President Bill Vs. Candidate Hillary

Indeed, Clinton spent much of his New Hampshire speech, not touting Hillary’s virtues, but reminding voters of his own presidential successes. At one point he went over two minutes without mentioning her name. But unfortunately for nostalgic voters, a Hillary Clinton presidency would be very different from Bill’s. Bill Clinton, after all, was a “New Democrat,” the president who declared that “the era of big government is over.” Hillary is an unapologetic defender of ever bigger government. In that same State of the Union address where he announced the demise of big government, Bill went on to say that he had “worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic Government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means.” If Hillary said anything even close to that, her head would explode. For example, Bill was a champion of free trade, pushing through NAFTA among other trade agreements. But Hillary is campaigning as a protectionist, even repudiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that she helped negotiate. Bill — pushed, of course, by Republicans in Congress — brought us welfare reform. Hillary seeks to expand the American welfare state. Bill presided over the first and only balanced budgets since the Nixon administration. Federal spending averaged just 19.2 percent of GDP during the Clinton presidency and bottomed out at just 17.6 percent, the lowest level since 1966.