The New Republic
by Michelle Cottle
The exclusive story of Hillary's fall, as told by the high-level advisors, staffers, fundraisers, and on-the-ground organizers who lived it.
Post Date Friday, May 16, 2008
Endings are rarely as joyous as beginnings--and in the case of a long, wearing, and ultimately disappointing campaign, they can be downright brutal. But they also have the potential to be educational, for participants and gawkers alike. So it is that we asked (begged, really) a range of Hillarylanders for their up-close and personal lists of "What Went Wrong?" Not everyone wanted to play. Many stubbornly pointed out that their candidate is not yet dead. But, on the condition of total anonymity, a fairly broad enough cross-section of her staff responded--more than a dozen members all told, from high-level advisors to grunt-level assistants, from money men to on-the-ground organizers.
<...>
PROBLEMS AT THE OUTSET<…>
"Devastating vulnerabilities such as Obama's associations with Wright and Ayers were not unearthed by the campaign's vaunted research team in time to be fully taken advantage of--despite being readily available in the public domain." "Running as an incumbent, as the inevitable candidate, was probably our biggest mistake, particularly in a time when the country is really hungry for change."
<…>
"Harold Ickes's encyclopedic understanding of the proportional delegate system was never operationalized into a field plan. The campaign inexplicably wrote off many states entirely, allowing Obama to create the lead of 100+ delegates that he has today. Most notably, we claimed the race would be over by February 5, but didn't devote any resources to the smaller states that day and in the weeks that followed, allowing Obama to easily run up margins and delegate counts on the cheap--the delegate margin he will win by."
PROBLEMS WITH THE PERSONNEL"Hillary assembled a team thin on presidential campaign experience that confused discipline with insularity; they didn't know what they didn't know and were too arrogant to ask at a time early enough in the process when it could have made a difference, effectively shutting out even some long-time Hillaryland loyalists. Her innermost circle of (Patti Solis) Doyle, (Mark) Penn, (Mandy) Grunwald, (Neera) Tanden and (Howard) Wolfson formed a Board of Directors with no single Chairman or CEO; nobody was truly in charge, nobody held truly accountable."
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PROBLEMS WITH EXECUTION"There were more themes in this campaign than anything I've ever seen."
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PROBLEMS WITH THE CANDIDATE"I don't think anybody in America doesn't think she can do the job. What they're dying for is to know a little bit more about her. And we were unable to present that side of her."
"If you look at this campaign as a 15- or 16-month gambit, the public turning point was the Philadelphia debate. Her non-answer on the driver's license issue. Again, it spoke to the character issue: The sense that she will say anything and do anything to get elected. It drove the Obama narrative of her home."
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PROBLEMS IN IOWA"We placed a huge financial bet on Iowa and raised its importance by sending senior staff there. And because we didn't plan for a national campaign, we couldn't point to an operation that could withstand an Iowa blow the way Obama could after New Hampshire."
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PROBLEMS WITH THE PRESS"The way we handled you guys was a mistake on our part. What we're hearing is that we truly treated people badly and weren't accessible enough or open enough. We had bad relationships with reporters, and it probably bit us on the ass."
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AND, FINALLY... "Her people spent all of 2008 making lists blaming each other (but never themselves) rather than lists of solutions."
(emphasis added)
If you like insider accounts of political campaigns, you'll probably love Michelle Cottle's latest TNR
report on her soundings of Hillary Clinton staffers about "what went wrong." What's remarkable about this article is how little agreement there appears to be among folks "on the inside." There's a fair amount of anger expressed towards former chief strategist Mark Penn and former campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle (which you'd expect, since they were the people in charge of message and organization, respectively, during HRC's fall from inevitability to second place), but beyond that, the explanations of "what went wrong" are all over the place.
This analytical disarray may just reflect the small and probably random sample of HRC staffers willing to talk to Cottle, even on a strictly off-the-record basis. But another factor is probably in play: the natural human tendency to play what-if, and attribute political setbacks to correctable internal "mistakes" rather than uncontrollable external forces.
What's largely missing from the insider accounts quoted by Cottle is a recognition that Barack Obama's campaign surprised virtually everybody in politics. It's hard to remember this, but there was an extended period a few months after Obama entered the race when the CW was that he was a flavor-of-the-month who had created some excitement but was rapidly losing steam against the powerful, disciplined Clinton Machine.
One of the post-mortems quoted by Cottle suggests that HRC's big mistake was in not going nastily negative on Obama from the get-go. But that's pure hindsight: a negative campaign made no sense for a candidate with Clinton's poll standings and resources prior to Iowa, a state whose Democratic caucus-goers are notoriously averse to intraparty attacks. And after Iowa, when it became obvious that Obama's was generating previously unimaginable numbers of volunteers and cash, and building a never-seen-before electoral coalition, Clinton's campaign was already in desperate survival mode. Another little fact that a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that a couple of days before the NH primary, the chattering classes were busy writing HRC's political obituary, in anticipation of a blowout Obama victory that would have nailed down the nomination then and there.
Perhaps the Obama phenomenon was predictable, but not many political experts actually predicted it in any detail. (I certainly include myself in this assessment; the only aspect of Obama-mania I anticipated was the rapid and massive shift of African-American support to him after Iowa). So it's a little strange that so many people inside and outside the Clinton campaign are so sure her initial strategy should have been based on improbable developments instead of the lay of the land as it first appeared. Sure, the acid test for any political campaign is the ability to adjust to the unforeseen, but given HRC's success in avoiding electoral extinction again and again during the primaries, you have to admit she showed some deft footwork.
The bottom line is that "what went wrong" with Hillary Clinton's campaign was the emergence of a once-in-a-lifetime politician whose particular assets made him very nearly unbeatable once he established himself as a viable candidate. Here's hoping that John McCain's brain trust goes with a high-percentage game plan like HRC's, and underestimates Barack Obama's ability to change the rules.
By Eric Kleefeld - May 16, 2008, 9:04AM
In a sign that they are likely to declare victory in the presidential primary very soon, the Obama campaign is now boasting in a memo to reporters that they are on the cusp of winning the pledged-delegate majority, thanks to the endorsement from John Edwards and a group of his delegates.
By the Obama campaign's math, they are only 17 elected delegates away from the pledged-del majority, a number that they are guaranteed to pull off next week in Oregon and Kentucky. Expect them to court super-delegates to break their way en masse after that happens, on the basis that Obama has the popular mandate to be the nominee.
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