Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States. He served two full terms, from 1993 to 2001. He belonged to the Democratic Party. He was from Arkansas — he had been that state's governor — and he called himself a “New Democrat.” After a tough 1992 primary and a weak New Hampshire result, he bounced back, and the nickname the Comeback Kid stuck. His vice president for both terms was Al Gore of Tennessee. Gore later ran for president in 2000.

For much of the 1990s the U.S. economy was a boom: jobs rose and the internet grew. Clinton and a Republican Congress reached a rare budget result — a balanced budget, then a surplus, because the government took in more than it spent. In 1996 he signed a welfare-reform law that set time limits and work rules for cash aid. NAFTA was a trade deal among the United States, Canada, and Mexico. A 1994 crime bill is best known for hiring more police and building more prisons. The Family and Medical Leave Act let many workers take unpaid time off for a new baby or a sick family member.

In 1998 the House of Representatives impeached Clinton — that means it formally accused him — mainly for lying under oath about a White House intern. The Senate held a trial and acquitted him, so he finished the term and stayed president until January 2001. He sent U.S. forces to stop killing in Bosnia and Kosovo. In 1993 he appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. He was the first president from the baby-boom generation, born in 1946 after World War II.