BILL CLINTON graduated from Yale Law School in 1973. The next year he ran for Congress.

Ambitious? You bet. Still just a snot-nosed Rhodes Scholar, Clinton lost that election. But only by a few points. He's been moving up ever since, as perhaps the slickest pol the Democrats have offered since JFK.

But his success is explained not just by the crass style and posturing that marks a winning politician. Clinton has considerable substance as well. His ability to address a crowd with all the down-home furor of Tom Harkin's "Bullshit!" speechifying and yet all the technocratic details of Mike Dukakis' white papers make him not just a good policy driver but a good policy maker. Clearly, Clinton would be the best president.

And, perhaps most important, he's the only one of the Democrats with a chance in hell of beating Bush.

CLINTON'S successes in Arkansas are impressive. Working with a conservative legislature and a state so poor that it provides less than one percent of federal revenues, Clinton has created a laboratory for badly needed change.

Since he first became governor in 1978, Arkansas has flourished and currently leads surrounding states in job growth and almost all states in educational improvements. The Clinton record in Arkansas reads like a K-School professor's dream:

By decreasing class sizes and setting standards for both students and teachers, Clinton has given Arkansas the highest high school graduation rate in the South.

Clinton pushed the legislature to establish annual $1000 college scholarships for all middle and lowincome students who maintain a 2.5 grade point average and stay off drugs.

Clinton has expanded and restructured vocational education in the state to include generous apprenticeship and technical training programs which have kept more non-college bound students in high school. And he has not quarantined vo-tech programs in urban areas but has kept them integrated into larger high schools.

By providing targeted investment tax credits to businesses, Clinton has overseen the second largest period of job growth in Arkansas' history. In 1991, for example, while the national average plummeted, Arkansas ranked seventh in job growth.

To help minority businesses, in 1983 Clinton issued an executive order establishing a "10 percent goal" that requires that at least 10 percent of certain state services and products be purchased from minority businesses. And he made it easier for minority businesses to bid for state contracts.

All this in a state with only one interstate, no national sports teams and a hog for its university's mascot. And all this during the Reagan years, when federal aid to states and cities was subject to draconian cuts--cuts that made it impossible for most governors to win two terms, let alone five.

Now Clinton offers this breadth of experience--far and away more than any of his rivals--to the nation. He seems to have a plan to cure everything except George Bush's sliding popularity.

WITH THE END of the Cold War and a sluggish economy, middle class Americans have turned their attention to their declining standard of living. Unfortunately, the ignored phrases from 1988 about the growing chasm between rich and poor are only now receiving a proper hearing.

For over a decade, America's poor and politically powerless have lived with Reagan-Bush policies which redirected social spending to a military buildup and which sought to retrain no one for a new world economy.

Clinton won't make the same mistakes. But he knows that to stay competitive, the Keynesian deficit spending offered by New Deal and Great Society-era programs cannot work. Were America the unquestioned economic leader of the world, a plan to return to such programs might make at least some sense.

But the borrow and spend Reagan-Bush years have created a burgeoning deficit that constantly chips away at America's competitiveness by decreasing the pool of funds available for investment and growth. As manufacturing jobs have been lost, little has been done to restructure the economy to create new jobs in competitive industries.

In this changing world economy, we must have a new plan. Clinton, we believe, has the best one offered by the Democrats.

CLINTON'S roots are populist, and he has not forgotten about the people most disaffected by the Reagan years--people whose votes, of course, he would love to win. But even if it's just unctuous political rhetoric, Clinton's concern for these people is missing from the plan offered by Paul E. Tsongas.

While Tsongas has become the yuppie/suburb candidate (just last Saturday in South Carolina, he beat Clinton only among voters making more than $75,000), Clinton has reached out to the middle-and low-income families who suffered most under Reagan and Bush. And with his rhetoric come innovative and logical ideas.

He would hike the top tax bracket for those earning more than $200,000--those who have received huge windfalls in tax breaks during the Reagan-Bush years. With this money, he would spark a short-term jump in the economy by cutting taxes for those earning less than $70,000.

Unlike Tsongas, he would not provide more breaks for the rich with deep cuts in the capital gains tax. Tsongas "probusiness" message sounds a lot like Ronald Reagan's If we cut those nasty corporate taxes, all the friendly business execs will trickle higher wages down to their workers and start up lots of new factories.

No good. Blanket cuts in capital gains taxes raise corporate profits and executive salaries, not the GNP. Clinton would target capital gains tax cuts only for original investment, thereby encouraging firms to restructure and retrain employees for light manufacturing and technology--the areas in which the U.S. is most competitive.

To be sure, there are few other major differences between the Clinton and Tsongas visions. Both would provide tax credits for research and development, both support some version of free trade that would avoid the protectionist wars other candidates might prompt, both are committed to reducing the deficit. In addition, both are solidly pro-choice and both offer similar environmental and foreign affairs policies.

But Clinton has the advantage of having implemented many of his ideas already. Furthermore, he has offered specifics on cutting military programs (one-third of the defense budget would be cut over the next five years) while Tsongas has waffled on actual figures.

And although Tsongas' domestic economic plan would surely help business, it lacks the apprenticeship programs, loans to low-income entrepreneurs and expanded earned income tax credits that would make it easier for America's poor to attain resources lost in the last decade--or never even created.

AFTER Bill Clinton lost the governor's race in 1980 (and before coming back in '82), he told the Florida democratic convention how to win an election: "If your opponent picks up a hammer at you," he said, "you need to pick up a meat ax and cut off his arm."

As the last few weeks have shown, Clinton has incredible political resilience. In 1988 he told Dukakis to firm up his attacks on the president, but the Massachusetts governor's unwillingness to fight back cost him the election.

Now the '92 nomination has come down to Clinton and Tsongas, and Democrats across the country must realize that they have to pick the one who can beat Bush, whose dismal presidency cannot continue.

Bush has watched cities decline into poverty and violence with no national funding and leadership to help. His education proposals came late and lacked the requisite funding--ditto for his bare-bones health care "policy." He has tightened the definition of wetlands and threatened to authorize off-shore drilling. He has nominated right-wingers to the Supreme Court who will try to overturn Roe v. Wade this summer.

The Bush presidency has been disastrous for the country--the point is that he must lose on November 3. So any Democratic nominee who would allow a Bush win must not receive the nomination.

Paul Tsongas would allow a Bush win. The president could easily blast him out of the South, where he is currently known only in Republican-dominated Florida. This would leave the race up to the battleground states of 1988--the industrial Midwest and California.

Tsongas couldn't get a labor endorsement to save his life. Unions would withhold support in a race between Bush and Tsongas, removing a huge part of the Democratic base in the Midwest.

And Tsongas has little organization and few endorsements in California, leaving the sugar daddy of Electoral College votes for Bush, who won there in 1988.

Even now, at the height of Tsongas popularity, his own aides acknowledge that the campaign is struggling for stability. In Florida, Tsongas best hope for a Southern upset, he has found it difficult to strike back at his opponents attacks. Bush would exploit this weakness mercilessly. He did in 1988.

Finally, in the general election, Tsongas would have to battle Bush for the votes of the upper-income people who have given him Democratic primary successes. Bush will win the rich vote hands down.

ADMITTEDLY, we are discouraged by Clinton's immoral and anachronistic support of the death penalty. But Tsongas' unfortunate backing of capital punishment deemphasizes this issues in the primary.

In the end, as Bob Kerrey said when he bowed out of the race last week, Bush must be the number one target. Bill Clinton has the ideas and the political savvy to pull off a defeat of the president. Therefore, we endorse Clinton in today's primary.

In this election, Bush should get ready for the meat ax.