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Hillary gave a terrific speech, one she had written carefully and practiced hard; it displayed how much she had learned about the concerns of the different regions of the state and how clearly she understood the choices voters were facingShe also had to explain why she was running; show that she understood why New Yorkers might be wary of voting for a candidate, even one they liked, who had never lived in the state until a few months before; and say what she would do as a senatorThere was some discussion about whether I should speakNew York was one of my best states; at the time my job approval was over 70 percent there and my personal approval was at 60 percentBut we decided I shouldnt talkIt was Hillarys day, and the voters wanted to hear from her For the rest of the month, while politics dominated the news, I was dealing with a wide variety of domestic and foreign policy issuesOn the home front, I endorsed a bipartisan bill to provide Medicaid coverage to lower-income women for breast and cervical cancer treatment; made a deal with Senator Lott to bring five of my judicial nominees to the Senate floor for a vote in return for appointing the person he wanted, a rabid foe of campaign finance reform, to the Federal Election Commission; argued with the Republicans over the Patients Bill of Rightsthey said theyd pass it as long as no one could bring a law-suit to enforce it, and I argued that that would make it a bill of suggestions; dedicated the White House press room to James Brady, President Reagans courageous press secretary; announced a record increase in funds for Native American education and health care; supported a cartier tank louis change in food stamp regulations to allow welfare recipients who went to work to own a used car without losing their food aid; received an award from the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) for my economic and social policies and for my major Hispanic appointments; and hosted the National Governors Association for the last time In foreign affairs, we dealt with a lot of headachesOn the seventh, Yasser Arafat suspended his peace talks with IsraelHe was convinced that Israel was putting Palestinian issues on the back burner in favor of pursuing peace with SyriaThere was some truth in it, and at the time, the Israeli public was more willing to make peace with the Palestinians, with all the difficulties that entailed, than to give up the Golan Heights and put the Palestinian talks at riskWe spent the rest of the month trying to get things going again On the eleventh, the UK suspended home rule in Northern Ireland, despite the IRAs last-minute assurance of an act of arms decommissioning to General John de Chastelain, the Canadian who was overseeing the processI had gotten George Mitchell involved again, and we had done our best to help Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair avoid this dayThe fundamental problem, according to Gerry Adams, was that the IRA wanted to disarm because their people had voted for it, not because David Trimble and the Unionists had made decommissioning the price of their continued participation in the governmentOf course, without decommissioning, the Protestants would lose faith in the process, and eventually Trimble would be replaced, a result Adams and Sinn Fein did not wantTrimble could be dour and omega watches for sale pessimistic, but beneath his stern Scots-Irish front was a brave idealist who was also taking risks for peaceAt any rate, the sequencing issue had delayed establishment of the government for more than a year; now we were back to no governmentIt was frustrating, but I thought the impasse would be resolved because no one wanted to return to the bad old days On March 5, I commemorated the thirty-fifth anniversary of the voting rights march in Selma, Alabama, by walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge as the civil rights demonstrators had on that Bloody Sunday, risking their lives to gain the right to vote for all AmericansMany of the veterans of the civil rights movement who had marched with or supported Martin Luther King Jrmarched arm in arm again that day, including Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Andrew Young, Joe Lowery, Julian Bond, Ethel Kennedy, and Harris Wofford In 1965, the Selma march galvanized the conscience of the nationFive months later, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into lawBefore the Voting Rights Act, there were only 300 black elected officials at any level, and just three African-American congressmenIn 2000, there were nearly 9,000 black elected officials and 39 members of the Congressional Black Caucus In my remarks, I noted that Martin Luther King Jrwas right when he said that when black Americans win their struggle to become free, those who have held them down will themselves be free for the first timeAfter Selma, white and black southerners crossed the bridge to the New South, leaving hatred and isolation behind for new oppor-tunities and prosperity and political tiffany replica influence: Without Selma, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton would never have become President of the United States Now, as we crossed the bridge into the twenty-first century with the lowest unemployment and poverty rates and the highest home and business ownership rates among African-Americans ever recorded, I asked the audience to remember what was yet to be accomplishedAs long as there were wide racial disparities in income, education, health, vulnerability to violence, and perceptions of fairness in the criminal justice system, as long as discrimination and hate crimes persisted, we have another bridge to cross I loved that day in SelmaOnce again, I was swept back across the years to my boyhood longing for and belief in an America without a racial divideOnce again, I returned to the emotional core of my political life in saying farewell to the people who had done so much to nourish it: As long as Americans are willing to hold hands, we can walk with any wind, we can cross any bridgeDeep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome I spent most of the first half of the month campaigning for my gun safety measures: closing the gun show loophole, putting child trigger locks on guns, and requiring gun owners to have a photo-ID license showing that they had passed the Brady background check and had taken a gun safety courseAmerica had been rocked by a series of tragic shooting deaths, one of them caused by a very young child firing a gun he had found in his apartmentThe accidental gun death rate for children under fifteen in America was nine times higher than that of the twenty-five next largest economies combined Despite the crying chanel ceramic watches need and rising public support for gun control, the NRA so far had kept anything from happening in Congress, though most gun manufacturers, to their credit, were now providing child trigger locksOn the gun show loophole, the NRA said, as it had in opposing the Brady bill, that it didnt object to instant background checks, but it didnt want anyone inconvenienced for the publics safety by having to endure a three-day waiting periodAlready, 70 percent of the checks were completed in an hour, 90 percent in a dayIf we didnt have a waiting period, people with bad records could buy their guns at closing time on Friday afternoonThe NRA was also adamantly against licensing gun owners, seeing it as the first step toward depriving them of the right to own weaponsIt was a spurious argument; we had required drivers licenses for a long time, and no one had ever suggested banning automobile possession Still, I knew the NRA could scare a lot of peopleI had grown up in the hunting culture in which its influence was greatest and had seen the devastating impact the NRA had had on the 94 congressional electionsBut I had always felt most hunters and sports shooters were good citizens and would listen to a reasonable argument plainly statedI knew I had to try, because I believed in what I was doing and because Al Gore had put himself squarely within the NRAs gunsights by endorsing the licensing idea even before I did On the twelfth, Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the NRA, said that I needed a certain level of violence and was willing to accept a certain level of killing to further my political objectives, and his vice chloe bags paddington presidents,