Obama has been a far more effective President than Clinton ever was. So, Obama.
...why do you think so?
I've been pleasantly surprised at his skill at working with Congress in his first two years, and during the lame duck session. He got a lot more legislation through Congress than Clinton, whose health care initiative never even made it out of committee. If he were to win reelection I have little doubt he'd be able to go back and hammer out a deal with Boehner to cut the structural deficit, likely based around the deal they were close to in 2011.
I think Clinton was a center-right president though. I'm assuming most of the bills Obama got out of congress were during the Democratic majorities in Congress 09-11; Clinton probably didn't want to sign a lot of them, and didn't really lead from the front lines until post-94.
Clinton's health care plan was to the left of Obama's; remember, Obama's health care plan is what conservatives proposed as
the alternative to the Clinton plan in 1993. And he definitely put his personal political capital on the line for it.
Clinton's mistake was that he and Hillary put together the plan in secret in a highly centralized White House committee and then tried to ram it through Congress without sufficiently consulting was Congress was willing to pass. The top-down approach failed. Obama was much smarter about it-- he basically let Congress create the plan and simply endorsed it. Compared to Clinton he was a legislative genius-- the opposite of what I had feared when he came in.
Obama is to the right of Clinton in the other ways too-- he is against Clinton's tax levels, and mostly supports the Bush tax policy.
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