It came to power riding a center-left push against the messes of the Bush administration. Clinton was careful to distance himself from the crazies with a series of high-profile rebuffs of the worst among them.
The hope was to advertise as a moderate but govern slightly to the left.
But then the polls and the markets started to speak, and loudly. The Clinton White House was highly sensitive to them. The president himself was said to have cursed the bond market more than once, demanding to know who precisely was running this country, himself or bond traders?
Nonetheless, the administration responded to all inputs. The federal budget did not expand dramatically. Indeed the budget was temporarily balanced. And then welfare itself was reformed to cut it out with the generous benefits for sheer laziness that had characterized the welfare state since the 1960s.
An economic boom commenced and these days people look back rather fondly on the whole experience, choosing only to remember the president's dalliance with an intern.
Comment: Though there were a slew of other events under the Clinton White House that may be categorized as downright malevolent:
NATO's bombing of Serbia, the crippling and lethal sanctions of Iraq, back-assward Crime Bills, the list goes on....
Comment: See also: Lockdown pushes Sri Lanka to brink of bankruptcy, situation made worse by foreign debt burden