“One of the leading television commentators on one of our liberal cable channels said I was the best Republican president the country ever produced, which would come [as] quite a surprise to the Republicans, half of whom still think I’m a closet communist,” Clinton said during an appearance with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia…

“We had 100 times as many people move out of poverty during those eight years [I was president] than the previous 12 years because we had an earned income tax credit, not because we had another traditional anti-poverty program hiring people,” he said…

“What gave birth to the Third Way in America was that the Democrats kept getting beat because people saw us as the party of big government, and our own political base very often was more concerned with means than ends,” he said. “I think the people on the right that say that, ‘government is the enemy, we don’t need it,’ are wrong, particularly in this economic time. And I think people on the left that say, ‘the only way to deliver services or solve problems is with a bigger state,’ are not always right and are more often wrong than not.”