Although Mrs. Clinton proved a more agile candidate than many had expected, she built a campaign that was suffused in overconfidence, riven by acrimony and weighted by the emotional baggage of a marriage between former and would-be presidents.
In the Times, Peter Baker and Jim Rutenberg analyze the end of the Clinton campaign.
It’s not pretty.
Some nuggets:
[Hillary] did little to stop the infighting back home among advisers who nursed grudges from their White House days. The aides grew distracted from battling Senator Barack Obama while they hurled expletives at one another, stormed out of meetings and schemed to get one another fired.
…[Clinton adviser Mark] Penn argued that Mrs. Clinton should find subtle ways to exploit what he called Mr. Obama’s “lack of American roots,” referring to his Kenyan father and his childhood years in Indonesia and even the offshore state of Hawaii, the campaign officials said. Mr. Penn recommended that Mrs. Clinton own the word “American”….
….[Clinton adviser Harold] Ickes, a bare-knuckled liberal friend of labor, had despised Mr. Penn since their days in the Clinton White House and did nothing to hide it, regularly mocking “our vaunted chief strategist” and at least once engaging in a profanity-laden shouting match with him….
….Aides to Mrs. Clinton took umbrage at Mr. Clinton’s freelancing and deemed his office uncooperative….
….Mr. Clinton was making matters worse. On the night of the South Carolina primary, Mr. Clinton called and Mr. Clyburn said he told him to tone down his rhetoric against Mr. Obama. Mr. Clinton responded by calling him a rude name that Mr. Clyburn would not repeat in an interview.
…Mrs. Clinton dumped her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, who had been with her since 1992, and the two have not spoken since.
A couple of impressions after reading this: One, why was there not a single new figure to emerge as a voice for change in the Clinton campaign? Ickes, Penn, Gruenwald, Wolfson—these are all old political hacks, and not the people to represent change or intuit new trends in politics. They reek of same old, same old.
And two…relief. Relief that these people will not be occuping the White House, busily fighting with each other, kicking and scratching over power while the business of the country suffered.
Can you imagine a White House with Mark Penn as its pollster and Harold Ickes as its chief of staff? Terry McAuliffe as, I don’t know, secretary of state or something? Bill Clinton as the resident curmudgeon and lech?
At a time when the country needs a quantum leap forward, the Clintons represented nothing but more of the same, and the failure to adapt was a huge mistake on Hillary’s part. She surrounded herself with cronies and she failed to realize that, with them infiltrating every important job in her campaign, it was fundamentally impossible for her to manifest a message of change.
The other thing this article accomplishes: It presents a picture of such disarray, cluelessness, infighting, and just general nastiness within the Clinton campaign that it adds substantially to the argument against picking her for v-p.