Quoting the funny Bill Clinton :

“Being president is like running a cemetery: you've got a lot of people under you and nobody's listening.”

“Sometimes I feel like a fire hydrant looking at a pack of dogs.”

Photo credit: Wikipedia

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton . . . born William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946 . . . was the 42nd President of the United States, serving from 1993 to 2001. Before his presidency, Clinton served nearly twelve years as the 50th and 52nd Governor of Arkansas. Clinton was the third-youngest person to serve as president, after Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

Clinton was born in Hope, Arkansas, and raised in Hot Springs, Arkansas. His father was William Jefferson Blythe, Jr., a traveling salesman, who died in a car accident three months prior to the birth of his son. In 1950 his mother, Virginia Dell Cassidy (1923 - 1994), married Roger Clinton, a partner (with his brother) in an automobile dealership.

It was not until Billy (as he was known then) turned 14 that he formally adopted his stepfather's surname of Clinton; although, he had assumed use of Clinton prior to that. Clinton claims his stepfather was a gambler and an alcoholic who regularly abused his mother and, at times, his half-brother, Roger, Jr.

In Hot Springs, Clinton attended St. John's Catholic Elementary School, Ramble Elementary School, and Hot Springs High School - where he was an active student leader, avid reader, and musician.

In 1963, two influential moments in Clinton's early life contributed to his decision to become a public figure. One was his visit to the White House to meet President John F. Kennedy, as a Boys Nation senator. The other was listening to Martin Luther King's 1963 I Have a Dream speech (which he memorized).

With the aid of scholarships, Clinton attended the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., receiving a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service (B.S.F.S.) degree in 1968. It was at Georgetown that he interned for Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. While in college he became a brother of Alpha Phi Omega and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. On graduation he won a Rhodes Scholarship to University College, Oxford where he studied government.

After Oxford, Clinton attended Yale Law School and obtained a Juris Doctor degree in 1973. While at Yale, he began dating law student Hillary Rodham who was a year ahead of him.

After graduating from Yale Law School, Clinton returned to Arkansas and became a University of Arkansas law professor. A year later, in 1974, he ran for the House of Representatives. The incumbent, John Paul Hammerschmidt, defeated Clinton with 52% of the vote. In 1976, Clinton was elected Attorney General of Arkansas without opposition in the general election.

In 1978, Bill Clinton was elected Governor of Arkansas for the first time; at 32, he was the youngest governor in the country. Running for re-election in 1980, Clinton was defeated by Republican challenger Frank D. White. As Clinton once joked, he was the youngest ex-governor in the nation's history.

But in 1982, Clinton reclaimed his old job as governor and kept it for another 10 years, helping Arkansas transform its economy and significantly improving the state's educational system. He became a leading figure among the New Democrats, a branch of the Democratic Party that called for welfare reform and smaller government, a policy supported by both Democrats and Republicans, and served as Chair of the National Governors' Association from 1986 to 1987, bringing him to an audience beyond Arkansas.

There was some media speculation in 1987 that Clinton would enter the race for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination after then-New York Governor Mario Cuomo declined to run and Democratic front-runner Gary Hart bowed out due to revelations about marital infidelity. Often referred to as the "Boy Governor" at the time because of his youthful appearance, Clinton decided to remain as Arkansas governor and postpone his presidential ambitions until 1992. He did, however, give the opening night address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, a nationally-televised speech that introduced him to the American public.

In 1992, Clinton was the early favorite of Democratic Party insiders and elected officials for the presidential nomination; therefore, he was able to rack up scores of superdelegates even before the first nominating contests were conducted. However, there were still some doubts as to whether he could secure the nomination, as former California Governor Jerry Brown was scoring victories in other parts of the country and Clinton had yet to win a significant contest outside of his native South. With no major Southern state remaining on the primary calendar, Clinton set his sights on the delegate-rich New York Primary, which was to be his proving ground. Much to the surprise of some, Clinton scored a resounding victory in New York. It was a watershed moment for him, as he had finally broken through and shed his image as a regional candidate and as centrist Democrat whose standing with Northern liberals was questionable. Having been transformed into the consensus candidate, he took on an air of inevitability and was able to cruise to the nomination, topping it off with a victory on Brown’s home turf in the California Primary.

Clinton won the 1992 presidential election (43.0% of the vote) against Republican George H. W. Bush (37.4% of the vote) and billionaire populist H. Ross Perot, who ran as an independent (18.9% of the vote) on a platform focusing on domestic issues; a large part of his success was Bush's steep decline in public approval.

In the 1996 presidential election, Clinton was re-elected, receiving 49.2% of the popular vote over Republican Bob Dole (40.7% of the popular vote) and Reform candidate Ross Perot (8.4% of the popular vote), becoming the first Democrat to win reelection to the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt.

Clinton remained popular with the public throughout his two terms as President, ending his presidential career with a 65% approval rating, the highest end-of-term approval rating of any President since Eisenhower. In addition to his political skills, Clinton also oversaw a boom of the US economy.

- Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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