My life

percent. The NRA also hurt Al badly there and in several other states, including Arkansas. For example, Yell County, where the Clintons had settled a century earlier, is a populist, culturally conservative county a Democrat has to win to carry the state in a tight race. Gore lost it to Bush 50–47 percent. The NRA did that. I might have been able to turn it around, but it would have taken two or three days of rural work to do it, and I didn’t know how big the problem was until I went home right before the election. The gun lobby tried to beat Al in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and might have done so had it not been for a heroic effort by the local labor unions, which had a lot of NRA members themselves. They fought back by saying, “Gore won’t take your gun away, but Bush will take your union away!” Unfortunately, in the rural areas of Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, and Ohio, there weren’t enough union members to win the war on the ground.

In Kentucky, our stand against the big tobacco companies marketing cigarettes to kids hurt Al in the tobacco-growing areas. In West Virginia, he was damaged by the failure of Weirton Steel, an employeeowned company; the employees and their families were convinced the collapse was caused by my failure to limit cheap imported steel from Russia and Asia during the Asian financial crisis. The evidence indicated that the company had failed for other reasons, but the Weirton workers thought otherwise and Al paid the price.

New Hampshire went for Bush by a margin of just over 7,000 because Nader got 22,198 votes. Even worse, Nader received more than 90,000 votes in Florida, where Bush was hanging on by a thread in an election contest that would drag on for more than a month.

As the Florida vote battle began, it was clear that we had picked up four seats in the Senate and one in the House. Three incumbent House Republicans were defeated, including Jay Dickey, who lost to Mike Ross in Arkansas, and the Democrats picked up four seats in California, prevailing in all but one of the contested races. Al was at a disadvantage going into the election recount in Florida because the chief election official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, was a conservative Republican who was close to Governor Jeb Bush, and the state legislature that would certify the electors was dominated by conservative Republicans. On the other hand, the state supreme court, which presumably would have the final say on the counting of ballots, had more judges appointed by Democratic governors and was thought to be less partisan.

Two days later, still not knowing who my successor would be, I saw Arafat in the Oval Office. The violence was subsiding and I thought he might be serious about peace. I told him that I had only ten weeks left to make an agreement. In a private moment I held his arm, stared straight at him, and told him I also had a chance to make an agreement with North Korea to end its long-range missile production, but I would have to go there to do it. The whole trip would take a week or longer by the time I made the obligatory stops in South Korea, Japan, and China.

If we were going to make peace in the Middle East, I knew I would have to close the deal. I told Arafat I had done everything I could to get the Palestinians a state on the West Bank and Gaza while protecting the security of Israel. After all my efforts, if Arafat wasn’t going to make peace, he owed it to me to tell me, so that I could go to North Korea to end another serious security threat. He pleaded with me to stay, saying that we had to finish the peace and that if we didn’t do it before I left office, it would be at least five years before we’d be this close to peace again.