A Resurgence of Partisanship

• The Clinton administration encountered many missteps and misfortunes in its first months.

• Several of his early appointments became so controversial, he had to withdraw them.

• Despite its many problems, the Clinton administration could boast of some major achievements in its first year

• Clinton was a committed advocate of free trade and a proponent of many aspects of what came to be known as globalism

• The president’s most ambitious initiative was a major reform of the nation’s healthcare system.

The Republican Resurgence

• In 1994, for the first time in forty years, Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress

• President Clinton responded to the 1994 election results by proclaiming that “the era of big government is over” and shifting his own agenda conspicuously to the center.

The Election of 1996

• By 1996, President Clinton was in a commanding position to win reelection.

• As the election approached, Congress passed several important bills.

• It raised the legal minimum wage for the first time in more than a decade.

Clinton Triumphant and Embattled

• Bill Clinton was the first Democratic president to win two terms as president since Franklin Roosevelt.

• He still faced a hostile Republican Congress

• Clinton needed the popularity he had gained from the budget surplus when the most serious crisis of his presidency emerged.

• Clinton had been bedeviled by scandals from his first weeks in office.

• In early 1998, the president was charged with having had a sexual relationship with a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, and lying about it in a deposition.

• Those revelations produced a new investigation by the independent counsel in the Whitewater case, Kenneth Starr, a former judge and official in the Reagan Justice Department.

• Clinton forcefully denied the charges, and the public strongly backed him.

• His popularity soared to record levels and remained high throughout the year that followed.

• The Lewinsky scandal revived again in August 1998, when Lewinsky struck a deal with the independent counsel and testified about her relationship with Clinton

• In 1999, the president faced the most serious foreign policy crisis of his presidency, once again in the Balkans.

• A long-simmering conflict between the Serbian government of Yugoslavia and Kosovo separatists erupted into a savage civil war in 1998.

• Clinton finished his eight years in office with his popularity higher than it had been when he had taken office.

• Indeed, public approval of Clinton’s presidency—a presidency marked by astonishing prosperity and general world stability—was consistently among the highest of any post-war president, despite the many scandals and setbacks he suffered in the White House.

The Election of 2000

• The 2000 presidential election was one of the most extraordinary in American history—not because of the campaign that preceded it, but because of the sensational controversy over its results.

• George W. Bush—a Republican, a son of the former president, and a second-term governor of Texas—and Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat, easily won the nominations of their parties

The Second Bush Presidency

• George W. Bush assumed the presidency in January 2001 burdened by both the controversies surrounding his election and the perception that he was ill-prepared for the office.

• Bush appealed to the gun lobby by refusing to support a renewal of the assault weapons ban that Clinton had enacted.

• He proposed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

• The Bush administration was part of a broad and successful effort to mobilize evangelical Christians as an active part of the Republican coalition.

• But almost from the beginning, the aftermath of the September 11 attacks dominated both Bush’s presidency and the nation’s politics.

The Election of 2004

• The 2004 election pitted President Bush, who was unopposed within his party, against John Kerry, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts

32.1: The Economic Boom

From Stagflation to Growth

• The roots of the economic growth of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s lay in part in the troubled years of the 1970s when the United States seemed for a time to be losing its ability to produce long-term prosperity.

• Businesses cut labor costs in many ways.

• They took a much harder line against unions.

• Nonunion companies became more successful in staving off unionization drives.

• Some companies moved their operations to areas of the country where unions were weak and wages low—the American South and Midwest in particular.

• Digital technology made possible an enormous range of new products: computers, the Internet, cellular phones, digital music, video, and cameras, personal digital assistants, and many other products.

• The technology industries created many new jobs and produced new consumer needs and appetites.

• But they did not create as many jobs as older industrial sectors had.

• The American economy experienced rapid growth in the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

The Two-tiered Economy

• Although the American economy revived from the sluggishness of the 1970s and early 1980s, the benefits of the new economy were less widely shared than those of earlier boom times.

• The increasing abundance of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries created enormous new wealth that enriched those talented or lucky enough to profit from the areas of booming growth.

• The rewards for education— particularly in such areas as science and engineering— increased substantially.

Globalization

• Perhaps the most important economic change was what became known as the “globalization” of the economy.

• The great prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s had rested on the relative insulation of the United States from the pressures of international competition.

32.2: Science and Technology in the New Economy

The Digital Revolution

• The most visible element of the technological revolution to most Americans was the dramatic growth in the use of computers and other digital electronic devices in almost every area of life.

• Considerable technological innovation was needed before the microprocessor could actually become the basis of what was at first known as a “minicomputer” and then a “personal computer.” But in 1977, Apple launched its Apple II personal computer, the first such machine to be widely available to the public.

• Several years later, IBM entered the personal computer market with the first “PC.”

• IBM had engaged a small software development company, Microsoft, to design an operating system for its new computer.

• Microsoft produced a program known as MS-DOS (DOS for “disk operating system”).

• No PC could operate without it.

• The PC, and its software, made their debut in August 1981 and immediately became enormously successful.

The Internet

• Out of the computer, revolution emerged another dramatic source of information and communication: the Internet

• Gradually, interest in the system began to spread, and with it the number of computers connected to it.

• The network, soon renamed the Internet, was then free to develop independently.

• As late as 1984, there remained fewer than a thousand host computers connected to the Internet.

• A decade later, there were over 6 million. And by 2013, over two billion computers were in use around the world.

Breakthroughs in Genetics

• Computer technology helped fuel explosive growth in all areas of scientific research, particularly genetics.

• Early discoveries in genetics by Gregor Mendel, Thomas Hunt Morgan, and others had laid the groundwork for more-dramatic breakthroughs—the discovery of DNA by the British scientists

• Little by little, scientists began to identify specific genes in humans and other living things that determine particular traits and to learn how to alter or reproduce them. But the identification of genes was painfully slow.

32.3: A Changing Society

A Shifting Population

• Decreasing birth rates and growing life spans contributed to one of the most important characteristics of the American population

• This growing population of aging Americans contributed to stresses on the Social Security and Medicare systems, including the provisions of the Affordable Care Act introduced by President Obama.

African Americans in the Post-civil Rights Era

• The civil rights movement and the other liberal efforts of the 1960s had two very different effects on African Americans.

• For the black middle class, which in the first decade of the twenty-first century constituted over half of the African American population of America, progress was remarkable in the decades after the high point of the civil rights movement.

• African American families moved into more-affluent urban and suburban communities.

• The percentage of black high school graduates going on to college was virtually the same as that of white high-school graduates by the early twenty-first century (although a smaller proportion of blacks than whites completed high school).

• But there were still many other African Americans whom the economic growth and the liberal programs of the 1960s and beyond had never reached.

• These impoverished people—sometimes described as the “underclass”—made up as much as a third of the nation’s black population.

• Many of them lived in isolated, decaying, and desperately poor inner-city neighborhoods.

• As more successful blacks moved out of the inner cities, the poor were left behind in their decaying neighborhoods.

Modern Plaques: Drugs and Aids

• Two new and deadly epidemics ravaged many American communities beginning in the 1980s.

• One was a dramatic increase in drug use, which penetrated nearly every community in the nation.

• The enormous demand for drugs, particularly for “crack” cocaine in the late 1980s and early 1990s, spawned what was in effect a multibillion-dollar industry

• AIDS is the product of the HIV virus, which is transmitted by the exchange of bodily fluids (blood or semen).

• The first American victims of AIDS (and for many years the group among whom cases remained the most numerous) were gay men.

• But by the late 1980s, as the gay community began to take preventive measures, the most rapid increase in the spread of the disease occurred among heterosexuals, many of them intravenous drug users, who spread the virus by sharing contaminated hypodermic needles.

32.4: A Contested Culture

Battles Over Feminism and Abortion

• Among the goals of what was known as the “New Right” were challenges to feminism and its achievements.

• Conservatives had campaigned successfully against the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.

• They also played a central role in the most divisive issue of the last thirty years: the controversy over abortion rights.

• By the 1980s, abortion was the most commonly performed surgical procedure in the country.

• But at the same time, opposition to abortion was creating a powerful grassroots movement.

• They called themselves the “pro-choice” movement because they were defending not so much abortion itself as every woman’s right to choose whether and when to bear a child. But abortion rights remained highly vulnerable. Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, openly opposed abortion. Barack Obama supported the right to abortion when he became president.

The Growth of Environmentalism

• The environmental movement grew dramatically in the early 1970s and continues to develop in the present.

• An early milestone was Earth Day, held on April 22, 1970, a day that generated wide-scale interest in the environment.

32.5: The Perils of Globalization

Opposing the New World Order

• In the United States and other industrial nations, opposition to globalization—or to what President George H. W. Bush once called “the new world order”—took several forms.

• Many Americans on both the left and the right opposed the nation’s increasingly interventionist foreign policy.

• Environmentalists argued that globalization, in exporting industry to low-wage countries, also exported industrial pollution and toxic waste to nations that had no effective laws to control them, and contributed significantly to global warming

Defending Orthodoxy

• Outside the industrialized West, the impact of globalization created other concerns

• In one Islamic nation after another, waves of fundamentalist orthodoxy emerged to defend traditional culture against incursions from the West.

The Rise of Terrorism

• The term “terrorism” was used first during the French Revolution in the 1790s to describe the actions of the radical Jacobins against the French government.

• The United States, too, has experienced terrorism for many years, much of it against American targets abroad.

• Most Americans, however, considered terrorism a problem that mainly plagued other nations.

• One of the many results of the terrible events of September 11, 2001, was to jolt the American people out of complacency and alert them to the presence of continuing danger.

• That awareness increased in the years following September 11. New security measures changed the way in which Americans traveled

The War on Terrorism

• In the aftermath of September 2001, the United States government launched what President Bush called a “war against terrorism.”

• The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, government intelligence indicated, had been planned and orchestrated by Middle Eastern agents of a powerful terrorist network known as al-Qaeda.

• Its leader, Osama bin Laden—until 2001 little known outside the Arab world—quickly became one of the most notorious figures in the world.

• Convinced that the militant “Taliban” government of Afghanistan had sheltered and supported bin Laden and his organization, the United States began a sustained campaign of bombing against the regime and sent in ground troops to help a resistance organization overthrow the Afghan government

• The post–September 11 laws and policies made it possible for suspected terrorists to be held for months, and in many cases years, without access to lawyers, without facing formal charges, subjected to intensive interrogation and torture.

• They became examples to many critics of the dangers to basic civil liberties they believed the war on terrorism had created.

The Iraq War

• Bush administration slowly built a public case for invading Iraq

• Iraq was supporting terrorist groups that were hostile to the United States

• Iraq either had or was developing what came to be known as “weapons of mass destruction,” which included nuclear weapons and agents of chemical and biological warfare. developing what came to be known as “weapons of mass destruction,” which included nuclear weapons and agents of chemical and biological warfare.

• The invasion of Iraq was the most visible evidence of a basic change in the structure of American foreign policy under the presidency of George W. Bush.

32.6: Turbulent Politics

The Unraveling of the Bush Presidency

• For most of the first three years of his presidency, George W. Bush enjoyed broad popularity because of his resolute stance against terrorism

• The tax cuts also contributed to the nearly $10 trillion increase in the national debt during the Bush presidency.

• Also controversial was one of Bush’s most significant domestic accomplishments, an education bill is known as “No Child Left Behind,” which tied federal funding in schools to the success of students in taking standardized tests.

• Some educators and parents favored No Child Left Behind, but many others felt that students spent too many hours in the classroom learning how to take tests rather than think for themselves.

• Perhaps even more damaging to President Bush was the government’s response to a disastrous hurricane, Katrina, that devastated a massive swath of the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico in August 2005 and gravely damaged the city of New Orleans.

The Election of 2008 and the Financial Crisis

• Both parties began the 2008 campaign with large fields of candidates, but by spring the contest had narrowed considerably. Senator John McCain of Arizona emerged from the early primaries with the Republican nomination assured.

• As the nomination campaigns were heating up, a series of financial problems had arisen in mid-2007.

• By 2008, the nation was facing its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

• Other loans, called “jumbo loans,” extended credit to people who lacked the financial means needed to pay them back.

• For a while, the sale of houses, many of which were based on these risky mortgages, increased, causing a “housing bubble”—a rapid rise in housing prices fueled by high demand

• The so-called Great Recession of 2008, influenced by the loan crisis, also pushed down wages and triggered widespread job layoffs making it impossible for the additional owners of ARMS and jumbo loans to make payments thus increasing the number of home foreclosures

The Obama Presidency

• Few modern presidents have entered the White House with higher expectations from the nation and even the world, so it was inevitable that many of Obama’s supporters would eventually be disappointed.

• To shore up the faltering economy, Obama engineered the largest economic stimulus in history.

• The Obama stimulus package, announced in 2009, included tax cuts, expanded unemployment benefits, and increased spending on education, infrastructure, police, health care, and job creation

• There were many opponents of “Obamacare”—as many derisively called the Affordable Care Act. Some of Obama’s political adversaries were a group of evangelical, conservative, and libertarian Republicans who came to be known as the “Tea Party.”

• With former rival Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state, Obama sought peace between Israel and Palestine—an effort that, like all previous ones, was extraordinarily difficult.

• The Tea Party wasn’t Obama’s only critic during his first term—he also faced opposition from the political left.

• The key issues of the 2012 election included healthcare reform, immigration reform, the federal budget deficit, and taxation and spending.

• The strained economy kept the focus more on domestic than international concerns

• President Obama’s second term posed many challenges on both the domestic and international fronts.