Bill Clinton

D

Marriage

Clinton graduated from law school in 1973 and went to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to teach at the University of Arkansas Law School. Rodham worked with a congressional team investigating Watergate, a political scandal that involved members of the administration of President Richard M. Nixon. She joined Clinton on the law school faculty in 1974, and they were married on October 11, 1975. Their daughter, Chelsea Victoria Clinton, was born on February 27, 1980.

III

Early Public Career

Clinton had worked on a number of political campaigns in the late 1960s, including those of several Arkansas Democratic politicians and a U.S. Senate candidate from Connecticut. In 1974, midway through his first year of teaching at the University of Arkansas, Clinton entered his first political race, campaigning for a seat in the United States House of Representatives. The incumbent Republican congressman, John Paul Hammerschmidt, was a popular candidate and was considered unbeatable. Clinton defeated three candidates for the Democratic Party nomination and ran an energetic campaign against Hammerschmidt. Although Hammerschmidt defeated Clinton with 52 percent of the vote, the election was his closest in 26 years in Congress.

Clinton’s close race with Hammerschmidt earned him statewide attention and helped him during his campaign to be attorney general of Arkansas in 1976. He defeated two Democrats for the nomination and had no Republican opposition. Clinton took public office for the first time in January 1977. As attorney general, he fought rate increases by public utilities and opposed the construction of a large coal-burning power plant. He promoted tougher laws to protect the environment and consumers.

When Arkansas governor David Pryor ran for the U.S. Senate in 1978, Clinton ran for governor. He promised to improve the state’s schools and highways and to improve economic conditions so that more jobs would be created. At that time, the average income of people in Arkansas ranked 49th among the 50 states. Clinton won easily, receiving 60 percent of the vote against four opponents in the Democratic primary election and 63 percent against the Republican candidate, Lynn Lowe, in the general election. When he took office in January 1979 at age 32, he was one of the youngest governors in the nation’s history.

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A

Governor of Arkansas

A

1

First Term

Clinton’s first term as governor included efforts to improve Arkansas’s economy. One of his biggest successes as governor was his highway program, but it was politically costly. Clinton thought good highways were a key to developing the state, and the state’s roads were among the worst in the country. To upgrade the highways, he asked the legislature to pass a package of tax increases. The largest increases were on licensing fees on automobiles and on large trucks that damaged the highways with heavy loads. Clinton was forced to make compromises in his plan because many businesses and the trucking industry opposed his program. The compromise plan passed but was unpopular because it levied more taxes on individual car owners. The plan was also opposed by the trucking and poultry industries because it did not raise the weight limit for trucks on Arkansas highways.

Clinton undertook other legislative initiatives that generated opposition. His criticism of the practice of clear-cutting trees in national forests alienated the lumber and paper-making companies, which were the largest employers in the state. Physicians opposed his efforts to increase health care in poor, rural areas. Bankers disliked Clinton’s proposal to withhold state funds from banks that did not lend enough money for businesses that created jobs in their communities. The state’s largest utility tangled with Clinton over the cost-sharing arrangements for distributing power from nuclear plants in Mississippi.

Another factor affecting the governor was the presence of Cuban refugees in Arkansas. In 1980 Cuba temporarily removed its exit restrictions and permitted about 120,000 people to go to the United States. In May 1980 President Jimmy Carter temporarily housed about 18,000 Cuban refugees at an old United States Army post near Fort Smith, Arkansas. By the end of May, the confined refugees were disgruntled with delays in their resettlement, and some 300 escaped from the fort. On June 1 approximately 1,000 Cuban refugees broke through the gate of the post and were met in the nearby town of Barling by about 500 armed townspeople. State officers subdued the refugees, but the incident proved disastrous for Clinton, who had previously campaigned on his friendship with Carter.

Clinton ran for reelection in 1980 against Frank D. White, a Little Rock businessman who had switched to the Republican Party to run against Clinton. White received support from many of those alienated by Clinton—including the trucking and wood-products industries, the poultry industry, banks, and utilities. In addition, White used television advertisements that showed the Cubans rioting and claimed that they would be released into Arkansas communities and would take jobs away from Arkansas workers. Clinton’s popularity plummeted further, and White won the election with about 52 percent of the vote.

A

2

Second Through Fifth Terms

After his defeat, Clinton joined a large corporate law firm in Little Rock. Against the advice of most of his friends and advisers, who urged him to wait before running for office again, Clinton quickly began planning his campaign for the 1982 gubernatorial election. Clinton won the Democratic nomination, although it required a runoff election because of the closeness of the race. In the general election, Clinton faced White, who was running for reelection, and the two candidates swapped bitter charges. White repeated his accusations from the 1980 campaign, and Clinton accused White of unfairly letting utilities raise the rates people paid for electricity and telephone service. Clinton promised he would make it harder for utilities to obtain rate increases. Clinton campaigned for the votes of blacks, and he received more than 95 percent of their votes. Clinton ultimately defeated White with nearly 55 percent of the vote.

Clinton had found lessons in his 1980 defeat about how to govern. He learned to choose his fights carefully, to resist the urge to change everything at once, and to prepare people before proposing major changes. These lessons helped Clinton win reelection in 1984, 1986, and 1990, with the last reelection coming after the gubernatorial term was changed from two years to four years.

At the start of his second term, Clinton decided to spend all his energies trying to improve education, which he thought was the state’s biggest problem. Clinton believed that the state’s poor education system neither prepared children for good jobs nor made Arkansas attractive to industries that offered such jobs. He appointed his wife as the head of a committee charged with proposing higher standards for Arkansas schools. She conducted hearings in each of the state’s 75 counties, and she and her husband made numerous speeches across the state, saying more should be demanded from schools and students.

In the fall of 1983, Clinton called the legislature into a special session to approve many changes in the school system. Clinton won approval of most parts of his sweeping reform program: Taxes were increased to pay teachers more money, offer more courses in the high schools, and provide college scholarships. State money for education was distributed differently to help the poorest schools. Eighth graders were required to pass a test of basic knowledge before going to high school, and all school teachers and administrators had to take a basic-knowledge test to keep their jobs. The Clinton administration also adopted tough new standards proposed by Hillary Clinton’s committee. These standards raised the requirements for graduation from high school and forced high schools to offer more science, mathematics, foreign language, art, and music classes. They also reduced the size of kindergarten and elementary school classes. School districts that did not meet these requirements within three years would be merged into districts that did meet the standards.

The requirement that called for the testing of teachers angered many schoolteachers and generated a national debate. But the program, along with the taxes, proved popular with Arkansas voters. During this time, Arkansas students improved their scores on college-entrance tests. In the early 1980s a high percentage of Arkansas students dropped out of school before graduating, and fewer high school graduates went to college than in any other state. But by 1990, the dropout rate had fallen well below the national average, and the percentage of young people who went to college matched the national average.

Clinton also concentrated on economic development, promoting new businesses and job growth. He introduced an economic package to change banking laws, provide money to start new technology-oriented businesses, arrange loans for people to start new businesses, and reduce the taxes of large Arkansas companies that expanded their production and created new jobs. The legislature approved nearly the entire package. Although the rate at which new jobs were created in Arkansas in the late 1980s was among the highest in the nation, most of these jobs did not pay high wages, and the average family income remained low.

Clinton had difficulty trying to persuade the legislature to raise more taxes to carry out further reforms in education. The business groups he had once angered—the state’s largest electric utility, the wood-products industry, trucking companies, the poultry industry, and other farm groups—combined to block Clinton’s proposed tax hike. They also defeated legislation that would have imposed higher ethical standards on public officials and lobbyists.

After his election to a fifth term in 1990, Clinton was more successful in getting his legislative program enacted. Based on his overall success at the legislative session in 1991, Clinton announced that, despite a campaign promise in 1990 to complete a four-year term, he intended to run for president because he had accomplished his goals for the state more quickly than he had imagined.

Clinton had assumed national leadership roles during his years as governor. In 1985 and 1986 he served as chairman of the Southern Growth Policies Board, a group that planned strategies for economic development in 12 Southern states and Puerto Rico. He became vice chairman of the National Governors Association in 1985 and was the organization’s chairman in 1986 and 1987. As chairman, Clinton became a spokesman for the nation’s governors. In 1988 he led a movement to change the nation’s system of providing welfare to poor people. In 1990 and 1991 Clinton headed the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of moderate Democrats and businesspeople who work to influence national policies.

B

The Presidential Campaign of 1992

Clinton had prepared to run for president in 1988, but he backed out at the last minute, saying the campaign and the presidency would be too hard on his family, especially his eight-year-old daughter, Chelsea. He was then asked to give the presidential nomination speech at the Democratic National Convention for Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, who eventually lost the election to Republican George H. W. Bush.

In October 1991 Clinton announced that he would run for president in the 1992 election. Although President Bush was very popular at the time, Clinton thought Bush was vulnerable because the economy had been depressed for much of his presidency. Moreover, Clinton had established nationwide connections from his education crusade and the National Governors Association, and this network enabled him to raise campaign money more easily than other Democratic candidates. In early 1992, Clinton faced five Democratic contenders: former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas; former California governor Jerry Brown; Governor L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia; Senator Robert Kerrey of Nebraska; and Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa.

Clinton’s campaign focused on domestic issues, particularly the economy. He ran as a “New Democrat,” a term coined by the Democratic Leadership Council to describe a new type of moderate Democrat. Clinton believed that the big-government, high-spending policies of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party did not appeal to most voters. He thought that the party should find other ways to solve social and economic problems. For example, he proposed reforming the existing welfare system and finding additional ways to aid the poor, such as a special form of tax credits for low-income families. Clinton also wanted to expand trade with the rest of the world through trade agreements and lower tariffs.

During the campaign, Clinton promised to reform the health-care system, enact a tax cut for the middle class, institute a national service program, reduce the federal budget deficit, and make major investments in the nation’s infrastructure (highways, bridges, airports, libraries, and hospitals). Internationally, he pledged to use American military power to stop the advance of Serbs against Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina (often referred to simply as Bosnia). His campaign encountered some trouble when allegations of Clinton’s marital infidelity surfaced. Clinton also came under attack for not serving in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War (1959-1975) and for protesting the war. However, he was able to overcome these obstacles and win the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention, held in New York City in mid-July. Clinton picked Senator Al Gore of Tennessee as his vice-presidential running mate. Gore’s military service in the Vietnam War made the ticket more appealing to conservative voters.

During the presidential campaign, Clinton ran against the incumbent Bush and Ross Perot, who ran as an independent candidate. Clinton blamed Bush for the downturn in the nation’s economy and accused him of not caring about working people. He promised to reduce the taxes of middle-class families and to follow policies that would improve the economy. Bush said that Clinton would raise taxes if he became president and that Clinton lacked foreign-policy experience. He portrayed Clinton as a traditional big-spending liberal in the guise of a “New Democrat.” But Bush was hurt in the campaign because as president he had signed legislation raising taxes despite promising not to do so during the 1988 campaign.

Clinton won the election with 43 percent of the popular vote compared with 37 percent for Bush and 19 percent for Perot. In the electoral college, in which each state has a certain number of electoral votes depending on the size of its population, Clinton won 370 votes to Bush’s 168. In the congressional elections, the Democrats—who held a majority in both houses of Congress—gained one seat in the Senate, lost nine seats in the House of Representatives, but ultimately maintained their majority in both houses. On January 20, 1993, Clinton was sworn in as president.

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