Bernie Sanders takes
the lead in the Granite State;
Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has rocketed past
longtime front-runner Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, a stunning turn
in a race once considered a lock for the former secretary of state, a
new Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald poll shows.
Sanders
leads Clinton 44-37 percent among likely Democratic primary voters, the
first time the heavily favored Clinton has trailed in the 2016 primary
campaign....
Which reminds us of when we long ago asked a man (about experiencing Hillary) who
had worked side by side with her in the first Clinton Administration, as a deputy Sec'y in the Treasury. Berkeley economist Brad DeLong was, back then, not coy;
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.
Those were the good old day on
Semi-Daily Journal over a decade ago.
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