As we consider the trends and developments in the Democratic campaign, it would also be useful to reflect on what this campaign is showing us about the respective candidates’ managerial and political skills, and how those skills – or the lack of them – would be brought to bear in governing if they are elected.

First, the campaign itself: Clinton’s campaign has been erratically managed, and has squandered massive leads in most of the states that have voted.  Her electoral strategy has based on locking up traditional Democrats in very large states through voter familiarity, insider support and traditional get-out-the-vote efforts driven by established party leaders.  They have mainly succeeded in this task, but have failed almost everywhere else.  It’s also clear that they have failed in elementary electoral arithmetic, allowing Obama to rack up massive victories in states Clinton failed to contest effectively.  Thus Obama has been able to reap a huge delegate haul by the accumulation of serious delegate margins in a large number of smaller states, and now has a substantial edge in pledged delegates.   The Clinton campaign has also been quite unsuccessful in generating crossover support among Independents or Republicans, or even at generating real enthusiasm among its own core supporters, as seen by turnout at events on the campaign trail, and weak support at caucuses.  And polls continue to show Hillary Clinton, who is extremely well known to American voters, runs into a very firm electoral ceiling.  They show her either losing to or drawing with McCain.  This does not bode well for her chances in the fall.

The Obama campaign has, on the other hand, been smoothly and smartly managed, consistent in its approach, and relatively mistake-free.  And its trajectory has been almost uniformly upward.  They have a clear strategy for victory, have stuck to that strategy and have succeeded in executing it to achieve the desired results.  But of course the chief factor in the campaign’s success has been the charisma and public communications skills of the candidate himself.

This is very important as we look toward 2009.  If a Democrat is elected, getting a genuinely progressive agenda through Congress is going to involve mobilizing a large, unified, sustained and determined coalition of ordinary Americans to keep the pressure on Congress and act as a counterweight to powerful business interests.  Hillary Clinton has shown us nothing in her campaign that would lead us to believe that she possesses either the organizational and tactical ability, the public communications skills or the personal charisma to do this.  Accomplishing a progressive agenda is also going to involve increasing the Democratic majority in Congress, particularly in the Senate.  But we are seeing no polling or even anecdotal evidence that Clinton, even if she wins, is likely to possess long coattails.  Given her high negatives and more narrow, partisan base of support, she may even have negative coattails if she is the nominee.

The best Clinton will be able to accomplish in office, then, through her customary secretive, insider-based, power-broker approach, is another set of very middle of the road, incremental legislative changes: half a loaf here and there that helps us feel just a little bit good about doing just a little bit, but nothing that really solves any of the huge problems facing the country.  The Bill Clinton administration was itself incrementalist and unambitious in this way.   But Hillary Clinton lacks even the charisma of her husband.  How much do people really think Hillary Clinton will be able to accomplish on climate change, to take one example, after she negotiates a legislative package through a series of pow-wows with most of the important corporate player looking for a trade?  And even if she takes to the road to take on the corporations and convince Americans of the need for a major climate change initiative with the dramatic social policy changes needed to really address the problem, how likely is she to win over the public?  She just doesn’t have the public communications touch, and the hostility she attracts will constantly undermine and overshadow the message.

I’m guessing that this is why most of Edwards’s supporters have moved to Obama, despite the fact that there are a few policy areas where Clinton is sometimes closer to Edwards than is Obama – for example in the area of health care mandates.  These supporters just don’t believe Clinton will really deliver on that agenda.  She lacks the skills needed to get it done, and her insider instincts mean many of the legislative proposals will probably be compromised away on the path from the campaign stump to passage.  She failed to deliver health care reform in the nineties, and we are seeing nothing to indicate she will get it right this time.  Anyone can produce a policy position paper; but accomplishing change requires political skills that go beyond generating bullet points on paper.  And aside from these liabilities, the first Clinton administration ended up in something of a train wreck, so the Clintons would return to the White House with two strikes against them.

During his campaign, Edwards articulated a confrontational theory of change based on the idea of the need to fight against special interests, and was sometimes said to be skeptical of Obama’s more inclusive, broad coalition approach.  Aside for the fact that the Edwards approach strikes me as an orientation somewhat more built for the courtroom than the broader political arena, where the results are not decided by a small jury but rather by than the entire US Congress, Edwards should by now recognize that the Obama approach has been extremely successful in this campaign, and that Obama is in the process of building a highly-motivated coalition for change.  Edwards did much the same thing in the Iowa caucuses, getting a lot of enthusiastic supporters to show up.  Yet we have seen in state after state that Clinton can’t even get her supporters to show up at a caucus and register their enthusiastic support for her in public.  Today’s blowout result in Maine, a state where Clinton was supposedly ahead until the very end, is another case in point.   Given Clinton’s track record of friendliness with insiders, and her failure in this campaign to energize a broader, popular coalition, there is little reason to think she will be able to bring the kinds of progressive changes for which Edwards has fought.

The whole rationale for Clinton over Obama was supposed to be the based on the contrast between sound managerial competence rooted in experience, on the one hand, and charismatic hope and excitement on the other.  But that rationale has been blown away in recent weeks, since the Clinton campaign has shown itself to be both less charismatic and less competent than the Obama campaign.