A lot of the Democrats we know – and some we like – look at the Bush administration with horror. Their skin crawls because of what they regard as the president’s constant expressions of religious piety, his effort to roll back important government regulations, his callousness to the poor, his promotion of the flight of American jobs to countries with labor and environmental standards that are lower than America’s, his resorts to military solutions instead of diplomatic ones. So the release of President Clinton’s memoir, “My Life,” is well-timed to remind the American electorate that, in some respects at least, it was William Jefferson Clinton who put America on the course that George W. Bush has stayed. This point struck us looking at a spread of photos in the book. One pictures Mr. Clinton and Vice President Gore, heads bowed, “praying at our weekly lunch.” Another shows Mr. Clinton with Presidents Carter, Ford, and George H.W. Bush “on the eve of the announcement of the campaign for NAFTA.” And a third shows Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore before stacked binders of paper, “announcing the elimination of forklifts of government regulations, part of our reinventing government initiative.”

Mr. Clinton and his liberal admirers would probably deny it, as would Mr. Clinton’s harshest conservative critics, but in several senses, President Bush is Mr. Clinton’s true heir. Secular liberals are constantly complaining of the way that Mr. Bush wears his faith on his sleeve. But even a cursory flip through the Clinton memoir shows Mr. Clinton as a deeply religious man. He recounts his 1955 baptism. He tells of secretly mailing part of his allowance to the Reverend Billy Graham. He writes of “one of my favorite scriptural passages, from the eleventh chapter of Hebrews. It begins, ‘Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.'” And he concludes the book by quoting Saint Paul extolling the virtues of “faith, hope, and love.”

Mr. Bush’s efforts to make environmental and labor regulations less onerous have earned him the derision of the liberal interest groups. But Mr. Clinton writes, “eventually we would scrap 16,000 pages of federal regulations with no harm to the public.” Mr. Bush’s use of force in Afghanistan and Iraq have earned him the contempt of the hard left. But Mr. Clinton’s memoir recounts his own decisions to use force in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and in Iraq. Mr. Bush is accused of governing for the rich and of indifference to the plight of the poor. Mr. Clinton writes in his memoir that he signed the welfare reform legislation over the objections of advocacy groups for the poor. It was, he writes, “one of the most important decisions of my presidency.”

Mr. Bush, the New York Times reported breathlessly on Page 1 earlier this month, “is seeking to enlist thousands of religious congregations around the country in distributing campaign information and registering voters.” The Times article included a denunciation of Mr. Bush by a Kerry campaign aide who said, “We will never court religious voters in a way that would jeopardize the sanctity of their very houses of worship.”

Mr. Clinton recounts a 1992 New York Democratic primary in which, as part of his campaign, black ministers in Arkansas “called counterparts in New York to ask for pulpit time for our people on the Sunday before the election.” One Clinton operative from Arkansas “spoke in five churches that Sunday,” according to Mr. Clinton’s book. Messrs. Bush and Clinton were both educated at Yale. They both have Southern accents and are derided in some quarters as rednecks. They are both accused by their detractors of being liars. They both were of the generation eligible to serve in Vietnam, but neither man went. To be sure, the two politicians have their important differences. Mr. Clinton tried and mostly failed to negotiate peace with the Middle Eastern dictators, while Mr. Bush has placed a greater emphasis on regime change, democracy, and freedom in the Arab world. Mr. Clinton’s growth-spurring cut in the capital gains tax was enacted only after the Republicans, led by Speaker Gingrich, took control of Congress.

We wouldn’t want to make too much of all this. Left to his own devices and with a Democratic Congress, Mr. Clinton raised taxes. Not so Mr. Bush, whose tax cut was his own initiative. It is hard to imagine Mr. Bush having an affair with a White House intern. But we wouldn’t want to make too little of all this either. The liberal elites love to chide Mr. Bush for supposedly operating on the fringes. But an analysis can be made that he has been operating on much of the centrist ground Mr. Clinton hoed. It was Mr. Gore and, now, Mr. Kerry who have steered for the left fringe. Were some of Mr. Bush’s most bitter critics to make an honest, open-minded study of Mr. Clinton’s memoir, we’d wager that the perspective would take some of the venom out of the Bush-hatred.