Trying to coverup Clinton's holiday from history

Peter Baker:

It fell to Mike Turpen, a former Oklahoma attorney general, to warm up the crowd, and he did so with gusto. "Bill Clinton!" he shouted to several thousand people gathered in the McCasland Field House at the University of Oklahoma. "He gave us eight years of peace and prosperity! Do you remember?"

In case they didn't, the former president bounded onstage, took the microphone and spent some of the next hour reminding them: He balanced the budget and paid down the national debt. He made student loans more affordable. He worked with the rest of the world on global warming and arms control. But, he said, "I want you to understand this is not me. This is her."

Maybe, but it seems more than a little bit about him, too. As Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama clash on multiple political fronts heading into Super Tuesday, William Jefferson Clinton's record as president has emerged as a key battleground. How Democrats define his legacy could determine which presidential candidate they choose: Hillary Clinton, to extend it, or Obama, to make a clean break from it.

Bill Clinton's attacks on Obama on the campaign trail -- and the generally negative reaction they provoked -- have helped focus attention on the former president and seem to have created misgivings about his possible return to Washington. According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 55 percent of Americans view the former commander in chief favorably, unchanged from a year ago. But just 50 percent said they would be comfortable with him back in the White House, down from 60 percent in September.

The Clinton camp has presented the former president's eight-year tenure as a modern-day era of good feelings when the United States stood tall in the world and took care of its people at home. Aides have played on nostalgia for a simpler time, before the World Trade Center fell, before U.S. troops bogged down in Iraq, before the economy reeled toward recession, before President Bush.

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They continue to also give us a holiday from reality in their discussion of the Clinton legacy. Osama bin Laden declared war on the US in around 1996. He attacked the US repeatedly after that declaration, but Bill Clinton and the Democrats mostly ignored those attacks and used a lawfare approach which revealed our sources and methods of intelligence on bin Laden's organization allowing them to conceal their devastating attacks on 9-11. That is his real legacy. And, that is what Hillary, Obama and the Democrats want to return to.

They think they can end this war by retreating from the Iraq front, but I guarantee you that Osama bin Laden will not renounce his declaration of war with that retreat, he will declare victory.

As for the balanced budget, it, like welfare reform was a products of the Republican Congress that was forced down Clinton's throat and the only credit he deserves is that he bowed to the inevitable.