Inside the Clinton Campaign

Politico seems to have broken the embargo on the Atlantic’s big Clinton story for next week. It’s an interesting read, and seems to confirm the rumors that were floating around at the time about how disorganized and divided the Clinton campaign machine was. It also seems to confirm that they gave no real thought about what to do if Clinton didn’t walk away with the nomination out of Iowa, and that by the time they realized the size of their mistake, it was too late to regain their footing.

One thing that does surprise me though, is the extent to which the worst impressions of the Clinton campaign that I had during the primary are confirmed: the sense of entitlement, the internal instability and the half-hearted, incoherent response to the Obama campaign. According to the article, Mark Penn continually advocated the kind of “other” attacks on Obama that he was said to favor at the time. One of the impressions I get reading it is that Clinton and her advisers were torn – they couldn’t decide if they wanted to run with the kind of nasty, base attacks that would drive Obama’s favorability down and allow Clinton to sneak into a victory after they had almost completely wrecked their chances.

Of course, they didn’t do that – at least not to the extent that they could have done. In a lot of ways, the whole thing is amazing for watching how the Clinton campaign went from being the inevitable nominee to losing it almost exclusively through unforced errors. Obama ran a magnificent campaign. He and his advisers seemed to get everything right, to meet every crisis with a well thought out response. Clinton, it seemed, bumbled from one mistake to the next, and even when they saw one possible way to still win – attacking Obama as un-American – screwed it up by not committing.

At the start of the campaign, I felt like Clinton would make for an excellent president, although she certainly wasn’t my first choice. But as the campaign went along, like a lot of Obama supporters, I began to like her and how she was conducting her presidential bid less and less. This article confirms my impressions of her and her campaign, but it also improves my view of her. She saw one path to victory, by going wholly negative against Obama in more conservative states, but didn’t follow through with it (I still think the “3AM” ad and their response to Wright was pretty sleazy). There has to be something positive said about someone who sees the worst possible path, and even if they take a few hesitant steps down it, are still unable to walk down it boldly. Clinton’s performances on Obama’s behalf have been great so far, and I can see no effort on her part to undermine Obama to set herself up for 2012. While I think that Clinton’s campaign deserved to lose, if for no other reason than their clear internal incompetence, I’m pleased with the impression I’ve gotten of her since then.