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?

Moved Permanently

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 mold 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.

— With reporting by Tom Curry/New York

COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1992

Previous	Next