BOSTON

THIS WILL SEE the light of day after the results of the Ohio, Texas, Vermont and Rhode Island primaries are known. That is as it should be. Political analysts should not openly advocate for or against candidates before people vote.

When Michael Dukakis ran for governor of Massachusetts in 1974, he had an uppity bumper sticker: “Mike Dukakis should be governor!” Later, after he had disappointed friend and foe in the hurly-burly of governing, I thought that the Republicans should answer with a “Mike Dukakis shouldn’t be governor!” sticker. But it wasn’t my job to tell a party in disarray how to take back the governorship; I never expressed the mischievous thought.

That leads to a conclusion no one should make mischievously about a life and career, but is one I’ve been coming to: Hillary Clinton probably shouldn’t be president.

My first impression of Mrs. Clinton, in 1992, was that she had the same smartest-in-the-class way of talking down to people that Mr. Dukakis had. Yet I know Mike Dukakis. In person he isn’t like that at all, and people who know Hillary Clinton say she isn’t either. Her limited gift of rhetoric is not a disqualification. Moses, we remember, was a stutterer. God chose him to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt because He wanted the prophet understood to be speaking the Word of God, not of a wordsmith.

A more important consideration is how, in 2008, Mrs. Clinton has dealt with the way she managed the health-care issue in 1993 and 1994. Her work then was a failure on three counts: a policy failure, a methodological failure and a political failure. The policy proposal, in a nutshell, was managed care, managed by the federal government. Two of what Harvard Business School Prof. Regina Herzlinger calls “health-care killers” — combined.

The methodological failure was to put 1,000 or so “experts” in a task force, have them meet in secret, then tell the American people what was good for them. This was insulting, and led directly to the political failure of the plan, as well as to the Democrats’ loss of Congress in 1994.

What happened 14 years ago wasn’t a disqualification, either. It became one when Mrs. Clinton ran for president as a leading “health-care expert,” without explaining what she has learned about the shortcomings of her first plan and the failure of her methods. Instead, for the last year and a half she has had another task force meeting largely in secret. Her prospective 2009 plan is more modest and incremental than her 1994 one. But it retains the markers of big government, big insurers, big hospitals, big mandates and big lawyers that are American health care in Egypt — not its road out of the wilderness.

With mostly political juveniles opposing her for the Democratic nomination, Mrs. Clinton has run on George H.W. Bush’s fleshless 1988 slogan, “Ready from day one!” (Of course, no one can know that. Harry Truman was ready for the presidency; Herbert Hoover was not.) In Mrs. Clinton’s case, her experience doesn’t bear analysis. It is true she knows what the stresses on a president are, and under wrenching personal circumstances she showed the calm a president must have.

But beyond the health-care debacle, she had a heavy hand in every one of Mr. Clinton’s first-term embarrassments. She never had a security clearance, and he only hit his stride as president in 1995, after his wife had effectively been demoted. In 1998 and 1999, when such great issues as the Balkans confronted Mr. Clinton, he and Mrs. Clinton were obviously barely speaking.

A better case for experience can be made for Senator Clinton. When she took office she had the sense to keep a low profile, to work hard and to cultivate senatorial friends. Mr. Obama is correct that on the war in Iraq she has been a political weather vane. But her case for experience is better than that of the four-year senator with essentially no record. Unfortunately, as Churchill found, as George H.W. Bush found, as John McCain may find, elections usually don’t turn on anything as staid as that.

I think that Mrs. Clinton has generally handled the issue of gender as graciously as Mr. Obama has handled the issue of race. Except for an unbelievably quick recovery from a teary moment in New Hampshire, she has been savvy enough not to turn an advantage into a disadvantage by exploiting it. They will sometimes deny it, but many women feel it deeply that as a woman Mrs. Clinton should be president.

I’m more of a dirt-floor feminist than a glass-ceiling feminist. A president is only by-the-way of a sex or a race. Race is the great moral issue of American history. The emancipation of women is the great issue of modern human history — the key, I think, to peace, prosperity, population control and a healthy Earth. Irish revolutionaries used to say (in Gaelic), Tiocfaidh ar lá (CHUCKee ar LAW) — “our day will come.” Regardless of Mrs. Clinton’s immediate political fate, women will still say with men, for humanity, that “our” day will come.

But judgment is individual, and Mrs. Clinton and her campaign have to be judged on the record. In Rhode Island, it was obvious that the Obama campaign had the free-wheeling optimism of the 1992 Clinton campaign, while the 2008 Clinton campaign had fallen into the cautious, hierarchical mentality of the 1992 Bush campaign. Obama headquarters, on Westminster Street in Providence, had the spirit of the Happy Warrior. Clinton headquarters, on Broad Street, emptied as soon as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Congressman Jim Langevin and Rhode Island Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts left the opening.

Telling was the way Providence Mayor David Cicilline, a Clinton supporter, was treated. The mayor is in a longstanding contract dispute with his firemen. The Clinton campaign accordingly removed him as state co-chairman in September, pressured him to settle against what he regards as the city’s interest, then uninvited him to Mrs. Clinton’s appearance on Feb. 24. These were not the acts of a president who would understand cities, mayors, dispute resolution or the meaning of personal loyalty.

David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of The Journal’s editorial board.