Analysis of the week

Article of the week, if you read one article this week, read this one.

Why Bill Clinton's health care failure ultimately saved his presidency and how Newt Gingrich freed him from the radical left and made him the most popular leader of the decade.

Public skepticism increased when the Congressional Budget Office issued findings contradicting Mr. Obama's claims that his health-care reform would lower costs. And the more Americans have learned about the specifics, the more they dislike the plans. The president understands that he loses when he talks about substantive issues, which is why he's been fudging on the public option. He may not understand that he is closing the gap between his unpopular policies and his personal popularity in the worst way a president can: by reducing his own credibility.

A far more productive strategy would be to embrace Mr. Clinton's success, which was freeing himself from his party's left and returning to the centrist themes he had campaigned on....

Back in 1994, Mr. Clinton faced pretty much the same problem. Though he too had won the White House promising to be a new kind of Democrat, his first two years had a distinctly liberal tenor: battling over gays in the military, promoting a new energy tax, turning a promised middle-class tax cut into a huge tax hike, and trying to push through universal health care. Though he continues to deny GOP contributions to his success, after his 1994 health-care defeat, Mr. Clinton did what all smart pols do: He appropriated the most appealing parts of his opponents' agenda.

The result was a new Bill Clinton, embracing everything from deregulation and welfare reform to the Defense of Marriage Act. In his 1996 State of the Union, he even struck a Reaganite chord by announcing that "the era of Big Government is over. From this newly held center, Mr. Clinton advanced his presidency and pushed, both successfully and unfairly, to demonize Mr. Gingrich. Mostly he got away with it.

In his book "The Pact," historian Steven M. Gillon puts it this way: "Ironically, Gingrich's revolution may have saved the Clinton presidency by freeing him from the control of his party's more liberal base in Congress, giving him the opportunity to return to the moderate message that helped him win election in the first place.

"It was Gingrich who changed the language of American politics and forced Clinton to play the game on his turf," he writes. "But it was Clinton who ultimately got the credit and emerged as the decade's most popular leader."

At the moment, Mr. Obama plainly remains wedded to the view that the 1994 failure to get a health-care bill through Congress marked a catastrophe for the Clinton presidency rather than its liberation. On Friday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said his boss was "quite comfortable" with the idea that sticking to his agenda may well mean "he only lives in this house" for one term. Sounds like a man who appreciates the limits of a president's personal popularity.