Tamanon said:
Hillary only really had a struggle in the Primary, not in the Senate general one, although one might argue that she has been in the public eye more because she wanted to be, in order to build a Presidential campaign.
BTW, not a superdelegate, but Robert Reich to officially endorse Obama today. Kinda a surprise that he's actually endorsing.
Not that surprising. There's some history there.
In Clinton's first year the biggest issue was dealing with the economy. The recession was officially over but it was the middle of the
jobless recovery that followed. Reich argued that the administration should spend money on infrastructure development, while Robert Rubin, chair of the National Economic Council, said the focus should be on balancing the budget.
Rubin won out, so the administration made a big push to
balance the budget, which only passed by Al Gore's tiebreaking vote. Generally speaking, Rubin's stance was considered the more centrist and neoliberal, while Reich was supported by leftist labor theorists.
There's a pretty widely held perception that Reich's had a little bit of a grudge since then.
On a side note, Paul Krugman criticized some of Reich's work in the early 80's. He called Reich a "policy entrepreneur", meaning someone who presented himself as an expert without the real academic credentials to back it up and sought influence with politicians. Later he slammed the Clinton administration for relying too much on these people and not on real experts.
Weird thing is that Reich is supporting Obama and Krugman's now backing a Clinton, even though Obama's economic team is exclusively made up of experts in the field, apparently at Obama's insistence.
In any case, I'm not sure Obama and Clinton would pursue very different economic policies, since Obama appeared at the unveiling of the Hamilton Institute, which is Robert Rubin's new think tank.