Opinion: I’m proud to have so much to be humble about
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In today’s Financial Times, the wonderfully named Clive Crook acknowledges Hillary Clinton’s edge over Barack Obama in political experience. He just wonders whether it’s the kind of experience anybody should be bragging about:
Hillary Clinton, manager extraordinaire? It bears repeating that there is a single point of data to test this claim: her supervision of the healthcare task force set up by her husband during his first term. Opinions differ even now about that exercise – about whether Mrs Clinton was responsible for one of the most celebrated domestic-policy train wrecks in recent American history, a scapegoat for her husband’s misjudgments, or the hapless victim of organised special interests. What is undisputed is that the whole affair was an epic of hubris and mismanagement. Yes, that was a regrettable episode, she now says – but she is the stronger for it, having learned from her mistakes. That is good to know, but since when was failure, unredeemed by subsequent success, a qualification for the top job? By all accounts, Mrs Clinton has been a fine senator, as has Mr Obama for a shorter time, but this is not an executive role. It is good political experience, to be sure, but (unlike having been the successful governor of a big state, for instance) it tells you little about fitness to manage, and less about fitness to be president.