I swore I would avoid the Josh Green piece on the Clinton campaign, but I am apparently as weak as many of you suspect, and lo and behold, it was every bit as much a disaster as expected. Reading this, it almost appears sympathetic to Hillary in the respect that she really was led astray by infighting and foolish advice, all while being beaten handily at every part of the game by the Obama campaign. Regardless, that is a foolish notion, as Hillary herself, at the end of the day, is and was responsible for her campaign.
Of particular interest to me was the fact that the Clinton campaign really was just attempting to game the system with Florida and Michigan, and all the acrimony they whipped up amongst die-hard Clinton supporters about counting votes remains as deplorable and despicable and self-serving as everyone said it was at the time. They never cared about the votes in Florida and Michigan other than as a means to an end, despite all their lofty and fake rhetoric about counting every vote.
Reading through the litany of misfires and infighting wasn’t so much illuminating as it was confirmation of everything we thought we already knew. I don’t know how anyone can not look at the hash her internal campaign was and think anything other than that we dodged a bullet when she lost. If these guys were in charge right now, they would be publicly fighting over whose fault Georgia was while trying to figure out if launching ICBM’s at Russia would poll well with women voters and white males.
evie
The primary is over. Don’t feed the trolls.
DannyNoonan
Damn right she was responsible. This story illustrates a few points. First, don’t fuck with Josh Green. The Clinton campaign got a story of his killed last year. Payback is a bitch. Secondly, it’s satisfyingly ironic that Clinton’s supposed strength is what led to her demise. And, looking forward, the story is an excellent reminder of Obama’s prescient planning and managerial strength. While Obama leads steadily in the national polls, a lot of work is going on behind the scenes to open offices in every state, which will increase turnout at the polls on election day. Election strategists say a good ground game is typically worth 2-3 points. Meanwhile, a financially strapped McMaverick isn’t opening offices in many battlegrounds. That’s a crucial difference.
cleek
who cares.
actually, the people who will care are all those who read these things and find that they validate all the smears and criticisms they’ve already been making of Obama: ie. McCain and his supporters.
so, get ready for a big surge in wingnut pundits saying “Even Democrat Hillary Clinton said Obama wasn’t American enough!”
Xenos
Oh no, I would enjoy watching them chow down on this shite sandwich.
wasabi gasp
Hillary was ready to lead on Day One…not one minute sooner.
trollhattan
It’s hard to imagine her pulling together a cohesive, effective administration after a campaign like this. Bullets dodged, indeedie (and a free “heh”).
Feel free to draw similar conclusions from the Roveite campaign team McCain’s assembled.
Brother Flaming Taser of Warm Reason
It’s kind of nice to see that my thoughts and feelings, in large part at least, regarding the Clinton campaign were valid. At the same time it appears it was more the campaign staff than the candidate but she did pick them.
wvng
Hopefully, as a number of bloggers are pointing out today, the fact that the Clinton campaign was using dog whistles very explicitly will open up the discussion so McCain campaign’s behavior is scrutinized more honestly. It seems as if Jake Tapper actually listened to Gergen on This Week (two Sundays ago) and is finally paying attention to what McCain ads are really saying.
On the other hand, a TPM reader argues that McCain has been immunized against charges of racism, and “the genius of the strategy is that Obama cannot call him out without being accused of playing the race card again.”
Finally, I hope JC notices that I finally watched his “using links” tutorial.
Brachiator
This cannot be said often enough. There is a weird kind of almost … sexism … at work on the part of some who wants to portray Senator Clinton as the passively hapless victim of everyone, including herself. The other thing that is sadly clear from Green’s piece is that Senator Clinton doesn’t seem to have believed much in anything except in her own inevitability.
I give kudos to the Atlantic site which not only presents Green’s story, but the copious memos that circulated within the Clinton campaign and that clearly documents the often malodorous choices that Team Clinton made. The site also contains a great link to an earlier piece by Mark Ambinder, Teacher and Apprentice, which illuminates how early decisions by both Clinton and Obama would have consequences which are still unfolding. A few examples:
cleek
Coates puts it nicely:
Halteclere
I bookmarked this piece under “Business/Examples of Bad Management” for future reference.
John S.
Cue myiq to come in here with his rigorous analysis on how the memos were all faked (look at the kerning!) and this is just another hit job on Clinton.
In 3,2,1…
Incertus
Anyone else see similaritiesbetween Penn and Nixon?
Just Some Fuckhead
It looks like the cretinous Penn was the only one trying to win.
Corvus9
We dodged a bullet with Clinton. We dodged a bullet with Edwards. How lucky are we that the guy who narrowly and almost improbably pulled it through was in fact the only one of the top three even remotely (and yet actually quite) electable?
But for the grace of God, or something.
myiq2xu
Hillary dropped out two months ago.
As for the memos, much ado about nothing.
Where’s the smoking gun proving Hillary ran a racist campaign?
If anything, she rejected advice to go negative on Obama.
You also conveniently ignore that she got stronger as the campaign went on, winning most of the primaries in April, May and June.
Just Some Fuckhead
The biggest sin of the Clinton campaign – and I say this as someone who was utterly repulsed by her “White People Matter More Tour” through Appalachia – was the way they blew through a hundred and six million dollars for a third place finish in Iowa.
myiq2xu
You’re half right and half-wit, as usual.
Doug H. (Fausto no more)
I’ll second Coates’s article. Very well-written and thoughtful.
Doug H. (Fausto no more)
Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
cleek
he looks more like George Wendt, to me
gil mann
Sorta, yeah. Good call. And three and a half hours ago, the clock on my VCR accurately described the time.
I still can’t figure out why she surrounded herself with such a bunch of dickheads. The obvious explanation is that she’s a dickhead, but I can’t seem to convince myself of that (if she puts her name into nomination she’ll set me straight on this point once and for all).
If you’re going to hire hardcore Machiavellians, follow their fucking advice. That or run your campaign like a decent human being. Triangulation doesn’t work in every situation.
Martin
The memos were pretty much exactly what I was expecting. The ugly shit didn’t originate with Hillary, as expected, but the campaign operation was effectively a disaster. You can put a lot of smart people in a room and get some really fucking stupid results if they don’t work together well.
Penn was a cancer on the campaign as many of us predicted back in early 2007 and Hillary didn’t manage the operation well. I never really had much of a problem with Clinton’s policies, but the President is _executive_ branch and we need someone who can execute. Hillary sucked at that. McCain is worse. Obama appears to be quite good at it, however.
And that’s really where McCain is damaging for the US – he’ll give us 4 more years of political appointees doing whatever they feel like. Doesn’t really matter if government is big or small – if you can’t manage a few dozen people even a small government will quickly overtop its banks.
cleek
speaking of horrible diseases, here’s Alan Keyes
now that’s some high-quality wingnuttery!
cyntax
Yeah, I have to say what I was struck by was her lack of leadership. She had two major factions (and untold smaller ones) within her campaign that she failed to reconcile. When things went badly, she browbeat her staff on conference calls; it’s all the negative crap about the Clinton years that I didn’t like.
But to see another perspective wander over to TalkLeft–Ohhh boy.
Grumpy Code Monkey
How can you be prepared to lead a nation when you can’t get your own campaign staff to work together? Abysmal management all around. Thank God it torpedoed her campaign, or else Mark Penn would be Leo, Wolfson would be C.J., and Ickes would be Toby.
=shudder=
croatoan
You also conveniently ignore that she got stronger as the campaign went on, winning most of the primaries in April, May and June.
You conveniently ignore the fact that Obama won the race in February. Obama took an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates in February, and Clinton was never able to close the gap. She got 38 more delegates than Obama did after February, but by the end of February he led her by 159 delegates (1,289 to 1,130).
Clinton’s superdelegate support basically flatlined after mid-February as the superdelegates increasingly and dramatically supported Obama. (She had 247 superdelegates on March 4 and finished with 280. Obama had 199 on March 4 and finished with 394 after passing her around May 10.) The whole time Clinton was claiming that the supers would support her they were breaking 4-1 in favor of Obama.
Brother Flaming Taser of Warm Reason
When McCain’s Campaign is limiting his access to his own damn cell-phone like a parent does to a child you know there’s a problem.
Martin
I should have added…
I think the piece is good for Hillary, though. Yeah, she looks like an ineffective manager, but the world is full of those and it’s not a skill you necessarily need in the Senate. What it affirms is that a big part of her losing is the fault of the staff (which she managed, but we’ve already covered that) and that most of the shit that people took offense to didn’t come from her thoughts – it came from Penn, etc.
My worry that Hillary was actively seeking to marginalize the vote of minorities appears to be the work of her staff, and doesn’t seem to have been a malicious intent. I suspect they still don’t know how deeply they pissed some people off or why. That’s good news all around and hopefully people can see Hillary is a better light now that she’s been divested of some of the assholes from the campaign.
Faux News
Alan Keyes: Bug Chaser.
horatius
Well. At least she would have used the 527 campaigns to kick Mccain in his sagging wrinkled nutsack. Obama’s campaign has turned into the seventh level of PUSSY in the past three months and their killing of 527s is essentially a shot at their own feet. Somebody tell them they are getting schooled at campaigning.
Brachiator
Shorter: Turns you into a sore loser.
BTW, The current Mad Magazine outdoes The New Yorker’s notorious Obama cover, with a political poster that neatly sums up the outcome of the Democratic primary campaign with a nod to the famous Ali-Liston fight. Go here and look for “The Knockout Poster.”
Of course, Mad can get away with this because they are not a serious arts and commentary magazine. Heh.
Rome Again
This will help the PUMA movement gain more sanity… NOT!
Make it stop, please. Clinton lost, can we stop talking about her now?
Brachiator
The only problem with this is that Hillary was running for president, not the Senate. Everything about the way she handled this contradicts her “ready from Day One” claims.
It puts her in a worse light if she was so weak that she couldn’t even keep campaign staffers in line. Had she won, would people be offering an excuse that Hillary was an ineffective president because her Cabinet ran all over her?
It is beyond patronizing to suggest that Senator Clinton’s successes are her own, but her failures belong to other people.
I would love to. However, die-hard Clinton supporters keep claiming that she would have won had a groundhog not seen his own shadow on Super Tuesday, and are currently rumbling for an anti-Obama coup at the Denver convention.
Doug H. (Fausto no more)
Which is why Obama’s behind McCain in the polls- er-
Stuart Eugene Thiel
At 2:00 in the morning.
Larv
We won’t know until after the election, but I’m not so sure about this. THe Obama campaign probably realized that McCain’s only chance was to go almost entirely negative (as he’s done), and that they wouldn’t be able to effectively call him on it if Dem 527s were doing the same to McCain. The media loves accusations of hypocrisy, and everytime Obama or his surrogates criticized McCain for his negative campaigning they’d be forced to denounce any anti-McCain ads, whether put out by the campaign or not. Whether he can effectively hit McCain on the negativity remains to be seen, of course.
Incertus
Yeah, but they both ooze the same sort of slime.
Martin
But she lost and it looks like she lost for valid reasons. That said, she’s back in the Senate and the reasons why she may not make a good executive don’t translate into why she may not be a good Senator.
There’s no rolling the clock back and making her a candidate again. So what if she doesn’t look good for the job – we’ve already established that she isn’t. But going forward what does Hillary have to offer us? From the memos, it doesn’t seem that she carries anything that makes her a weak Democrat, hostile toward Obama or his constituents, or anything else. If she wants a long Senate career, I don’t see how the memos hamper that, and in fact erase some concerns that people had of her. Hillary needs to look good going forward and the memos don’t hurt that at all.
LanceThruster
This is great news for Hillary!
jbarntt
John Cole:
I don’t know how anyone can not look at the hash her internal campaign was and think anything other than that we dodged a bullet when she lost. If these guys were in charge right now, they would be publicly fighting over whose fault Georgia was while trying to figure out if launching ICBM’s at Russia would poll well with women voters and white males.
I guess you don’t like Hillary very much. Fair enough, neither do I. Not sure why you think she would have launched a nuclear strike against Russia.
Covering for Obama’s weak and multiple responses to the Georgia crisis ? Maybe their is a response that falls short of a nuclear strike, but is more than the tepid Bush/Obama response.
I liked Bill Richardson’s response: Get a UN security council resolution. LOL. This guy would sure bolster Obama’s lack of experience.
Doctor Jay
I think reading the internal memos of any political campaign is going to leave ones idealism in tatters.