Ready On Day One?

In an essay posted today on The Huffington Post, Paul Loeb considers the increasingly common reports of mismanagement and incompetence in the Clinton campaign. He speculates on what this might imply about Hillary's readiness to be president. Some excerpts:

I wonder whether she specifically surrounds herself with people who are so intimidated they can't even stand up and disagree with her, or tell her bad news. Personal loyalty is fine, but we've had plenty of that in the current administration, with disastrous results. ... [Recent events] suggest either that Clinton's built a team that is sharply lacking in basic skills, like high school math, or that she has a character that makes people afraid to challenge her. ...

Hillary has a consistent pattern of refusing to admit mistakes. Had she flat out admitted her Iraq war vote was wrong, she might well now be the presumptive nominee, but she chose instead to evade its implications through an endless succession of rationalizations and technicalities. She did the same thing with her vote on a regressive bankruptcy bill, which she now claims didn't matter since the bill ended up not passing. And she's doing the same thing with NAFTA. Bill Clinton staked much of his political capital in making it the centerpiece of his first term achievements, in the process creating so much anger and backlash among labor and environmental activists that many stayed home and helped the Gingrich Republicans sweep to their 1994 upset victory. Now, Hillary is saying, she'd always privately argued against it, so bears no responsibility for its hollowing out of America's industrial base.

So I worry that if she does get in, we're going to end up with one more president who lives in an insular bubble of yes-men — whatever their gender. I worry about the competence question — raised first by Clinton's squandering of her massive lead, and underscored just today by a report that her quintessentially professional campaign failed to file enough delegates in the critical state of Pennsylvania to actually take full advantage of the votes they could gain. Successful campaigns don't always correlate with successful presidencies, but if you're running on the basis of experience, yet end up in such perpetual melt-down, it's not a good sign.