John Taylor: So Nixon and Clinton are to be lumped together?

In January Sen. Obama was ridiculed by Sen. Clinton for saying that Ronald Reagan had a transformational effect on America. Nixonites and Clintonistas have a beef as well. The full Obama quote, as repeated by William Safire:

Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.

While Obama puts RN and Clinton in the same nontransformative boat, journalist Tom Wolfe doesn’t. Below is from Robert Stacy McCain’s article, “A Writer in Full,” in the March 2008 “American Spectator,” covering Wolfe’s talk at the magazine’s 40th anniversary gala:

[The Lewinsky affair, Wolfe] says, is practically the only thing anyone will remember about Clinton’s eight-year Presidency, whereas despite the stain of Watergate, “Nixon is remembered for certain shrewd policy maneuvers,” including his historic diplomacy with China and successfully disengaging the United States military from Vietnam. Even before negotiating U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, however, Nixon “ended the anti-war movement in five minutes,” Wolfe notes. Nixon “called off the draft, and that was the end of the anti-war movement,” Wolfe says, adding that this illustrates that the hippie protestors of the sixties were actually more concerned with avoiding military service than with anything so noble as “peace.” Compared to the Nixon legacy, Wolfe then asks, what achievement will mark Bill Clinton’s place in history, other than the Lewinsky scandal?