once it was realized how bad this disaster really was, the attempts to rebuild were a fine example of government waste; four years later, New Orleans has not completely recovered, and some victims who lost their homes are still living in motel rooms. On the political scene, some played the race card; the Rev. Louis Farrakhan suggested that Washington had blown up the levees to increase flooding in New Orleans, while others claimed rescue efforts weren't made quickly enough because two thirds of the victims were black; Nagin later promised that New Orleans would be rebuilt as a "chocolate city."

No president in American history was treated as brutally and unfairly as George W. Bush. From 2000 onwards his opponents saw him as an idiot, because he was a poor public speaker who tended to mangle words (e.g., "misunderestimated"). Not giving him the respect due to his office, the Bush-haters thought they were clever when they called him names like "Shrub," "Chimp," "Bushitler," and various things we can't repeat in a history text meant for the whole family. In the eyes of liberals, Bush could do nothing right, even when spending on projects liberals supported, even when supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants, or even when he sent more foreign aid money to Africa than any other president. To the Left Bush was still a "fundamentalist," a "right-wing zealot," not capable of even one good intention.

Other presidents endured baseless attacks; think of how the Democrats treated Lincoln and Nixon, and how the Republicans sometimes went too far during the Clinton years. All this pales, however, when compared with the assault on Bush, everything he stood for, and everything he tried to accomplish. Those who worked with him suffered, too (e.g., a White House aide, Scooter Libby, was tried and convicted for blowing a CIA agent's cover, a charge which was later proven to be false). Struggling actors and comedians tried to give their careers a boost by making fun of Bush. An obviously disturbed woman, Cindy Sheehan, spent much of Bush's second term camped near the president's ranch home in Crawford, TX, mourning the death of her son in Iraq, and not only was she joined by hundreds of other opponents of the war, but the mainstream media gave her more than fifteen minutes of attention. About the only media outlets on Bush's side were Fox News and conservative radio talk shows. The anger expressed by Democrats was so bad that to conservatives they looked unhinged; to the author it looked like the "Two Minutes Hate" sessions directed at Big Brother's opponent, Emmanuel Goldstein, in the novel 1984. Charles Krauthammer, a former psychiatrist, proclaimed the Democrats' behavior a mental disorder and called it "Bush Derangement Syndrome," or BDS.

One symptom of BDS is that conspiracy theories have traditionally been associated with right-wingers like the John Birch Society (see footnote #27), but under Bush they became more common among leftists. During Bush's first term, Democrats declared that he was too dumb to succeed on his own ability, and that his only qualification to be president was that his father once had the job; never mind that he got better grades in college than either Gore or Kerry. When Bush enjoyed success, they speculated that Vice President Cheney or his campaign manager, Karl Rove (soon to be nicknamed "Bush's Brain"), was telling him what to do. In 2004 the Democrats threw everything they had at him (billionaire George Soros spent millions for the Democrats through his organization, Moveon.org⁽¹¹⁸⁾), and Bush still won, so some claimed that Bush was not a dummy, but an evil genius. And then there were the "9/11 Truthers," who claimed that the September 11 attacks were an inside job; according to them, either Bush engineered the attacks, so that he would have an excuse to give neo-conservatives and the military-industrial complex whatever they wanted, or that he knew the attacks were coming and allowed them to happen, for the same results. Today it is astonishing how many high-ranking figures in Washington took the 9/11 Truthers seriously; they included Howard Dean, who became chairman of the Democrat Party during Bush's second term, and Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.

Bush's detractors felt that it was better to lose the war than to allow Republicans to win it, so they were willing to risk unbalancing the economy and the country's political system to keep Bush from succeeding. In this they probably crossed the line between the "loyal opposition" and treasonous behavior (see my essay "The Real Enemy"). Democrats in Congress, for instance, tried to delay or deny funding to the troops, and launched an unprecedented series of filibusters to keep Bush from making judicial appointments, though in most cases there wasn't anything wrong with the candidates he picked for his judges. In the end many judicial seats were left vacant, and Bush had to sneak in his UN ambassador, John Bolton, when Congress was not in session.

Among all of Bush's opponents, The New York Times was the worst offender; it jeopardized national security to undermine the president. Whenever it heard news of the tactics being used by the administration to wage war--intercepting telecommunications, interrogation techniques, the transporting of captured terrorists, even weak spots in the body armor worn by soldiers--the Times published it for the world to see. The Times even forced Washington to cancel a successful program used to locate terrorists through their financial transactions--a program that ironically, the Times had endorsed when it was first proposed, right after 9/11. That Bush was able to protect the nation when so many US citizens were working against him seems all the more amazing now.⁽¹¹⁹⁾

How The New York Times would have reported Paul Revere's ride,
if it had been around in 1775 (see Chapter 2, footnote #38).

Bush himself seemed to ignore most of the abuse thrown in his direction. He never fought back, and tended to show the kind of serenity one might expect from a monk: never too upset, never overjoyed, and never overwhelmed. Unfortunately most Republicans responded the same way, refusing to stoop to the Democrats' level in Congress or on the campaign trail. For example, Democrats accused those around Bush (e.g., Scooter Libby, Alberto Gonzalez) of various crimes, when none were committed, and the Republicans meekly apologized for the appearance of any wrongdoing. In that sense the GOP came across like the proverbial gentleman who brings a knife to a gunfight.

To summarize the politics of Bush's second term, after the 2004 elections, the Democrats were poor losers, but the Republicans were even poorer winners. When given a choice between a real Democrat and a "Democrat lite," most voters went with the former; consequently the Democrats captured both houses of Congress in the 2006 congressional elections. Harry Reid, a cheerless senator from Nevada, became the new Senate majority leader, while a San Francisco fanatic, Nancy Pelosi, became the new speaker of the House. That should have been a wake-up call to the GOP, but they still did not give the American people a compelling reason to vote Republican, guaranteeing that they would suffer worse losses in 2008.

What Bush might be thinking now.

An Election Like No Other

The conservative base of the Republican Party offered several candidates, none of which was satisfactory to everyone, while the GOP's moderate faction had one candidate, John McCain. McCain was well known because he had run for president eight years earlier. He also had a reputation for being a "maverick," because he got along better with Washington Democrats than with the social and religious conservatives in his own party. With those who opposed him unable to agree on a candidate, he gained an early lead in the first primaries, and never lost it. By March, most of the other Republicans had dropped out of the race.

As for the Democrats, the early favorite was Hillary Clinton. However, she also came with considerable baggage, starting with her husband; it wasn't clear whether Hillary, if elected, would serve a first term as president or a third term as Bill's co-president. It certainly didn't help when Bill campaigned for her, and occasionally let his tongue slip, saying "if you elect me" instead of "if you elect Hillary." There also was a nagging feeling that something was wrong with a system where, in a nation of 300+ million people, the candidates came from only a few families; for the past five presidential elections, the major parties had nominated either a Bush or a Clinton. Finally, bad memories from the 1990s gave Hillary high negative ratings in the polls, to the point that many Democrats looked for an alternative. The anti-Clinton they chose was a newcomer to national politics, Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama had given an inspiring speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, and was elected to the Senate in the same year; before all that, virtually no one outside of Illinois had heard of him. Thus, of all the dark horses who had run for president over the years, he was the most mysterious of all; even his place of birth was uncertain, but assumed to be at a hospital in Hawaii.⁽¹²⁰⁾ Like most Democratic candidates since the 1960s, Obama's views and platform were far to the left of mainstream opinion, but because he was charismatic and had biracial ancestry (his mother came from Kansas, and his father was a Luo tribesman from Kenya), voters found him more interesting than any white liberal. While Clinton won the primaries in the biggest states, Obama's supporters were more persistent, so he won most of the caucuses and the smaller primaries, and ended up with slightly more delegates. In June Clinton conceded defeat, and the Democratic convention took on the appearance of an Obama coronation, complete with a stage resembling the ancient Altar of Zeus at Pergamun, at the stadium where Obama gave his acceptance speech.

Throughout the summer, Obama was ahead in the polls by double-digit figures. Most of the journalists in the mainstream media, newspapers as well as radio/TV networks, had been creeping more to the left over the years; now when Obama pulled into the lead, they stopped even pretending to have an objective opinion, and endorsed Obama like a squad of cheerleaders rooting for their team.⁽¹²¹⁾ Meanwhile, the Republicans showed that they had learned nothing from the Grant presidency, or at least from 1996; old soldiers should fade away, not go to the White House. McCain couldn't generate much excitement until he chose an attractive conservative, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, as his running mate. With Palin on the ticket, conservative Republicans finally came out in support of McCain. This allowed him to catch up in the polls, so that by early September, some polls showed McCain and Obama in a statistical dead heat.

That was when the bottom dropped out of the economy. Real estate prices had peaked in 2005, and stocks peaked in 2007, so the economy as a whole was sluggish as 2008 began. Sensing trouble, Bush and a majority of congressmen got together to pass a huge tax rebate ($300-$600 for each individual filing an income tax return, $600-1,200 for each couple), which they called an "economic stimulus." In addition, millions of Americans had run up debt by living beyond their means, and energy costs were at an all-time high (the price of crude oil reached $147.30 a barrel in July); both put serious strains on the budgets of most families and businesses. Still, few realized that the first economic boom of the twenty-first century would end so soon, or so suddenly.

Whereas the Great Depression had been caused by overextended investors, borrowing too much money to buy stocks, this time the crash was caused by an overextended real estate industry. Over the years, owning your own home had come to be seen as part of the "American dream," and in the 1990s, to bring that dream to as many Americans as possible, several politicians ordered financial institutions to provide home loans to people who didn't qualify for them before. As with stocks in 1929, many bought houses that were too expensive with too little cash; the banks complied because they blindly assumed that real estate prices would go up forever. Now with the cost of fuel and heating oil increasing, the cost of everything dependent on energy (e.g., food) increased, too. This forced homeowners to choose between making mortgage payments or buying groceries, a full tank of gasoline, etc., and as more and more owners of "subprime mortgages" defaulted on their loans, financial institutions began to lose money, instead of making it.

For non-economists, the first clear sign of approaching trouble was the collapse in March of Bear Stearns, a major Wall Street investment bank. Then in September two of the nation's largest mortgage corporations, the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA or "Fannie Mae") and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC or "Freddie Mac"), declared themselves financially insolvent, and the federal government took over both for the time being to prevent the situation in the housing market from getting worse.⁽¹²²⁾

On September 15, 2008, the Federal Reserve System noticed a tremendous drawdown from money market accounts in the United States, an estimated withdrawal of $550 billion in an hour or two. The Treasury Department stopped the run by releasing $105 billion in funds; then it closed down the accounts in question and tried to head off panic by announcing that henceforth, the FDIC would raise its insurance limit, from $100,000 to $250,000 per bank account. According to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, if they hadn't acted as quickly as they did, $5.5 trillion would have been withdrawn. At this point, nobody knows who was pulling out the money; presumably it was a foreign power (Russia? China? Saudi Arabia? Venezuela?), or a group of very wealthy individuals like George Soros, who at least wanted to influence the election, if not destroy the US economy. Despite the magnitude of this charge, few seem to have even noticed what happened; about the only one in Washington, who did, outside the affected federal departments, was Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA). With hindsight, though, this may be remembered as the trigger of the 2008-09 recession, just as unusually heavy sales on Wall Street triggered the 1929 stock market collapse.

Unfortunately, the trouble did not stop there; also in September, Merrill Lynch was sold and Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, leaving Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as the only remaining big investment banks. For retail banks like Citigroup and Washington Mutual, the situation was even worse; those that weren't bought out by competitors saw their shares trade on the stock market for a fraction of what they had been worth a year earlier. Finally the American International Group (AIG), one of the world's biggest insurance companies, suffered a catastrophic lowering of its credit rating, and it took emergency loans totaling $122.8 billion from the Federal Reserve Board to keep it afloat. This was justified with the argument that AIG was "too big to fail," meaning that it would have been worse to let the insurance giant collapse.

John McCain interrupted his campaign to go to Washington, to vote on a spending bill that would commit hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks. This was in character for a military veteran, putting the country before personal interests, but others didn't see it the same way; some said he was chickening out. Looking back, it is now clear that the failing economy ensured that the Republicans would lose, and McCain's time-out ensured that the Democrats would win. Pundits like to say that people vote with their pocketbooks; they reelect incumbents when the economy is good, and turn them out (and their party) when the economy is bad. It had happened in 1932, 1980 and 1992, and now it happened again; the result on Election Day was 69 million votes for the community organizer from Chicago, 59 million for the old war hero.

2008 was also the first time that the Democrats won a presidential election without the South. In Chapter 4 and the first twenty-five years of this chapter, the South was the most loyal constituency of the Democratic Party. From 1800 to 1996, whenever a Democrat won, he took at least four states from the former Confederacy. And even after the South turned Republican, the Democrats needed Southern votes to win; five losing Democratic candidates (McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry) did not carry any Southern states at all. Finally, among the eighteen Democrats that became president, eleven were Southerners (the exceptions were Van Buren, Pierce, Buchanan, Cleveland, FDR, JFK, and Obama). In 2008, however, Obama carried just Florida, Virginia and North Carolina. But even if all three of those states had voted for McCain, it wouldn't have changed the outcome; Obama got the votes he needed by winning the entire North and half of the West.

100. "Clinton's an unusually good liar. Unusually good. Do you realize that?"--Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey

101. In 1997 the Campaign Study Group, an organization that reports on campaign spending, told CNN that the Clintons had allowed 800 guests to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House, and most of those guests were contributors who between them had donated $5.4 million. If you treat the Lincoln Bedroom like a fancy hotel, this works out to $6,750 a guest per night. They also reported that contributors were invited to meetings called "White House coffees," for $50,000 to $100,000 per invitation.

102. Yasir Arafat made more visits to the White House during the Clinton years than any other world leader. By contrast, the next president would not meet with Arafat at all.

103. Clinton responded in a similar fashion in 1996, when Cuba shot down two unarmed airplanes belonging to a Cuban-American humanitarian group, "Brothers to the Rescue." Aside from continuing the ongoing US embargo against Cuba, nothing was done to punish Fidel Castro. On the other hand, Clinton did have something to say in 1995 when a federal government building in Oklahoma City was blown up by a right-wing extremist, Timothy McVeigh; he accused radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh of inspiring McVeigh to commit that deed.

104. Foreigners were interested in the Lewinsky scandal, but not for the same reasons as Americans. The French wanted to know why Clinton didn't have more affairs; most French leaders would. Africans wanted to know why Clinton didn't have a son with her, because Hillary's only child was a daughter, Chelsea. And the Russians simply wondered why Monica Lewinsky was still alive.

105. You can see the peak and collapse of the high-tech promise in who was represented in Superbowl advertising at the time. Because millions of viewers watch that championship football game every year, many companies want to advertise there, and competition has driven up the price of ads so that a thirty-second spot on TV can cost millions; consequently, for all but the largest companies, a Superbowl ad can be a do-or-die gamble that will cost an entire year's advertising budget. In January 2000, seventeen high-tech companies ran Superbowl ads, but one year later, only seven of those companies were still in business.

106. "Ma" Richards was best known for what she said about the first George Bush, in a speech at the 1988 Democratic convention: "Poor George Bush! He can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth!"

107. "A few days ago, Senator Clinton tried to spend $1 million on the Woodstock Concert Museum. Now, my friends, I wasn't there. I'm sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time."--John McCain, making fun of Hillary Clinton's proposal to build a museum to Woodstock, 2007.

108. I'm embarrassed to report that Florida, my former home state, decided two elections, and both of them (1876 and 2000) were controversial.

109. The idea that Bill Clinton was the "first black president" came from a black feminist, Toni Morrison, who called him that in a 1998 New Yorker article. She was not looking at racial ancestry. Indeed, Warren Harding had a better claim; he may have been 1/4 black, if Democratic accusations about him are true. Instead, Morrison looked at Clinton's stand on the issues, and superficial, cultural similarities. Like many black Americans, Clinton started out poor, came from a single-parent household, liked fried chicken, played the saxophone well, and was busted by white conservatives.
Clinton was not offended by the comparison. In fact, he seemed to encourage it when he talked about racial violence, saying "I have vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child." This was just another lie, though; no black churches were burned in Arkansas during Clinton's childhood.
This kind of thinking encouraged John Kerry to make a really dumb statement during the 2004 campaign: "President Clinton was often known as the first black president. I wouldn't be upset if I could earn the right to be the second." Even his black supporters were offended by that whopper, and told Kerry he was too rich to qualify! As for Morrison, she stopped calling Clinton "black" in 2008, when she endorsed Barack Obama.

110. Berke Breathed, the cartoonist who drew "Bloom County," "Outland," and "Opus," got out of the business in 2008 because all his comic strips carried political jokes, and in these hypersensitive times, that is sure to offend somebody. Breathed explained his action by saying, "With the crisis in Wall Street and Washington, I'm suspending my comic strip [Opus] to assist the nation. The best way I can help is to leave politics permanently and write funny stories for America's kids." I'm guessing that my mother's favorite comic strip, "Pogo," with its cute swamp animals and polite political humor, would not succeed in today's market, either; the public's tastes in entertainment have changed too much since the mid-twentieth century.
The late Art Buchwald once said that the success of political humor depends on whose ox is being gored. The example he gave was that when he was telling jokes about Lyndon Johnson, Republicans thought he was very funny, but when he starting telling jokes about Richard Nixon, the same Republicans thought he had lost his sense of humor.
I believe we are truly in trouble if we have lost the ability to laugh at ourselves. Every free country in the past was good at that, starting with the Athenian democracy (e.g., Aristophanes). See also the Martin Bodek column on "comedemocracy," reposted on this site.

111. Rather than spell out their full names, some historians simply call George Herbert Walker Bush "Bush 41" and George Walker Bush "Bush 43," because they were the 41^st and 43^rd presidents respectively. The Bushes themselves encouraged this, by giving each other the nicknames of "41" and "43."

112. In a classic case of one hand not knowing what the other is doing, immigration officials approved the visa application of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the September 11 hijackers, in March 2002--six months after he had killed himself for Allah! President Bush was not amused, and he created a new immigration agency to replace the old one.

113. Osama bin Laden disappeared after the battle of Tora Bora, leading the author to believe he died around the end of 2001. Once or twice a year his supporters release a video or audio tape with his latest speech, but the footage is either faked, or reused material that is several years old. My summary of all those tapes is as follows:
If it's new, it's not bin Laden.
If it's bin Laden, it's not new.
Nevertheless, most American leaders talk about catching him eventually, as if that is the most important objective of the war.

114. Most of the opponents to the war in Iraq were Democrats, and apparently they forgot that they had supported military action when Bill Clinton bombed Kosovo. The best quote the author has heard, comparing Iraq to Vietnam, came from this letter to The Wall Street Journal:
"Iraq is just like Vietnam except: We occupy Hanoi. We've captured Ho Chi Minh. The North Vietnamese have just held a free and democratic election. The North Vietnamese are working on a new constitution. Yes, Iraq is just like Vietnam."

115. However, Kerry found out in 2002 that two of his grandparents were Austrian Jews, who secretly converted to Catholicism and changed the family name from Kohn to Kerry, before immigrating to the United States. Thus, he was half-Jewish, too.

116. When it came to manners, Teresa was no Jackie Kennedy. Like John Kerry, she caused a stir by saying embarrassing things regularly, like when she told a reporter to "Shove it." This couldn't have helped her husband's campaign. After the election, John Hawkins, a conservative blogger at RightWingNews.com, had this to say about her: "Most Republicans should probably be grateful for Ms. Heinz-Kerry's flubs because if there had been some sort of bizarro-world wife swap and George Bush would have been stuck with old foot in her mouth while John Kerry would have been married to Laura Bush, we'd probably be talking about President Kerry today."

117. My pet theory about the 2004 presidential election is that the most important votes were cast by the Amish community of Ohio. One news story told me that the Amish got more than half of the absentee ballots, so that they wouldn't have to use those "evil electronic voting machines." And it's a safe guess that most of them voted Republican, because nobody expects them to endorse a party platform that favors gay marriage. Think about it. These simple folks stay out of the limelight; most of the time we aren't even aware that the Amish are there. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if both major parties ignored them completely, when they campaigned in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And yet these people, who are stuck in the seventeenth century, may have decided what course twenty-first-century America will take. Do they sound a little like the Hobbits in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings?

118. Moveon.org, a Democratic think tank, was founded in 1998, during the Clinton impeachment. The name referred to the attitude expressed by Democrats at the time: "Sure, he did it and lied about it, but now let's put it behind us!" However, during the Bush years Moveon.org did not live up to its name; its members could not get over the Republicans winning in 2004, or even 2000.

119. Bush wasn't very popular abroad, either. In 2004 Democrats asserted that if the whole world's population could vote in that year's elections, John Kerry would win. My response to that was, "Big deal, if the animal kingdom could vote, Ralph Nader would be our next president!" Part of the unpopularity was no doubt jealousy over the success of the United States; it can get lonely at the top, as the saying goes. However, that feeling started to fade in Bush's second term, when France and Germany, two big opponents of the Iraq war, elected new leaders who liked the United States better than Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder did.

120. It is remarkable how few records of Obama have been released to the public, covering his life before he ran for the US Senate in 2004. Missing records include his original birth certificate (not the certificate of live birth posted on the Internet), Selective Service Registration, the grades and papers from the colleges he attended (Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School), scholarly articles published while in those schools, medical records, and baptismal records from the church he attended in Chicago. Even many records of his attendance and voting in the Illinois State Senate are not available, prompting some to call the period from 1995 (when he first ran for the State Senate) to 2004 the "lost years."

121. The New York Times promoted McCain as the ideal Republican candidate as 2008 began, only to call him "mean-spirited" and publish rumors about him, after he defeated his rivals; by then the Times had switched its endorsement to Obama. John O'Sullivan, columnist and former editor of National Review, explains the media's liberal bias with what he calls O'Sullivan's First Law: "All organizations that are not actually right wing will over time become left wing." Examples of other organizations whose agendas have gradually gotten more leftist include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Ford Foundation, the League of Women Voters, the YWCA, UNESCO, UNICEF, Planned Parenthood, the Episcopal Church, Canada and most of Europe.

122. If anyone can be blamed for the failure Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it is Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA). While he was pushing those companies to make bad loans, he had a homosexual affair with Herb Moses, a Fannie Mae executive from 1991 to 1998. Because Frank was on the Financial Services Committee, this was clearly a conflict of interests, but nobody wanted to talk about it, out of fear of being called a "homophobe." Now that Frank is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, he is in charge of fixing the mess he helped to create! Nor is this the only time his sex life got him into trouble; a previous boyfriend had run an escort service out of Frank's apartment. Will he ever learn that it's not a good idea to date, while in Congress?

© Copyright 2009 Charles Kimball