Bill Clinton and the Arkansas Years, A Governor's Long Education

On a January morning in nineteen seventy-nine, a thirty-two-year-old man was inaugurated as Governor of Arkansas, becoming the youngest sitting governor in the United States. His name was Bill Clinton, and he had grown up in Hope and Hot Springs, gone to Georgetown and Oxford and Yale Law School, come home, and now stood at the beginning of what would be a long, complicated, repeatedly interrupted political career in this state. Clinton lost his first reelection campaign in nineteen eighty to Frank White, a banker who ran against him on car-tax increases and the issue of Cuban refugees housed temporarily at Fort Chaffee who had rioted.

The defeat was humiliating and, by his own account, transformative. He spent two years watching what had gone wrong, adjusting his positions and his manner, and in nineteen eighty-two he defeated White and returned to the governorship. He served as governor for the next ten years, interrupted only by that single term.

The Arkansas years shaped Clinton's politics in specific ways. He served a poor, rural state with a complicated racial history and a weak tax base, and the perpetual tension between what he wanted to do and what the legislature and the electorate would tolerate made him a committed incrementalist. His wife Hillary Rodham Clinton chaired his education reform committee in the early nineteen eighties, producing a set of changes, teacher testing, curriculum standards, expanded kindergarten, that were genuinely substantive and were fiercely resisted by the teachers' unions, a preview of political dynamics that would follow them both for years.

When Clinton announced his presidential campaign in the fall of nineteen ninety-one, most national observers assumed he was running to build his national profile for a later campaign. They were wrong. He was elected president in November of nineteen ninety-two, and Little Rock, suddenly, was where the world was paying attention.