Summarizing the 2008 Primaries
By IB in comments is almost entirely correct:
This whole thread is reminding me why, in 2008, I so preferred Obama to Clinton during the primary campaign. The two candidates were nearly identical on the issues. But Obama seemed to hire excellent people and make smart decisions. Clinton’s primary campaign was run by idiots and, consequently, full of mistakes. And the poor hires she made capped a career of bad decision making, from mishandling the politics of healthcare reform in 1993 to cozying up to The Family, from generally idiotic hawkery (capped, but by no means limited to, the Iraq War vote) to the idiotic, ex post facto special pleading that extended the 2008 primary campaign far longer than it should have gone (thanks, JosephW, for reminding us what this sounded like upthread).
As readers of this blog’s comment threads know, I’m far from an unalloyed Obama fan. But I have never, for a moment, doubted that Clinton would have been a less effective president. Her general political orientation is very similar to Obama’s. But her political skills and judgment are clearly not as good.
Clinton was a surprisingly good Secretary of State. But the difference having a cabinet post in someone else’s administration and being president involves precisely the kind of decision making that Clinton seems worst at.
In 2008, Clinton benefited from the very reasonable sense that it’s time that we had a female President. Eight years later, this sentiment should be even stronger. My hope is that some other serious, female Democratic candidates emerge, so that the feeling that it’s time for woman to win the White House doesn’t automatically translate into primary votes for Clinton.
My one quibble is that I don’t really have any issue with Clinton staying in the campaign until the bitter end, which was an overblown issue, although certainly the attempts to retroactively count the Michigan and Florida straw polls was outrageous and having the campaign hacks who utterly botched everything engage in a months-long campaign of insulting people’s intelligence pathetic. But otherwise this is right.