On Sunday, Patti Solis Doyle, the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was sacked. About 48 hours later, Mike Henry, the deputy campaign manager, was gone. By last night, two more staffers had left the campaign as well.
As I mentioned the other day, I’ve never seen the inner workings of the Clinton campaign up close, but I’ve always pictured an extremely efficient, professional operation, run by some of the most experienced Democratic staffers in the business. If the campaign faltered, it wouldn’t be the fault of a slapdash, mistake-prone team.
But The Atlantic’s Josh Green has a fascinating item this week on the inner workings of the campaign, and what led to the staff shake-up. The problem began early on by dismissing Obama’s chances.
“Not a lot, but some people, were losing sleep about Obama as early as last winter, keeping an eye on his moves and tracking his hires and outreach,” a Clinton insider admitted to me last spring. “There were two reasons nothing happened. First, by admitting he’s a factor, you’re giving him the credibility that you don’t want him to have. Second, everybody thought he would flame out. They didn’t think he could pull a money team and enough talent together to mount a serious challenge.”
Of course, Obama did just that, relying on the new donor class Clinton had ignored. “When Obama came along,” an embittered Clinton aide told me, “suddenly you had your choice of rock star.”
The Clinton team soon came to realize that Obama was a credible candidate for the nomination, but decided the way to neutralize the threat was to stick to the “inevitability” strategy.
Here, too, Solis Doyle was disastrous; her lack of skill in areas other than playing the loyal heavy began to show. The first public sign of this came just after Clinton’s reelection to the Senate. Even though Clinton had faced no serious opponent, it turned out that Solis Doyle, as campaign manager, had burned through more than $30 million. As this New York Times story makes clear, the donor base was incensed. Toward the end of the Senate campaign, Solis Doyle did her best to bolster the impression of the inevitability of Hillary’s nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate, spreading word that Clinton’s Senate reelection fund-raising had gone so exceptionally well that $40 million to $50 million would be left after Election Day to transfer to the incipient presidential campaign. But this turned out to be a wild exaggeration — and Solis Doyle must have known it was. Disclosure filings revealed a paltry $10 million in cash on hand; far from conveying Hillary’s inevitability, this had precisely the opposite effect, encouraging, rather than frightening off, potential challengers.
Rather than punish Solis Doyle or raise questions about her fitness to lead, Clinton chose her to manage the presidential campaign for reasons that should now be obvious: above all, Clinton prizes loyalty and discipline, and Solis Doyle demonstrated both traits, if little else. This suggests to me that for all the emphasis Clinton has placed on executive leadership in this campaign, her own approach is a lot closer to the current president’s than her supporters might like to admit.
Ouch. How did Solis Doyle get the campaign-manager position in the first place? Green explained that she was rewarded for her “loyalty, rather than her skill, despite a trail of available evidence suggesting she was unsuited for the role.”
And all of this comes, of course, after recent revelations that Clinton was intentionally kept in the dark about the campaign’s financial troubles, with her top aides preferring to keep her in a bubble, reinforced by constant encouragement that everything was fine.
So, what happens now?
Even at this late date, Clinton has a clear path to winning the nomination if she can prevail in Ohio and Texas, as she’s expected to. Solis Doyle’s replacement, Maggie Williams, is thought to possess many of the skills her predecessor lacked, while enjoying a relationship with Clinton that is every bit as close. Every reaction I’ve gotten from inside the campaign has been exuberance at Williams’s arrival — followed by concern over whether the change was made too late.
I can still imagine a scenario in which Clinton recovers and wins the nomination, despite mismanagement in her campaign, but a) it’s a little tougher to believe than it was a couple of weeks ago; and b) it’s even easier to imagine Clinton in a far better position in the race right now were it not for these very costly internal mistakes.