Voices of experience

It is Hillary Rodham Clinton's misfortune to have spent a long and honorable career building up the experience that would qualify her to be a serious candidate for president of the United States -- only to come to the apex of that career just as the nation decided that experience isn't everything. She squeaked out a victory on Tuesday, but across the wintry plains of Iowa and the unseasonably mild hills of New Hampshire, large numbers of voters in the past five days have affirmed that they are looking forward, not back, and thus swarming to Barack Obama's thoughtful, eloquent expression of hope and away from Clinton's call of experience and readiness.

January 9, 2008