The savvy Scott Helman has a smart piece in today’s Globe:

With the economy in crisis and Election Day in sight, Obama can’t say enough about the Clinton epoch - the job growth, the budget surpluses, the broad prosperity - and often lauds the former president’s economic stewardship as a model.

"We need to do what we did in the 1990s and create millions of new jobs and not lose them," he told 6,000 people in Abington, outside Philadelphia, last week. "We need to do what we did in the 1990s and make sure people’s incomes are going up and not down. We need to do what a guy named Bill Clinton did in the 1990s and put people first again."

The crowd roared.

Obama’s characterization of Clinton’s presidency is markedly different than the one he offered during the Democratic primaries, when he was running against Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Clinton.

Obama argued that, despite the successes, Bill Clinton let some of the country’s biggest problems fester while in the White House. The implication - that his two terms had not been indisputably positive for American families - was one the former president deeply resented.

It was always an awkward argument to make, but one Obama felt he had to: After all, Hillary Clinton was running in part to revive her husband’s economic legacy, which many Democrats recall fondly. Obama’s fully embracing the 1990s would have been tantamount to embracing his opponent.

Now, Obama is offering a Clinton restoration to create a foil for what he calls the failed economic philosophies of President Bush and Obama’s presidential rival, John McCain. "America can’t take four more years of John McCain’s George Bush policies," he said yesterday in Dayton, Ohio.