A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (162 page)

Whether racism and ethnic distrust had increased or decreased in the 1990s depended on which surveys one consulted. More Americans than ever before encountered people of all races, ethnic identities, and faiths in their daily routine. Affirmative action had placed, in many cases, disproportionate numbers of blacks and Hispanics in a wide variety of occupations, government service, and in higher education, although the same laws tended to exclude Asians and Jews.

Thus, as the year 2000 neared, racial harmony remained the dream Martin Luther King had had some twenty years before, but at the same time, the realization of that dream in practical terms was closer than ever because millions of black families had entered the middle class, become stockholders and business owners, professionals and labor leaders, executives and stars. Although the O. J. Simpson murder case in the early 1990s threatened to divide black and white America, even anger over that soon subsided. Despite its shortcomings, race relations at the end of the 1990s remained better than anywhere else in the world, as horrible race riots in England and Muslim gang attacks on native French citizens there would later attest.

Social Pathologies, Spiritual Renewal

Unlike the 1960s, when street crime led to surging gun ownership, in the 1990s it was renewed distrust of government that had sparked a rise in gun sales and concealed-carry laws. In the wake of the McVeigh bombing, gun control groups pressed for the Brady Bill, legislation named after President Reagan’s press secretary Jim Brady, who had been wounded in the 1983 assassination attempt, and which had been advocated by his wife, Sarah. The Brady Bill required registration by gun purchasers and a waiting period before acquiring a gun, ostensibly to reduce gun crimes. Gun owners feared this was the first step in a national confiscation, as had occurred in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, leaving the public defenseless against a tyrannical government.

There was one small detail that gun control groups ignored: gun crimes, according to both federal and state authorities, peaked in Bush’s term, roughly two years before the Brady Bill kicked in. Under Reagan and Bush, prosecutions of federal gun violations had risen from 2,500 to about 9,500 in 1992.
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This was remarkable because the call for new gun laws came on the heels of two years of
nonprosecution
of
existing
gun laws by the Clinton administration. It allowed Clinton to set up a self-fulfilling cycle: there were more gun crimes; therefore, the nation needed more gun laws. The Brady Act was passed in February 1994, followed by the Clinton-Gore semiautomatic ban later that year, yet gun prosecutions at the federal level continued to fall sharply, back to where the number had stood when Bush took office. It allowed Clinton, in the wake of several highly publicized gun crimes (including the Columbine High School shooting in April 1999), to paint gun owners as irresponsible at a time when his administration failed to enforce the existing gun laws. In fact, momentum swung toward less gun regulation: several states began to pass concealed-carry laws that tended to further reduce crime. Through a crime crackdown under Republican mayor Rudolph Giuliani, New York City homicides per hundred thousand were lower than in the 1800s.
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Issues of gun ownership reached a key point in 2001 when the
Emerson
case in Texas came before a federal district court. It represented the first time since the Great Depression’s original gun control laws had taken effect that the meaning of the Second Amendment was actually addressed in a higher court. The judges ruled that in fact the “right to bear arms” was an individual right, not a militia right, and therefore meant exactly what proponents of the amendment for years had said it did. Although the justices attempted to include language that might still allow state and local gun regulation, the critical issue of whether the “militia” referred to the National Guard units or to armed individuals was settled in favor of individuals.

Issues of gun control divided the public almost as sharply as the abortion issue. Each, in turn, was closely associated with particular religious viewpoints. A growing number of Americans seemed concerned about family values and social maladies including abortion, drugs, illegitimacy, and street crime, which were broadly linked to a decline in the spiritual side of American life.

The nation had slowly but steadily moved toward attitudes more favorable to religion, and generally—though not universally—expressed at the polls concerns against normalizing what were once considered objectionable or even deviant lifestyles. In early 2001, the Pew Charitable Trusts concluded a broad study of the role of religion in public life and found, “Americans strongly equate religion with personal ethics and behavior, considering it an antidote to the moral decline they perceive in our nation today.”
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This was accompanied by an “equally strong respect for religious diversity…[and] tolerance of other people’s beliefs.” Nearly 70 percent disagreed with the statement that the nation would “do well even if many Americans were to abandon their religious faith,” and a similar percentage wanted religion’s influence on American society to grow, whereas only 6 percent wanted it to weaken. Nearly 80 percent supported either a moment of silence or a specific prayer in public schools; and at a ratio of two-to-one the respondents agreed that prayer taught children that religion and God were important. Two thirds of the respondents were not threatened by more religious leaders becoming involved in politics. Majorities of Americans sensed a bias among journalists against Christians and 68 percent agreed that there was “a lot of prejudice [in the media] toward Evangelical Christians.”

The spiritual renewal had started perhaps as early as the 1980s, when a Gallup survey found that 80 percent of Americans believed in a final judgment before God; 90 percent claimed to pray; and 84 percent said, “Jesus was God or the Son of God.”
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Most of the growth that had occurred in American Christianity came from one of two sources. First, Hispanic immigrants, who tended to be Catholics, brought renewed energy to the Roman Catholic Church, which, with 60 million members, was the largest denomination in the United States. Second, independent/nondenominational churches grew at astronomical rates. The largest churches in America—that is, a group of similarly minded believers at a single location—included Willow Creek (20,000 members) in Chicago, Crenshaw Christian Center (22,000 members) in Los Angeles, and Southeast Christian Church in Louisville (17,000 members). Focused on “soul winning” through modern methods—contemporary music, abundant church athletic and musical activities, large youth programs—these churches kept two groups who had abandoned the mainstream churches years earlier—males and young people.

A sure sign of a church in decline is the absence of men and a preponderance of elderly women. The newer churches had tapped into the call for men to be family heads, and, assisted by such independent programs as Promise Keepers, they emphasized strong traditional families with a male family leader. At the same time, the use of contemporary music, innovative teaching methods, and teen-oriented Bible messages brought millions of American youths to Christianity. By 1991, a survey showed that 86 percent of teens said they believed “Jesus Christ is God or the Son of God, and 73 percent considered regular church attendance an important aspect of American citizenship.” An even more surprising, perhaps, statistic showed that nearly one third accepted the Bible as the literal word of God.
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Ever attuned to image and style, Clinton early in his presidency had suddenly begun attending church regularly. But Clinton best employed religion during the impeachment scandal, when he brought in several spiritual advisers, such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson (who at the time was secretly conducting his own extramarital affair) to help him deal with his “mistakes.” In fact, the spiritual renewal that had begun percolating through the United States had not quite come to a boil by 1996, when Clinton campaigned for reelection, or even by 1998, when he was impeached, but the general sense of moral unease with the president’s actions certainly came into focus after 1999.

“I Did Not Have Sex with That Woman”

The buoyant economy was a tremendous fire wall for Clinton against any Republican challenger in 1996. It was ironic that, having come into office criticizing the Reagan policies, Clinton now claimed credit for them and fortified his reelection bid with them. Perhaps aware that any candidate would be a sacrificial lamb—the “Mondale of 1996”—the Republicans nominated warhorse Robert Dole of Kansas, who had walked point for Gerald Ford in 1976. Dole had paid his dues, and minor challenges from other candidates had failed to gain traction. Already the question before the electorate was clear: would any candidate running on “character issues” be sufficient to unseat a president in a booming economy in peacetime?

Ross Perot returned with another independent campaign as the nominee of the Reform Party. However, in 1996, the issues differed dramatically from those of 1992: budget deficits were gone or disappearing; unemployment had plummeted; and free trade no longer seemed a threat. Perot severely hurt himself by failing to attack Clinton’s credibility and character problems, leaving Dole as the only real alternative to Clinton.

Dole lacked Reagan’s charm and grace, and, though not without humor (Dole later appeared in clever Pepsi, Visa, and Viagra commercials), the GOP standard-bearer seemed too old (he was younger than Reagan, at 73, but seemed to lack energy). His vice-presidential nominee, tax-cutting advocate (and former Buffalo Bills quarterback) Jack Kemp, lacked the aggressiveness to attack weaknesses in the Democratic platform. Above all, Dole and Kemp still operated out of fear that lingered from the 1995 government shutdown, when the Democrats had successfully demonized Republicans as opposing children and the elderly.

Clinton’s vulnerability lay in the serious character weaknesses—the lies about extramarital affairs had already become well-documented. Equally important, the Democratic National Committee had developed a strategy for burying the Republicans under a tidal wave of cash, from any source. Clinton rode the crest of that wave. Slowly at first, then with greater frequency, reports of Clinton’s unethical and often illegal fund-raising activities began to appear in the press. Concern about money from the communist People’s Republic of China, funneled through John Huang into the Clinton/Gore coffers, percolated through newsrooms, but the media never closed the loop of equating the cash with policy payoffs by the administration. Huang’s cash payments were the most serious breach of government ethics since Teapot Dome and, more important, were grounds for a special prosecutor, but the Clinton Justice Department was certainly not about to conduct such an investigation.

With the Clinton media team in full spin mode, each new revelation was carefully managed by several loyalists who received talking points by fax machines each morning. They were immediately dispatched to the television talk shows to claim that (1) everybody does it, (2) there was really nothing illegal about the transactions, and (3) the allegations were merely Republican efforts to smear Clinton. Without a tenacious—or, more appropriate, vicious—press to look skeptically at every administration defense (and defender), as it had in the Watergate era, Clinton successfully swept aside the most damaging issues of the campaign.

When the votes were tallied in November, Clinton still had not cracked the 50 percent mark, netting 49 percent, whereas Dole received 41 percent and Perot snatched 8 percent. Clinton increased his electoral margin over 1992 by 9 electoral votes, indicating the damage done to him by the ongoing scandals.

Even after his reelection, the character issue haunted Clinton in the form of an ongoing thorn in his side named Paula Corbin Jones. Named in
The American Spectator
“troopergate” story as having had an affair with then-governor Clinton, Jones set out to prove that something quite different had happened. In 1994, Jones filed a civil lawsuit against President Bill Clinton for sexual harassment during a political event at a Little Rock hotel while Clinton was governor of Arkansas. While working a meeting at the Excelsior Hotel in 1991, Clinton sent troopers to ask her to come up to a hotel room to meet the governor, and Jones claimed that once she had entered the room, and realized that only she and Clinton were there, Governor Clinton exposed himself and asked her to perform oral sex on him. Jones refused, left the room, then alleged that she had suffered “various job detriments” for refusing his advances.
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The lawsuit proved historic because in 1997 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Clinton’s legal claim that a citizen could not sue a president. Quite the contrary, the Supreme Court unanimously concluded “like every other citizen who properly invokes [the District Court’s] jurisdiction…[she] has a right to an orderly disposition of her claims.”
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Or, stated another way, no citizen is above the law.

Jones’s legal team began the discovery process, during which it gathered evidence and took depositions. Understandably, one of the questions the Jones legal team asked Clinton in his deposition required him to identify all the women with whom he had had sexual relations since 1986. (He was married the entire time.) Clinton answered, under oath, “none.” Already Gennifer Flowers and former Miss Arkansas Sally Perdue had claimed to have had an affair with Clinton (Flowers’s affair occurred during the time in question), but the Jones team found several others. One of them was Juanita Broaddrick, who contended that in April 1978, Clinton had raped her while he was attorney general of Arkansas, and while she had told a coworker at the time, she had not pressed charges.

In fact, one relationship was still going on at the time of Jones’s suit—regular sexual liaisons at the White House between Clinton and a young intern, Monica Lewinsky. Most Clinton biographers disagree over whether Hillary knew about the ongoing liaisons or whether she was kept in the dark.
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(She would have protected her husband to prevent their loss of power.) The fact that a president of the United States would boldly lie about his relationship with Lewinsky to representatives of a federal court would have gone unreported except for the work of an Internet sleuth, Matt Drudge. Drudge, who styled himself after Walter Winchell, the journalist who virtually invented the gossip column, ran a Web site in which he posted the latest rumblings from newsrooms around the country. He learned that
Newsweek
magazine had found out about the Lewinsky affair, but had determined to spike the story. Drudge ran with it, forcing the major media outlets to cover it and, in the process, establishing himself as the vanguard of a new wave of Internet reporters.
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