Bill McGurn’s column today suggests that the Obama Administration has done more to repudiate the legacy of President Clinton than that of President Bush. He writes:
there’s a persuasive case that the legacy most threatened by the Obama presidency belongs to the last Democrat who sat in the Oval Office: Bill Clinton.
Think about it. It was Mr. Clinton who campaigned on the promise to “end welfare as we know it.” It was Mr. Clinton who signed the bill removing the Glass-Steagall barriers separating commercial from investment banking. Most famously, it was Mr. Clinton who assured us that “the era of Big Government is over.”
Today all the assumptions that once defined Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats” are being contested by the Obama White House. And nowhere is the contrast more stark than on the defining issue of trade.
I think (hope?) it’s too early to judge the Obama Administration’s trade policy, but the point still stands. At the same time, the Obama Administration has made only modest, often just cosmetic, changes to the Bush Administration’s counter-terror policies and is continuing the Bush Administration’s fiscal profligacy. Is this a fair assessment?