THE FIFTH CLINTON TERM:

GEORGE W. CLINTON: FOR 16 YEARS, IT'S BEEN THE SAME THING (KYLE SMITH, January 18, 2009, NY Post)

A thought experiment. Suppose tomorrow were the last full day of the Clinton administration. Suppose Dubya was elected in 1992, and people got tired of his party, so the electoral college barely sloshed over to the opposite side in 2000.

The idea is not that bizarre. Both presidents left office a few months after a stock market implosion. Both left their successors to deal with a recession. (Though only one of them was blamed for these things.) Both left with Iraq looking dangerous.

Clinton would have loved. Loved. Loved. To have been president during a crisis like 9/11. He would have called in the most celebrated strategists for urgent all-nighters, let it leak out to the press that he was reading up on Kennedy and Cuba if not Churchill and Chamberlain.

Bush would have been de-freaking-lighted to have presided over the Nothing Years. (Has there ever been a period so uneventful as the 1990s? The only rival lately is the Eisenhower administration - a time when little kids practiced hiding under their desks in case of nuclear annihilation.) He would have been spotted on the golf course every other week, joking about his divots.

Bush, if he'd been elected in 1992 (replacing that feckless dunce, President Dukakis), wouldn't have opened the military to gays, so we as a nation would not have spent half a year discussing the fate of the 45 gay Americans interested in serving in uniform. Bush wouldn't have raised taxes (after Dukakis, he probably would have had to lower them).

Everything else (barring the celebrated Clinton character flaws that, while amusing, didn't do a lot to change your life or mine) would have been about the same.