This past June, on the way to a campaign event in Boone, Iowa, I asked Obama again about Clinton’s legacy. “I think his basic instincts were sound in suggesting that we’ve got to break out of a lot of these false divisions that exist in our politics,” he said. “Is government the problem? Is crime just a function of individual immorality, or is it institutional racism or poverty?” But he was also critical of the direction that his party had taken since the nineties, saying that a lot of Democrats had concluded that “the message of Bill Clinton and his electoral success is that we should split the difference with the other side on every issue.” Choosing his words carefully, Obama went on, “I do think that for a variety of reasons, including some of the appalling tactics of the Gingrich Republicans and the conservative right, he was never able to make that full case to the American people in a way that would create a broad base of consensus for change. So, politically, you never had the capital, you never had the tools to actually deliver on that vision on big projects. What you would end up getting instead were great insights, but the applications were modest.”

Obama may be right to believe that, in the wake of Bush’s sharp drop in popularity and the new Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, a Democrat of bold ideas who presents himself as the anti-Clinton could be successful. The Party’s interest groups certainly feel emboldened. There is little appetite for unrestricted free trade, a cornerstone of Clinton’s economic strategy, starting with his support for the North American Free Trade Agreement during the 1992 campaign. The Service Employees International Union, one of the most liberal unions in America, has successfully pushed every Democrat in the race into supporting universal health care. And, with an economy that is producing historic levels of inequality and stagnant median wages, there is an opening for a more populist message. There is some evidence that such a message worked in 2006. Senators Jon Tester, of Montana, and Jim Webb, of Virginia, arguably won last year by challenging the Wall Street wing of their party.

But it’s not clear that Obama is the right candidate for that message. He has made a fetish of the politics of consensus at a moment when his party seems to want confrontation. And although he has correctly diagnosed what alienated some Democrats from Clintonism, he seems at times more concerned with distancing himself from liberals than with embracing them. An outside adviser to Obama sounded exasperated as he described the complicated ideological terrain of the Democratic Party in 2007: “The frustration is that there is a revival of old-fashioned populism out there. Edwards is embracing it, and Clinton is embracing it, too. If Obama gets up and says something extremely populist on, say, trade, to appeal to the left-wing base of the Party or to the unions, wide groups of voters and insiders say, ‘Oh, is he really a liberal candidate? We’re no longer going to view him as a uniter who brings people together. We’re going view him as a left-wing panderer.’ ”

The issue of health care has been particularly vexing. It has not proved to be the liability for Clinton that her opponents assumed it would. “At the S.E.I.U. health-care forum in Las Vegas, it doesn’t go that well for Barack,” the Obama adviser explained, referring to one of the numerous candidate cattle calls this season. “He tried to leave it at the highest level of principle, and then he’s roundly panned. S.E.I.U. says, ‘You’re a joker.’ They asked, ‘What is your plan?’ He did what all the experts said to do: just get up and say what your general view is, because if you release details you get hammered. The public reaction and the S.E.I.U. reaction was extremely negative.”

In describing this dynamic, Obama’s adviser became more and more agitated. “Then Hillary Clinton doesn’t come out with any plan! Because she just says, ‘I know a lot about health care,’ they have let her go for months without a plan! And then her advisers, on background, criticize Obama’s plan, even though they don’t have one.” He continued, “Coming up with a plan to solve America’s health-care crisis is not an easy thing. We pulled a lot of all-nighters. And I’m, like, Why doesn’t she have to come out with a plan?” (Clinton is scheduled to unveil a plan soon.) The adviser was baffled about why many experts in the health-care field believe that Hillary’s experience in 1993 and 1994 is an asset. “I’m sure George Bush learned how not to invade Iraq,” he said. “Should we then trust him to invade Iran?”

It is true that Hillary Clinton’s unhappy experience with health care has been remade into a political selling point. During her first two years as First Lady, her five-hundred-person Task Force on National Health Care Reform, which worked in secret, came to symbolize everything that was wrong with her approach—arrogance, a lack of consultation with Congress, a final product that pleased no one. Its failure set back the cause of universal health care and probably cost the Democrats control of Congress in 1994. Now she uses what happened as a parable about hubris and lessons learned—a reminder that, more than any other candidate, she understands the limits of the American political system’s capacity for sweeping change. “We came in and, largely propelled by a lot of the stories from back-yard meetings and living-room gatherings in New Hampshire, determined to do something about health care,” she told a gathering of voters in Concord. “But we didn’t have a good enough grasp of how to get it done. And if we had known then what we know now it would have been a lot different.”

Much of Clinton’s case for doing better this time rests upon the graduate degree in legislative politics that she feels she has earned since her election to the Senate, in 2000. Gone is the style that she brought to Washington in 1993, when she became the first First Lady to have an office in the West Wing—and faced ferocious criticism when she tried to use it. Now she talked about being “flexible” in working with the House and the Senate and about respecting the “prerogatives that the Congress wants to claim,” and she scoffed at what she sees as the naïveté of her Democratic rivals. “When my colleagues who are running against me, who are all wonderful people, say things like ‘We’re going to make it happen!’—well, we’ve got to get the vote, and we’ve got to be able to make the persuasion. And that very often means you’ve got to compromise, which is not a word that people in a Democratic primary want to hear, because we all want to think that we can go in and do exactly what we believe in and make it happen. The fact is you can’t. And I think we learned that as well. When Bill passed the deficit-reduction act, it was with one vote. And I’m glad he passed it with one vote, but it sort of set up a lot of the political problems to come.”

Karl Rove recently attacked Clinton as a “fatally flawed” candidate, arguing that nobody who started the primary season with disapproval ratings as high as hers (they are in the high forties) has ever won the Presidency. She claims, however, that her faults, because they are well known, are actually a strength, and that nominating a candidate who is relatively unknown to the public would be a dangerous course. “The tactic used, effectively, will be to drive up the negatives of whoever our nominee is,” she said at the close of her talk in Concord. “And it will all be fresh information. It will all be ‘Oh, you didn’t know? Let us tell you. Let us paint a caricature. Let us give you this picture.’ Whereas I have the somewhat mixed but rather fortunate blessing of already starting with those negatives. And I mean for me that’s a plus.” Clinton’s argument is that she offers electability, plus everything that voters loved about the Clinton era and none of the things that they hated. As she finished up, she said, “I’m running because I think I can win and I can take the White House back for us, and, frankly, build on the positives of the nineties and avoid some of the mistakes.”