WASHINGTON: Hillary Clinton has a few problems if she wants to secure the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. She is a leader who fails to lead. She does not appear ‘electable’. But most of all, Hillary has a Bill Clinton problem. (And no, it’s not about that.)

Moving into 2008, Republicans will be fighting to shake off the legacy of the Bush years. Every Democratic contender will be offering change, but activists will be demanding the sort of change that can come only from outside the Beltway.

Hillary Clinton leads her Democratic rivals in the polls and in fundraising. Unfortunately, however, the New York senator is part of a failed Democratic Party establishment — led by her husband — that enabled the George W. Bush presidency and the Republican majorities, and all the havoc they have wreaked at home and abroad.

Of course, it’s still early. At this point in the last presidential cycle, the first hints of Howard Dean’s transformational campaign were barely emerging. In 2002, the Democrats had no clear front-runner, but the conventional wisdom was betting on a handful of insider candidates with money and connections.

But the netroots — the far-flung collection of grassroots political activists organising online — proved to be a different world, one unencumbered by Washington’s conventional wisdom. Even as the establishment mocked Dean and his supporters, his army of hyper-motivated supporters organised across all 50 states. This movement exploded onto the national scene when Dean began reporting dramatically higher fundraising numbers than his opponents. Had Kerry not lent himself millions to reach the Iowa caucuses, and had Dean not been so green a candidate, Dean probably would have been the nominee.

Dean lost, but the point was made. No longer would DC insiders impose their candidates on us without our input; those of us in the netroots could demand a say in our political fortunes. Today, however, Hillary Clinton seems unable to recognise this new reality. She may be the establishment’s choice, but real power in the party has shifted.

Our crashing of Washington’s gates wasn’t about ideology, it was about pragmatism. Democrats haven’t won more than 50 per cent of the vote in a presidential election since 1976. Heck, we haven’t won more than 50.1 per cent since 1964. And complicit in that failure was the only Democrat to occupy the White House since 1980: Bill Clinton.

Despite all his successes — and eight years of peace and prosperity is nothing to sneeze at — he never broke the 50-per cent mark in his two elections. Regardless of the president’s personal popularity, Democrats held fewer congressional seats at the end of his presidency than before it.

While Republicans spent the past four decades building a vast network of small-dollar donors to fund their operations, Democrats tossed aside their base and fed off million-dollar-plus donations. The disconnect was stark, and ultimately destructive. Clinton’s third way failed miserably. It killed off the Jesse Jackson wing of the Democratic Party and, despite its undivided control of the party apparatus, delivered nothing. Nothing, that is, except the loss of Congress, the perpetuation of the muddled Democratic ‘message’, a demoralized and moribund party base, and electoral defeats in 2000, 2002 and 2004.

Those failures led the netroots to support Dean in the last presidential race. We didn’t back him because he was the most ‘liberal’ candidate. In fact, we supported him despite his moderate, pro-gun, pro-balanced-budget record, because he offered the two things we craved most: outsider credentials and leadership.

And therein lie Hillary Clinton’s biggest problems. She epitomizes the ‘insider’ label of the early crowd of 2008 Democratic contenders. She’s part of the Clinton machine that decimated the national Democratic Party. And she remains surrounded by many of the old consultants who counsel meekness and caution. James Carville, the famed long-time adviser to the Clintons, told Newsweek last week, “The American people are going to be ready for an era of realism. They’ve seen the consequences of having too many ‘big ideas.’ “

Meanwhile, pollster Mark Penn, a brilliant numbers guy, has counselled the Hillary team to ignore the party’s netroots activists as ‘irrelevant’.

At a time when rank-and-file Democrats are using technology to become increasingly engaged and active in their party, when they are demanding that their leaders stand for something and develop big ideas, Clinton’s closest advisers are headed in the opposite direction. But big ideas aren’t Bush’s problem — bad ideas are.

Yet staying away from big ideas seems to come naturally to Hillary Clinton. Perhaps first lady Clinton was so scarred by her failed health-care reform in the early 1990s that now Senator Clinton shows no proclivity for real leadership as a lawmaker.—

Dawn/The Washington Post News Service

Markos Moulitsas is founder of the political blog ‘Daily Kos’ and coauthor of ‘Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics’