The President We Deserve: Bill Clinton: His Rise, Falls, and Comebacks

Bill Clinton, argues Walker, is a genuine New Democrat who wants to revise the liberal reforms of the 1960s, to end welfare dependency, provide universal health insurance, cut the deficit and get tough on crime. Clinton's vision of an activist government involves investment in high-tech industries, creation of an ecology corps and free college education in return for two years of community service. But this ambitious agenda, in Walker's analysis, was largely derailed by budgetary constraints, the Whitewater scandal and a Republican opposition that, ironically, shares many objectives of Clinton's new centrist consensus. Washington correspondent for Britain's Guardian, Walker, an acquaintance of Clinton going back to Oxford, relies heavily on published sources. Nevertheless, this is a kinetic, dramatic political biography of the 42nd president, whom Walker credits with charting for the U.S. a new post-Cold War international course as linchpin of a free-trading global economy. Photos. (Sept.)