Son of Inside the Clinton Campaign

The Atlantic’s big story on the Clinton campaign has dropped, and it’s a fascinating read. If you followed the campaign with any interest at all, I highly suggest that you hop over there and read the whole thing. There really aren’t any huge revelations. Mark Penn seems very unpleasant, and they couldn’t make up their mind on what to do with Michigan and Florida. The campaign was beset from the beginning with an inability to question the received notions it operated in. By the time that it occurred to them that the race wasn’t going to be how they’d assumed, it was almost too late. The main idea that I walked away from the article with is amazement that the Clinton campaign remained viable for so long after the math had shifted decisively against them.

The irony of the whole thing is that, despite Clinton’s “ready on day one” rhetoric, she never took a firm executive hand in her own campaign. Instead of making hard decisions when they needed to be made (and would have made a difference), she waited until any benefit that the hard choices would have incurred had already evaporated. While Obama’s campaign seems to have been run in a very tight fashion, with Obama firmly at the head, Clinton’s was beset with all sorts of internal rivalries and factions.