January 1, 2012

As a first-term governor in 1979, Bill Clinton proposed modest reforms in education and commercial regulation, particularly to control pollution, but his biggest initiative, a highway program, was expensive fiscally and politically. In his reelection campaign in 1980, his opponent Republican Frank White used this issue and the unpopular placement of Cuban refugees at Fort Chaffee by the federal government as major points in his campaign. White received almost fifty-two percent of the vote in defeating Clinton. The portrait shown here is Clinton’s official first-term gubernatorial portrait.