If only she'd run a competent campaign, that is. This article:
http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=f7a4a380-c4a4-4f84-b653-f252e8569915is on the TPM news feed and won't be there long, but you don't want to miss it. It's Clinton campaign staffers explaining why they think she lost.
... There was no attention to history ...
... Not learning from the mistakes of Kerry and Gore, the campaign was based in the D.C. area, rooting its perspective in the fishbowl and echo chamber nature of the capital. ...
.. There was not any plan in place from beginning to end on how to win the nomination. It was, 'Win Iowa.' There was not the experience level, and, frankly, the management ability, to create a whole plan to get to the magical delegate number. ...
... 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, ...
... [Policy Director] Tanden and [Communications Director] Wolfson, the HQ's most senior department heads, had no real presidential campaign experience, and no primary experience whatsoever. Notoriously bad managers, they filled key posts with newcomers loyal to them but unknown to and unfamiliar with the candidate, her style, her history, her preferences. ...
... We would just cringe. Ugh. Such an out-of-touch corporate run kind of campaign ...
... Our message in fact was working very well through September. What we failed to do is pivot when we needed to. [...] We repackaged the old message and sent it back out. Instead of 'Ready on Day One,' we changed to 'Solutions.' It was a very IBM approach. ...
... There was financial mismanagement bordering on fraud. A candidate who raised more than a quarter of a billion dollars over the years had to pump in millions more of her own money to stave off bankruptcy. ...
... If you have no cash because you totally mismanaged the budget, you have no money to go up on TV; you're getting crushed on TV and in direct mail because Obama has so much more money--that is a huge problem. Who was looking at the money? The financial situation was a disaster. ...
... The Senator is as loyal as she is smart. And I think that removing Patti is where those two things came into conflict. She knew the right thing to do. At same time, she was very loyal to Patti, who had been very loyal to her. ...
... we didn't plan for a national campaign ...
... It was obvious talking to people on the ground there that they simply did not get the Iowa caucus from a field perspective. That's where the thing was lost. ...
... The real race was the three-way. But [Penn] always focused on the eight-way when we'd start going over the numbers in Iowa. It was frustrating to the state staff and other people as well. It just showed a lack of understanding and a disconnect. ...
... We ran a press operation that lost all credibility with the press through endless and pointless memos like, 'Where's the Bounce?' and polling memos that cherry-picked only positive polls when we were up and ignored polling when we were down. ...
Remember, these are comments from Hillary's own campaign staff. Read the whole thing, and breathe a huge sigh of relief.
Why bring this up? Because Hillary is still in it, but now for the veep slot. Someone who surrounds themselves with advisors based on putting loyalty over confidence, who relies on simplistic planning and is slow to accept that it isn't working, etc., etc., shouldn't be that close to the Oval Office. Certainly not as President, but also not as Vice President.
If any candidate without the name recognition and fundraising advantage and party support that Hillary started out with had mismanaged their campaign this badly, they'd have been out long, long ago.
I wish her a long and successful career in the Senate. If Obama appoints her to the Supreme Court, as some have suggested, I'll cheer (in part because it would be fun to see wingnuts tied up in knots for many years as a result). Anything that doesn't require competence at large-scale management.
