Once in a great while, we can point to just one thing that ruined a presidential campaign. For Joe Biden in ’84, it was the controversy surrounding plagiarism. For Gary Hart in 1988, it was a scandal in his personal life. But in most instances, when campaigns come up short, it’s a wide variety of factors, some of which have nothing to do with the candidates themselves.
I suspect books will be written about Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and why things didn’t work out for the one-time frontrunner, but now that the race for the nomination is over, it’s probably worth taking a moment to consider the inevitable “what went wrong?” question.
Atrios noted a couple of times this morning that news outlets have been asking this question quite a bit, but the media seems to be missing one of the major factors: “[I]t is Iraq. No Iraq, no way to challenge Clinton.”
Clearly, Iraq alone wasn’t enough to carry Obama to victory. But had Clinton voted against the war in 2002 there would have been no Obama challenge — it would have been a senseless and absurd thing to do. In short — no war, no Obama.
That sounds right to me. I’ve wondered from time to time during the process what would have happened if Clinton had taken a page from John Edwards’ playbook and acknowledged, long before the campaign began in earnest, that voting for the war was the wrong move. Edwards’ candor and regret was seen as sincere, and he gained considerable credibility in progressive circles by proactively acknowledging his mistake, explaining why he made it, and arguing how he’d do better in the future.
Clinton never felt comfortable with this move. I think I know why — she didn’t want to appear like a “flip-flopper,” or someone the Republicans could characterize as “weak” when it came to the military and/or national security. But the result was an awkward dynamic in which Clinton wouldn’t say she was wrong, but couldn’t say she was right. Clinton became quite adept at dodging questions about what she would have done if she could make that vote again, but voters could tell she was being evasive.
It gave Obama an opening, and a chance to distinguish himself as the one who got the “big question” right from the start. That Obama and Clinton agree on practically everything else made this distinction all the more significant.
To be sure, I don’t think Dems, in general, necessarily used the 2002 AUMF vote as a litmus test. John Kerry and John Edwards both voted with the majority on this, and Dems embraced their ticket with great enthusiasm. Indeed, Clinton was the Democratic frontrunner throughout 2007, and everyone knew full well how she voted on the war five years prior.
The point, though, is that it gave Obama an edge on one of the biggest, if not the biggest, issues on the minds of Democratic voters. It was a foot in the door. Without this distinction, Obama might not have even run. And without Obama, Clinton probably wins the nomination in a walk. (Her major competitors — Edwards, Dodd, Biden — voted the same way on Iraq that she did.)
And what about what happened after Obama got his foot in the door? It’s probably not realistic to think Clinton lost the 2008 nomination in October 2002, especially given her enormous leads over the Democratic field as late as, say, November 2007.
I’m still collecting my notes (and thoughts) about the various missteps and strategic errors that contributed to Clinton’s strong second-place finish, but the WaPo has a fascinating front-page item that everyone really should read about how and why the Obama electoral strategy — focusing on delegates, not states — was simply a better game-plan.
Almost from the beginning, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s superior name recognition and her sway with state party organizations convinced Barack Obama’s brain trust that a junior senator from Illinois was not going to be able to challenge the Clinton political machine head-on.
The insurgent strategy the group devised instead was to virtually cede the most important battlegrounds of the Democratic nomination fight to Clinton, using precision targeting to minimize her delegate hauls, while going all out to crush her in states where Democratic candidates rarely ventured.
The result may have lacked the glamour of a sweep, but last night, with the delegates he picked up in Montana and South Dakota and a flood of superdelegate endorsements, Obama sealed one of the biggest upsets in U.S. political history and became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to wrest his party’s nomination from the candidate of the party establishment. The surprise was how well his strategy held up — and how little resistance it met.
“We kept waiting for the Clinton people to send people into the caucus states,” marveled Jon Carson, one of Obama’s top ground-game strategists.
“It’s the big mystery of the campaign,” said campaign manager David Plouffe, “because every delegate counts.”
Clinton gambled on a strategy in which she’d cruise to some early victories, before wrapping up the nomination on Super Tuesday. When she stumbled in Iowa, and split the Super Tuesday contests, Clinton didn’t seem to have a Plan B.
Senior advisers, including Plouffe and delegate specialist Jeffrey Berman, diced the country into 435 congressional districts, the basis for pledged-delegate allocations. They examined each district under different scenarios — for instance, before and after former senator John Edwards left the race. And they identified quirks that Obama could exploit — such as the fact that in districts that awarded an even number of delegates, the take was generally split evenly, if the winning margin was kept reasonable.
The campaign leadership had wanted no distractions before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, so the planning in Chicago was done in secret. But on the night of Jan. 4, as Obama’s Iowa staff staggered into his Des Moines campaign headquarters, still ragged from celebrating the senator’s improbable victory there, field director Paul Tewes took it public.
Everyone on the payroll in Iowa would be assigned to another state, he announced. Hotels had already been booked and rooms in the homes of volunteers arranged. Marygrace Galston, who had helped oversee the ground-game deployments, gave staff members until 6 p.m. to say whether they were accepting their new assignments.
Obama’s team left Des Moines and fanned out — to Idaho, to Alabama, to Alaska, places that had never seen a Democratic presidential primary campaign. The months ahead would have other key moments. The late-night standoff in Indiana last month deprived Clinton of a strong victory to offset her crushing defeat in North Carolina — and ultimately left Obama’s big delegate take intact. Edwards’s endorsement of Obama on May 14 helped sap what momentum Clinton had from her landslide win in West Virginia the day before. […]
“It’s the story that hasn’t been written yet, how Obama did everything right, targeting caucuses, targeting small states, avoiding the showdowns in the big states where he could,” said Bill Ballenger, editor of Inside Michigan Politics, who watched the strategy play out in microcosm in his own state, “and how in the end Clinton did so much so wrong.”
Clinton fans are left wondering what could have been.