Tilting at windmills.

• Author: Waldman, Steven

Four regulations and a funeral

A few years ago, my wife became a funeral director. She has a special emphasis on "back to basics" funerals: simple caskets, avoiding embalming if possible, woodland burial, personal attention from the funeral director. She'd like to set up her own small funeral establishment some day, but she discovered a roadblock. New York State requires that funeral homes have embalming rooms and chapels. That means you have to have an enormous amount of start-up capital to launch a new enterprise.

This reminded me of one of the greatest myths of modern politics and policy: that the fight over regulation is usually between lefty public interest groups and free-market-oriented conservatives. On the state level, regulation is often imposed by a set of businesses to keep out newcomers.

Normally I'm against forest fires but ...

Driving along a highway in New York State, I came across a sign for Donald J. Trump State Park. How is this possible???

Obama and Clinton complete each other

The Game of Thrones fans among us can't help but speculate about the behind-the-scenes relationship between the Clintons and the Obamas. Surely these bitter rivals must be planning how to poison or impale each other. Conservatives, meanwhile, enjoy stoking a conflict, arguing that Obama has abandoned the centrism of good-ole Clinton in favor of 1970s liberalism. "President Obama has now effectively undone everything that Clinton and the New Democrats did in the 1980s and '90s," Michael Gerson wrote.

In fact, the Obama and Clinton presidencies complement, complete, and reinforce each other. To oversimplify, Clinton provided the policy and ideological original thinking; Obama's the one who got the policies over the goal line.

Obama has not often been a policy innovator. Most of his big proposals were designed in the Clinton administration or by Clintonites. Obamacare was close to what Hillary proposed in 2008 and to the right of what the Clintons proposed in the 1990s. His first big environmental push was a centrist, market-oriented cap-and-trade regime. His stimulus package was almost one-third tax cuts. For all the attention to Obama's slight weakening of the welfare law, the more striking thing is that he has pretty much left welfare reform--the most conservative thing Clinton did--intact.

Many of Obama's key aides--Rahm Emanuel, Jack Lew, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, John Podesta, Larry Summers, Susan Rice, Gene Sperling, Bruce Reed--served in the Clinton administration. That's not including his first secretary of state. It's a testament to how much Clinton changed the Democratic Party that even a conventional progressive like Obama ended up being "New Democrat" on most issues.

Conversely, Obama completed and expanded on the Clinton presidency in key ways. The most obvious is passing health care when Clinton couldn't. That's a big what-Joe-Biden-said. There's more: Clinton started a modest-sized "direct lending" program that allowed college students to borrow straight from the government, bypassing banks; Obama got the banks out entirely, saving taxpayers billions in the process. Clinton proposed raising fuel efficiency standards for cars from 27.5 mph to 40. He failed. Obama has successfully raised them, with a target of 55 mph by 2015. Clinton moved the military from being actively hostile to gays to the milder-but-problematic policy of "don't ask, don't tell"; Obama allowed gays to openly serve.

One can debate the extent to which these achievements happened because of Obama's skills or his timing. I think his long view, maturity, and pitch-perfect sense of when to take the big risk (e.g., jamming through Obamacare after the Scott Brown election; invading Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden) were major factors.

But the bottom line is an impressive list of large policy accomplishments. Clinton's legacy wasn't undone by Obama; it was enlarged. We tend to think of Clinton as the canny pol and Obama as the visionary, but the truth is closer to the opposite. Clinton was the philosopher who reimagined progressivism in the modern era; Obama is the guy who made it happen. Clinton was the JFK; Obama the LBJ.

I don't expect Bill or Hillary to get misty-eyed and declare, "You complete me!" But the Clintons and the Obamas have been good for each other.

What Obama and Taft should have in common

If Hillary Clinton wins, Obama should be her first Supreme Court appointment. It'd be good for her, and very good for progressives.

Would he want it? It's possible he'd view it as too confining, but it may be the only job a former president can get that won't seem like a step down.

Speak softly and carry a venti latte

There were many amazing moments in the Ken Burns series about the Roosevelts that ran last year. But none was as significant as this: Teddy Roosevelt drank a gallon of coffee a day. This changes everything. All this time I thought TR had a preternatural zest for life. Now we must wonder if the bursts of bully-bully-bullyness were just caffeine spasms.

Be careful in the echo chamber

In the 1980s, we bemoaned that the rise of talk radio was polarizing. The types of shows that succeeded pushed outrage and extremism, usually on the right. When cable TV exploded, we thought, Oh, good, with hundreds of channels, we'll have a real diversity of voices...