Megan McArdle is a dunce. Imagine, if you will, that Hillary Clinton had become president in 2009 instead of Barack Obama. Now imagine that she tried to implement the health care plan she ran on. She would have been dependent on the exact same Congress with the exact same committee chairs who had the exact same ideas about what should and shouldn’t be in the bill. Now, imagine that her chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had recommended that she drop the effort to pass the bill because it was too politically fraught. Would Hillary have countenanced losing on health care for a second time when she still had a path to victory?
Did anything she did on the campaign trail in 2008 indicate that she’s the kind of woman who folds her tent and gives up when the odds look stacked against her?
There is no question in my mind that Hillary Clinton would done exactly what President Obama did because she would have seen failure on health care as unthinkable so long as it could be avoided.
Their presidencies would have been much different from each other in many respects, but not on this one.
