I think it's wrong to characterize Clinton as using welfare reform only for political gain. He did allow the Democratic Congress to push him too far to the left on the issue and water it down too much, and then stood his ground when he thought the Republican Congress was going too far to the right and cutting too much. The resulting compromise was about perfect in my opinion. In the end I think he got what he wanted all along.
Obviously neither of us can read Clinton's mind to know his true intentions, but seeing as that he campaigned on welfare reform and then ended up signing it, I personally give him the benefit of the doubt. Others can draw their own conclusions.
It's also wrong to say that Clinton didn't do much in his time in office. On the contrary, he did a lot in his first two years, and much of it was pretty sensible; a combination of spending cuts and tax increases on the wealthy only to reduce the deficit; and a crime bill that was a compromise in terms of adopting conservative positions such as increasing the number of police officers and expanding the death penalty with more liberal, but yet still pretty sensible gun control restrictions. The assault weapons ban was mostly symbolic, true, but since it was, it was equally silly for Republicans to despise it as much as they did; it goes both ways there. The Brady Bill, however, was a pretty common sense piece of legislation.
On health care reform, Clinton did a horrible job of explaining his plan and allowed it to be caricatured into something it wasn't.
Clinton's own welfare reform proposals in 1993-94 were too far to the left, and they had a very low priority. It was clear that he wasn't serious about the issue.
And the welfare reform bill that he signed was WAY to the right of what he originally wanted. If it had been what he originally wanted, he would have signed it gladly, not reluctantly. There's no need to agonize when you get something that you want.
As far as health care goes, he seriously damaged that the day he appointed Evita to head it. She was so brittle and clearly had the president under her thumb, and froze out anybody who raised any concerns about her plan. People were afraid to raise objections, and the president was afraid to confront her about anything. Among other things, her plan would have imposed quotas based on race and gender determining who could be admitted to medical schools. That alone would be reason enough to oppose her plan, not to mention the fact that she made it a criminal offense for anybody to pay a doctor for services outside of the umbrella that she proposed. This is the equivalent of saying that parents aren't allowed to send their kids to anything but public school, and that utilizing private schools is illegal. It is completely un-American.
You implicitly admit he didn't do much as president when you say he did a lot in his first two years. What about the last six? The reality is that much of what he really wanted to do wouldn't have been that popular, and doing nothing is how he maintained his popularity, especially when there didn't appear to be that many pressing problems. But during those years, North Korea was developing nuclear weapons, about which Clinton did worse than nothing, sending arch-appeaser Jimmy Carter over there to make a deal that allowed them to receive benefits from us, while he looked the other way at their blatant violations of the agreement. The terrorist threat was growing, and the only time Clinton took any action was when he needed to distract attention from his perjury issues. He passed up, on legalistic grounds, opportunities to capture leading terrorists. Even our dependence on foreign oil, and old story, grew tremendously during the Clinton years (and I agree nominally with the Democrats more than the Republicans in pointing out the danger of this).
True, the country didn't care about these issues at the time, but it's a leader's responsibility to alert people to realities that they don't necessarily want to face. This is the great achilles heel of democracy - that voters will turn away from leaders who make them face unpleasant realities, and reward those who sweep the issues under the rug, to return as more acute crises later. In the case of the Clinton presidency, the latter is what occurred.
