Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1992moy.001

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                                                                                January 4, 1993

Man of the Year

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 historical pageant 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 extravagant popularity 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 righteous indignation. 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 hopeful statistics, 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 exceptionally sensitive awareness, conscious or
half-conscious, of the tendencies of one's milieu, of the
desires, hopes, fears, loves, hatreds, of the human beings who
compose it, of what are impersonally described as social and
individual `trends.' "

    The lines suggest something about Clinton at his best, or
about the promise of his character. History may eventually
decide that the key to Clinton's accomplishment (assuming he
does well) lay in his temperament -- in his buoyancy, optimism
and readiness to act, in his enthusiasm for people and his
curiosity about their lives. Clinton emerges from the sunnier,
gregarious side of American political character, home of F.D.R.,
Hubert Humphrey, Harry Truman -- as opposed to the sterner, more
punitive traditions distilled and preserved in their purest form
in the mind of Richard Nixon.

    As a 16-year-old member of Boy's Nation, Clinton stood in
the Rose Garden of the White House in 1963 and shook hands with
John Kennedy -- an instant of symbolic torch passing that had a
powerful effect upon the ambitious boy from Hope, Arkansas.
Clinton likes to invoke a parallel. Kennedy and Clinton do not
look alike, though they share an air of youth and vigor and good
health (deceptive in J.F.K.'s case). Kennedy had a physical
elegance that Clinton lacks. Clinton's boyishness subliminally
looks to be headed down the road toward W.C. Fields or Tip
O'Neill. Other parallels unravel quickly enough: although
Clinton speaks of the New Frontier as a time when vigor and new
ideas came to Washington after eight years of stagnation and
reactionary Republican policies, in fact Kennedy was most
vigorous in pursuing the cold-war aims of Dwight Eisenhower --
most embarrassingly at the Bay of Pigs. J.F.K. offered few
innovations on the domestic side (the investment-tax credit, a
proposed income-tax cut in 1963) and was excruciatingly cautious
in addressing issues of civil rights.

    There are other parallels with Clinton's predecessors.
Nixon in 1968, like Clinton this year, won only 43% of the
popular vote and during his first term had to work to win the
disaffected votes of the George Wallace constituency (Wallace
won 13% as an independent candidate in '68), just as Clinton
will need to win over the Perot voters in order to get
re-elected in 1996. Woodrow Wilson was an innovative policy-wonk
Democratic Governor who won a close three-way race in 1912 after
the Republican Party fractured and produced the insurgent
candidacy of Theodore Roosevelt, who won 27% of the vote. The
voters rejected the Republican incumbent, William Howard Taft.
Wilson ushered in an era of domestic change: tariff reform,
creation of the Federal Reserve System, federal regulation of
working hours. But Wilson was in many ways a conservative
states' rights Southerner and, on issues of race, a reactionary.
Until 1918 he refused to support a women's suffrage amendment
to the Constitution.

    The Clinton approach is infinitely more inclusive. He has
a progressive agenda (family leave, worker retraining, for
example) and believes it is the Federal Government's job to
carry it out. But Clinton knows -- or has been warned within an
inch of his life -- that the lavish all-daddy government of
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal is not a possible model in the
'90s. Nor is Lyndon Johnson's bountiful Great Society. The $290
billion deficit sits at the edge of American government like
antimatter, like a black hole that devours revenues and social
dreams. Clinton will take office under immense fiscal
constraints. The better news is that those limitations will (as
they say) empower Clinton's stronger side, his gift for
improvisation -- in giving poor people incentives to save money
to start a business or buy a home or in establishing a national
service program as a way for students to repay college loans.

    Clinton's domestic ambitions may also be overtaken by the
demands of international problems. In six months or a year,
Americans may look back at their preoccupation with the domestic
economy, with the question of whether it would be a good
Christmas shopping season in American stores, and be amazed at
their own insularity. In the republics of the former Soviet
Union, in the Balkans, in China and India and the Middle East
there were dangers that promised to preoccupy the new President
and might keep him from the domestic agenda -- health care,
education, public-works spending and the rest -- that he was
elected to address. A few days before he went to Washington in
1913, and 17 months before World War I broke out, Woodrow Wilson
said, "It would be the irony of fate if my Administration had
to deal chiefly with foreign affairs." Clinton is aware of the
risk. "I might have to spend all my time on foreign policy," he
admitted three weeks ago. "And I don't want that to happen."


    It will be quickly seen how the demands of an increasingly
savage world may square with some of the gentler motifs that
Clinton worked in the campaign -- notably the themes of the
recovery movement. Again and again in debates and speeches,
Clinton talked about the need for Americans to find in
themselves "the courage to change." The phrase comes from the
Alcoholics Anonymous Serenity Prayer ("God, grant me the
serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to
change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the
difference"). Clinton, whose stepfather's violent alcoholism
shaped his early life, and Al Gore, who often borrows recovery
language and concepts, turned the Democratic Convention last
summer into a national therapy session and display case for
personal trauma and healing. Gore dramatically retold the story
of his son's near fatal accident and the effect on his family.

    The subtext of the recovery-and-healing line is that
America is a self-abusive binger that must go through recovery.
Thus: the nation borrowed and spent recklessly in the 1980s,
drank too deeply of Reagan fantasies about "Morning in America"
and supply-side economics. And now, on the morning after, the
U.S. wakes up like a drunk at the moment of truth and looks in
the mirror. Hence: America needs "the courage to change" in a
national atmosphere of recovery, repentance and confession.

    It is therapeutic for alcoholics and other abusers to tell
their stories. Bill Clinton has a side of his character that is
a mellow talk-show host. The nation saw this Donahue-Oprah
style at work during the second presidential debate in the
campaign, when a member of the audience, a young black woman,
asked the candidates how the national debt (she meant the
recession) had "personally affected each of your lives? And if
it hasn't, how can you honestly find a cure for the economic
problems of the common people if you have no experience in
what's ailing them?"

    Bush flubbed the question. He answered defensively, "You
ought to be in the White House for a day and hear what I hear
and see what I see and read the mail I read . . ." Clinton,
smarter in the format, saw his opening and stepped forward and,
like Phil Donahue, urged Hall to tell her story. "Tell me how
it's affected you again. You know people who've lost their jobs
and lost their homes."

    There are obvious limits to the approach. The President of
the U.S. cannot invite a fanatic, murderous regime to come
forward and speak of "the inner child that's hurting," the Inner
Serb, the Inner Iraqi. The recovery attitude is useful in
certain fragile, protected environments, but the world at large
meets that description less and less. There remains a question
whether Clinton's impulse to act can, when necessary, override
the more passive, tender protocols of therapy.

    America periodically reinvents itself. That is the secret,
the way that Americans dig out of their deepest problems. It is
the way they save themselves from decline, stagnation and other
dangers -- including themselves.

    The American story is an epic of reinventions: Andrew
Jackson's rough westward tilt of American democracy, the Civil
War that ended slavery and hammered the states into Union, the
vast Ellis Island absorption, the New Deal that saved American
capitalism from suicide, the Civil Rights Movement that (legally
at least) completed the work of the Civil War.

    Every time a melodrama of change (often raw and violent
and, by definition, traumatic to the status quo) has brought
the country to a new stage of self-awareness and broadened
democracy. It is miraculous that the American transformations
overall have been changes in the direction of generosity and
inclusion -- democracy tending toward more democracy, freedom
toward more freedom.

    The Clinton reinvention -- if it succeeds -- will bring
his baby-boom generation (so insufferable in so many ways, and
so unavoidable) to full harvest, to the power and
responsibility that they clamored to overthrow in the streets
a quarter of a century ago. Clinton's selection of Al Gore to
be his running mate suggested something of the energy that might
be released -- a sort of sibling synergy. The ticket of Clinton
and Gore violated traditional political rules demanding
geographical balance and even a sort of personality contrast
between a party's two nominees. The very similarity of Clinton
and Gore in generation and regional accent produced a powerful
twinning effect -- policy wonks in a buddy movie: Butch and
Sundance.

    It is the boomers, born in the afterglow of American
triumph in World War II and reared in the unprecedented and
possibly unrepeatable postwar affluence, and now arrived at
middle age, whose instruments most poignantly play the American
note of mourning. It is a chronic, yearning noise, much like one
that Thoreau made 140 years ago: "I long ago lost a hound, a
bay horse and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail."

    For the moment, however, the loss note will not be
audible. Bill Clinton will come down Pennsylvania Avenue
blaring, parading and bringing the American stuff -- youth,
energy, luck, ideals -- like booty to his new house.