Learning from experience:

Clinton’s idea of leadership is very different. Her effort to reform health care shortly after her husband took office was notable in that no one mobilized the public. Her team took polls, conducted focus groups, and engaged interest groups. But they never mobilized the public. And although an outsider at the time, she tried to play the insider game. But in the insider’s game, only the insider’s reality counts. So she lost – and so did the millions of us who never had an opportunity to help make the health care “changes” we needed and wanted and deserved.
Now Clinton wants us to hear what she will do “for” us, what “she” will deliver – much as a lawyer, drawing strength not from her client but from her expertise, argues a case. Obama, on the other hand, urges people to join with him in acting for themselves and each other. A former community organizer, he learned that changing ourselves and changing the world go together, and that without mobilizing the strength of people who want change, it won’t happen.
America doesn’t just need “change”—it needs the kind of change that mobilizes those who want and need it, rather than relying on those who resist and fear it. Clinton made her key mistakes on health care in 1994; fourteen years later, what the imbroglio about Martin Luther King and LBJ shows is not racial insensitivity but that she’s never learned the real lesson about how to make change that matters and lasts.
http://tpmcafe.com/2008/01/21/clinton_obama_mlk_leadership_f/#more