Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter.
In 2006, Mr. Egan won the National Book Award for his history of people who lived through the Dust Bowl, “The Worst Hard Time.” The book also became a New York Times best seller.
In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series “How Race Is Lived in America.” He has done special projects on the West and the decline of rural America, and he has followed the entire length of the Lewis and Clark Trail.
Mr. Egan is the author of five books, including “The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest,” and “Lasso the Wind, Away to the New West.” He lives in Seattle. Mr. Egan’s column appears every Friday.
ON MARCH 6, 2015 Timothy Egan writes in the New York Times Opinion Pages a piece titled: HILLARY’S STEP.
In conclusion to this article he says:
” . . . . One hopes that Hillary has been using her time out of the limelight, such as it is, to do some hard thinking about the serious structural flaws of the United States. We are creating more wealth, at an astonishing rate, for a select few, while also creating more poverty. The issues of great consequence — health care for all, affordable education that is a ladder to a better life, a middle class with security, not the fear of being one paycheck from panic — are mired in the deadened cast of our politics.
If Clinton hasn’t been looking for answers to the Big Questions, if she hasn’t been using the best and brightest around her to present something fresh, original and unifying, she will be stuck at the Hillary Step — close enough to taste the top of the world, but with no way to get there.”
AuntyUta 
A very relevant article by Mr Egan. I like Hilliary but, I don’t think she stands a chance in hell against the Repub candidate who will play dirty as the devil.
This playing dirty is really an immense problem. In the Australian political life too.
I honestly can’t visualize any transformation that would magically make Hillary Clinton the solution to the massive corruption that pervades US domestic and foreign policy.
I don’t have a great deal of confidence in any of the candidates, including Hillary. So much is a stake, but it’s still many months before serious campaigning begins, and there are more and more concerns floating to the top of her facade. It will happen to everyone who has stepped into the ring so far; it will just be different concerns for them. There is no shining star available in either of the parties.
Egan is a sharp-witted and elegant writer. I’ve read several of his books, am in fact, re-reading his The Short Nights of the Shadow-Catcher right now for my book club. And, in this essay, as usual, he is on target. I do hope the Democrats can raise a better candidate than Hillary. I fear this country falling yet again into Republican hands. The Republican’s have really fallen over the edge of reality.