Bill Clinton: Radio Address on the Welfare Reform Act

About the Author

Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas. His father, William Blythe, was killed before Clinton was born. His mother, Virginia, married Roger Clinton, and Bill changed his name to William Jefferson Clinton at age sixteen. He graduated from Georgetown University with honors in 1968, attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and earned a law degree from Yale.

Clinton's political career began when he volunteered for Democrat George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign. He unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 1974, but he was elected as Arkansas attorney general in 1976 and governor in 1978. In 1975 he married Hillary Rodham. Clinton lost the reelection bid in 1980, but he regained the governor's office two years later and served for five consecutive terms. Clinton chaired the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization created in response to the defections of conservative southern Democrats from the party's traditional positions. The council pursued a more centrist agenda, including welfare and education reforms. Clinton was instrumental in organizing governors across the country to restructure welfare laws and to gain support for the Family Support Act.

Clinton defeated George H. W. Bush and the independent candidate Ross Perot in the 1992 presidential election. Although he campaigned under the banner of welfare reform, Clinton devoted much of his first term to an unsuccessful national health care reform program, passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Oslo Accords, during which Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat agreed to Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and the West Bank. In 1994 the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time in forty years.

Dogged by investigations into the Clintons' investments in the Whitewater Land Development project in Arkansas as well as the looming sexual harassment lawsuit filed by Paula Corbin Jones, Clinton nonetheless was reelected to a second term in 1996, shortly after signing the PRWORA. Although partisan disagreements between the president and the Republican-controlled Congress hindered much progress on the domestic front, the economy improved dramatically in the late 1990s; in 1998 the federal budget had a surplus of $70 billion, the largest since the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s.

Foreign policy matters dominated Clinton's second term, with problems in the Middle East and Bosnia presenting particular challenges. But the majority of his time was spent dealing with the investigation of his sexual relations with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. In November 1998 the House Judiciary Committee began impeachment hearings, and in December, Bill Clinton became the second president in history to be impeached. The 1999 impeachment trial ended with neither the charge of obstruction of justice nor the charge of perjury sustaining enough votes to remove Clinton from office.

During the 2000 election Clinton's wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, successfully ran for U.S. senator in New York. After leaving office, Clinton moved into an office in Harlem and published his memoirs, My Life, in 2004. Clinton played a prominent role in his wife's bid for the presidency in the 2008 election.