Brad DeLong on Hillary Clinton as President

Brad DeLong on Hillary Clinton as President
Brad DeLong served on Hillary Clinton's Health Care Task Force. He recalls his experience and give his reasons why she should never be anywhere near the White House ever again.

Oh Hell! Here's the whole thing. I won't tell you to read evey word. You won't be able to stop anyway.

Time to Pound My Head Against the Wall Once Again
The Economist's Lexington correpondent devotes a full page to Hillary Rodham Clinton (with a time out for slams at Sidney Blumenthal for being a "brown-noser" and Paul Krugman for being "shrill"):
... wronged woman... staggering revelations... Clintonia... that bitchy, chaotic house party.... Since September 11th, the United States has had more important things to think about.... Mrs Clinton's past... future... an incredibly potent force... a heroine... a hate-figure... the most likely next Democratic president... "Draft Hillary"... conservative... capacity to elicit frenzied support from her core constituency... money... volunteers... Mrs Clinton's credibility with the left has also allowed her to move further to the centre... she does not have to buy the left's support... self-discipline... Senate campaign in 2000... impressively tank-like... broadening her experience... constituency work... Democratic givers... successful senator from a large and rich state... name recognition... support of many women... embodies the Democratic America that won the popular vote in 2000....
Read the column--it's a long column. Reflect upon several facts. First, almost all of the column is "inside political baseball" of little use to anyone who is not a serious political junkie. Second, "Lexington" doesn't like Hillary Rodham Clinton or Bill Clinton or Paul Krugman or Sid Blumenthal--but doesn't bother to say why. Third, there is nothing in the column to give the reader any information about whether Hillary Rodham Clinton would make a good president, or about whether "Lexington" thinks Hillary Rodham Clinton would make a good president. Is there anything else that readers--most of whom are Americans, most of whom vote--more need to learn than whether Hillary Rodham Clinton would make a good president? No, there isn't. So why does "Lexington" spend so much time on insider political baseball and trying to settel scores? Why doesn't he do something useful with his space--like tell us whether he thinks Hillary Rodham Clinton would make a better president than George W. Bush (almost surely) or would make a good president (almost surely not)?
We really do need a better press corps. We need one very badly. "Lexington" spends more time watching Hillary Rodham Clinton than almost every single one of his readers: almost all of his readers would value--and badly need to know--his judgment about whether she would make a good president. But this is the one thing "Lexington" does not talk about.
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.