The former president comes to town tonight to rally support for Democrats, many of whom have made Bush's handling of foreign affairs - and, particularly, the threat of war against Iraq - a hot-button issue in the mid-term elections.
But there is hardly an issue with which Bush has had to contend that wasn't mishandled by the last administration.
As Sen. John McCain warned back in 1999, the hallmark of Clintonian foreign policy was "a mystifying uncertainty on how to act in a world where we are the only superpower."
Indeed, said the Arizona Republican, Clinton repeatedly refused to act decisively - choosing instead to "put off resolution of the most difficult problems, often substituting photo-op diplomacy for meaningful action."
When Clinton did act, it reeked of political opportunism. His December 1998 air strikes against Iraq, for example, came one day before the House was to vote on impeachment.
But then, Clinton's policy on Iraq flip-flopped from Day One: Time and again, he drew a line in the sand - but when Saddam crossed that line, Clinton just . . . blinked.
All along, he seemed to be looking for some way to make the Iraqi despot disappear as painlessly as possible. In the end, Clinton gave up on actually enforcing the U.S. policy of containment - while warning Americans not to "overreact" to Saddam's latest provocations.
Similarly, Clinton publicly declared his determination to hunt down those responsible for a succession of murderous terrorist attacks: the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa; the bombing of USS Cole; the bombing of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia.
Yet plans for concrete action were vetoed - by Clinton's Joint Chiefs of Staff, on military grounds, and then by the president himself, for political reasons.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin said: "We certainly were counting on a more active cooperation in combating international terrorism."
Even a top Clinton aide told Time magazine that, when it came to fighting Osama bin Laden, "We didn't do diddly."
In the end, Clinton couldn't even stop the Saudis from stonewalling an FBI probe of the Khobar Towers massacre.
Now Bush finds himself reaping the bitter fruits of the 1994 deal, brokered by Jimmy Carter, in which Clinton pursued a see-no-evil policy toward North Korea - even as his own special adviser, former Defense Secretary William Perry, warned that Pyongyang was continuing to develop nuclear weapons.
That foreign policy of confusion and incoherence has left his successor scrambling to articulate a long-term global strategy while coping with the fallout from Clinton's failures.
But reversing course is a daunting task when the previous skipper has fecklessly steered the ship of state straight into a dangerous typhoon.
