An Ordinary Golden Boy : FIRST IN HIS CLASS: A Biography of Bill Clinton, <i> By David Maraniss (Simon & Schuster: $25; 512 pp.)</i>

Among some of the reporters who followed Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992, he came to be known, perhaps in a good-natured but not an entirely joking way, as “Slick Willie.” That nickname kept coming back to me as I read “First in His Class” (which, by the way, Clinton wasn’t, except metaphorically).

Not that David Maraniss, a Washington Post reporter, ever uses the word “slick” in this biography. But even when Maraniss is intent only on laying out Clinton’s impressive talents and achievements--this book ends at the opening of his presidential campaign--the question of character keeps sneaking in. Is Clinton deceitful? Does he cave in when the going gets tough? Does he blame others for his mistakes? Is he loyal to supporters? Can he control himself?

In these pages you will get some answers to those questions. If the answers make you a bit nervous about the man in the White House, it won’t be because Maraniss tried to stir you to that reaction. What he is trying to stir you to is a feeling for Clinton’s aura and promise of importance, even in his early years. Maraniss wants you to see Clinton as he sees him, as “a big character, whether he is acting big-hearted or small.” His intention is plainly to present a personality and character that glow with the kind of luckiness that arouses great expectations. Over and over, probably a dozen times, Maraniss quotes people who even in Clinton’s boyhood and early manhood, perhaps after only one encounter with him, predicted that “the guy probably will be governor some day,” or, showing unbelievable prescience, “someday he will be president.”

I’m willing to take Maraniss’ word or their word that encounters with the live Clinton were that rousing. But just reading about him, I don’t feel very turned on. Has Maraniss failed, or has my bulb burned out?

Maraniss, who obviously admires Clinton, wants us to consider the man’s minus side as simply part of “a complicated human being.” To keep the defects in perspective he argues that “with Bill Clinton it is often tempting, but usually misleading, to try to separate the good from the bad, to say that the part of him that is indecisive, too eager to please and prone to deception, is more revealing of the inner man than the part of him that is indefatigable, intelligent, empathetic, and self-deprecating. They co-exist.”

The three defects he mentions may not be more revealing of the inner man, but they are more revealing of the outer politician, since they are among the worst qualities a politician can have. We’ll get back to the evidence of them in this book, but for the moment let me pause to give you the lowdown on what I know you’re itching to know about: girls.

Yes, his girlfriends are scattered through these pages like the leaves of autumn. (One might say he was as gluttonous about women as he was, we are told, about food, “inhaling apples in a few massive bites. . . . Hot dogs went down so fast they barely touched his teeth.) But Maraniss is very decorous about Clinton’s romances, and, so far as you can tell, a lot of the friendships were Platonic. And a lot weren’t, including some after he had married Hillary, which is probably why divorce was in the air several times. But believe me, it’s pretty dull stuff, and you’d have to be hard up to describe Maraniss’s treatment of it as sexy.

In fact the only interesting thing about all the skirt-chasing is that it was apparently done so flagrantly that the national press made a sap of itself by pretending to be shocked to “discover” it in 1992. For at least the previous four years Clinton’s reputation for philandering--one insider described it as “incredible”--was so well known that he and his advisers feared his chances for a presidential nomination might go down the toilet as Gary Hart’s had done, and for the same reason.

What is there in his genes and upbringing to explain the Clinton we now see? Fascinating stuff. His grandmother and mother--who are, Maraniss says, “central to understanding the man he would become”--loved him excessively. And there were rumors these two gaudily-painted, flirtatious women loved quite a few men the same way. “There is little history of sexual restraint” in what Maraniss calls Clinton’s “family culture.” Little is known about Clinton’s father, who was killed three months before Bill was born, except that he was an exceptional liar and somewhat covertly had had a string of wives before he married Bill’s mother. Bill’s first step-father, the one he knew best (there would be two more), was a failed car dealer, a womanizer, a drunk and bad gambler, but an expert wife-beater.

The parents yelled at each other, but they didn’t yell at Bill. He was pampered. Home was a shrine in which to display the prizes won by “the golden son.” One myth--not discouraged by Clinton--is that he grew up in poverty. In fact, Maraniss tells us, as a teen-ager he played golf and swam at the country club. In high school he drove a big-finned Buick and at Georgetown University (a school that richly deserved the graffiti “Georgetown Gentlemen Are Lapdogs of the Establishment”) he drove a white Buick convertible. Except for some easy summer stuff in Sen. William Fulbright’s office when Clinton was a college student, or political campaigning, Clinton never did a lick of real work in his life.

The early Bill Clinton led such a charmed life, it was unreal. True, there were always some people “who resented him, who thought he was a phony,” but most people who met Clinton were very impressed by him and liked him. His life was charmed because he was bright and generally charming (though he could throw temper tantrums), not because he worked hard. Books came easy, scholarships came easy, friends came easy, girls came easy.

Was Clinton a typical Rhodes Scholar? “Studying” seems to have consisted mostly of lying around with his pals talking about the injustice of the draft and how to escape it, of drinking and trying to smoke a little pot, of being visited by old and new girlfriends, of playing strip poker (he lost), of traveling on the continent.

At Yale law school he seems to have seldom attended class, nor was he asked to; when he and Hillary Rodham were students there, Yale law school was sort of a rebellious laugh-in that was almost impossible to flunk out of.

Clinton’s most notable achievement in the years covered by this biography was to be elected governor at 32, the nation’s youngest governor in 40 years. Nice going, but let’s not get carried away. After all, we’re talking Arkansas, a state that regularly ranks so close to the bottom of just about everything that its residents kid themselves with the remark, “Thank God for Mississippi.” And besides, two years after going in he went out as “the youngest defeated governor in American history and only the third Arkansas governor in the 20th Century to be denied a second two-year term.”

Clinton’s reaction to this defeat, says one of his closest aides, was to seem “more hurt that he had screwed up as a politician than that he had screwed up as a governor.” Which wasn’t surprising, for Clinton was far more tuned to campaigning than to governing; later he would boast of having been involved in 15 elections in 14 years. Maraniss says Clinton’s reaction to defeat was “characteristically” in two parts: “feeling sorry for himself” and “plotting a comeback.”

He did come back, two years later, and was elected four more times. His terms were not exciting, for the South was long past its civil rights crisis, and Arkansas was no longer the focus of the world’s attention as it had been when President Eisenhower sent troops to integrate Little Rock High School in the 1950s. On the day Clinton spoke to a crowd in Little Rock about his plans to run for president, Orval Faubus, the once-notorious governor who had defied Eisenhower, was in the crowd, ignored by everyone, “an ancient and lonely man, reduced to a sideshow, hawking one of his books” on the sidewalk outside the state capitol.

History had moved on, to a saner and duller era--Clinton’s era.

Exciting or not, what a president did politically before he reached the White House offers fascinating clues to why he acted as he did after he got there.

If liberals were surprised when Clinton, who campaigned as a populist in 1992, started marching to Wall Street’s fife-and-drum corps as soon as he became president, it was because they hadn’t paid enough attention to what he was like as Arkansas’ governor. Maraniss argues that notwithstanding Clinton’s “peacenik” manipulations, he had, all his life, considered himself a part of the establishment. In his relationship with big business, he was, as governor, content to play a servile part.

This was particularly true, Maraniss tells us, after Clinton’s defeat and comeback. Just as George Wallace vowed after his first defeat by segregationists, “They’ll never out-seg me again,” Clinton seems to have vowed that hereafter no politician in the state would work closer with the industrial and banking barons.

Except in rhetoric, the populist Clinton was gone. Now he loaded the people with a regressive sales tax while giving major corporations big tax breaks and suspending environmental laws that bothered them. “Tyson Foods received $7.8 million in tax breaks from 1988 to 1990 at a time when the world’s largest poultry firm had a budget twice as large as the state’s,” writes Maraniss.

The come-back governorship, Maraniss tell us, now rode around in corporate jets. And he shaped his career around a new ploy: a permanent campaign, funded largely by his new corporate pals. Polls became “a way for Clinton to organize his thoughts.”

Where was his center? Maraniss says Clinton reversed himself on utility reform and took three positions, as the winds changed, on highway reform. He turned on groups that once supported him, and Maraniss notes “a certain fail-safe method to Clinton’s rebukes; they were directed at groups who had fallen out of public favor.” When the legislature got stubborn, he went soft. When the timber and poultry lobbies got tough, he caved in. Why fight? He preferred to be known as “the education governor”--and he indeed did a lot for Arkansas’ schools, but that, after all, was a nice comfortable nonpartisan issue.

It’s not hard to see the connections to Maraniss’s next volume.