It's true that Clinton didn't emerge
from quite the same patch of slime that spawned Obama; before becoming chief
executive, he, like Johnson and Carter, had been considered conservative by the
standards of the Democratic Party (which is not saying much), and I think that
Rush Limbaugh was correct in his assessment of him as not really believing in
anything except Big Government. Unlike
the current holder of his office, therefore, he was dedicated not to the transmogrification of the USA into a leftist utopia but merely to the prolongation of his
political career. This does not mean,
though, contrary to the implication or assertion by some pundits who ought to
know better, that he metamorphosed into a centrist in response to political circumstances. He may have proclaimed in an address to
Congress that "The era of big government is over!", but he did nothing
to reduce the size of that government except, naturally, in regard to defense,
the one area in which greater (but wiser) expenditures might have been
justified.
It's also true that the economic growth
throughout the Clinton years occurred because of wise policies, but the policies
were those not of Clinton, who had little influence in such matters even before
his party lost control of both chambers of Congress, but rather those of the
post-1994 Republican legislative majorities. (The "boom" of the
1990's has been considerably exaggerated anyway; not until nearly the end of
the decade did economic growth reach 3.5 percent, which was only the average
for the USA over at least the eight decades prior to our becoming the Obama
Nation, and is pathetically inferior to what has become standard for the
nominally Communist People's Republic of China.)
Only in a perverse way can we honestly
credit Clinton for the USA's relative economic success in the 1990's, since it
was his repudiation in the 1994 congressional elections, and his weakness of
leadership, that assisted the opposition in carrying out reforms. He's no more a rôle model fiscally than he is morally.
