Campaign Critique

Another assessment of recent Demo campaign history from Paul Jenkins at the Huffington Post. 

Clinton, on the other hand, did not see Obama coming and dismissed him as an arriviste who would soon enough realize that he should wait his turn and embrace a Clinton restoration. This lack of vision by the candidate herself was compounded by her senior staff, a deeply unappealing group whose arrogance continues to damage her campaign, and who seem unable to convey the most basic truths to their boss. That she has surrounded herself with relative incompetents such as Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Patti Solis Doyle is obviously one of her biggest failings, and should give pause to anyone reflecting on the kind of staffing choices she would have to make as president.
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Clinton's post-Iowa reworked message morphed into increasingly personal, angry and entitled attacks on Obama as a talker not a doer. It is at that point, especially as South Carolina was looking to be a complete bust, that the campaign should have felt that primary voters would not tolerate the type of aggression that the Clintons practice as a matter of course, especially since Hillary wasn't under unusually belligerent pressure. But the Clintons and their court simply don't know any better, and it is far too easy to picture a Clinton White House in 2009 that throws us back to the darkest dysfunction of Bill's presidency, and the inevitable political paralysis this would cause.

To this day, the campaign just doesn't get the silliness of slogans that, for instance most recently, paint Clinton as a hard worker (we ASSUME presidential candidates are hard workers; are they saying Obama has been on vacation for the past 15 years?). The Clintons don't get that the constant petty jabbing and maneuvering (plagiarism! hot air! disenfranchised delegates!) should be way, way below them and that, in the end, it irredeemably cheapens her candidacy, making her look anything but presidential. It is a remarkable feat that it also makes her husband, a two-term president, look anything but presidential. And it plays into the worst stereotypes of Hillary as a small-minded and dishonest conniver who doesn't understand why she may be denied what she deems to be (and has been told is) her due. With this in mind, how on earth do we expect that a Clinton presidency could take anything but the low road, with little to show for its fights except power itself?