Clinton: What Went Wrong

A year ago, I predicted Clinton would be our next president, and Obama would be her vice president. After Obama’s ninth and tenth consecutive wins since Super Tuesday—in Wisconsin and Hawaii, not counting his “beauty contest” win in Washington State—that prediction looks wrong. Clinton could regain her lead with successive victories in Texas and Ohio March 4 and Pennsylvania April 22. Should she lose one of those three, however, she likely loses, period.

What happened to Clinton? Of course, Obama’s surge to the top is most of all a credit to him. Clinton’s problem was common to all of us who underestimated Obama and his strategy. Still, Clinton had a commanding lead in a race that was hers to lose.

Joshua Green has had as good a look as any inside “Hilleryland,” one good enough to have led the Clintons to block publication in GQ of one of his pieces. Writing recently in the Atlantic, Green mentioned these problems with Clinton’s campaign:

• Arrogance. Green saw this in the person of Patti Solis Doyle [pictured], Clinton’s recently-fired campaign manager, who was “Clinton’s alter ego and was installed in the job specifically for that reason.” Solis Doyle went around saying, “When I’m speaking, Hillary is speaking.” Campaign team arrogance, according to Green, “led directly to the idea that Clinton could simply project an air of inevitability and be assured her party’s nomination.”

• Solis Doyle. She coined the phrase “Hilleryland,” and earned Clinton’s complete trust by enforcing discipline and stopping leaks during a 2000 Clinton senate campaign rough patch, but Solis Doyle both underperformed as a fundraiser and overspent as a manager, wasting financial resources that should have been a major Clinton asset.

• Bill Clinton. The campaign seriously believed the “first black president” stuff about Bill Clinton; that Bill would gather and maintain a large part of the African-American electorate for his wife.

• Strategy. Chief strategist Mark Penn and media consultant Mandy Grunwald, who wanted Clinton to stick to the issues, prevailed internally over adman Dwight Jewson and BillPal Harold Ickes, who thought Clinton "should confront her chief shortcoming—the notion that she was power-hungry and calculating.”

• Complacency. Clinton’s sense of inevitability led her to postpone the launching of her presidential campaign, or even to talk about it, until after she had won senate re-election in 2006, conceding a crucial fundraising head-start to Obama.

• Ignorance. After campaign law changes limited the role of $100,000 big whale donors, a "new generation of fund-raisers able to corral . . . four-figure checks suddenly became the true prize. . . people like Mark Gorenberg, Alan Solomont, and Steve Westly [not] well known to the Clintons. . . tech moguls who hail from a wealth center, Silicon Valley, that barely existed during Bill Clinton’s last run.” They went for Obama.