Reelecting Bill Clinton

On Election Eve 1996, US citizens awaited the outcome of a national election that would give them a reelected Democratic President, William Jefferson ""Bill"" Clinton, and a Republican Congress - a combination that would inevitably handicap the nation. True, Clinton would become the first Democrat to be reelected to the highest office in the land since Franklin Delano Roosevelt 60 years ago. But, this was no New Dealer - this was a ""New"" Democrat who outraged his Republican opponents in Congress by using some of their proposed legislative innovations as his own. The electorate chose this ""New"" Democrat quite deliberately in what seemed to be a move to counterbalance the probability of another Republican Congress. And just how this experiment in a different kind of government would work out is another story entirely, for on Election Eve all the salutes were for the winners in both the Executive and Legislative branches. In this follow-up to his 1992 work, The Bill Clinton Story: Winning the Presidency, John Hohenberg analyzes one of the strangest elections in Presidential history, and the controversies that ensued. Hohenberg examines the reasons behind the troubled campaign of Bob Dole, the Republican leader, and his relations with the brash Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Also scrutinized are the two government furloughs that handicapped the Republican Congress and a gridlock that was narrowly averted, the direction of welfare reform, the ever-reviving Whitewater scandal and its targets, disaster relief efforts, the necessary anti-tobacco legislation, and the foreign crisis that figured into the Presidential campaign.