Who’s more moderate: Obama or Clinton?

(Carolyn Kaster - AP) Tuesday’s column has left me thinking a lot about what it means for a president to be “moderate.” The DW-Nominate system — which has some flaws when rating presidents, but is nevertheless suggestive — shows that President Obama is more moderate than President Clinton. That seems wrong to me. But it’s easy to argue that it’s right.

Consider their economic policies. Among Clinton’s first major fights in office was the 1993 budget, which raised taxes on the rich, on corporations and on fuel. It passed with zero Republican votes. Obama, by contrast, cut taxes during his first two years in office and has called for extending most of the Bush tax cuts. So in a simple analysis in which higher taxes = more liberal, Clinton was clearly more liberal. In fact, Obama’s preferences more closely mirror George W. Bush’s tax policy than Bill Clinton’s.

Clinton’s health-care policy was, similarly, much more “liberal” than Obama’s. The simplest way to establish this is to note that Obama’s policy is almost a carbon copy of the Health Equity and Access Reform Act of 1993, which was one of the leading Republican alternatives to Clinton’s proposal.

But Obama’s place in the party is very different than Clinton’s. Obama comes from what I’d call the pragmatic-liberal wing. Clinton, by contrast, was a reformer. Prior to running for the presidency, Clinton’s political project was to pull the Democratic Party to the center. There’s nothing in Obama’s history that comparable to Clinton chairing the Democratic Leadership Council. Nor is there anything comparable to Clinton passing welfare reform, though there perhaps would have been if Speaker John Boehner had been able to come to an agreement with the White House back in August.

Which suggests, in part, that perhaps this is a flawed question. We’re talking about presidents when we should be talking about parties and conditions.

It’s possible that Obama’s instincts are more liberal but the opportunities available to him are more moderate. It’s possible that Clinton’s instincts were more moderate, but his early economic problem — high interest rates driven, in part, by high deficits — suggested tax increases in a way that Obama’s early economic problems — a fall in aggregate demand driven by a financial crisis — didn’t.

It’s also the case that the relevant institutions have changed over the past two decades. Clinton tried to free gays to serve in the military and ended up retreating to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Obama’s Democratic Party — not to mention Obama’s military — supported his effort to do away with DADT.

It’s also worth noting that Obama’s strategic choices have been shaped, in part, by the lessons and outcomes of Clinton’s strategic choices. If Clinton’s health-care bill had passed, Obama wouldn’t have had to try for health reform. If Clinton had never tried to pass health-care reform, Obama might have gone with a more ambitious approach, as it wouldn’t have become conventional wisdom in Democratic policy circles that Clinton’s plan collapsed in part because it tried to do too much. So evaluating them independently of one another is more or less impossible.

But I’m still thinking this through. I’d be interested in your take.