frantic search to get the medicine for
The next day Hillary, Chelsea, and I flew to Monroe, Michigan, for a passing the torch rally with Al and Tipper Gore. A good crowd in a battleground state sent Al off to Los Angeles to claim the nomination and become the leader of our party, and me to the local McDonalds, a stop I hadnt made in years.
The Bush-Cheney ticket had settled on a two-pronged campaign message. The positive argument was compassionate conservatism, giving America the same good conditions we had provided, but with a smaller government and a bigger tax cut. The negative one was that they would elevate the moral tone and end bitter partisanship in Washington. That was, to say the least, disingenuous. I had done everything I knew to reach out to the Republicans in Washington; they had tried to demonize me from day one. Now they were saying, Well stop misbehaving if you give us the White House back.
The morality argument should have had no resonance, unless people believed Gore had done something wrong, especially with the super-straight Lieberman on the ticket. I wasnt on the ballot; it was both unfair and self-defeating for voters to blame them for my personal mistakes. I knew their strategy wouldnt work unless the Democrats accepted the legitimacy of the Republican argument and failed to remind voters of the impeachment fiasco and how much more damage the right wing could inflict if they controlled both the White House and the Congress. An NRA vice president had already boasted that if Bush were elected, the NRA would have an office in the White House.
After our convention, the polls showed Al Gore had come from behind to hold a narrow lead, and I accompanied Hillary to the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York for a couple of days of vacation and campaigning. She was running a different race from the one she had begun. Mayor Giuliani had withdrawn, and her new opponent, Long Island congressman Rick Lazio, presented a new challenge: he was attractive and smart, a less polarizing figure who was nevertheless more conservative than Giuliani.
I ended the month with two short trips. After meeting in Washington with Vicente Fox, the president-elect of Mexico, I flew to Nigeria to see President Olusegun Obasanjo. I wanted to support his efforts to curb AIDS before Nigerias infection rates reached the levels of southern African nations, and to highlight the recent passage of the African trade bill, which I hoped would help Nigerias struggling economy. Obasanjo and I attended a gathering on AIDS at which a young girl spoke of her efforts to educate her schoolmates about the disease, and a man named John Ibekwe told the gripping story of his marriage to a woman who was HIV-positive, his becoming infected, and his frantic search to get the medicine for his wife that would enable their child to be born without the virus. Eventually John succeeded, and little Maria was born HIV-free. President Obasanjo asked Mrs. Ibekwe to come up onstage, where he embraced her. It was a touching gesture and sent a clear signal that Nigeria would not fall into the trap of denial that had contributed so much to the spread of AIDS in other countries.
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