Hillary the Unbold

When Bill Richardson starts looking good to you, you know the Democratic Party field is weak. In this week’s London Review of Books, Linda Colley helps to explain why:

[Hillary] can still appear confined within some of the radical priorities of the later 20^th century, and unable or unwilling to generate a comprehensive and compelling vision of America and of the world’s present and future. But it is Al Gore who has hammered out an informed and powerful position on the environment, energy conservation and global warming. She has only belatedly borrowed some of his language and ideas. And it has been John Edwards who has been steering the Democratic Party firmly back form the direction of economics. He, not Hillary, has been the most eager to address the gulf between America’s rich and poor. A one-time Democratic senator’s critique of Hillary’s initial hard-line support of the Iraq war therefore seems more broadly applicable. She puts herself, he argued “in the position of looking backward, not forward, of caving to conventional wisdom instead of moving in the direction of…new ideas, being bold.”

—Linday Colley, “The Clinton Succession”, LRB 5, 16 Ag 2007