Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton or William Jefferson Clinton (born August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Bill Clinton previously served as governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and again from 1983 to 1992, and as attorney general of Arkansas from 1977 to 1979. A member of the Democratic Party, Clinton became known as a New Democrat, as many of his policies reflected a centrist "Third Way" political philosophy. Bill Clinton is the husband of Hillary Clinton, who was a senator from New York from 2001 to 2009, secretary of state from 2009 to 2013 and the Democratic nominee for president in the 2016 presidential election.

Clinton was born and raised in Arkansas and attended Georgetown University. Bill Clinton received a Rhodes Scholarship to study at University College, Oxford and later graduated from Yale Law School. Bill Clinton met Hillary Rodham at Yale; they married in 1975. After graduating from law school, Clinton returned to Arkansas and won election as state attorney general, followed by two non-consecutive terms as Arkansas governor. As governor, Bill Clinton overhauled the state's education system and served as chairman of the National Governors Association. Clinton was elected president in the 1992 presidential election, defeating incumbent Republican president George H. W. Bush and independent businessman Ross Perot. At 46 years old, Bill Clinton became the third-youngest president of the United States and the first president to be born in the Baby Boomer generation.

Clinton presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history. Bill Clinton signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, but failed to pass his plan for national health care reform. The Republican Party won unified control of Congress for the first time in 40 years in the 1994 elections, but Clinton was still comfortably re-elected in 1996, becoming the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a second full term. Starting in the mid-1990s, Bill Clinton began an ideological evolution as Bill Clinton became much more conservative in his domestic policy, advocating for and signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, the State Children's Health Insurance Program and financial deregulation measures. Bill Clinton appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to the U.S. Supreme Court. During the last three years of Clinton's presidency, the Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus—the first such surplus since 1969.