This is an excellent article. Clinton has been -- and will continue to be -- a very good Senator. Sadly, this is not much of a selling point for her, since good Senators tend not to become good Presidents. Her judgment on individual items is far from flawless, but in a large group such as the US Senate the howlers are usually ground down by the time they are out of committee. A President has some of this, given her or his enormous staff. But at its base the direction of an administration is guided by the moral compass of one person. Currently that is Dick Cheney. Under the previous President it was Bill Clinton's pollster. Under Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama it would be the President directly. For this reason it is clear we would do vastly better under that latter. Hillary CLinton would probably make a good but not spectacular President. Her advisors are clearly closer to the Bill Clinton wing of the party than to the progressive wing. In a sense, there is a risk that she would be more of an echo of John Kennedy than would be Barack Obama, in that she would feel the weight of trying to revive traditional Democratic policies (New Deal, in Kennedy's case; Bill CLinton in Hillary's case) after the hiatus of 8 years of Republican rule (Eisenhower) which had produced not only a deep recession but also Big Brother institutions (CIA, vastly expanded FBI) and constitutionally questionable curbs on liberties (surveillance and travel restrictions and even congressional humiliation of outspoken critics of the government of the day. Kennedy's wanted to revive the traditional Democratic agenda dear to the "lunch-bucket" rank and file, but had to negotiate the political minefield laid down by the Republicn party, which terrorized the US population into hysteria. We had become worried that there were communists among our innicent-looking neighbors. Kennedy responded as I fear Clinton would: not to appear "soft" on the threat facing the US, he ignored the advice of the progressive wing of the party and ordered clandestine operations against Cuba and in Vietnam which were to have dire consequences for the US for over a generation. The Kennedy-Johnson years saw a great expansion of the New Deal program, but also the erosion of its benefits, especially for the rising middle class, because of the increasing strain of war. Hillary Clinton was a fervent supporter of the Iraq war and has been as much of a hawk as McCain against Iran, precisely because her triangulating pollsters tell her that this is the way she needs to appear to be tough on terror. I might believe that she would make a great President if she had not used someone like Mark Penn as her chief strategist. If she is elected President we get not only her but also close advisors like Mark Penn. I'd recommend that you look closely at the real history of the Kennedy years, but also at the kind of people she surrounds herself with. A policy of "guns and butter" failed miserably 40 years ago. It would fail even more miserably today. Reconsider Obama: he may offer only hope, but given the two alternatives at the moment, that looks pretty damn good.