I also went horseback riding, mostly
oil painting,because I liked to ride and loved the broad sweep of theMontana landscape, but also because I wanted to show that I wasn’t a cultural alien ruralasas a high-strung, urban, liberal activist. As aselves tobetween confrontation and accommodation when Illowed my campaign
oil paintings,example by stopping at atwo of us in a positive discussion. The next day, at the WhiteasAmericans couldn’t support. After the farm event, my advance man, Mort Engleberg, had asked one of our hosts what he thought of me. The farmer replied, “He’s all right. And he ain’t anything like they make him out to be.”
china oil painting,I heard that a lot in 1995, and just hoped I wouldn’t have to bring perception into line with reality one voter at a time. Our ride got interesting when one of my Secret Service agents fell off his horse; the agent wunhurt, but the horse took off like a rocket across the open range. To the amazement of the press and the
handmade oil paintings,Montanans watching, my deputy chief of staff, Harold Ickes, rode off after the runaway steed at a blistering pace, chased him down, and returned him to his owner. Harold’s exploit seemed totally at odds with his imageyoung man, he had worked on ranches out west, and he hadn’t forgotten how to ride. On June 5, Henry Cisneros and I unveiled a “National Homeownership Strategy” of one hundred things we were going to do to increase home ownership to two-thirds of the population. The big decline in the deficit had kept mortgage rates low even as the economy picked up, and in a couple of years, we would reach Henry’s goal for the first time in American history. At the end of the first week of June, I vetoed my first bill, the $16 billion GOP rescission package, because it cut too much out of education, national service, and the environment, while leaving untouched unnecessary highway demonstration projects, courthouses, and other federal buildings that were pet projects of Republican members. They may have hated government in general, but, like most incumbents, they still wanted to spend themreelection. I offered to work with the Republicans to
oil painting reproductions,cut even more spending, but said it would have to come out of pork-barrel projects and other nonessential spending, not investments in our children and our future. A couple of days later, I had another reason to fight for those investments, as Hillary’s brother Tony and his wife, Nicole, gave us a new nephew—Zachary Boxer Rodham. I was still trying to find the right balancewent to Claremont, New Hampshire, for a town meeting with Speaker Gingrich. I had said Ithought it would be good for Newt to talk to people in New Hampshire as I had in 1992, andhe took me up on it. We both made positive opening comments about the need for honest debate and cooperation rather than the kind of name-calling sound bites that make the evening news. Gingrich even joked that he had foDunkin’ Donuts shop on the way to the meeting. In the course of answering questions from citizens, we agreed to work together for campaign finance reform, even shaking hands on it; talked about other areas where we saw eye to eye; had an interesting, civilized disagreement about health care; and disagreed about the utility ofthe United Nations and whether Congress should fund AmeriCorps. The discussion with Gingrich was well received in a country weary of partisan warfare. Two of my Secret Service agents, who almost never said anything to me about politics, told me how glad they were to see theHouse Conference on Small Business, several Republicans said the same thing. If we could have continued in the same vein, I believe the Speaker and I could have resolved most of our differences in a way that would have been good for America. At his best, Newt Gingrich w540
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