Is the scene set for a replay of Clinton and the 90s?

The undertakers of Bill Clinton's political doom showed up in Little Rock, Ark., in 1992 for a meeting with the president-elect two months before his inauguration. They were the leaders of the Democratic Congress, and they might as well have been draped in black crepe.

"You can trust us," House Speaker Tom Foley told Clinton, in an assurance as false as it was sincere. "We all want to make this administration succeed."

Two years later, Clinton stood among smoldering political ruins. Democrats had lost both houses of Congress. A Republican upstart had defeated Tom Foley. In trusting the Democratic leadership in Congress, Clinton had nearly destroyed his presidency.

He learned a bitter lesson in the perils of trying to govern a center-right country in league with a left-wing Congress. It's not an accident that the most sustained period of political success for any of the last three Democratic presidents, outside of their initial honeymoons, came after Clinton lost Congress. Only then was he forced to govern from the center.