With the economy in crisis and Election Day in sight, Obama can't say enough about the Clinton epoch - the job growth, the budget surpluses, the broad prosperity - and often lauds the former president's economic stewardship as a model.
"We need to do what we did in the 1990s and create millions of new jobs and not lose them," he told 6,000 people in Abington, outside Philadelphia, last week. "We need to do what we did in the 1990s and make sure people's incomes are going up and not down. We need to do what a guy named Bill Clinton did in the 1990s and put people first again."
The crowd roared.
Obama's characterization of Clinton's presidency is markedly different than the one he offered during the Democratic primaries, when he was running against Clinton's wife, Senator Hillary Clinton.
Obama argued that, despite the successes, Bill Clinton let some of the country's biggest problems fester while in the White House. The implication - that his two terms had not been indisputably positive for American families - was one the former president deeply resented.
It was always an awkward argument to make, but one Obama felt he had to: After all, Hillary Clinton was running in part to revive her husband's economic legacy, which many Democrats recall fondly. Obama's fully embracing the 1990s would have been tantamount to embracing his opponent.
Now, Obama is offering a Clinton restoration to create a foil for what he calls the failed economic philosophies of President Bush and Obama's presidential rival, John McCain. "America can't take four more years of John McCain's George Bush policies," he said yesterday in Dayton, Ohio.
The more politically problematic parts of Clinton's legacy - the Monica Lewinsky scandal and, relevant to the current economic collapse, his embrace of deregulation - go unmentioned, of course.
The shift in Obama's rhetoric is another chapter in the fraught relationship between the Obamas and the Clintons, who clashed often in the fierce primary race. Some Obama supporters question whether Bill Clinton is wholeheartedly behind his wife's former rival, but the former president offered a well-received endorsement at the Democratic National Convention and last week began stumping for Obama.
The Clintons are scheduled to campaign together on Obama's behalf for the first time on Sunday, joining the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Senator Joe Biden, in Scranton, Pa., a blue-collar stronghold where Biden was born and where the family of Hillary Clinton's father hails from.
During the primaries, Obama at times praised the Clintons for their past work. But in the heat of the battle, hardly a week went by when he did not take swipes at the 1990s - at both the policies and the politics the Clintons promoted.
Obama said they took the wrong approach to universal healthcare. He said they had done little to advance the country's energy policies. His wife, Michelle, broadened the critique to supporters at a California rally before Super Tuesday, saying, "Through Democratic and Republican administrations, it hasn't gotten better for regular folks."
Obama, in a clear knock on the Clintons, frequently attacked "poll-tested" partisan politics and "triangulation," the Clinton strategy of adopting Republican positions for political advantage. "George Bush and Dick Cheney may have turned divisive, special-interest politics into an art form, but they didn't invent it," Obama said in New Hampshire last year. "It was there before they got to Washington."
Hillary Clinton had a ready rejoinder for such criticism.
"You know, sometimes during this campaign, my opponent criticizes the '90s, criticizes what my husband did," she said in Philadelphia in April, according to The Chicago Tribune. "But when I hear him criticizing the 1990s, I'm always wondering which part of it didn't he like - the peace or the prosperity? Because I like both."
That same month, Bill Clinton caused a stir when he asserted that older voters were gravitating to his wife because they were too savvy to buy Obama's rhetoric.
"Once you've reached a certain age, you won't sit there and listen to somebody tell you there's really no difference between what happened in the Bush years and the Clinton years; that there's not much difference in how small-town Pennsylvania fared when I was president, and in this decade," he said, comparing his and President Bush's record on measures such as jobs and family incomes.
Today, those are the very measures Obama cites to attack Bush - and by extension McCain - as villains to the middle class. In recent weeks, Obama has praised Clinton for creating millions more new jobs than Bush, helping boost family incomes, and for running budget surpluses, as opposed to the deficits that have grown under Bush.
"When Bill Clinton was in office, the average family income went up $7,500," Obama said in Green Bay, Wis. last month. "Twenty-two million jobs created. So we just have to be clear about the history." Last week in La Crosse, Wis., Obama said, "It's time to return to the fiscal responsibility and pay-as-you-go budgeting, the kind of budgeting we had in the 1990s. You remember, Bill Clinton left a surplus for George W. Bush?"
Obama and Clinton have even had a few private conversations over the past several weeks about the financial meltdown, and the former president has been "very impressed with the way that Senator Obama has handled the economic crisis," according to a person close to the former president who asked to remain anonymous to speak candidly.
Bill Carrick, a Democratic strategist who worked for Bill Clinton's 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, said Clinton's legacy presented an awkward dynamic for both Hillary Clinton and Obama in the primaries, because she did not want to celebrate all aspects of her husband's record, and Obama could not, in good conscience, be a "wholesale critic" of his economic policies.
Today, Carrick said, "Senator Obama probably has a much higher comfort level saying, 'Look, we were going gangbusters in the '90s, and here, what happened?' "
Clinton's record, though, does not always dovetail with Obama's agenda, particularly over the past few weeks as Obama has blamed the financial meltdown largely on deregulation of the financial industry. It was Clinton who, in 1999, signed a major banking deregulation bill into law. (Further complicating matters, two former top Clinton economic advisers, Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin, pushed the deregulation effort, and they are now part of Obama's economic team.)
For now, Obama - and Bill Clinton, as he campaigns for the Illinois senator - are content to highlight their rosy recollections.
"Look at the mess that we have in our financial system," Clinton said at a campaign stop in Orlando, Fla., last week. "Compare that to what happened before. It wasn't like this. This is not accidental, folks."
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