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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 w