A mismanaged campaign
These are all anonymous quotes from insiders of the Clinton campaign:
-Hillary assembled a team thin on presidential campaign experience that confused discipline with insularity… -There was financial mismanagement bordering on fraud. -Her people spent all of 2008 making lists blaming each other (but never themselves) rather than lists of solutions.
There are a lot more like that in the article. It makes me feel extremely glad that this team is unlikely to be running the White House in one year’s time.
Comments (3)
but... but... it's better to be ready on day 1!!
The number one worst mistake they made is this:
As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state's 370 delegates. It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all. Sitting nearby, veteran Democratic insider Harold M. Ickes, who had helped write those rules, was horrified — and let Penn know it. "How can it possibly be," Ickes asked, "that the much vaunted chief strategist doesn't understand proportional allocation?" And yet the strategy remained the same, with the campaign making its bet on big-state victories.
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1738331,00.html
If I were to ask her to do it over, here are the two things I would recommend:
1. creating enough ground forces in small caucus states and spending money on those ground operations
2. forcing Bill out of the spot light and focusing him on small rural communities both black and white starting in Iowa, SC, and NH
I do hope she gets her place as VP on the ticket. She has run a very hard fought race and I think she did very well, just not as well as Obama. I do think Michigan and Florida will be counted, but I think the Super Delegates will still make Obama the candidate as the compromise. At the end many people will have voted.
Apparently the pundits on Meet the Press all trashed Clinton as a poor choice for VP, but she currently is beating McCain in the electoral vote 310 to 217 or something is recent polls if she were the nominee. I think she is an asset to the Democratic Party and an asset to this presidential campaign on the top or bottom of the ticket.
People like me are depressed about our apparent loss in the primary season. I have always liked Obama and think he will be a great president, but I really hope me and the others who voted for Clinton are respected at the convention and that some concessions are made to us. Either the adoption of our Healthcare platform, HRC as VP, or our energy policy (minus the gas holiday).
The more the press continues to trash her (and thus her constituents) the more Obama will have to make us feel welcome somewhere in the political landscape of America.