PRESIDENT Bill Clinton re-election endows him with historic stature, the first Democratic president to win a second term since Franklin D. Roosevelt 60 years ago.
His recovery, deemed almost impossible for most of the first three years of his often chaotic presidency, has been the ultimate revenge of the Comeback Kid on those who always write him off too soon.
Mr Clinton first came to the White House by a series of accidents and strokes of luck, and at least four years before he was seriously ready. He decided to run in 1992, knowing the traditional rule that the voters liked to take a first look at a candidate before entrusting him with the highest office.
It was Hillary Rodham Clinton, one of the most formidable, ambitious and politically astute of political wives, who urged him most strongly in 1991 to run. President George Bush might have been basking in Gulf War approval ratings of almost 90 per cent, but the economy was in recession - it had to be a year for Democrats to do better than expected. To make a strong showing would position Mr Clinton perfectly for 2000.
Then everything fell into place for him when the favoured candidates Governor Mario Cuomo of New York, Senator Al Gore, and Congressman Dick Gephardt - all decided to duck the 1992 race. Mr Clinton became the unexpected front-runner in a singularly undistinguished field. Had there been a halfway decent Democratic alternative in February, 1992. when the Clinton campaign crumbled under the twin embarrassments of Gennifer Flowers and his record of avoiding the Vietnam draft, his ambition would have stopped in the New Hampshire primary. Mr Clinton won the Democratic nomination almost by default.
Then came the second stroke of luck, the intervention of the Texan billionaire, Mr Ross Perot, with his pathological loathing of Bush and his bottomless moneybags, spend lavishly to attack the president's unimpressive economic stewardship.
Mr Bush himself provided the final unexpected boost to Mr Clinton's quixotic campaign. Mr Bush was tired and sometimes disoriented by his sleeping pills, jet-lagged to the point of public nausea in Japan, and simply not prepared to believe that the voters could ditch him for a draft-dodging womaniser.
Mr Clinton, by contrast, was elected on a wave of enthusiasm by Democrats thrilled at the prospect of regaining power. Catapulted into the most powerful job in the world with a mandate of just 43 per cent of the vote, Mr Clinton was an innocent in Washington with a thin talent pool among Democrats who had been excluded from government experience for 20 of the previous 24 years. Moreover, he inherited from Bush an economy that was only just emerging from a tough recession.
Two weeks before his inauguration, he reluctantly agreed to drop the bulk of the Keynesian proposals to stimulate the economy on which he had been elected.
In historical terms, the most important feature of Mr Clinton's first term has been to exploit the internationalisation of the economy with a strategic pursuit of global free trade.
In defiance of his own Democratic leadership in Congress, he worked with the Republicans to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement and the GATT world trade pact. He launched the first Pacific Rim economic summits, securing a regional free trade pledge to be phased in over 15 years.
This became the Clinton Doctrine, probably the most strategic legacy of his, presidency.