The Audacity of Hopelessness

[Joanne98]

The Audacity of Hopelessness
By FRANK RICH
WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.

It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.

The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.

That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. But he’s actually not even all that loyal. Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo.

Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.

But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/opinion/24rich.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

[Akimbo2112]

1. Cross-Posted from another thread...

I'm a Clinton supporter......
and I agree with the notion that she's run a tragically ordinary campaign. But it isn't so much because of arrogance, in my opinion. I think she just got beat by a candidate that has rock-star appeal, enough policy savvy to hold his own, and not a lot of negative baggage to hold against him. Whether she's arrogant or not, she got a lot of votes. But Obama caught fire with early caucus victories (smart as hell if you ask me) and has really managed to sustain and increase his appeal to a surprisingly diverse demographic.

The Patriots were supposed to win too. It isn't like they lost out of arrogance, they just flat-out got beat.

[bemildred]

2. "Experience" is always a questionable selling point when the people want "change".

This is not the first time a guy touting "experience" has lost in one of these years where the government has thoroughly screwed the pooch and the people want change. That's how Bubba got elected the first time, that's how Jimmy Carter got elected, that's how Nixon got elected the first time. Nixon was lying of course, but then that's politics. Ms Clinton should fire her campaign strategists, not that that will fix the problem, but at least some justice will be done.