Today, November 3, 1992, Bill Clinton was Elected President
Bill Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States, and the second to be impeached. He oversaw the country's longest peacetime economic expansion.
Who Is Bill Clinton?
William Jefferson Clinton, better known as Bill Clinton (born August 19, 1946) was the 42nd president of the United States, serving from 1993 to 2001. In 1978 Clinton became the youngest governor in the country when he was elected governor of Arkansas. Elected U.S. president in 1992 and reelected in 1996, Clinton enacted legislation including the Family and Medical Leave Act and oversaw two terms of economic prosperity. Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives in 1998 following the revelation of his affair with Monica Lewinsky but was acquitted by the Senate in 1999. Since leaving office, Clinton has worked with the Clinton Foundation and campaigned for his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the 2008 and 2016 presidential elections.
How Old Was Bill Clinton When He Was Inaugurated as President?
Bill Clinton was inaugurated as the 42nd president of the United States in January 1993, when he was 46 years old, making him the third-youngest president up to that point.
Bill Clinton’s Affair with Monica Lewinsky
Bill Clinton's second term in the White House was dominated by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The president at first denied, and then later admitted, that he had sexual relations with Lewinsky, his White House intern.
Working closely with his wife, Hillary, in his first term as governor Clinton set out on an ambitious agenda to reform the state's education and health care systems. However, hampered by his youth and political inexperience, he made several blunders as governor. Clinton mishandled the riots by Cuban refugees interned at Fort Chaffee and instituted a highly unpopular fee hike on auto licenses. At the time, Arkansas governors served only two-year terms, and at the conclusion of Clinton's term in 1980 a little-known Republican challenger named Frank White shockingly knocked him out of office.
Although the loss devastated Clinton, he refused to let it put an end to his promising political career. After spending some time working at the Arkansas law firm of Wright, Lindsey & Jennings in Little Rock, Clinton once again sought out the governorship in 1982. Freely admitting his past mistakes and beseeching voters to give him a second chance, Clinton swept back into office, this time for four consecutive terms.
As governor, Clinton took a centrist approach, championing a mix of traditionally liberal and conservative causes. Appointing Hillary to head a committee on education reform, he instituted more rigorous educational standards and established competence tests for teachers. Clinton also championed affirmative action, appointing record numbers of African Americans to key government positions.
At the same time, Clinton favored the death penalty and put in place welfare reforms designed to put recipients back to work. Also noteworthy was Clinton's tactic of running the government like a political campaign, constantly consulting public opinion polls and pitching policies through carefully orchestrated advertising campaigns.
Seeking to increase his national profile, Clinton served as chairman of the National Governors Association from 1986-87. At the end of the decade he became chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of moderate Democrats seeking to move the party in a centrist direction.
However, at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Clinton squandered an opportunity to announce himself as an obvious future presidential candidate when he delivered an excruciatingly long and boring nomination speech for Michael Dukakis. In a skillful bit of political damage control, Clinton quickly made fun of his disastrous speech on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson .
Bill Clinton and the 1992 Presidential Election
In 1992 Clinton easily defeated his competitors in the Democratic primaries to become the party's nominee for the presidency, choosing Tennessee Senator Al Gore as his vice presidential running mate. The Republican incumbent, President George H.W. Bush, was vulnerable in the election of 1992 because he had broken his celebrated campaign promise not to raise taxes and, especially, because the national economy was mired in recession.
Although Clinton's campaign was troubled by accusations of draft dodging and rumors of marital infidelity, he managed to turn the narrative by portraying himself as a hard-working, family man. Additionally, he successfully hammered home his economic message, underscored by chief strategist James Carville's pithy slogan, "It's the economy, stupid."
Clinton was also aided by the surprisingly successful third-party campaign of billionaire Ross Perot, who siphoned off a significant portion of the Republican vote from President Bush. On November 3, 1992, Bill Clinton was elected the 42nd president of the United States.
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