Bill Clinton: Mastering the PresidencyA decade-and-a-half after President William Jefferson Clinton first took the oath of office, biographer Nigel Hamilton tells the riveting story of what was possibly the greatest self-reinvention of a president in office in modern times. The Clinton presidency began disastrously -- kicking off with the worst transition in living memory and deteriorating through a series of fiascos, from gays in the military to Hillary Clinton's failed health care reform. How Bill Clinton faced up to his failures and refashioned himself in the White House thereafter is an epic, hitherto unwritten story -- a story that climaxes with the trouncing of Bob Dole in the landslide presidential election in 1996. Clinton began his second term as the undisputed and tremendously popular leader of the Western world. In vivid prose, Hamilton charts Clinton's dramatic reversal of fortune and his ultimate triumph over himself -- and his foes. Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency is a riveting narrative of American politics, an incisive character portrait, and powerful reminder of what a great president can accomplish. |
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Page 13 - Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world, and the urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy.
Page 15 - This beautiful Capital, like every capital since the dawn of civilization, is often a place of intrigue and calculation. Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.
Page 14 - Our democracy must be not only the envy of the world but the engine of our own renewal. There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.
Page 14 - To renew America, we must be bold. We must do what no generation has had to do before. We must invest more in our own people, in their jobs, and in their future, and at the same time cut our massive debt. And we must do so in a world in which we must compete for every opportunity.
Page 14 - Revolution (35) to the Civil War, to the Great Depression, to the Civil Rights movement, our people have always mustered the determination to construct from these crises the pillars of our history.
Page 14 - This new world has already enriched the lives of millions of Americans who are able to compete and win in it. But when most people are working harder for less; when others cannot work at all; when the cost of health care devastates families and threatens to bankrupt our enterprises, great and small; when the fear of crime robs law-abiding citizens of their freedom ; and when millions of poor children cannot even imagine the lives we are calling them to lead, we have not made change our friend.