Business

In a recent conference call with reporters, Newt Gingrich claimed that President Obama is the “anti-Clinton” because while “Clinton was trying to move the party to the center…Obama has moved it to the left.” While it is amusing to hear Bill Clinton ‘s name on the favorable side of a comparison made by Gingrich, the statement was all the more remarkable because it simply isn’t true. On issue after issue, the president has positioned himself as a centrist and a pragmatist, not a left-winger: Private insurance-based health care reform; the most hawkish Democratic foreign policy in a generation; milquetoast financial reform; a refusal to push for any new gun control despite a string of mass shootings — the list goes on and on. Health care reform provides one of the more direct contrasts between the supposedly ‘centrist’ Clinton and ‘left-wing’ Obama. President Clinton’s plan involved a far larger role for government in regulating the insurance industry through plans for a National Health...