Just a few days before voters head to the polls in Ohio and Texas, two contests Hillary Clinton has to win big, it’s surprisingly unhelpful to see top Clinton aides start to point fingers at one another.
Harold Ickes definitely doesn’t buy the argument that Mark Penn isn’t responsible for everything that has happened to the Hillary Clinton campaign. “Mark Penn has run this campaign,” said Ickes in a brief phone interview this morning. “Besides Hillary Clinton, he is the single most responsible person for this campaign.
“Now, he has been circumscribed to some extent by Maggie Williams,” said Ickes, who then pointed out that that was only a recent development.
When asked about the assertion by one senior Clinton official the campaign was effectively run by committee, diluting Penn’s authority, Ickes was incredulous.
“I don’t know what campaign you’re talking about,” said Ickes. “I have been at meetings where he introduces himself as the campaign’s chief strategist. I’ve heard him call himself that many times, say, ‘I am the chief strategist.'” Asked if Penn preferred the title of chief strategist to pollster, Ickes said, “Prefer it? He insists on it!”
Ickes specifically held Penn responsible for the campaign’s strategy: “Mark Penn,” Ickes said, “has dominated the message in this campaign. Dominated it.”
For his part, Penn blamed Ickes for the campaign’s questionable spending priorities. “Every single expenditure is reviewed and approved by the campaign, by Harold Ickes and his team, one by one,” Penn said. “I have absolutely no budget authority or any administrative control.”
There have been several reports about the Clinton campaign having morale problems at this point, but having two of her top campaign aides feuding, on the record, is really not a helpful sign.
For what it’s worth, Ezra Klein had a good item suggesting the finger-pointing among the top Clinton aides is rather pointless.
Oddly, I actually think Mark Penn is right to say that he gets a bum rap among those who blame him for creating a microtargeted, small-bore effort. His book may have been about microtrends, but the campaign he helped run really did stake its success on broad themes, large arguments, and big policies. It just hasn’t been enough.
Insofar as the campaign made big mistakes, they were tactical and organizational in nature. They didn’t realize how long the primary would go on, and weren’t ready to compete after Super Tuesday. They did a terrible job organizing in caucus states, and began opportunistically questioning the legitimacy of the process. They didn’t control their surrogates, and let Bill Clinton, Mark Penn, and others trash Hillary’s image by going too negative. Those were all errors, and some of them had a pretty large impact. If the campaign hadn’t turned so many folks off in South Carolina, Obama may not have registered the win that revived his momentum after losing New Hampshire.
Sounds right to me.