page_title: Bill Clinton
section_title: Presidency
hierarchical_section_title: Bill Clinton / Presidency
caption_attribution_description: English: Bill Clinton, standing between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, taking the oath of office of President of the United States.
context_page_description: William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician and humanitarian activist who served from 1993 to 2001 as the 42nd President of the United States. He was 46 years old when he was elected and the third youngest president.
  He took office at the end of the Cold War. Clinton was the first president from the baby boom generation. Clinton was the second president to be impeached. He was impeached in 1998. Before he was president, Clinton was the Governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992, Attorney General of Arkansas from 1977 to 1979. He is married to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was the 67th United States Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009, and the Democratic nominee for president in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
context_section_description: In the 1992 presidential election, he beat Republican George H. W. Bush. During the early part of Clinton's first term, he put in place a tax code which would increase taxes on the rich.
  In 1994, during Clinton's first term in office, the Congress switched to a Republican majority. However, Clinton still beat Republican Bob Dole in the 1996 election.
  The Republicans defeated Clinton's proposal for the U.S. government to adopt universal health care. The Republicans proposed many new ideas to Congress to limit the size of government such as requiring the budget to be balanced and to stop people from abusing the welfare system.
  Clinton was sued by Paula Jones for sexual harassment, but the lawsuit was officially dismissed after Jones failed to prove damages. This made him the first sitting United States president to be sued.
  President Clinton was accused of wrongdoing by the U.S. House of Representatives in December 1998 during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and was impeached. Although he lied that they did not engage in sexual activity, he was found to have done nothing wrong by the U.S. Senate in February 1999.
  The country faced few challenges during his term. The Cold War was over and there was very little need for the U.S. military to get involved in the world's affairs, so defense spending was significantly lowered. The economy was doing very well during his term, though there is a debate whether the economy was well because of Clinton's policies or because of the Republicans' policies.
  The decade ended with the being the first time the United States did not have to borrow money to pay for its budget. Clinton left office with high approval ratings and was succeeded by George W. Bush.
caption: The First inauguration of Bill Clinton, January 1993
exif: {"Image SubfileType": "Full-resolution Image", "Image ImageWidth": "3894", "Image ImageLength": "3126", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image StripOffsets": "8702", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image RowsPerStrip": "3126", "Image StripByteCounts": "36517932", "Image XResolution": "400", "Image YResolution": "400", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Artist": "Library of Congress", "Image ExifOffset": "2332", "Image XPAuthor": "Library of Congress", "Image Padding": "[]", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}