Hillary was right: Obama wasn't ready to be president

It is the unforced errors that raise the question of whether Hillary Clinton was right back in 2008 when she argued that the White House was no place for “on-the-job training.” At the time, Clinton’s stinging attacks on Obama’s relative inexperience infuriated the insurgent candidate’s supporters, who damned the Clinton machine for its savage bullying. Yet there was an obvious truth behind Clinton’s rhetoric. As a major player during her husband’s administration, she had an opportunity to learn from the amateurish mistakes made during the Clinton White House, including a callous disregard for key congressional allies and the country’s moderate-to-conservative temperament on contentious social issues. More to the point, the army of ex-Clinton staffers were the ones who wouldn’t need on-the-job training. They already knew how to staff bureaucracies and how to make government work. Even now, a number of critical administration jobs remain unfilled. Republican opposition has something to do with this, but overwhelming Democratic majorities in Congress make this excuse more than a little unconvincing.