Clinton Comeback

When Hillary Clinton and John McCain traded rhetorical blows over North Korea last week, some pundits hailed the exchange as a taste of 2008: a titanic clash between the early front runners in the next presidential election.

They forgot that the real titans of modern politics have yet to leave the stage: two relatively young, two-term presidents who show no sign of stepping out of the national debate on domestic politics and foreign affairs. Welcome to the heavyweight title fight between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Clinton declared his political comeback Wednesday with a set-piece speech that is aimed, according to his aides, at framing his governing philosophy in the context of the 2006 elections. Clinton’s goal: to show why his philosophy works, and why Bush’s doesn’t. Clinton, of course, doesn’t cite Bush’s name. But he hardly pulls his punches against what he calls “the leadership in Washington today.”

In theory, Wednesday’s speech marked the 15th anniversary of Clinton’s “new covenant” speech at Georgetown University. In practice, it marked a reinventing of Clinton’s themes—three weeks before the congressional elections—for today’s problems.

Back in 1991 (as he was running for president), Clinton explained his new covenant like this: “People once looked at the president and the Congress to bring us together, to solve problems, to make progress. Now, in the face of massive challenges, our government stands discredited, our people are disillusioned. There’s a hole in our politics where our sense of common purpose used to be.”

Now the disillusion and discontent is fueled more by war than the economy. But Clinton is still trying to offer a vision of what he calls the “common good” instead of division over taxes, culture and conflict. “We believe in mutual responsibility. They believe that, in large measure, people make or break their own lives and you’re on your own,” he explained in today’s speech. “We believe in striving, at least, to cooperate with others because we think that there are very few problems in the world we can solve on our own. They favor unilateralism whenever possible, and cooperation when it’s unavoidable.”