Some of you may recall that the Clinton/Gore ticket was the youngest to ever make it to the White House. And while many people like to make fun of Gore (saying he invented the Internet didn’t help), he is actually credited with making the Vice Presidency more than just a figurehead. Throughout the Library Clinton gives Gore great credit for things like cutting $137 billion from the national budget, reducing the number of federal regulations and decreasing the number of civilian employees to its lowest number since JFK was in office.
Unlike many of the other libraries we’ve visited, Clinton’s doesn’t provide a lot of insight into the man behind the presidency, the experiences that shaped him or drove him to become the Rhodes Scholar that he was. The emphasis is on his presidency, his priorities and accomplishments – and they were many. Not only did Clinton and Gore lead the U.S. to its first budget surplus since 1969 and achieve the longest peacetime expansion in our history, 95% of America’s schools were connected to the Internet, there was a world-wide ban on child labor, and Clinton received the Charlemagne Prize for American’s role in creating a Europe that was democratic, undivided, and at peace for the first time in history.
Another unique feature of this library is that you can actually see some of the documents it houses as a library. In some of the pictures below you’ll see what appear to be giant bookcases. These bookcases hold 4,536 blue boxes containing presidential records representing approximately 2-3% of the entire Clinton Library archival collection, estimated to be about 80 million pages in total. Ugh! Glad I didn’t have to catalogue those records!
JodockWorldTravel 