The President-Elect: Just the Average Joe (or Bill) : Personality: A golf duffer who’s often tardy and battles his weight, Clinton has share of human foibles.

You know the type: the slightly pudgy, middle-aged guy who takes advantage of a darkened movie theater to discreetly indulge in a junk-food feast.

You’ve seen him on the golf course, too, concentrating with every fiber of his being, then thumping a shot straight into the water. He’s the guy in your neighborhood who roars out of his driveway in the morning because he’s 40 minutes late--just as he was the day before.

Meet Bill Clinton: World Leader. Rhodes Scholar. Average Joe.

During the presidential campaign, Americans got used to hearing the Arkansas governor described in the most extreme terms, as either the nation’s salvation or its ruination.

Now that he’s President-elect, and the most humdrum details of his everyday life are world news, Americans are getting to know the rest of Bill Clinton. And they’re learning that he struggles with many of the same petty problems that afflict the legions of mortgage-paying, mall-trotting, lawn-mowing Americans he will lead for the next four years.

Americans who heard months ago about Clinton’s File-o-Fax memory are only now learning of his attempts to conquer a weight problem, his occasional flashes of temper and the perennial tardiness that some Arkansans call Clinton Standard Time. They already knew about his skill on the stump and in the Statehouse; now they’re finding out he’s a three-thumbed weekend athlete, a dangerously distracted motorist, a man with no natural talent at the haberdasher’s.

It’s a side of Clinton that old friends and the crowd in the press plane have been seeing for a long time. “This is no saint who’s just dropped out of the sky,” says Carolyn Staley, a childhood friend. “In some ways, he’s just an average guy. The American people are going to be able to identify with that.”

The public’s dawning awareness of a President-elect’s foibles is a standard, albeit important, part of his adjustment to the job. Lasting impressions--both fair and unfair--take shape as Americans find out about the new Chief Executive’s life down home, and close up.

The country learned about George Bush’s fractured syntax, Ronald Reagan’s afternoon naps and family spats and Richard M. Nixon’s habit of wearing wingtip shoes with casual shorts. Gerald R. Ford got tagged as a stumbler, although the former All-American football player was probably one of the White House’s more athletic residents.

The process can be agonizing, because it comes just as the White House’s new occupant is surrendering almost the last shred of his privacy to the encroaching throngs of minicam correspondents and notebook scribblers.

Clinton’s reaction to this microscopic scrutiny may be more extreme than most, since he relishes both his privacy and the curbside contacts with the public he enjoyed as governor. He vows he’ll continue to meet those crowds--just as he did in Washington last week--but acknowledges that carrying on a life offstage will be a lot tougher.

Officials “need to let their hair down, and it’s just difficult to do if the only place you can do it is in your house,” Clinton said in an interview earlier this year.

An aide was even more blunt about Clinton’s discomfort with the new restrictions of his life: “It kills him.”

That discomfort has been barely concealed during the transition.

In his jogs, Clinton has taken to running the wrong way down one-way streets to avoid the reporters and photographers chugging after him in a press pool van. Last weekend, he gave the press pool the slip to eat dinner at Juanita’s Restaurant in Little Rock with wife Hillary and TV journalist Bill Moyers.

Clinton didn’t seem pleased that a press detail followed him on another recent Sunday night when he used a family movie outing to take a vacation from his diet.

After Hillary and daughter Chelsea had been seated in the theater, Clinton appeared from the concession stand balancing popcorn, nachos, a hot dog and a Diet Coke, which he consumed with a little help from his family. After the movie, he exited without a word to reporters.

These days, after trimming his weight to 210 pounds from a peak of nearly 225 last spring, Clinton appears to be trying to do all he can to keep his waist from expanding again. At the Hay Adams Hotel, where he stayed last week during his Washington swing, his room was stocked with bananas, oranges and Arkansas spring water.

But as his movie outing shows, the fight against temptation is constant.

David Leopoulos, a Clinton friend since the two were in fourth grade, says there are few foods--outside of those that trigger his allergies--that Clinton doesn’t like to eat.

“I think his only rule is, it can’t be moving,” jokes Leopoulos. “I think he starts talking, and eating, and then, to be honest, I don’t think he even knows what he’s putting in his mouth.”

During the spring phase of the campaign, Clinton was observed on several occasions to work out for a while, take a break for junk food, then start the workout again.

Some average Americans will also empathize with Clinton’s struggles on the golf course. The governor has had little time to practice golf this year, and it shows.

In two Saturday outings to the Chenal Country Club, he was twice stumped by the 15th hole: Each time he clubbed the ball into the bordering creek. Eyewitnesses said the governor had the kind of choppy form that any golfer would display if he had spent his last year shaking hands at fairgrounds, rather than striding down the fairways.

Clinton seems to be as interested in talking as in golfing on these outings. In contrast to President Bush, whose manic golf game takes him through a round in one hour (and has been called “golf cart polo”), Clinton recently dallied on the links for six hours.

“He struggles with the game,” says Leopoulos. “He’s not a great golfer, I think.”

The transition is clearly demonstrating Clinton’s tendency toward tardiness, and shown how it constantly tests the resourcefulness of his staff.

On Wednesday morning, Clinton was still lingering in the governor’s mansion 40 minutes after he was scheduled to leave for his historic White House meeting with Bush. “If this was my first meeting like this, I’d leave extra early, not late,” said one panic-stricken aide.

But Clinton’s senior staff know their boss’s habits well enough that they took care to build in enough extra time to accommodate a delay. When the governor’s chartered jet arrived in Washington, it had to circle National Airport several times, but Clinton still made it to the session with Bush with time to spare.

History also will record that the new President kept an election-eve crowd in Little Rock waiting for an hour in the cold and rain in front of the Old Arkansas State House to hear his victory speech.

This lateness, of course, is attributable to Clinton’s well-documented desire to shake every hand, meet every well-wisher, outline every idea. But he doesn’t discriminate: Even his best friends end up yawning and tapping their feet as they await his belated appearances.

Also contributing to his lateness is his inclination to get up late, and stay up later.

Even after he had become his state’s chief executive, Clinton was seen at midnight at a Little Rock Alpha Beta store thumbing through the grocery’s meager selection of rock ‘n’ roll albums.

While he likes to stay up until the early hours, Clinton has a hard time mobilizing in the morning. Like many Americans, his mood is cranky and features swollen when the sun is still low in the sky. And the speech he gives at 9 a.m. never quite crackles like the one he delivers at 1 p.m. “He growls and grumbles as he greets the day,” says campaign aide Paul Begala.

Sometimes he growls later in the day as well. While voters generally saw an even-tempered candidate on television all year, the off-camera Clinton did not always display the same invariably sweet, TV preacher persona. He could explode at junior aides if reporters were asking the wrong questions, photographers were straying too close or voters were being kept too far from his outstretched hand.

On a golf outing after the election, Clinton fired off profanity at a country club manager who allowed the press pool to venture close enough to get a look at his golf game. “Goddammit, I thought we had an agreement that they weren’t going to be up here,” he shouted, according to a wire service photographer who was standing nearby. Aides insist that such displays are like tropical storms that explode and pass, and not the kind of long-lasting anger nursed by former President Nixon.

It is not his temper, but his chattiness, that can make Clinton a bit of a menace on the roadways.

When he drives the family’s blue Oldsmobile around Little Rock, he tends to talk nearly nonstop, and doesn’t like to break eye contact with the passenger he’s addressing, says old friend Leopoulos.

“If you’re in the back seat, you’re really risking it, because he’ll turn around to talk to you,” says Leopoulos. “He’s a terrible driver.”

He adds that Clinton has managed to avoid getting traffic citations. For a long time, the governor has been chauffeured by the state police and, more recently, the Secret Service. “We’ve been safe around here for some years because of it,” Leopoulos says.

Clinton’s pals also readily acknowledge that their friend needs a little help when he visits the clothing rack.

The Armani suit he wore to his first post-election press conference looked natty, but it was chosen by the clothing consultant friends brought in during the election year to sharpen his image. The flashy tie he wore on the Arsenio Hall show last spring was chosen by the program’s staff.

While one friend argues that he has a pretty good eye for ties, others remember Clinton startling New Hampshire voters last winter with jarring floral neckwear. These days, observers try to fathom the fashion statement Clinton has in mind when he wears a pair of white nylon gloves on his morning jog through the mild Little Rock weather.

“Fashion has never been Bill’s trademark,” says Staley. “He’s like a lot of people: He just doesn’t care that much.”

Staff writers Douglas Jehl and David Lauter in Washington contributed to this story.