With the focus of the political world on November, and what’s going to happen over the next 84 days, it’s tempting to downplay revelations about the inner workings of the Clinton campaign. If only the revelations weren’t so interesting, I probably would.
I should note at the outset that more than two months later, the explanation for why the Clinton campaign came up short hasn’t changed. My friend Tom Schaller explained this very well yesterday: “[Clinton’s team] underestimated Obama, they didn’t have a plan for winning delegates in caucus states, and they were caught flat in the period immediately following Super Tuesday.” Howard Wolfson’s protestations notwithstanding, these are the reasons Clinton was a close second, instead of first.
But questions linger, still, as to how this process unfolded, given Clinton’s advantages at the start of the race. The Atlantic’s Joshua Green obtained some fascinating internal documents that paint a discouraging picture of a Clinton campaign divided.
While Senator Hillary Clinton campaigned for president by offering herself as a sure-handed, competent successor to President Bush, her campaign team of highly paid advisers was riven by back-biting, poor management, and conflicting strategies that contributed to her loss to Senator Barack Obama, according to an article in The Atlantic that was just released.
Senator Clinton also appeared prone to blowing up in anger privately, over negative news media coverage and at her own aides for not pressing political arguments against Mr. Obama more aggressively and for not dealing better with problems such as the political limbo of her delegates from the unofficial Florida and Michigan primaries, according to an article by Joshua Green of The Atlantic magazine that was posted tonight on its Web site.
Among those contributing to the turmoil was former President Bill Clinton, who sided with Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, in pressing for “aggressive confrontation to tear Obama down” — an assessment made by the magazine based on previously undisclosed memos and e-mail among the strategists.
There’s plenty of blame to go around.
Greg Sargent had a helpful summary of some of the highlights (or lowlights, depending on one’s perspective):
* Hillary anger prompted “kindergarten” attack on Obama. Green reports that Hillary got angry on a conference call in December of 2007
, wondering why the campaign wasn’t on the attack. That sparked a flurry of emails among Hillary advisers, with chief spokesperson Howard Wolfson writing: “I would like to put out a release documenting all the instances that we know Obama has been contemplating a potus run.”
Later the campaign would make an issue out of Obama’s kindergarten essay on running for President one day, only to say the whole thing was a joke after the attack was ridiculed.
* Several Hillary advisers advocated a big push in March to address the Florida and Michigan delegation standoffs, but the campaign didn’t do anything in earnest until May. A March 10, 2008, memo from two Hillary advisers insists that “our campaign should step into the vacuum” and says that the goal is to run up the “popular vote totals” in the two states. Nothing happened for at least two months, and by then, it was too late to build real momentum for revotes.
* Top Hillary strategist lashed out at campaign leaking. When Geoff Garin took over as Hillary’s chief strategist in April 2008, he penned a memo saying he was appalled at all the leaking going on. Garin wrote: “I don’t mean to be an asshole, but…”
* Uber-Washington-insider Robert Barnett also lost it over leaking. D.C. lawyer and top Hillary supporter Barnett boiled over after seeing a Washington Post article filled with leaks. “This circular firing squad that is occurring is unattractive, unprofessional, unconscionable, and unprofessional,” Barnett wrote. “It must stop.”
I’d just point out a couple of additional angles. First, as you may have heard, Mark Penn recommended a brutal, xenophobic series of attacks, which Clinton, to her credit, rejected. From a Penn memo:
All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.
Save it for 2050.
It also exposes a very strong weakness for him — his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.
There was also this jaw-dropper:
On February 10, Clinton finally fired Solis Doyle and moved Williams in—but did not heed calls to fire Penn, enraging Solis Doyle’s many loyalists. At this crucial point, long-simmering feuds burst into the open. On February 11, Williams’s first day on the job, Phil Singer, Wolfson’s deputy and a man notorious for his tirades at reporters, blew up in Wolfson’s office and screamed obscenities at his boss before throwing open the door to direct his ire at the campaign’s policy director, Neera Tanden, an ally of Solis Doyle. “Fuck you and the whole fucking cabal!” he shouted, according to several Clinton staffers. In the end, he climbed onto a chair and screamed at the entire staff before storming out.
The same day, Philip Bennett, the managing editor of The Washington Post, sent Williams a letter formally complaining that Singer had maligned one of his reporters by spreading unfounded rumors about her (apparently in retaliation for an accurate — and prescient — story that had noted, long before anyone else, Clinton’s tendency to burn through money). Fearing for his deputy’s job, Wolfson intercepted the letter, though Bennett eventually got a copy to Williams. Singer disappeared and was presumed fired. But a week later, he made amends and rejoined the campaign. “When the house is on fire, it’s better to have a psychotic fireman than no fireman at all,” Wolfson explained to a colleague.
I’m not sure which part of this is the most bizarre, but I’m leaning towards the notion that a campaign’s communications director was hiding mail intended for the campaign manager.
It doesn’t exactly say, “finely-tuned machine.”