Monday, November 30, 2015

Doug Henwood on Brad DeLong

I often link to Brad DeLong. He is erudite and brilliant but also seems political. Here are some comments by Doug Henwood.
From Doug's wall:
The epigraph to my anti-Hillary book. Neoliberal tool and Clinton administration functionary Brad DeLong, 2003, from a blog post he's now deleted:
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. . . . Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative offcial 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.
From the comments there: But the most amusing thing about this now is that Brad is running away from it. He deleted his blog archives, refused to respond to me about whether he still believes it, and only engages Dan Davies on Twitter about it and not me. Because he probably wants a job.

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