Back to Clive Crook's blog homepage
If only they had chosen Clinton…
August 12, 2008
I don’t think so. Read this piece by Josh Green and the accompanying haul of documents from inside the Clinton campaign. This is the candidate who ran on management expertise–on “actions speak louder than words”, on the ability to get things done. Hillary, it appears, is a pitiful manager.
Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.
I am writing without having yet been able to read the full Green article. But based on the way it begins, and on Clive Crook’s comments about it, it would seem that if Hillary had received a call from her own campaign staff at 3:00 am, (and she may have in fact received many), she wouldn’t have had the faintest idea how to respond.
Posted by: algasema | August 12th, 2008 at 11:51 pm | Report this commentPerhaps the Americans have not got themselves ready for a woman president
Posted by: littlegeorgebush | August 13th, 2008 at 1:58 am | Report this commentAfter reading the Josh Green piece in full, it seems to me that a campaign full of boneheaded decisions finally ended with a wise one: Hillary’s decision to withdraw.
However, foolish assumptions were by no means limited to the Clinton campaign. As Green points out, the Republican right initially boosted Obama’s chances because it considered him unelectable. In one sense, Obama’s campaign might actually have begun in earnest when Karl Rove published his “advice” in an FT oped urging Obama to attack Hillary more vigorously. Obama seems to have taken that advice, both to Hillary’s regret and, in all likelihood, Karl Rove’s as well.
Now that McBush’s campaign is foundering (despite some temporary help from Vladimir Putin) perhaps he should consider hiring Mark Penn as his chief adviser. McBush has already borrowed Penn’s main idea, which Hillary had the decency to reject, namely attacking Obama as un-American.
Why not? After all, the US Supreme Court once ruled, in the Dred Scott decision, that black people could never be Americans.
Posted by: algasema | August 13th, 2008 at 9:28 am | Report this commentReading the Atlantic piece, one might forget that Sen. Clinton blew out Sen. Obama in the last 6 weeks of the primary, which Green describes as period of “chaos”, and a “blowout loss”.
Clinton won the popular vote by 350,000+ in that time period, despite being outspent almost 3:1 by Sen. Obama.
The total popular vote margin for Sen. Obama was less than his huge margin in his ultra-corrupt home Cook County (also Clinton’s original home, but no doubt who the Machine backed).
Such chaos, we should all suffer from!
JBP
Posted by: John Powers | August 13th, 2008 at 3:58 pm | Report this commentWhile it is always nice to have things documented, I do think we knew most of this about Hillary.
She had a gigantic advantage over Obama in the Democratic primary: priceless name-recognition, an ex-president hubby, and a hubby known as a great fund-raiser.
She blew it to a man who most people had never heard of. That has still not sunk in for the remarkable event that it was.
She made a lot of noise about generalship but in fact before our eyes followed bad strategies and tactics and demonstrated relatively weak leadership.
As for Obama, despite his charm and intelligence, had Hillary demonstrated the required skills, he could not have won.
Posted by: JOHN CHUCKMAN, TORONTO | August 13th, 2008 at 4:38 pm | Report this commentAmerica and the whole world needs change and fresh air, a total different approach to politics, to energy and energy independence, to fresh food and water supplies, to health care and education , a new approach to the massive prison-industrial-complex here in the USA ( it costs 50 billion dollars a year to keep 2.3 million prisoners ) , just to name a few, we all need a change,a good one, and that’s why S. Obama won, deep inside most of us want a new and better direction, a new message and new content, enough !
Posted by: blogger | August 13th, 2008 at 10:32 pm | Report this comment“and that’s why S. Obama won, deep inside most of us want a new and better direction, a new message and new content………..” that and spending an unprecedented $300 Million gets you nominated I suppose.
I had lunch yesterday a “grassroots” campaigner who told of paying $4000 per busload to get attendance up at Sen. Obama’s rallies.
Obama spent more in Pennsylvania than the entire Kerry Primary. If spending huge amounts of money to get elected is “a total different approach to politics”, I would like to have the old approach back.
JBP
Posted by: John Powers | August 14th, 2008 at 1:02 pm | Report this commentJBP,
Senator Obama has taken to heart the bad shape the economy is in, and decided to opt for some fiscal stimulus. Not yet elected and already doing the Treasury and the Fed’s bidding.
Posted by: RCS | August 14th, 2008 at 2:38 pm | Report this commentalgasema has confessed to being a rich lawyer, so he ought to distinguish between unsupported allegations and facts. What evidence is there that the right wing thought Obama was unelectable? Many, probably most, reckoned that the best chance of a Republican winning lay in HRC getting the Democratic nomination (and most of them wanted anybody except McCain to win the Republican primaries).
Posted by: John | August 15th, 2008 at 7:51 pm | Report this commentSecondly I do not recall Senator McCain making a fuss about lapel flags or the ridiculously false allegations about Senator Obama’s religion. One friend I knew at university was killed in Vietnam, another in Northern Ireland - neither descended to, or would have dreamed of (?had nightmares about), the cheap “patriotic” posturing of the Clinton campaigners. He, likewise, has no need to do so.
John Powers, I have “confessed” to being an “expensive” lawyer, not necessarily a rich one. There are much easier ways for lawyers to make money than by working in immigration law. Many of us in this field are doing it more out of a sense of mission than for the money, and I think that I can fairly include myself among them. Therefore, can we dispense with the personal comments?
To turn to the substance of your post, if the right wing did not think that Barack Obama was unelectable, at least in the beginning, why did Karl Rove take the trouble to give him such detailed (and sound) advice about how to beat Hillary in the pages of the FT? Was it just because the Republicans thought that they could use him to take some of the “shine” off Hillary, or to stir up a nice fight within the Democratic party?
You certainly can’t think that Rove was offering Barack advice because the Republicans wanted to see him as president. Nor, as far as I know, has Rove ever been in the habit of offering any advice, unsolicited or otherwise, to someone whom he expects to lose. There is good reason to believe that, at least at that time, the Republican right wanted to see Obama at the head of the Democratic ticket. This applies not only to Rove, but to William Kristol and the Fox News people, who were also initially very warm toward Obama. However, once Barack Obama began to be taken seriously by the public, then, in panic, Jeremiah Wright was dragged out of the woodwork.
One does not have to be a lawyer to draw inferences from circumstantial evidence: Many Republicans thought then, and still believe, that no black candidate can ever be elected on the Democratic ticket.
Black Republicans, of course, are an entirely different phenomenon. They can be relied on not to rock the boat, while at the same time giving the right wing a veneer of racial fairness, which is in reality nothing more than a veneer.
Posted by: algasema | August 16th, 2008 at 6:37 pm | Report this commentReading the e-mail messages in the Green article is interesting. That Senator Clinton is a poor manager is not surprising, but is ultimately irrelevant in regard to her election. She lost because a superior candidate emerged out of nowhere.
The most noteworthy if the e-mail messages - I agree with Mr. Chuckman - are those from Mr. Penn. Astonishing really. “Paint Senator Obama as unAmerican”. Racism at its worst. One expects that from right-wing Republicans - that is their stock in trade after all - but a recommendation from a chief advisor to a female Democratic Presidential candidate who is also the CEO of a major advertising company? That Senator Clinton is being feted at the Democratic Convention when this kind of scurrilous activity was going on when her expected coronation was foundering says everything about her character - despicable. No wonder so many average Democratic voters spurned her.
Posted by: Wendell Murray | August 18th, 2008 at 2:21 am | Report this comment