Speaking at Georgetown University in October of 1991, shortly after he announced that he would be pursuing the presidency, Bill Clinton put forward what he called “A New Covenant,” an agenda that proposed an alternative to both “small government” conservatism and “big government” liberalism.

He spoke of a “third way to approach the American family,” one that would do away, once and for all, with “the old big-government notion that there is a program for every social problem.” Most famously, Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it.”

While these proposals were nominally centrist, in practice they relied on right-wing rhetoric that decried “dependency” and lauded “personal responsibility.”