The seven years since Hillary Clinton’s last presidential bid have induced a kind of amnesia about the true reason for her loss, a subject newly relevant now that she’s running again. Several factors cloud our ability to recollect it clearly: the passage of time; Democrats’ desire to put a bruising primary race behind them; and, above all, the mythologizing of Barack Obama’s campaign brain trust, which cast him as a figure of destiny and her as someone who history swept aside. … But while Obama was indeed a rare talent, his skill alone wasn’t what cinched the nomination. Clinton blew a winnable race, despite having had almost every conceivable advantage. Oddly, the one thing she truly lacked was the very thing she chose to present as her primary qualification for the presidency: executive leadership skills. As Clinton often declared, in an obvious dig at Obama’s inexperience, she alone had the capacity to “do the job from Day One.” Yet whatever management skills Clinton may possess, she didn’t deploy in 2008.

— Joshua Green, writing for Bloomberg.

Connect: