On this point, I agree with fellow blogger James Withers: last night’s Democratic presidential candidate debate on health care was boring. It wasn’t the topic, which is — or at least should be — of compelling interest to every American. It was the candidates, who really frankly seemed more interested in taking pot shots at each other than in telling the electorate what they’d actually do as president to fix our woefully broken health care system.

The biggest disappointment of the evening for me was the non-appearance of Barack Obama. I just have to wonder if he was worried about being compared unfavorably with John Edwards, Bill Richardson, and above all, Hillary Clinton. But isn’t that what debates are supposedly for — so that we can compare the candidates for ourselves?

As for Clinton, Edwards and Richardson, they all seemed eager to declare themselves the leader of the pack on health care.

True, Edwards was the first of the Democrats to come out with a detailed plan for health care reform, which he insisted on reminding us of at regular intervals. But the Breck Girl was not to be outdone by the Man with a Plan from Santa Fe, who pointed out that he was the only governor on stage and therefore the only one with experience with dealing with health care issues as an executive. Then there was Christopher Dodd, who stressed his quarter century in the Senate.

And finally, there was Joe Biden, who joked that he’d made so many positive comments that some people were accusing him of running for Hillary’s secretary of state. But last night, Biden made so many nice-y nice-y comments about Hillary that you had to wonder if he was running for her VP running mate.

As for the plans themselves, they’re not very far apart, as all the candidates more or less admitted, and the Democrats’ plans are certainly more of a piece than are those of the Republican candidates, all of whom insist on calling the Democrats’ plans for health care reform ’socialism.’ That charge is particularly ironic if not hypocritical coming from Mitt Romney, who himself as governor of Massachusetts introduced a health care reform plan that is strikingly similar to the one Hillary has just announced. If Hillary’s a socialist, wouldn’t that make Mitt a socialist, too?

But it’s not just Joe Biden who’s making nice about HillaryCare: economist and New York Times columnist Paul Kruger praises Hillary’s plan in his column in today’s paper. Krugman also observes trenchantly “the timidity of Democratic politicians scarred by the failure of the original Clinton health plan.”

And therein lies the rub. If Hillary was the one who messed up the first attempt at health care reform (in what she habitually refers to as ‘the first Clinton administration’), then why should we trust her with it again?

Hillary’s response was “been there, done that” — in other words, according to the First Lady-turned-senator, it’s precisely because she messed up the first time that we should entrust the task to her again; she’s learned from her mistakes, she says. I have to admit I don’t find that logic entirely persuasive.

Bill Clinton gave Hillary Clinton the lead role on health care reform in his first term, and her failure was a spectacular one: not only did the Clintons’ failure to achieve health care reform help the Republicans gain control of Congress in 1994 (control of the House lasted a full 12 years), Bill and Hillary ruined the chances for meaningful comprehensive health care reform for a decade and-a-half. If Hillary does indeed win the nomination and the White House, she will be inaugurated in January 2009, a full 15 years after the failure of HillBillaryCare led to the Republican take-over of Congress, and that’s a sobering thought.

Even admitting that none of the Republican presidential candidates have any desire to bring about comprehensive health care reform, let alone a clue as to how to do it, the simple fact is that the failure of the Clintons to get it done when the country was behind them back in 1993-94 has made it harder even to talk sensibly about the subject for over a decade now.

So why even talk about it now? Well, first, of course, if everyone else has a plan, then Hillary has to have one. Second, health care reform is one of the top issues on the public’s agenda, so Hillary would be a fool to ignore it.

And third, and perhaps most pointedly, Hillary’s very failure to deliver 13 years ago means that it would be a liability unless she were able to turn that liability into an asset, which is precisely what she’s trying to do now. How very Karl Rove of her…