People looking back on our era will understand that a massive transformation took place: the building of a fundamentally new technological infrastructure, a change in the nature of capitalism, a shift to a highly integrated global system that will define the 21st century. We are simultaneously crossing many thresholds, described variously as the shift from an analog to a digital world, from an Industrial Age to an Information Age, from the Cold War to some ill-defined post-Cold War geopolitics. However you frame it, Clinton was the midwife to this process. The birth of the 21st century world happened on his watch.

When Clinton was inaugurated, essentially no one but a handful of geeks had even heard of the Internet. The first Mosaic Web browser was just being invented, and the tech obsession of the day was Interactive TV. Remember that?

Today everyone from Montana to Mongolia understands that the Net is the future. No one has to explain anymore that computers actually are productive tools, that all information is going digital, that all people need to be connected. Everybody gets it.

Clinton can't take credit for a technological transformation of that scale, but he and his administration by and large did the right things to help foster it. He got it early on, and mostly took a hands-off approach, allowing companies and industries to rapidly innovate and migrate to common standards by themselves. He stepped in only when everything got stuck, as happened with the revamping of telecommunications law in 1996, or when a situation became outrageously unfair, as when his Justice Department rightly moved to break up Microsoft.

When Clinton took office, the country was still coming off a recession, downsizing was the managerial obsession, growth was anemic, the paltry productivity rate hadn't changed in 20 years. The conventional wisdom was still that the Japanese were going to run the global economy and America was in decline.

Today the U.S. economy is continuing on its largest economic expansion ever –- and the Federal Reserve Bank is doing everything it can to slow the economy down. This is an astounding economy, sustaining historically high 4-percent growth rates, on average, throughout the entire Clinton era. Productivity has shot up to levels not seen since the 1960s, undermining almost all signs of inflation, and even allowing solid wage gains for the first time in a generation. It's a fundamentally different kind of high-tech, high-growth economy, the new economy, and it's here to stay. We are in the middle, if not the beginning, of a Long Boom, a vast global economic expansion that's reminiscent of, but even bigger than, the post-World War II boom.

Clinton is as responsible as any president can be for the state of the economy. And he deserves credit. He made tough choices early on to balance the budget in order to help interest rates come down. He kept moving government away from the 20th century welfare state model, initiating welfare reform. And he appointed top-flight economic people, like Robert Rubin as treasury secretary, who were respected throughout the economy and the world.

When Clinton took office, the politics of this country were defined by scarcity. The 1980s legacy had been to cut taxes, downsize government and then ferociously fight for what money was left. The battle royal was between the Republicans wanting money for the military, and the Democrats wanting money for the surviving social programs. The result was an unsustainable annual deficit of about $300 billion and a massive national debt of more than $2 trillion.

Today governments at all levels, whether national or local, are enjoying fabulous surpluses, essentially at the same tax rates as before. The federal government recently revised its rather conservative estimate that the federal tax surplus will top $3 trillion (yes, trillion) over the next 10 years.

This will be one of Clinton's most enduring legacies. He ushered in the era of a new politics of prosperity. By skillfully operating in the political environment of scarcity, he helped prepare the groundwork for the good times to come.

To do that, he needed to refashion the Democratic Party, which will be seen as another important part of this legacy. Remember how before Clinton everyone talked about the Republican lock on the presidency? How the Democrats could not win in the South or reach out to the new middle class? Clinton obliterated that theory by taking the market orientation of traditional Republicans and fusing it with the social orientation of traditional Democrats.

It's a formula that worked in this country and has been copied all over the world by leaders of other "parties of the people," as opposed to the parties associated with business. So Tony Blair reshaped the new Labour Party. Gerhard Schroeder did the same to the German Social Democrats. They all understand the winning formula now.

When Clinton came into office, the world was still in shock that the Cold War was over. The concept of globalization was just being bandied about. Some Americans were still thumping their chests that we had won the "war" against a two-bit tyrant, who, incidentally, we still left in power in Iraq.

Today there is no doubt that we're well on our way to creating a new highly integrated global economy and need to devise a much more interconnected global system for the 21st century. Everything is going global in a shift that will be seen as a watershed by generations in the future. They'll understand that around the turn of the century, all systems, all institutions started reorienting to this new reality, the norm from that point on.

Clinton understood that trend and did some effective things to start laying the foundations for the looming transition. He dragged his party, kicking and screaming, to support opening up the flow of trade, starting with the fight for the North American Free Trade Agreement, and ending with getting China accepted into the World Trade Organization (almost). He started America down a path toward a more multilateral foreign policy. He appropriately scaled back the military, allowing former enemies and even allies to breathe easier. And he pushed for reform and a higher profile for the existing global institutions like the International Monetary Fund.

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