As I read the article, Clinton's Plan A was to come in as roaring Leftists, and do the usual leftist crap. Socialized medicine. Tax increases. Environmental crackdowns. Expanding social programs. BTU taxes. The whole socialist wet dream.

There were, broadly speaking, two domestic policy strategies possible for the incoming Clinton administration. The first was a double-or-nothing Social Democracy strategy. Republicans had created a big deficit? Fine. Let solving the deficit problem be the responsibility of some future Republican administration. Keep the deficit constant (or maybe rising a bit) as a share of GDP while pursuing Democratic priorities: restructuring health care so that even Americans who were not comfortably off could afford to go to the doctor, expanding social insurance to provide better benefits and real retraining for workers who had lost their jobs, repairing the large gap in infrastructure, restoring public investment priorities, making sure the $200,000+ a year crowd paid their fair share of taxes, providing real incentive--like a carbon tax--for industry and the economy to rest lightly on the environment.

Anybody want to guess where the economy would have been in 1999 had all this actually been done?

But wait. They decided to go for Plan B:

...Hence Bill Clinton rejected the Social Democracy strategy in favor of the second possibility--call it the "Eisenhower Republican" strategy.

Make economic growth the first priority.

Attempt to get the Federal Reserve to be dovish on interest rates in exchange for seriously reducing the deficit. Take other steps, like trade liberalization, to try to boost growth.

Reform rather than expand the social insurance state so that you can argue that taxpayers are getting good government value for what they are buying.

Hope that these policies will boost the flow of spending into investment, and make the Clinton expansion a high-investment high-productivity growth expansion.

And hope that in 1997 or 2001 a decade of relatively rapid productivity and salary growth coupled with a resolution of the deficit problem would create an expanded set of politically-realizable possibilities.

Translation: Do what a Republican would do. Don't forget welfare reform.

Did you notice that in this entire article, there is not a single proactive thing done by Clinton or Rubin? One major policy enacted other than "leave it alone," how did Rubin create this magic? According to this article, the clever use of "Probabilistic thinking?" What the hell is that supposed to mean? It sounds like he grew the economy by the sheer force of Holding Good Meetings.