Clinton wanted to restore confidence in government as a force for good while not alienating antigovernment voters. Yet he inherited a huge budget deficit—$4.4 trillion in 1993—that precluded substantial federal initiatives. Moreover, Clinton failed to win a majority of the popular vote in both 1992 and 1996, and the Republicans controlled Congress after 1994. Throughout his presidency, Clinton was burdened by investigations into past financial activities and private indiscretions.

Despite these obstacles, Clinton achieved a number of reforms. He issued executive orders easing restrictions on abortion and signed several bills that Republicans had previously blocked. In 1993, Congress enacted gun control legislation and the Family and Medical Leave Act, which mandated unpaid leave for child-birth, adoption, and family medical emergencies for workers in larger companies. The Violence against Women Act of 1994 authorized $1.6 billion and new remedies for combating sexual assault and domestic violence. Clinton won stricter air pollution controls and greater protection for national forests and parks. Other liberal measures included a minimum-wage increase and a large expansion of aid for college students.

Most significantly, Clinton pushed through a substantial increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Begun in 1975, EITC gave tax breaks to people who worked full-time at meager wages or, if they owed no taxes, a subsidy to lift their family income above the poverty line. By 2003, some fifteen million low-income families were benefiting from the EITC, almost half of them minorities. One expert called it “the largest antipoverty program since the Great Society.” The program implicitly recognized the inability of the free market to secure a living wage for all workers.

Shortly before Clinton took office, the economy had begun to rebound. Economic expansion, along with spending cuts, tax increases, and declining unemployment, produced in 1998 the first budget surplus since 1969. Clinton failed, however, in his major domestic initiative to provide universal health insurance and to curb skyrocketing medical costs. Congress enacted important smaller reforms, such as underwriting health care for five million uninsured children, yet forty million Americans remained uninsured.

Pledging to make the face of government “look like America,” Clinton built on the gradual progress women and minorities had made since the 1960s. For example, African Americans and women had become mayors in major cities from New York to San Francisco. Virginia had elected the first black governor since Reconstruction, and Florida the first Latino. Clinton’s cabinet appointments included six women, three African Americans, two Latinos, and an Asian American. His judicial appointments had a similar cast, and in 1993 he named the second woman to the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose arguments as an attorney had won key women’s rights rulings from that Court.