Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says she’s learned a lot in the 13 years since she unsuccessfully tried to inflict a universal health-care program on America during her days as this nation’s unelected “co-president.” But failure then has hardly dimmed her ardor for such a sweeping initiative.

Speaking in Iowa on Monday, Mrs. Clinton, now a Democratic candidate for president, did not candy-coat her intentions. “We’re going to have universal health care when I’m president,” she said. “There’s no doubt about that. We’re going to get it done.”

How to explain such a lead-pipe certainty? “I believe the American people are going to make this an issue,” Mrs. Clinton added. “I believe we’re in a better position today to do that than we were in ’93 and ’94 . . . It’s one of the reasons I’m running for president.”

It may also be one of the reasons Americans are increasingly uneasy about the former first lady’s presidential bona fides. A national poll conducted by independent pollster John Zogby recently indicated that nearly half of those surveyed (46 percent) said they wouldn’t vote for Mrs. Clinton under any circumstances. Even more startling — or at least it should be to party power-brokers — is that, among likely Democratic voters, 18 percent said they “would never cast a vote in Mrs. Clinton‘s favor.”

That she is such a polarizing figure, we maintain, dates back to the health-care fiasco early in her husband’s first term. Mrs. Clinton bristled with certainty then about the righteousness and inevitability of her cause. But Americans, though aware then of what might be deemed deficiencies in this nation’s health-care delivery system, simply were not buying her draconian remedies. What makes her believe the tenor of the country has so dramatically changed in the interim? Why does she consider socialized medicine, with its rationed care and long lines for treatment, the antidote for whatever ails us?

It is our contention that Americans would resist any “remedy” that reduces individual choice in health care or that increases government mandates on employers, individuals, and health-care providers.