The Front-Runner’s Fall

Joshua Green has written a very interesting article into what went wrong behind Hillary Clinton's campaign. It starts with stuff that most of us could see at a glance:

The campaign was not prepared for a lengthy fight; it had an insufficient delegate operation; it squandered vast sums of money; and the candidate herself evinced a paralyzing schizophrenia—one day a shots-’n’-beers brawler, the next a Hallmark Channel mom. Through it all, her staff feuded and bickered, while her husband distracted.

What many of us said at the time was that the charge of inexperience against Obama seemed cheap as he was blatantly running a better campaign than the one Hillary was running, and if Hillary ran the country as shockingly as she was running her campaign, then she simply did not deserve to be president.

But behind the scenes it was even more chaotic than any of us suspected:

The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House. But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.

Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.

It's quite clear reading the whole thing that, as many of us suspected, Hillary thought it would all conclude on Super Tuesday and that she had no plans for after that date. And there is certainly no mention of super delegates or the later-caucus states which came to feature so prominently towards the end of the campaign.

Then there was the financial side of things:

Ickes seemed attuned to the asymmetric risk that accompanies overwhelming front-runner status: the collapse of momentum that would accompany an unexpected loss. He posited that Edwards and Obama could sustain losing Iowa and New Hampshire but worried that Clinton could not; he urged that she spend “substantial” time in Iowa; and he recommended a contingency plan that would haunt the campaign when his own budget team didn’t fulfill it. Noting the difficulty of raising more than $75 million before Iowa, Ickes stressed the need to maintain a $25 million reserve, presumably as insurance against a setback. The campaign wound up raising more than $100 million—but, according to The New York Times, by the time Iowa was lost, $106 million had been spent. The $25 million reserve had vanished, and the campaign was effectively insolvent.

It's also confirming another thing many of us suspected at the time, that it took Hillary far too long to realise that the candidacy would be won through the delegate count and not by states.

Then, on December 22—just 12 days before Iowa—Ickes tried again, in a memo that seems to be introducing the subject of delegates for the first time:

Assuming that after Iowa and New Hampshire the presidential nominating contest narrows to two competitive candidates who remain locked in a highly contested election through 5 February, the focus of the campaign and press will shift to the delegate count. The dedication of resources (including candidate time) should be influenced, in part, by factors that will afford HRC an advantage in acquiring more delegates compared to her opponent(s).

The advice finally registered—but it was too late.

At the time I thought Hillary was fighting as if she was running for president rather than to be the Democratic presidential nominee. It now turns out that she was. The problem was that they are both entirely different races and the winner is established under different rules.

It's astonishing to realise that this initial assumption was actually correct.

It's a fascinating read. Read the whole thing by clicking on the title.

Tags: Clinton, Obama, US election 2008