Success is hard to define, and it isn’t the same as popularity. But being elected leader of the greatest democracy in the history of the world twice certainly makes Bill Clinton world-class at politics, his chosen field.

Only the second U.S. president to be impeached, he displayed amazing resilience in the face of his own failures and won acquittal.

For better or worse, Clinton also made Arkansas known to virtually every person on earth.

For better, he accumulated a peacemaker reputation. Nowhere were Clinton’s extraordinary intelligence, compassion and persuasive powers used to greater effect than Northern Ireland. Though men such as George Mitchell, David Trimble and Gerry Adams did the spade work for the historic peace that restored home rule to Northern Ireland, Clinton supported Mitchell and worked tirelessly to accomplish the peace that holds even now.

Clinton stumbled badly in his first military test, a 1993 debacle in Somalia, moving tentatively as the conflict he inherited from President George Bush steered rudderless toward calamity. Like almost every world leader, he allowed genocidal atrocities in Africa and Central Europe to take place, offering only ineffective protests.

But, amid a barrage of criticism, domestic and international, Clinton directed the defeat of Serbian forces intent on carrying out ethnic extermination ordered by President Slobodan Milosovich. Generally acknowledged to be the first successful campaign executed entirely in the air, the action of U.S. and NATO forces saved thousands of Muslim people in the Kosovo province without a single U.S. combat casualty.

For worse, there was Monica. Though massive, taxpayer-funded investigations revealed him to be clean of the “Whitewater” scandals, his personal arrogance brought him to the brink of downfall and led to his impeachment, deeply offending those loyal to him.

Clinton, born in Hope and raised in Hot Springs, won a Rhodes Scholarship and graduated from Yale Law School. As a law professor at the University of Arkansas, he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1974. Two years later, Clinton was elected Arkansas attorney general, then succeeded David Pryor as the nation’s youngest governor, at 32, in 1979. Defeated in 1980 by Frank White (now State Bank Commissioner), he returned to defeat White, serving as governor from 1983-1992, when elected president. Clinton’s five successful campaigns and his nearly 12 years in office ranked him second only to Orval Faubus among Arkansas governors.