This has not been a lucky year for Clinton.
If she’s the next Democratic presidential candidate, she will have to follow a Democratic president whose approval ratings — once as high as 76 percent — are now scraping 40.
As a former member of Barack Obama’s Cabinet, she has to defend the indefensible, kiss the ugly baby of Obamacare and smile for the cameras.
Maybe time will prove Obamacare a success. But until that distant day, it will remain emblematic of governmental overreach and liberalism run amok.
The catastrophic rollout has been followed by even more bad news — higher-than-expected premiums, lower-than-expected coverage or, worse, no coverage at all.
In short, it has become a vindication of everything conservatives say. Even liberals are wondering if the government can make such an extensive contraption work, and at a reasonable cost.
It remains to be seen if gender will play the role for Clinton that race did for Obama. Probably not. The prospect of a woman becoming president has an air of inevitability about it.
Alas, recent Democratic presidents, with the exception of Obama, have come from statehouses — Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. They proclaimed themselves Washington outsiders and ran their campaigns down the middle of the road.
Clinton, meanwhile, is the quintessential Washington insider, a former secretary of state whose portfolio is devoid of a soaring triumph and whose name is attached not to some diplomatic doctrine but to a failed health-insurance plan.
As in 2008, Barack Obama could wind up defeating her.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-hillary-clintons-unlucky-year/2013/12/30/5c93ab06-7180-11e3-8b3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html?tid=pm_pop