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I got an inkling of just how effective his work had been the weekend before the election when I went to a closing rally at the Hot Springs Convention CenterWe didnt have as many people there as had attended his dinner a few days beforeOur people had worked their hearts out, but they were tired Still, on election day, I thought we might winAs we gathered in my headquarters to watch the returns, we were nervous but hopefulWe led in the vote count until nearly midnight, because the largest and most Republican county, Sebastian, reported lateI carried twelve of the fifteen counties with fewer than eight thousand total votes, including every voting box along the Buffalo River in Newton and Searcy countiesBut I lost five of the six biggest counties, suffering narrow defeats of fewer than five hundred votes each in Garland County, where I grew up, and Washington County, where I lived, losing Crawford County by eleven hundred votes and getting killed in Benton and Sebastian counties, where my combined losses were twice the total margin of victoryWe each won one county by about two to oneHe won Sebastian County, the biggest, and I won Perry County, the smallestIt seems ironic now, when rural Americans vote overwhelmingly Republican in national elections, that I began my political career with a profoundly rural base, born of gucci backpack intense personal contact and responsiveness to both their resentments and their real problemsI was on their side, and they knew itThe final total vote was 89,324 to 83,030, about 52 to 48 percent The Democrats had a good night nationally, picking up forty-nine House seats and four seats in the Senate, but we just couldnt overcome Hammerschmidts enormous popularity and his last-minute pushWhen the campaign began, his approval rating was 85 percentI had whittled it down to 69 percent, while mine had gone from zero to 66 percent, very good but not good enoughEverybody said I made a good showing and had a bright futureThat was nice to hear, but Id wanted to winI was proud of our campaign and I felt that somehow I had let the steam go out of it in the last few days, and in so doing let down all the people who worked so hard for me and the changes we wanted to makeMaybe if Id had the money and the sense to run effective television ads on the congressmans voting record, it would have made a differenceNevertheless, in 1974, I saw firsthand, in thousands of encounters, that middle-class voters would support government activism to solve their problems, and those of the poor, but only if the effort was made with due care for their tax dollars, and if efforts to increase opportunity were coupled with an insistence on chloe bag bay responsibility After I spent a few days traveling and calling around to thank people, I went into a funkI spent most of the next six weeks at Hillarys house, a nice place near campusMostly I just lay on the floor, nursing my regrets and trying to figure out how I was going to pay off my campaign debt of over $40,000My new salary of $16,450 was more than enough to live on and pay off my law school debts, but nowhere near enough to cover the debt from the campaignSometime in December, there was a big band dance at the university, which Hillary coaxed me into taking her toAfter we danced a few hours, I began to feel betterStill, it would be a good while before I realized the congressman had done me a favor by beating meIf I had won and gone to Washington, Im sure I never would have been elected PresidentAnd I would have missed the eighteen great Arkansas years that lay ahead I n January 1975, I went back to my teaching, the only full year I did it uninterrupted by politicsIn the spring term, I taught Antitrust and held a seminar in White-Collar Crime; in summer school, Admiralty and Federal Jurisdiction; in the fall, White-Collar Crime again and Constitutional LawIn Constitutional Law, I spent two full weeks on Roe vWade, the Supreme Court decision that gave women a constitutional privacy right to an abortion in the first two trimesters of cartier tank must pregnancy, the approximate amount of time it takes a fetus to become viablethat is, able to live outside the mothers wombAfter viability, the Court ruled, the state could protect a childs interest in being born against the mothers decision not to have it, unless her life or health would be threatened by continued pregnancy or childbirthSome of my students who saw Constitutional Law as just another course in which they had to memorize the rule of law in each case couldnt understand why I spent so much time on RoeIt was easy to remember the three-trimester rule and the reasoning behind it I made them delve deeper, because I thought then, and still believe, that Roe vWade is the most difficult of all judicial decisionsWhatever they decided, the Court had to play GodEveryone knows life begins biologically at conceptionNo one knows when biology turns into humanity or, for the religious, when the soul enters the bodyMost abortions that dont involve the life or health of the mother are chosen by scared young women and girls who dont know what else to doMost people who are pro-choice understand that abortions terminate potential life and believe that they should be legal, safe, and rare and that we should support young mothers who decide to complete their pregnancies, as most of them doMost ardent pro-lifers are all for prosecuting gucci silver bag doctors but grow less certain when their argument that an abortion is a crime is carried to its logical conclusion: prosecuting the mother for murderEven the fanatics who bomb abortion clinics dont target the women who keep them in businessAlso, as weve learned first with Prohibition and later with our drug laws, which have more support than a total ban on abortion does, its hard to apply the criminal law to acts that a substantial portion of the citizenry doesnt believe should be labeled crimes I thought then and still believe that the Court reached the right conclusion, though, as so often happens in American politics, its action sparked a powerful reaction, the growth of an active, effective national anti-abortion movement, which over time drastically reduced the practical availability of abortions in many places and drove large numbers of voters into the new right wing of the Republican PartyRegardless of what opinion polls show about voters positions on abortion, our national ambivalence about it means that its impact on elections depends on which side feels more threatenedFor most of the last thirty years, for example, during which a womans right to choose has been secure, pro-choice voters have felt free to vote for or against candidates on other issues, while for anti-abortion voters, the other issues often didnt chloe paddington handbag mat