I remember the Clinton presidency well, since I was twenty-nine years old when Bill Clinton took office. Clinton did a number of things well but he passed on some significant opportunities as well. He did not use part of the budget surplus to invest in our nation's infrastructure. This is way overdue, as the bridge collapse in Minneapolis illustrates. He also did not put a high enough priority on energy independence and environmental concerns, specifically climate change. He took too long to develop new CAFE standards (vehicle emissions), and the Bush administration scrapped them before they could be instituted. Even so, when Clinton took office energy-efficient compact cars were so ubiquitous in the greater Washington, DC area that most parking garages repainted their lines to allow for more and smaller spaces. When SUVs, popular with the drug-dealing subculture, started to cross into the mainstream in the early 90s, Clinton could have mounted a public awareness campaign to try and stem the tide. US Automakers would have howled bloody murder, but if they had stuck with trying to make more energy-efficient cars in the 90s they wouldn't be in deep trouble now. Also, thought the Clinton administration did ratify the Kyoto Protocol thanks to Al Gore's eleventh hour machinations, a state department insider who participated in many negotiations like this has told me that the Clinton Administration failed to gain widespread support for Kyoto, a critical mistake.
The Clinton Adminstration bungled health-care reform and brought about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" but I regard those as noble failures and rookie mistakes. Maybe someone else has information that Clinton should have known better and those big failures shouldn't have happened, either, but I'm giving him a pass on those. I also think free trade agreements were probably inevitable, but NAFTA should have contained more substance related to worker's rights, sustainability and environmental issues. It could be argued that if the US bothered to hold Mexico's feet to the fire regarding the actual wording of NAFTA, things would be better for Mexican workers. And maybe it's just silly to argue over NAFTA when so many industries have abandoned Mexico in the race to the bottom.
Finally, I did want to point out that Barack Obama is running against Hillary Clinton, not Bill. Our laws make it illegal for him to be president again. If that wasn't so, he might still be our president. I'm not sure if that would be a good thing or a great thing. Certainly he would have done a much better job than W has.
Barack Obama has said that he would want to utilize Bill Clinton in a high-level position in his adminstration. I wouldn't be surprised if he found a role for Hillary as well.
Perhaps the most interesting thing I've read about Obama of late is his willingness to reach out to his critics, to listen to them, and to sometimes change course because of what they say, and at other times persuade them of the wisdom of his tatics. Clearly the president that Barack Obama is most modeling himself after is not Bill Clinton, but Abraham Lincoln. (I do see that he's borrowing from the styles of FDR and JFK as well, though.) I don't see how this choice is a repudiation of Bill Clinton. If I was running for president, I wouldn't pick Clinton as my #1 role model, either. Clinton was good--even very good in some ways--but I don't think history will judge him as great. He should make the top twenty presidents, no problem, but maybe not the top ten, and certainly not the top five.
Obama has tapped into the yearning for someone who is willing to reach for greatness instead of mere success. Their were lots of signs that America wanted that, including (but not limited to) the success of the TV show "The West Wing." Obama just did a better job of reading the zeitgeist than Hillary. I don't think this makes him stupid or even lucky, but instead very smart and probably even wise. Hillary can't read the zeitgeist because she is conditioned to denial through her years of putting up with a philanderer. That's why she hasn't even been conceding primaries and caucuses to Obama lately--because denial is not just a river in Egypt to her. It's a way of life.
