Very interesting column - check the link for much, much more. For instance, Bill has apparently taken over running the campaign.
http://nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/42393/Iowa Ice CapadesIs Hillary coldly competent or warmly personable? And if her own campaign can’t figure it out, how can voters? By John Heilemann Published Dec 30, 2007
Like their counterparts across Iowa, the Democrats of Woodbury County, which encompasses Sioux City, have come to expect a vast degree of obeisance from their party’s would-be nominees. They expect more than speeches, more than rallies, more than rote fund-raisers. They expect, in particular, that the candidates will appear before something called the Truman Club, an outfit run by local Democratic pols that hosts a series of intimate, private receptions with them as a prelude to the caucuses. And, indeed, in the past few months, every Democratic runner has turned up and kowtowed to the club. Every runner, that is, except Hillary Clinton—whose campaign twice promised that she would come, only to bail out later.
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Woodbury, to be sure, is just one of 99 counties in Iowa. And Lord knows it’s dangerous, especially when it comes to the Hawkeye State, whose mysteries are a cause of perpetual befuddlement to even the sharpest political minds, to make too much of a single anecdote. But what’s striking about the Truman Club story is that
it reinforces a broader narrative: of a Clinton operation that badly misread and misplayed Iowa for months; of a top-heavy, Beltway-centric beast that never found its footing and that now confronts the possibility of a potentially devastating loss. And although that narrative would be rendered instantly inoperative if Clinton pulled off a win in Iowa—replaced with a triumphant tale of the Comeback Queen—the memories of what she had to do to get there might not be so easily erased.
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This argument was powerful, logical, but it also entailed clear risks. That the persona projected by Clinton would be seen not as authoritative but as imperious, bloodless, entitled. That a campaign waged with an eye forever cast toward the general election would lead her to embrace positions (supporting the Bush administration in declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, for instance) that would not endear her to Democratic-primary voters. That a relentless focus on her experience would keep her from connecting with the craving for change so evident in the electorate. That if Obama finally caught fire, she would have precious few reserves of genuine affection among voters to fall back on—and this is precisely what seemed to happen about a month ago in Iowa.
The reaction of the Clinton campaign to the Obama surge was, to put it mildly, aggressive—and, I think, deeply telling. The candidate herself went negative, with apparent gusto (“Now the fun part starts”). So did her husband, on Charlie Rose. The candidate’s opposition-research team went negative, to the point of absurdity (kindergartengate). The candidate’s surrogates went beyond negative into the realm of the genuinely vile (Billy Shaheen raising the possibility that Obama had dealt drugs, Bob Kerrey jibbering about his having attended a “secular madrassa”). Going negative is part of the game, it’s true, and far be it from me to tsk-tsk. But it’s considered dumb politics in Iowa, where the aversion to campaign bile is acute—which raised the possibility, firmly held by some in Obama’s upper echelon, that Clinton’s aim was to help Edwards win and deny Obama victory at all costs, including a third-place finish for herself.
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Still, even if Iowa turns into Clinton’s springboard to the nomination, what has happened there the past few weeks may come back to haunt her.
For countless independents and even many Democrats, the suspicion, the fear, is that Hillary is a candidate without a core or convictions other than that she should be, must be, president. That her shifting personas, and the machine she has assembled to create and perpetrate them, are designed to conceal the fact that she is nothing but ambition incarnate. And that she and her husband are entangled in a bizarro codependency that coughs up chaos and queasy-making psychodrama in roughly equal measure. One need not accept the most extreme version of these views to acknowledge that they are a very real, perhaps the central, political obstacle she would face in a general election. In most presidential races, it’s a rule of thumb that what happens in Iowa stays in Iowa. But Hillary may not be so lucky.
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