As President Clinton prepares to make his triumphal return to the Democratic National Convention, let’s remind ourselves of one thing:

If what Mitt Romney is proposing worked, George W. Bush would have been the keynote speaker at the Republican Convention.

But the fact is George W. Bush’s policies on taxes and deregulation, his foreign policy advisers and his key strategist all dominate the Republican Party. Still the GOP refused to say his name more than three times at their convention for fear he’d be conjured and appear.

Bill Clinton on the other hand is the most popular politician in America. His policies and success are praised by both sides of the aisle. Even John Sununu a Romney adviser who voted to impeach the ex-president says President Obama is “no Bill Clinton.”

Simply there’s no better way to judge the political parties than by who typifies its policies. One side has Clinton. And the other side has a nightmare everyone is trying to forget.

While the GOP went out of the way to hide this, their platform reveals that what Mitt Romney is selling is exactly what John McCain, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were all selling. “It’s the same exact agenda. Specifically, the Romney agenda for job creation in 2012 is stuff that John McCain wanted to do anyway in 2008,” says Roosevelt Institute fellow Mike Konczal.

It’s the same agenda, mentioned back to back almost in the same order. Bush mentioned No Child Left Behind several times, though I’m not sure if that matches up with the school choice of in Romney’s economic plan for school choice, so I excluded. It’s always time for cutting spending, more oil drilling, free trade, and lower taxes and regulation to fix the economy.

So while Bush isn’t welcome, his ideas are still the GOP’s only ideas. And I imagine that’s something Bill Clinton will point out tonight.

[Image by DonkeyHotey]