Of course there were political and personal
Group painting,excesses in the 1960s, but the decade and the movements it spawned also produced advances in civil rights, women’s rights, a clean environment, workplace safety, and opportunities for the poor. The Democrats believed in anworked for those things. So did a lot of traditional Rdepublicans, including many of thegovernors I’d served with in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Abstract oil painting,In focusing only on the excesses of thegoln and the national Republicans in ending slavery andpreserving the Union. On the big issues,
Impressionism oil painting,slavery and the Union, the South was wrong.urecially in the areas of science, technology, and entrepreneurialism, andhe was a committed internationalist in foreign policy. Also, I had thought for years that theal problems with those embodied inthe “Contract with America.” Politics at its best is about the competition of ideas and policy.itical power of his theory was that it forcefully and clearly confirmed the negativestereotypes of Democrats that Republicans had been working to embed in the nation’snege ofofThe problem with his theory was that it didn’t f
Animal oil painting,it the facts. Most Democrats were tough onSoon he would charge, without a shred of evidence, that 25 percent of my White House aideswere recent drug users. Then he said that Democratic values were responsible for the large1960s, the New Right reminded me a lot of the carping that white southerners did against Reconstruction for a century after the Civil War. When I was growing up, we were still beintaught how mean the Northern forces were to us during Reconstruction, and how noble the South was, even in defeat. There was something to it, but the loudest complaints always overlooked the good done by LincNow it was happening again, as the right wing used the excesses of the sixties to obscure thegood done in civil rights and other areas. Their blanket condemnation reminded me of a story Senator David Pryor used to tell about a conversation he’d had with an eighty-five-year-oldman who told him he had lived through two world wars, the Depression, Vietnam, the civilrights movement, and all the other upheavals of the twentieth century. Pryor said, “You shave seen a lot of changes.” “Yeah,” the old man replied, “and I was against every one of them!” Still, I didn’t want to demonize Gingrich and his crowd as they
Floral oil painting, had done to us. He had some interesting ideas, espeDemocratic Party needed to modernize its approach, to focus less on preserving the party’s industrial-age achievements and more on meeting the challenges of the information age, andto clarify our commitment to middle-class values and concerns. I welcomed the chance to compare our New Democrat ideas on economic and sociBut Gingrich didn’t stop there. The core of his argument was not just that his ideas were better than ours; he said hisvalues were better than ours, because Democrats were weak onfamily, work, welfare, crime, and defense, and because, being crippled by the self-indulgent sixties, we couldn’t draw distinctions between right and wrong. The polconsciousness since 1968. Nixon had done it; Reagan had done it; and George Bush had doit, too, when he turned the 1988 election into a referendum on Willie Horton and the PledAllegiance. Now Newt had taken the art of “reverse plastic surgery” to a whole new levelsophistication and harshness.crime, supported welfare reform and a strong national defense, and had been much more fiscally responsible than the New Right Republicans. Most were also hardworking, law-abiding Americans who loved their country, worked in their communities, and tried to raise their children well. Never mind the facts; Gingrich had his story line down pat, and he appliedit every chance he got.522
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