Obama vs. the Clinton Legacy

A half-too-clever piece by Karl Rove in the WSJ...

In the areas where Obama and Clinton deviated, Rove is implicitly assuming that Clinton chose those paths freely and out of an ideological belief in the efficacy of those policy positions. On welfare, Clinton followed the Republicans; on the supposed "end of govt as we know it", he followed the rhetoric of his day.

Rove, of course, is also ignoring the many ways in which Obama is following and extending the footprints of George W. Bush.

All that said, Rove's strongest point is also his key point here: there are good reasons to expect Senator and community activist Obama to be different from Governor Clinton-- on the importance of international trade and investment.

Inside the Fourth Estate, the received wisdom holds that the White House is now home to the anti-Bush. And on issues from taxes and stem cells to union elections and Guantanamo, Barack Obama is indeed taking America in a direction different from that of his predecessor.

Still, 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.

To begin with, Mr. Obama has yet to deliver a major address on trade...

...the differences between the Clinton and Obama approaches to trade no doubt owe something to differences in economic philosophy. But they probably also owe something to personal experience. Governors spend a great deal of time at events like factory openings because they know firsthand what the jobs created by foreign investment and overseas trade can mean to a family and community, not to mention what economic growth means for their political tenure....