Anyway, here’s DeLong’s view of Clinton, circa 2003:
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.
Hotness. White-hot hotness.
Now, in fairness to DeLong, he has since revised this opinion. And by revised, I mean totally and completely reversed it. As in: He jumped out in the front of the parade and “endorsed”—his word—Clinton for president in April 2015.
How could he endorse Clinton without even knowing who her likely Democratic opponents would be or her eventual Republican challenger? It’s a mystery that surely has nothing to do with rote partisanship. But whatever the case, his 2003 appraisal of Clinton still seems remarkably on point and persuasive—whatever his current opinions.
