In spite of the apparition once again of sexual scandal in his career, Bill Clinton has been one of the more successful American Presidents since the 1960s and is now well into his second term. An admitted master of PR, he appears to epitomise the so called New Consensus politics which, after all, he has done much to create in Martin Walker's opinion, he is above all a builder of coalitions.
Arkansas, his native state, was on the losing side in the American Civil War but was less shattered by it than the core of the Confederacy; only a fifth of the population were/are blacks, so Clinton inherited relatively few racial tensions. His father, a sales man, was killed in a car accident a week before Clinton was born and his mother married five times in all, twice to the same man. A drunken and sometimes violent stepfather gave him some trouble, but Clinton proved a bright law student, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and did well at Yale Law School where he met his future wife, who herself was a brilliant student. As a Democrat, he inherited the legacy of New Deal politics. but as a rather youthful Governor of Arkansas he made enemies of local business lobbies and was voted out of office. After regaining it he was more cautious and pragmatic, though the real iron - or rather steel - in the partnership appears to come from Hilary, who has always nerved her husband after career setbacks and stood by him publicly when his alleged sexual misdeeds were played up by the press and by political enemies. An adept handler and "fixer" of domestic issues, Clinton was slow to learn international diplomacy, but as Martin Walker says: "In persuading Boris Yeltsin to withdraw the last troops from the Baltic states; in nudging his British allies to deal in Northern Ireland; in levering the great reluctancies of the Middle Fast; in seizing the moment to impose a peace settlement in the Bosnian war. he applied the political skills of an Arkansas backroom fixer to the great international issues of his day, and helped them along."