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Cover: Is Bill Clinton For Real?Anointed -- prematurely -- as the front runner, he remains an enigma: a bold planner but poormanager, a conciliator yet sometime waffler. Still, many Democrats believe he's electable, andthat's what they want.By GEORGE J. CHURCHJan. 27, 1992A few weeks ago most voters in the 49 states outside Arkansas had not even heard the name of Governor William Clinton. And those few political junkies who might recognize it wouldremember mainly one thing: his introduction of the newly nominated Michael Dukakis at the1988 Democratic National Convention. Clinton's speech droned on through 33 minutes thatseemed about five times as long; the cheers that erupted when he said "in conclusion" appearedto toll the knell of any hopes he might have had to succeed in national politics.Yet now, before a single caucus or primary ballot has been cast anywhere, the national press andtelevision have anointed Bill Clinton as the front runner for the Democratic presidentialnomination. Some pundits are speculating that he might even have the prize locked up in anothereight or nine weeks. Their script: Clinton uses a victory or strong second-place finish in the NewHampshire primary Feb. 18 as a launching pad to wins in scattered primaries and caucuses fromArizona to Maine, and then storms the polls in 11 states, eight of them in his native South, thatwill vote on Super Tuesday, March 10. The next day the Arkansan will have the lion's share of the 1,400- odd delegates chosen by then -- out of an eventual 4,282 -- and so much momentumthat he can finish off any rivals who might survive that blitz in the Illinois primary on March 17.Going further still, many analysts believe Clinton is the Democrat most likely to beat GeorgeBush in November -- which, in a fine example of circular reasoning, is precisely why they say hehas become the front runner.Well, now, wait just a minute. New Hampshire's cantankerous primary voters have a long historyof giving a comeuppance to supposed front runners, from Harry Truman in 1952 (who lost toEstes Kefauver there shortly before withdrawing from the race) to Robert Dole in 1988. Evennow, though Clinton has rocketed from 5% in a November poll of New Hampshire Democratstaken by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center to 23% in a resurvey of the samevoters two weeks ago, he still trails "undecided" (26%). Similarly, in a nationwide poll taken lastweek for TIME by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, "not sure" led with 24%; Clinton tied forsecond with ex-California Governor Jerry Brown at 22%. But Brown, who started out with fargreater name recognition, has probably topped out, while Clinton is rising.From now on, most of Clinton's opponents can be expected to take dead aim at him, rather thanscatter their fire against one another. And as he comes under close scrutiny for the first timeoutside Arkansas, Clinton may well be vulnerable on a variety of issues. One of them is hispenchant for offering what sounds like detailed programs that on examination sometimes turnout to be distressingly vague. Nebraska Senator Robert Kerrey has already assailed theimprecision of Clinton's stand on health care, which is emerging as one of the hottest issues of the campaign. The Arkansan promises a plan that will combine insurance coverage of everyone
 
with cost controls so stringent as to make the plan "revenue neutral": that is, it would require noadditional tax money to finance. To some experts that combination sounds flatly impossible.Then there are the rumors about womanizing that have dogged Clinton for years and resurfacedin sensationalist tabloids last week. Clinton called the stories "lies" but, asked point-blank by aNew Hampshire television interviewer last week, "Have you ever committed adultery?" hereplied, "If I had, I wouldn't tell you." He admits that his 16-year marriage has gone throughsome troubled times but says it is now solid. Friends, and even some foes, note that no one hasever been able to pin down anything.Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the Clinton boom is a suspicion that it is largely anartificial creation by the press. Journalistic pundits are constitutionally incapable of confessingthat they have no idea what will happen in a presidential race; they are irresistibly driven toimpose some sort of structure on the most shapeless contest. Last year many were looking forsomeone to cast as the principal rival to presumed front-runner Mario Cuomo. They came upwith Clinton partly because he seemed the perfect foil to a Northern Big Government liberal: aSoutherner who took many moderate stands -- on education and welfare reform, for example --and talked constantly about the "responsibility" of people who receive government benefits to dosomething in return.Then, too, many journalists had repeated until it became conventional wisdom the idea that theDemocrats have lost five of the past six presidential elections largely because they had becomeidentified as a party of the poor, blacks, labor unionists, radical feminists and other specialinterests. Supposedly they could win again only if they chose a candidate moderate enough towin back middle-class voters, especially Southern whites. That idea was promoted mostassiduously by the Democratic Leadership Council, a group headed in 1990-91 by none otherthan Bill Clinton. When Cuomo finally decided just before Christmas not to run, pundits of thisschool were pretty much stuck with hailing Clinton as the new front runner by default. Somewho had complained endlessly about the interminable length of past campaigns are evenbeginning to grumble that this one may be over almost before it begins.But Clinton can not be dismissed as a mere creation of journalistic fashion. Many Democrats didnot need the media to tell them that their standard-bearer should be someone who cannot beattacked as a McGovernite liberal. Reporters on the early campaign trail have been struck by thenumber of party activists who volunteer that this time around they are looking for "electability"far more than liberal purity in a nominee. Clinton got himself cast in that role largely because hecould present solid credentials: as a canny politician who has run in 18 elections (countingprimaries and runoffs) in the past 17 years and lost only twice; as a Governor with a genuine,though far from unassailable, record of accomplishment; and as a candidate who says things thenation is not accustomed to hearing from Democrats -- support of the death penalty, for instance.< Like every politician who comes out of nowhere to hit the big time, Clinton remains somethingof an enigma, the more so since he often seems a bundle of contradictions: a visionary leader anda poor manager; a propounder of bold programs and a waffler who talks on both sides of hotissues. All of which raises the insistent question: Is Clinton for real -- not only as front runner butas man, as Governor, as candidate? An attempt at some answers:
 
 THE MAN. Though Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, tongue in cheek, introduced Clinton at ameeting two years ago as "the only politician to be a rising star in three decades," he knew painand adversity in childhood. His father, a heavy- equipment salesman, was killed in a freak roadaccident three months before Clinton -- originally christened William J. Blythe IV -- was born onAug. 19, 1946, in the little southwestern Arkansas town of Hope. Five months later, his motherVirginia returned to nursing school in Shreveport, La., to get a degree in anesthesiology, leavingBill with grandparents who ran a small grocery store. When Bill was four, she returned to Hopeand married Roger Clinton, a Buick dealer who moved the family to Hot Springs. Bill'sstepfather was an alcoholic who sometimes beat Virginia and once fired a gun at her in theirliving room (she insists to this day he intended only to frighten, not to injure, her). Virginia andRoger divorced but quickly remarried; as a gesture to help keep the family together, Bill, then15, had his name legally changed to Clinton.The turmoil at home seems to have left two imprints on Clinton. One was a driving ambition toget out and make something of himself in the big world, initially by being the perfect student. Asa high schooler, he was selected a senator in Boys Nation, an annual promotion by the AmericanLegion in Washington, and he got to visit the White House and meet President Kennedy. Hecame home starry-eyed and fixed on politics as his career. He enrolled at Georgetown Universitylargely to be near the Congress he hoped one day to enter. Then came Oxford, on a Rhodesscholarship, and Yale Law School, where he met the brightest woman in the class, HillaryRodham -- today a successful lawyer and a feminist who did not call herself Mrs. Clinton untilher unwillingness to do so began to hurt her husband politically.Back home, Clinton lost a race for Congress but became state attorney general and in 1979, at32, the youngest Governor in the country. Two years later, he was the youngest ex-Governor; hehad impressed some of his constituents as an arrogant whiz kid who had surrounded himself witha bunch of outsiders who looked on Arkansans as barefoot hicks. In 1982 a chastened Clintoncame back, apologizing to voters for developing a swelled head but vowing to reform; he haswon every election since.The 1980 defeat also intensified a trait that is universally considered Clinton's greatest weakness.Even as a young teenager, he recalls, he often felt compelled to act as a peacemaker, trying tosmooth over the violent quarrels at home. As a politician, he wants to be loved by everyone evenmore than most practitioners of his trade. Says Stephen Smith, a professor of communications atthe University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and onetime Clinton aide: "He would really like to get100% in an election." Clinton makes such extreme efforts to conciliate opponents that Arkansans jest that the way to get something you want desperately is to become an enemy of theGovernor's.Clinton's compromising bent also makes him appear at times to take both sides of a controversialissue. To cite the most prominent current example, he claims to be the only Democraticcandidate to have backed George Bush early and unreservedly on the gulf war. But on Jan. 15,1991, the war deadline, the Arkansas Gazette quoted him as saying that he agreed with themajority of Democrats in Congress who voted against the use of force and for longer reliance onsanctions.
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