Bill Clinton

In January 1992, with his presidential campaign nearly sunk by stories about his private life and the draft, Bill Clinton finished second in the New Hampshire primary and went before the cameras as if he had won. He called himself "the Comeback Kid," and the name stuck because it kept coming true. Few American politicians have been counted out so often, or returned so quickly.

He was born William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas, at 8:51 in the morning, the time from his birth record, read in Central Standard Time. His father, a traveling salesman, had died in a car accident three months earlier. Read that way, his chart rises in Libra, and four planets crowd the first house: Mars and Neptune within a couple of degrees of the Ascendant, then Venus and Jupiter just beyond them. Libra is the sign of charm, persuasion and the wish to be liked, and a first house this full puts all of it on the surface. People who met Clinton routinely described the same experience: the sense, in a crowded room, that he was talking only to them.

Venus, ruler of the Libra Ascendant, sits in its own sign there, which strengthens the charm considerably. Mars beside it adds a competitive edge, and Neptune, the planet of image and longing, sits almost exactly on the rising degree, where astrologers read a magnetic, hard-to-pin-down public persona that different audiences can see themselves in.

His Sun is in Leo, in the eleventh house of alliances, networks and collective hopes, with Pluto in the same house. Mercury and Saturn, also in Leo, stand in the tenth house, which governs office and public reputation. Leo wants to lead and to be seen leading, and Saturn in the tenth describes authority pursued early and held under heavy scrutiny. As a teenager at Boys Nation in 1963 he shook hands with John F. Kennedy at the White House, and he later pointed to that moment as a turning point.

He grew up with his mother, Virginia, and a stepfather, Roger Clinton, whose drinking and violence he confronted as a teenager; at fifteen he took Clinton as his surname. He studied at Georgetown, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and met Hillary Rodham at Yale Law School. They married in 1975. He became attorney general of Arkansas, then governor at thirty-two, lost re-election in 1980 and won the office back two years later.

The Moon is in Taurus in the eighth house, the area of shared resources, secrets and crisis. Taurus wants comfort and steadiness, and the eighth is where those wants are tested. As president he presided over a long economic expansion and the first balanced federal budgets in a generation, but his affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky led to his impeachment by the House in December 1998. The Senate acquitted him in February 1999, and he left office in 2001 with high approval ratings.

Uranus in Gemini, in the ninth house of ideas and travel, fits his later career of global speeches and the Clinton Foundation. The Libra planets won the rooms; the Leo planets kept him in them.