TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

The Collapse Of Hillary

ADVERTISEMENT

The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 11, 2008

This time last year it looked as if Hillary Clinton's path to the Democratic nomination would be a cakewalk. She had the best brand name in American politics. She controlled the Democratic establishment. She had money to burn and a double-digit lead in the opinion polls. And as the first American woman to have a chance of breaking the presidential glass ceiling, she had a great story to tell.

And Barack Obama? He was a first-term senator with few legislative achievements and a worrying penchant for honesty (in his autobiography he admitted to using marijuana and even cocaine, "when you could afford it").

He knew how to give a good speech. But how could that compare with Clinton's assets - a well-oiled political machine and a winning political formula that combined a carefully calibrated appeal to the center with hard-edged political tactics?

Today, Clinton has not only lost the Democratic nomination. She has humiliated herself in the process.

She has been forced to lend her campaign more than $11 million of her own money. She has cozied up to some of her former persecutors in the "vast right-wing conspiracy," notably Richard Mellon Scaife, a newspaper magnate. She has engaged in phony populism, calling for a temporary break on gas taxes, praising "hardworking Americans, white Americans," vowing to "totally obliterate" Iran and waving the bloody shirt of Sept. 11.

The conservative Weekly Standard praised her as "a feminist form of George Bush." So how did one of America's most accomplished politicians turn a cakewalk into a quagmire?

From the first, most of her biggest advantages proved to be booby-trapped. Clinton stood head and shoulders above Obama when it came to experience - she had been one of the two most influential first ladies in American history and had proved to be a diligent senator, a "worhorse, not a showhorse."

But Clinton's "experience" included her decision to vote in favor of invading Iraq, a decision that was radioactive to many Democrats. And Obama was the first to grasp that this is an election about change, not experience. Americans have had enough of experience in the form of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Seventy percent of them say America is headed in the wrong direction.

The Clinton machine only exaggerated this problem. Clinton surrounded herself with familiar faces from her White House years - people like Mark Penn, her chief strategist; Terry McAuliffe, her chief fundraiser; Howard Wolfson (one of the least helpful spokesmen this newspaper has ever encountered) and, of course, her husband.

Bill Clinton was the very embodiment of the Clinton paradox: a huge asset who was also a huge liability. Clinton is a political superstar - a man who left office with a 60 percent approval rating and a claim to have delivered eight years of peace and prosperity. Most Democrats love him. But he is also a cad and a narcissist.

His presence on the campaign trail reminded voters that Clinton is hardly a self-made woman - she rose to power on his coattails and endured repeated humiliations in the process.

These strategic errors probably doomed the campaign from the first. The Clintonites were so confident of an early victory that they spent money like drunken sailors (one of the biggest beneficiaries of all this spending was Penn's own political consultancy).

The campaign was all but bankrupt by late January - though Patti Solis Doyle, the campaign manager, failed to tell her boss the bad news - and the Obama campaign outspent them two or three to one on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5.

The machine was so confident of victory in the big states such as California, Ohio and Pennsylvania that it failed to plan for the smaller caucus states, or for the primaries and caucuses that were to follow immediately afterwards. Obama was thus given free rein to rack up huge victories in places like Virginia. After Super Tuesday, Obama scored a series of 11 wins in a row. Without those, he would never have secured the nomination.

These grand strategic errors were compounded by poor day-to-day management. The people who introduced the "war room" to American politics proved to be slow-witted and gaffe-prone.

The Clinton machine all but fell apart under the pressure of defeat. Rival factions were constantly at each other's throats.

This chaos left Clinton without a compelling story to sell to the Democratic electorate.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT