In America, in 2015, large swaths of people with wildly differing political ideologies—and, in some cases, wildly differing factual and analytical premises—are converging on a series of assumptions they didn’t always share. The list is long, but it includes the following, timely opinions: that the drug war is a moral and practical failure; that three-strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and myriad other aspects of our criminal justice system are flawed, racially biased, and in desperate need of reform; that the loosening of certain financial regulations in recent decades was disastrous; that the Iraq war never should have happened.

The political establishment hasn’t caught up to all of these consensuses, or emerging consensuses, but in most cases the public has, and in each instance the public has outpaced its elected officials. And when you view the aforementioned left-right convergence in light of federal policymaking over the past 20 or 30 years, it reflects poorly on our country’s most recent political leaders. Or at the very least, it suggests those political leaders made a number of very consequential decisions while they were in power without thinking past near-term politics. You might believe these errors stem from the inherent difficulties of governing, or from systemic institutional failures, or a mix of both. But the phenomenon is indisputable, and a reckoning with the causes is now inevitable.

Why? Because these issues have moved to the foreground of the country’s political imagination just as the most recent president’s brother and his predecessor’s wife are running for president. In the absence of the Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush candidacies, a new paradigm could prevail without a great deal of bipartisan introspection. Instead, this election will force referenda on the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies. The coming Democratic and Republican primaries will to a great extent turn on how adeptly and convincingly Jeb and Hillary can explain away or atone for the country’s biggest public policy failures in recent memory. Were these mistakes? Were they rational decisions that simply didn’t withstand tests of time or have grown obsolete? Or, despite all appearances, is the jury still out?

From an elevated vantage point, the retrospective politics of the 2016 campaign should be easier for Hillary Clinton than for Jeb Bush to navigate. Whatever particular mistakes her husband made in office, the public generally remembers Bill Clinton’s presidency fondly, as a time of relative peace and economic growth. He left office popular and has grown more so ever since.

George W. Bush’s presidency, by contrast, is widely and correctly understood as a travesty—marred by debt-financed social policy, intelligence failures, the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history, grand-scale deception, a gruesome, losing war of aggression— which culminated in the country’s worst economic crisis in nearly a century. He became historically unpopular and has only returned to parity, or near-parity, by dint of the afterglow that tends to accrete around presidents after they leave political office.