Word: ideas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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TIME: Whose idea was the train...
Morris: The most significant departure was making Monday nonpolitical, featuring Christopher Reeve and Sarah Brady. Mark Penn and I pushed that. Almost everybody at the White House criticized the idea, calling it "happy talk." The President himself was quizzical. But I called him every morning on his vacation, and he said that if I thought it would work, we should...
Morris: He had been scheduled for Thursday, which is traditional. I came up with the idea of his speaking on Wednesday, so the day would be dominated by a major speaker and one headline. But Gore was very, very reluctant. He was suspicious he was being separated from the President. I raised hell about it and talked to the President constantly about it. Gore acquiesced. I felt if the Vice President could be himself, his emotional and caring self, then the stiffness and formality that have shackled him politically would be gone. When he gave that statement about his sister...
Morris: The State of the Union last January was the most important event in the past two years in moving him up in the polls. It was my idea that giving a second such speech this year would produce an equivalent gain. The main work was getting approval for each of the 30 or so initiatives he would propose. We had been collecting ideas for months, polling them and vetting them. We announced some on a daily basis and put some in a piggy bank to save for the convention speech. The bureaucracy opposed a lot of them, but [presidential...
...line drawn more clearly than on the subject of school choice. It has been touted as an all-purpose panacea: let parents shop around and they will reward good schools over bad, forcing the bad ones to play catch-up, thus improving quality overall. President Clinton has embraced this idea in the form of "charter schools"--public schools that throw out all the rules, including union rules, and start over--and some local teachers' unions have slowly come around to endorsing these experiments. But the unions draw the line (as has the President, so far) at giving students public funds...