Hillary's competence

Ezra over at Tapped, and Matt Zeitlin in comments suggest that Hillary's competence--or reputation thereof--might be alluring to some progressives. Ezra: "To my mind, there's a fairly strong "competence" argument in favor of electing Clinton. She has a deep and broad understanding of the executive branch, and will be able to hit the ground running." And Matt: "One could easily imagine Edwars or Obama floundering once they got into office, it's hard to see Hillary doing the same thing."

Even if this was true--and I'm not certain it is--it's unclear to me why a non-progressive president should be appealing to progressives even if she has the ability to accomplish the big-though-not-progressive items on her agenda. It just isn't a compelling rationale.

But on top of that, I'm not certain "competence" has all that much to do with it. Basically, I'm not certain she'd be less likely to "flounder" because she'd still be dealing with a divided (though hopefully much less divided) Congress. And the sad truth is that whether Hillary's big ideas are too liberal or too centrist getting 60 votes is a hard, hard thing to do these days. I'm unconvinced that any of her big agenda items, liberal or otherwise, would have an easy time of it. And the ones that might make it through just aren't all that appealing to me. This, of course, has very little to do with a president's political acumen. Just ask her incredibly talented husband if getting things done was easy for him.