American presidents (7): Bill Clinton

The final session of my City Lit course on post-war US presidents covered two: the elder Bush and Clinton. This session saw a return of the lecturer Paul Hadjipieris who had previously covered Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. He is a personable and able lecturer and we all learned a lot.

Bill Clinton was the 42nd president and served from 1993-2001.

There is no doubt that the guy is super bright – according to a table shown us by our lecturer, his IQ is 182, the highest of all the post=war presidents. There is no doubt that he was hugely ambitious and a terrific political campaigner – he was the youngest ever governor of Arkansas at the age of just 32 and, when he was first elected president, he was 47. In spite of the Republicans taking both houses of Congress in 1994, he managed to win re-election in 1996.

He was not a traditional Democrat, believing in stable taxes and balanced budgets. Indeed he produced the first balanced budget for 24 years and the Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus between the years 1998 and 2000, the last three years of Clinton’s presidency. Yet he also presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history. By contrast, he failed to achieve his desired reform of health care because of Congressional opposition.

In terms of foreign affairs, he avoided ‘boots on the ground’ but his time in office saw both the Oslo Accords on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Dayton Accords on the Bosnian-Serb conflict.

Sadly Clinton’s tenure of the White House was mired in scandal from the start with first the Whitewater real estate allegations, then the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, and most imfamously the Monica Lewinsky case. The House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against him but the Senate did not manage to achieve the two-thirds majority necessary to convict him. He was forced into making a humiliating public apology.

In spite of all this scandal, he left the White House with the highest end-of-office approval rating of any US president since World War II. Since then, he has been involved in public speaking and humanitarian work and was a fierce campaigner for his wife Hillary when she sought the Democratic nomination for the presidency. What might this man have achieved if he’d kept his penis in his pants? Will his First Lady yet become the first female president?

You can read more about Bill Clinton here.


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