Who could possibly be “ready from Day 1″ to be president?
The Bush administration entered office prepared to devote their foreign policy energy toward containing China. It didn’t work out that way; as someone who works in China, that’s not altogether a bad thing, but it’s clear they weren’t prepared for the challenges that faced them. Hillary Clinton claims that she is. If she really believes this, it’s a mark of pretty amazing hubris. So, hopefully, it’s a campaign claim.
But something that makes me think she might really believe this comes from an old description by an economist who impresses me as being of sober judgment, Brad DeLong at Berkeley. He was part of her health care task for in the 1990s, and wrote this:
My two cents’ worth—and I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994—is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn’t smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation’s health-care system…
Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch—the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.
I really think that we could have achieved universal health insurance in the early 1990s. Bill Clinton had run on doing this, he had majorities in the Senate and the House, and the leader of the Senate (Bob Dole) was sympathetic. In the end, though, they spent more than a year toiling in secret and produced something that was bizarrely complicated and appealed to know one. It was presented as a fait accompli to the Senators and Congressmen, and they were happy to reject it when it became unpopular.
Looking at what I can see of how she’s built and run her campaign, particularly this article, does nothing to convince me that she learned very much from that experience.
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