Such negative impressions are perhaps inevitable given that the first historical take on Clinton has painted him as an enormously talented but deeply flawed politician, lacking backbone and caring more about polls than principles. His presidency is often depicted as a time of missed opportunities.

But the moment has come to reconsider Clinton’s legacy. And with a Democratic Party in search of a vision for the future, Clinton’s ability to push a progressive agenda while appealing to moderate voters should prove instructive.

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Clinton rescued a desperate Democratic Party in 1992. With the exception of Jimmy Carter’s single term, Republicans had controlled the presidency since 1968. The GOP seemed to have a lock on the electoral college as white voters in the Northeast, Midwest and South abandoned the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt to become Reagan Republicans — a journey Reagan himself made. Clinton’s hopeful message of inclusion, however, attracted traditional Democrats while neutralizing Republican appeals to alienated white voters on social issues.

By his own admission, Clinton stumbled in his first months in office. He hired staff inexperienced in the ways of Washington and ran a disorganized White House.

But he also faced substantial institutional obstacles — something commonly left out of the story of Clinton’s presidency. He won with only 43 percent of the vote in a three-way race. He presided over a Democratic Party that felt little loyalty toward him because of this weak showing and had yet to overcome the deep ideological divisions between New Deal liberals and New Democrats. Throughout the previous decade, liberals argued that the party needed to reassemble the old class-based New Deal coalition by embracing traditional Keynesian economics, while New Democrats — Clinton’s wing of the party — contended that shifting political and economic realities required the party to adopt market-based ideas that would appeal to more moderate suburban voters. That debate was still raging when Clinton took the oath of office in January 1993.

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Furthermore, Clinton confronted a unified Republican Party that was determined to sabotage his agenda. Since passage of the civil rights legislation Lyndon B. Johnson had helped usher in during the 1960s, Democratic control of Dixie had weakened as Republicans successfully used race and fear of crime to attract white Southerners to their side. By the 1990s, congressional conservatives such as Newt Gingrich had gained more attention and power in the GOP by ruthlessly attacking the “old guard” in both parties. They saw politics as warfare and intended to stop Clinton’s program by any means necessary.

Finally, Clinton was the first president to face a gossipy media that needed to satisfy the appetite of a 24-hour news cycle, turning minor incidents — from a presidential haircut to the firing of employees in the White House Travel Office — into major scandals. Each scoop seemed to prove that Clinton was both out of touch and indecisive. His slow and not-always-forthcoming responses to stories often exacerbated the problem by convincing reporters that he was hiding something.

The journalists writing the first histories of Clinton’s presidency misjudged it for a key reason. Most maintained a distorted concept of presidential power. They expected great presidents, such as Roosevelt and Johnson, to command the apparatus of government and force Congress to abide by their demands.

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But in an era of divided government and profound polarization, the age of the heroic presidency had passed. The kinds of new government programs liberals dreamed about were nearly impossible to pull off — and certainly not in the bipartisan fashion common in Johnson’s time. Ignoring this new divisive landscape, pundits held Clinton to an unrealistic standard as they dove into the sausage-making of White House policy, highlighting his failures — especially his doomed effort to pass universal health insurance — rather than acknowledging his skill in getting Congress to pass many key parts of his legislative agenda: the Family and Medical Leave Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, AmeriCorps, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, a major crime bill and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

He was also not afraid to make tough decisions that departed from party dogma but were popular with more moderate voters. Confronted with a budget deficit that surpassed previous estimates when he entered office, Clinton reluctantly abandoned his middle-class tax cuts and focused on balancing the budget. This decision proved unpopular with his base and earned little credit from Republicans, but it laid the foundation for the longest economic expansion in history.

The result — Clinton’s robust economic record — is impressive. Economic growth during the Clinton administration averaged 3.8 percent per year, and unemployment fell dramatically between January 1993 and January 2001, dipping to 3.9 percent at the end of Clinton’s term. The prosperity was widely shared. Real median family income increased by $6,338, from $42,612 in 1993 to $48,950 in 1999. Poverty also declined dramatically under Clinton’s tenure, buoyed by record-high surpluses and an expanding labor force.

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And yet, critics scorn Clinton’s willingness to compromise on the budget and welfare reform after Republicans captured control of Congress in 1994 as reflecting a lack of principles. They charge that beginning in 1995, under the Svengali-like influence of adviser Dick Morris, Clinton triangulated, abandoning congressional Democrats and the progressive principles and lofty idealism of the 1992 campaign in favor of compromising with Republicans.

But this claim ignores political reality. Clinton had to grapple with the central dilemma troubling all progressive candidates since the 1960s. As Robert F. Kennedy asked during his 1968 campaign, “How do we seek to change a society that yields so painfully to change?” Like Kennedy, Clinton understood the fundamental paradox of modern politics: Americans still clung to older notions of limited government even as they fiercely defended those government programs that benefited them.

It was his recognition of that push-and-pull that allowed Clinton to outmaneuver Gingrich, win reelection in 1996 and leave office with soaring approval ratings. Unlike Gingrich, who fashioned himself a revolutionary, Clinton understood what the British observer Godfrey Hodgson once wrote: “Americans love change, but they hate to be changed.” Clinton brilliantly straddled that fence by promising popular reforms while preserving the social programs many Americans had come to depend upon.

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Successful initiatives, such as getting Congress to raise the minimum wage and pass the Kennedy-Kassebaum Act, which barred insurance companies from denying health coverage to workers when they switched jobs, may have fallen short of the grand ambitions of his first year in office, but they still pushed the political agenda in a moderately progressive — and nonthreatening — direction, despite a Republican Congress and the failure of universal health care. By abandoning sweeping reforms in areas such as health care, and instead shifting toward pushing gradual changes, Clinton was able to improve life for millions of Americans while avoiding the instinctive backlash triggered by trying to change too much too fast.

There is no excusing the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But given the history of presidential personal behavior, this is not a reason to banish Clinton from the Democrats’ pantheon. It tarnishes Clinton’s personal legacy, but it shouldn’t keep Democrats from embracing his politics.