Bill Clinton

The Torch is Passed



BILL CLINTON parades into Washington as America gambles on youth,luck and change







By LANCE MORROW -- With reporting by Tom Curry/New York

For years, Americans have been in a kind of vague mourning

for something that they sensed they had lost somewhere -- what

was best in the country, a distinctive American endowment of

youth and energy and ideals and luck: the sacred American stuff.



They had squandered it, Americans thought, had thrown it

away in the messy interval between the assassination of John

Kennedy and the wan custodial regime of George Bush. A wisp of

song from years ago suggested the loss: "Where have you gone,

Joe DiMaggio?"



Or perhaps the qualities were only hidden, sequestered in

some internal exile, regenerating. Now Bill Clinton of Arkansas

will ride into Washington brandishing them in a kind of boyish

triumph. But are they the real thing? The authentic American

treasures, recovered and restored to the seat of government? Do

they still have transforming powers?



The full answers will come later. Everyone knows, for the

moment, that Clinton's energy and luck are real. The world

watched them. Clinton looked at very bad odds and gambled. He

ran against an incumbent President whose re-election seemed, at

the time, a mere technicality. And after an arduous, complex

wooing, the American people made a fascinating choice -- one

that a year ago lay somewhere on the outer margins of the

probable. They responded to Clinton's gamble by taking an

enormous risk of their own.



Americans deserted the predictable steward that they knew,

the President who had managed Desert Storm steadfastly and

precisely. At the end of the cold war, in a world growing more

dangerous by the hour, Americans gave the future of the U.S.,

the world's one remaining superpower, into the hands of the

young (46), relatively unknown Governor of a small Southern

state, a man with no experience in foreign policy and virtually

none in Washington either. They rejected the last President

shaped by the moral universe of World War II in favor of a man

formed by the sibling jostles and herdings of the baby boom and

the vastly different historicalpageant of the '60s. The

youngest American bomber pilot in the Pacific war against Japan

will yield power to a Rhodes scholar who avoided the draft

because of his principled objections to the war in Vietnam.



The election of 1992 was a leap of faith in a sour and

unpredictable year. American voters, angry and disgusted and

often afraid of the future, began the campaign feeling something

like contempt for the political process itself, or for what it

seemed to have been producing for too long -- the

woman-harassing, check-bouncing, overprivileged classes on

Capitol Hill, and the curious vacancy at the other end of

Pennsylvania Avenue. The White House of George Bush, impresario

of Desert Storm, deteriorated in some surreal, inexplicable way

-- became feckless, confused, whining, rudderless.



Discontent with politics was bottomed on a deeper anxiety.

The famous sign in the Clinton headquarters in Little Rock

stated the essential problem briskly: THE ECONOMY, STUPID! The

chronic recession had eaten deeply into the country's morale.

Americans sensed that the problem was not a matter of the usual

economic cycles, a downturn that would be followed by an upturn,

but rather involved something deeper and scarier -- a

"systemic" change in America's economic relations with the rest

of the world and a deterioration in what America was capable of

doing. The nation's moral and economic pre-eminence in the years

after World War II -- the instinctive American assumption of

superiority, the gaudy self-confidence -- seemed to dim in the

new world. The battleground ceased to be military and became

economic, and Americans were not entirely prepared for this

change in the game. Forty-six years after the Japanese

surrendered on the deck of the battleship Missouri, the

President of the U.S. went to Tokyo to plead for breaks for

American cars and collapsed at the state dinner; that indelible

vignette of American humiliation began the defeat of George

Bush.



TIME's Man -- or Woman -- of the Year is traditionally

defined as the person who has most influenced the course of the

world's events -- for good or ill -- in the past year. Bill

Clinton's successful campaign for the presidency of the U.S.

makes him 1992's Man of the Year because of its threefold

significance:



1. Improbably, abruptly, the election has made the

Arkansan the most powerful man in the world -- and therefore the

most important -- at a radically unstable moment in history,

with the cold war ended, the world economy in trouble, and

dangerous, heavily armed nationalisms rising around the globe.



2. Clinton's campaign, conducted with dignity, with

earnest attention to issues and with an impressive display of

self-possession under fire, served to rehabilitate and restore

the legitimacy of American politics and thus, prospectively, of

government itself. He has vindicated (at least for a little

while) the honor of a system that has been sinking fast. A

victory by George Bush would, among other things, have given a

two-victory presidential validation (1988 and 1992) to

hot-button, mad-dog politics -- campaigning on irrelevant or

inflammatory issues (Willie Horton, the flag, the Pledge of

Allegiance, Murphy Brown's out-of-wedlock nonexistent child) or

dirty tricks and innuendo (searching passport files, implying

that Clinton was tied up with the KGB as a student). A win by

Ross Perot would have left the two-party system upside down

beside the road, wheels spinning.



3. Clinton's victory places him in position to preside

over one of the periodic reinventions of the country -- those

moments when Americans dig out of their deepest problems by

reimagining themselves. Such a reinvention is now indispensable.

It is not inevitable. Clinton, carrying the distinctive values

of his generation, represents a principle at home of broadened

democracy and inclusion (of women in positions of equal power,

of racial minorities, of homosexuals). The reinvention will have

global meaning as well. George Bush stated the winner's brief

in Knoxville, Tennessee, last February: "We stand today at what

I think most people would agree is a pivot point in history, at

the end of one era and the beginning of another."



Bill Clinton's year was an untidy triumph of timing and

temperament, both elements at work under the influence of a huge

amount of luck.



Luck is a mystery -- it is magic and by definition

unreliable. The role of luck, good and bad, in the politics of

1992 has been conspicuous. Bill Clinton came to the finish line

after hurtling like a downhill racer through a number of very

narrow gates. He won only 43% of the popular vote, which is

hardly a popular mandate; Michael Dukakis got 45.6% in 1988,

though that was a two-man, not a three-man, race. For Clinton,

the course of his campaign was littered with indispensable

happy accidents.



One can advance the case that, paradoxically, it was

George Bush's success in the Gulf War that destroyed the rest

of his presidency and his bid to be re-elected. In the first

place, Bush's extravagantpopularity in the wake of the war (he

rose as high as 91% in one public approval poll) persuaded the

supposed front-line Democratic possibilities, including West

Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller, House majority leader Dick

Gephardt and Tennessee Senator Al Gore, among others, to stay

out of the race. Better to cede '92 to the unbeatable

hero-incumbent and wait for '96. Thus Clinton entered a far less

daunting field of Democrats than he otherwise might have. That

same aura of invulnerability as a result of the Gulf War clouded

Bush's judgment and prevented him, until too late, from seeing

the danger that he faced at home.



It was Clinton's luck that New York Governor Mario Cuomo,

who would have been a formidable candidate both for the

Democratic nomination and for the presidency against Bush,

decided to sit out the race for reasons still unclear. It was

Clinton's luck that stories of his womanizing surfaced early in

the campaign, allowing time for Clinton and his wife to prove

their own equilibrium and touching steadiness in the way they

reacted, and allowing the American people time to process and

absorb the charges, get bored by them and move on. If the

Gennifer Flowers story had exploded all over the tabloids and

networks in September or October of 1992, in the intense

homestretch of the campaign, Clinton would probably have been

defeated.



It was Clinton's luck that Pat Buchanan behaved as if he

were a mole and sapper in the employ of the Democratic National

Committee. Buchanan dealt Bush devastating blows not once but

twice. First he ran against Bush in the early Republican

primaries as the candidate of righteousindignation. Buchanan

softened up the President for Clinton, ranting about Bush's

weaknesses as man and leader and demonstrating the incumbent's

vulnerability by collecting 37% of the New Hampshire Republican

vote. After that act of lese majeste, Bush should have run

Buchanan out of the county. But (again Clinton's luck) the

President felt he had to allow Buchanan back into the Republican

fold. Then the President permitted Buchanan, the man who tried

to destroy him, to speak at the Houston convention during prime

time. Buchanan delivered a snarling, bigoted attack on

minorities, gays and his other enemies in what he called the

"cultural war" and "religious war" in America. Buchanan's ugly

speech, along with another narrow, sectarian performance by Pat

Robertson, set a tone of right-wing intolerance that drove

moderate Republicans and Reagan Democrats away from the

President's cause in November. If Houston represented the

Republican Party, many voters said, they wanted out.



Clinton's best luck was that the economy kept dragging

along the bottom for the duration of the campaign. Bush's

re-election turned on the hope that Americans would stick with

the President and policies they knew rather than risk the

economic damage that an unknown quantity like Clinton might do.

More hopefulstatistics, signs of the revival Bush had been

promising for two years, held off until after the voting was

done. The Ross Perot vote siphoned off 19%. Enough voters were

so disgusted with the Bush performance by Nov. 3 that they were

willing to take a chance that Clinton might (as Bush kept

warning) tax and spend the economy into yet more trouble. If the

brighter statistics had appeared before the election, Bush might

now be preparing for a second term.



Isaiah Berlin once described Franklin Roosevelt in these

terms: "So passionate a faith in the future, so untroubled a

confidence in one's power to mould it, when it is allied to a

capacity for realistic appraisal of its true contours, implies

an exceptionallysensitive awareness, conscious or

half-conscious, of the tendencies of one's milieu, of the

desires, hopes, fears, loves, hatreds, of the human beings who