"Bottom line: I just don't think she was hungry enough for it in the beginning. It wasn't really until the ten-in-a-row loss that she started doing stuff like Saturday Night Live and Jon Stewart. In the beginning, it was hard to get her to do those things. Early in the campaign, she spent much more time in the Senate than the campaign would have liked. It took the threat of a real loss to get her hungry enough for it."That's about the last thing that I would have suspected - that Hillary lacked sufficient ambition for this campaign. But it also does speak to her strengths. She's great with policy, and she's apparently really nice in a personal setting. Which are both good qualities for a Senator. They're also good qualities for a presidential campaign, but they don't make as much of a difference in a presidential campaign as they do in the Senate.
"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 . . . nobody was truly in charge, nobody held truly accountable."More surprises, specifically that her team was thin on campaign experience. How many campaigns has Hillary been through? Counting her own Senate campaigns, Bill's campaigns for governor and President, that's at least 11 (Bill ran for governor 6 times, winning 5 times and losing once). The last thing that I would have expected was for Hillary not to have top-notch people with lots of experience. But, of course, her two Senate campaigns were against weak opponents. And, if you look at Bill's campaigns, his presidential campaigns were against weak opponents, as well. He never did get a majority of the popular vote.
"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."This is key. I think Hillary believed her own hype. I think she thot that she had a great plan, and had no reason not to think otherwise. As the primary fades and the post-mortems roll in, what I am starting to see is that Hillary was not, in fact, as competent as she made herself out to be. She doesn't really have a great track record of accomplishment. The healthcare debacle in 1994 is not an outlier. She thinks of herself as a supremely competent manager, and sells herself that way. But from what we're hearing, she's a good manager, but not a great one. But her managerial competence was a selling point in the campaign. So when things started going wrong on her campaign, that part of the message was tarnished.
She's smart and competent, but she's also never had to face failure on a large scale and learn to deal with her own inadequacies. Since marrying Bill, she has rarely, if ever, been in a situation where she has been tested on her own. Obama, on the other hand, is well aware of his own shortcomings, and knows how to deal with them.
"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. And [the campaign] was overstaffed with hired guns with no real allegiance to HRC; she was the safest and easiest bet, no sacrifice necessary."Two things here: "not learning from the mistakes of Kerry and Gore." It sounds like Hillary did not think she needed to learn from the mistakes of Kerry and Gore, which goes back to her arrogance and lack of self-awareness. And again we hear about problems with hiring the right staff. She has almost never had the experience of hiring staff and not having them work out, particularly on this scale. Bill has certainly had that experience, but apparently Hillary didn't learn the lesson from him. It's ironic that she had "hired guns" with no real allegiance to her, because it's the exact opposite of another problem that she has, which is that she hires people who are very loyal, but don't have the experience.
Democracy in action. As long as this primary season has been, I think we can be thankful that the candidates truly have been tested. Without Obama in this race, Hillary probably would have cruised to the nomination. But, giving what we know now, I'm glad she didn't get the nomination, because I am far less confident now about her abilities in the White House than I was when this campaign started.
I remember the '92 campaign. I was in Washington when Bill Clinton was elected and became president. It was a wonderfully exciting time.
But I also remember Bill Clinton being knocked off track by Republican attacks almost as soon as he was sworn in. The two issues that hit him hard were gays in the military and Haiti. He was not prepared for either.
More importantly, though, Democrats were not prepared for either. There were a lot of young people in DC, all of whom wanted to change the world. We were young and enthusiastic, but we were naive. I like to think I've learned my lessons since then. I'm not sure Hillary has.
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