Hillary has not yet articulated where she sees our country going.

Matt Bai: That’s a big question. That’s a question I’m wrestling with in my writing right now. I . . . I’m not . . . I’m not convinced she’s gonna win the nomination of the Democratic party. I think that’s a very open question. And if so, I think she’s got a long way to go to get to the presidency. But to me, to this point . . . Politicians evolve. I don’t know Hillary Clinton well. I’ve talked to her a couple of times. To me this is the defining difference between her and her husband. And of course the comparisons are inevitable and she has to deal with that, because if it weren’t for her husband she wouldn’t be where she is. So we have to be able to make that comparison. Bill Clinton identified a vision for his party and for the country that was . . . that was new, and counterintuitive, and divisive. It made a lot of people unhappy. It still makes a lot of Democrats unhappy – the idea of Clinton as in the idea of moving to the center; the idea that party orthodoxies of the New Deal and great society era were not adequate to the moment in governing. He made very little progress in convincing his party of that. But he made that argument and made it consistently through his presidency. And . . . and . . . and think, you know, outlined a real vision for where he wanted to take the country. She has not. I mean she runs to win. That’s her slogan, “I’m in to win.” Or you know some vaguery like “The change we need,” right? Some vague . . . a vague . . . It’s not a vaguery is it? It’s some vague comment, some vague slogan. But she, unlike . . . Unlike Bill Clinton, Hillary has not articulated, you know, some vision of where she thinks the country or the party needs to go; some . . . some rejection of the past, some notion that inspires people, or gets them thinking or debating. She has been a very conventional politician running effectively to gain power. And her . . . her essential argument is to pick up where her husband left off. And I don’t . . . I don’t . . . I don’t know that that’s enough to build . . . to build on the, you know . . . to build on the conversation that he started.

Recorded on: 12/13/07