It's been a very strange week for Gov. Howard Dean. It was supposed to be the week in which he repositioned himself as a "centrist" and addressed the light-on-issues nature of his campaign with two big speeches on foreign and domestic policy. Instead, as DLC President Bruce Reed told The New York Times: "One day Dean says Americans are no better off with Saddam out of power; now he seems to be saying Democrats are better off with Bill Clinton out of power."

The latter utterance was at the heart of Gov. Dean's domestic policy address in New Hampshire yesterday. As with the earlier statement about the relative insignificance of Saddam's capture, the disrespecting of the Clinton legacy wasn't some sort of ad lib to reporters. In fact, it was in the key section of his prepared text.

"Some Democrats have accepted the Republican notion that the Social Contract cannot be preserved, let alone made stronger.

"While Bill Clinton said that the era of big government is over, I believe we must enter a new era for the Democratic party -- not one where we join Republicans and aim simply to limit the damage they inflict on working families.

"I reject the notion that damage control must be our credo."

It's never been a secret that some (though hardly all) people in the left wing of the Democratic Party think this way about the Clinton administration and its accomplishments, believing that Clinton accepted the basic premises of conservatism and simply made their implementation a little slower and a little less harsh. And it's also no secret that Gov. Dean has spent much of his campaign harshly attacking Democratic centrists for not making reflexive, unthinking, 100 percent opposition to George W. Bush's policies their only guiding principle. This speech pulls together these two strands of self-delusion, and appears to establish Gov. Dean as the candidate who wants to take the Democratic Party not forward to some exciting project of revitalization, but backwards to its pre-Clinton posture.

But Dean's speech definitely gives us a new way of looking at the Clinton years.

22 million new jobs -- damage control!

Trillion dollar budget surpluses. The first real gains in middle-class income in three decades. Welfare rolls cut in half as poverty rates declined. Eight straight years of lower violent crime rates. The lowest recorded unemployment rates for minorities in history. The highest homeownership rates in history. The smallest federal bureaucracy since the Kennedy administration. Millions of innovative new small businesses, many owned by women and minorities.

This is "damage control?"

If that's what the Clinton record represents, then count us as vastly preferring -- yea, praying for -- a lot more "damage control" in the future. What Gov. Dean seems to miss entirely is that President Clinton's accomplishments were not based on some sort of easy accommodation with Republicans, but on a modernization of the progressive political tradition to adjust to new times and to address unnecessary Democratic weaknesses that were feeding a conservative upsurge -- an upsurge that would have totally, not just partially, dominated the American political system in the 1990s had Bill Clinton not come along.

Believe it or not, Gov. Dean made a second statement yesterday that reflected his outrageous habit of lumping centrist Democrats and conservative Republicans together, while compounding his earlier unfortunate remarks about Saddam: "The capture of one bad man does not mean that this president and the Washington Democrats [Deanie code for everybody in the party other than the Doctor and his supporters] can declare victory in the war on terror." Who's "declaring victory in the war on terror?" And can Gov. Dean really not tell the difference between the foreign policy views of other Democrats, and those of the Bush administration?

Maybe not, since he seems to have trouble distinguishing the "damage control" of the Clinton years with the dismal record of George W. Bush. If Gov. Dean's New Social Contract can promise a fraction of Bill Clinton's progressive accomplishments, especially for the unprivileged citizens Democrats are supposed to care about most, then he'd better start proving it, instead of undermining the best evidence Democrats have for their ability to govern America far better than Bush.