These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

The First Lady, still a neophyte in the capital, urged her husband to make no compromises; in his 1994 State of the Union address, he promised to veto any bill that did not provide for universal coverage. By the midterm elections, when Republicans took over Congress, winning majorities in both houses for the first time in decades, the proposal, much derided for its intricacies and hobbled by conservatives’ distaste for the president’s wife, had failed. Felled by the unyielding partisanship of a new political culture, it never even reached a vote.139 The failure of Clinton’s health care proposal crippled his presidency. His lasting legacy, as a liberal, came in 1993, when he appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. But Clinton, who had more millionaires in his cabinet even than Bush had, moved to the right—even before the midterms—and much of his agenda amounted to a continuation of work begun by Reagan and Bush.140 He secured the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), against the opposition of labor unions. He took up the War on Drugs waged by Nixon in 1971 and continued by Reagan with the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. In 1994, the year Newt Gingrich issued a conservative “Contract with America,” Clinton signed a new crime bill that lengthened mandatory sentencing and instituted a 100:1 ratio between sentences for possession of crack and of cocaine. (The bill also included an assault weapons ban, set to expire after ten years.) Some members...