<p>Today’s WSJ has an excellent article (Road to Second Place: Where Clinton Went Wrong) that covers some of the errors made during Hilary Clinton’s campaign. These included over-reliance for strategy two people - long-time Clinton pollster Mark Penn, and her husband Bill; focusing on non-caucus states, partly because Bill didn’t have experience with caucus tactics; relying on only one pollster (Mark Penn) so he had an unusually strong effect on messages, etc (in contrast, Obama has used multiple pollsters to get multiple approaches and points of view); flawed messages, partly because of reliance on polls; Bill Clinton controversies, etc etc.</p>
<p>It was interesting to read this because I wonder if it could give some insight as to how she would have operated as President. Relying on a small clique, relying on one (flawed) pollster, not listening to other viewpoints from experienced staff, etc.</p>
<p>There was another article on the lavish spending on the ‘campaign trail’ - and how it transitioned from using a private helicopter - to large private jet with gourmet food and trips home at night to sleep in her own bed - to a more humble jet with sandwiches wrapped in plastic. Hotels changed from Four Seasons to Holiday Inn Express. Obama’s group is now the one staying in fancy hotels. I’m naive, but I didn’t realize people’s campaign donations were lavished away…</p>
<p>It would be interesting to have this type of info on Obama & McCain, too!</p>
<p>Early on, Obama told a potential supporter who expressed reservations about his lack of executive experience that he should watch the way he ran his campaign. As it turned out, the campaign was among the best-run and most efficient ever. As posted above, Obama made sure that there were no battles and no prima donnas. Furthermore, they focused on every state, learning each state’s arcane rules in order to get every delegate possible, and setting up multiple offices and sending in many paid staffers long before each primary or caucus, in order to organize the volunteers, while the Clinton campaign ignored many states, sending in a small team a few days before the primary to arrange events. This is the way Obama built up an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates early on (his lead has been, for all practical purposes, insurmountable for about 3 months). </p>
<p>I read somewhere that Mark Penn did not even realize that the primaries were not winner-take-all, but it’s hard to believe that he could have been so stupid.</p>
<p>Clinton and Obama have roughly equal support. She lost because he out-organized her.</p>
<p>Indeed, I think that action speaks louder than words, and Obama certainly made the case that he is a more effective leader of an organization than Hillary Clinton is.</p>
I remember reading that, too. If someone has a resource showing otherwise, I’d like to see it.</p>
<p>
I completely agree. This wasn’t as easy to see at the beginning. In the beginning I would have been satisfied with either candidate, but leaned toward Obama (meaning Hillary could have easily swayed me in a number of ways). As the campaign progressed, and I saw the organization style and management of the Obama campaign, I felt it gave me a glimpse into his abilities to be an effective leader. As Hillary mounted up bills through lavish spending, it made me question how she would justify spending our tax dollars - would she just spend, spend, spend and worry about where the money would come from later?</p>
<p>Very interesting analysis. I also did not know how delegates were apportioned until this primary season. But then, it’s not my occupation unlike Mr. Penn.</p>
<p>Actually, roughly equal support translated into an Obama nomination for two structural reasons:</p>
<p>a) a stacked DNC rules committee nullifying huge early wins in major states of Michigan and Florida. The real tally at that point was Obama: IA, SC versus Clinton: NH, NV, MI, FL. The storyline was that Obama had already clinched the nomination.</p>
<p>b) a delegate selection process that awards disproportionate degelegates to districts voting Democratic in the last election. Because Democrats have had such little appeal, the only districts getting bonus degates were heavily African American districts. It is essentially impossible mathematically for the Democratic Party, under its current rules, to nominate anyone but a black candidate. Winning suburban and rural counties is penalized under the nominating rules. Of course, the irony here is that it is impossible to win national elections without appeal in these suburban and rural counties.</p>
<p>Could you explain what you mean by that? Who were the Clinton and Obama supporters on the committee at the time it decided (last year) that MI and FL wouldn’t count?</p>
<p>It seems to me that the mistakes Hillary made in running her campaign were very similar to the ones she made trying to reform health care the first time.</p>
<p>The biggest mistake Clinton made strategically was ignoring Bill Clinton’s advice to kneecap (politically speaking) Obama right out of the gates. </p>
<p>Hillary, instead, took the high road for the first nine months of the campaign, in debate after debate refusing to attack her fellow Democrats and choosing to focus on the Republicans. This while Obama was accusing her of corruption and, then, starting the night of NH loss, of racism.</p>
<p>Clinton gambled that she could win the nomination without a divisive fight and lead a unified party into the general election. She lost the gamble on a general election strategy. </p>
<p>To be honest, I think it was the correct gamble. The nomination is worthless with a Democratic Party fractured along racial lines. That’s why many of us were shocked when the Obama campaign played the race card starting the evening and morning after the loss in NH. Credit where credit is due. It worked for him. Fanning the racist flames with his Malcolm X rhetoric in black churches to win 92% of the black vote was the key to his delegate math. It’s not unlike cynically using Rev. Wright and his Black Liberation Theology to build street cred in his Hyde Park district.</p>
<p>I agree, teriwtt, and I was also disgusted at the way the Clinton campaign stiffed so many small vendors along the way.</p>
<p>id, those two “major wins” were in primaries that were, as all candidates agreed in the first place, not going to count because they were being held in violation of DNC rules. Clinton was the only name on the ballot in MI!</p>
<p>Re: comments that Mark Penn didn’t know how delegates were allocated - it’s mentioned in the Wall St Journal article:</p>
<p>"Mr. Ickes, a rules expert, had long argued against the strategy. Last June at a meeting at the Penn home, Mr. Penn suggested Sen. Clinton would get all 370 state delegates when she won California’s primary, attendees say. Mr. Ickes, they say, mocked him: “The vaunted chief strategist” doesn’t know that party rules aren’t winner-take-all?</p>
<p>Mr. Penn calls the account “totally false.”</p>
<p>Then and later, others say, Mr. Ickes would lecture that the rules give each candidate delegates in proportion to their share of the vote. He argued that Sen. Clinton should compete even in caucuses she’d lose to limit Sen. Obama’s delegate gains. “Even if you lose, you win,” these people recall Mr. Ickes saying. But he failed to press the matter, they say".</p>
<p>I knew Mark Penn back when we were both of high school age. He hasn’t changed much. (I actually had to share a bed with him one night – long story, nothing untoward; he took up 98% of the mattress and I ended up sleeping on the floor.) Anyway, he wasn’t stupid by any stretch of the imagination, and I refuse to believe he was so ignorant that he really believed all the primaries were winner-take-all.</p>
<p>The story that he didn’t know comes, as the story notes, from Harold Ickes, who hated Penn and has a large axe to grind.</p>
<p>Ironically, of course, Ickes himself was heavily involved years and years ago in the rules reforms (including the caucus system) that ultimately, many believe, contributed largely to Obama’s victory.</p>
<p>I am so tired of hearing about Michigan and Florida. Hillary was right there with Obama in supporting the initial decision to punish them for breaking the rules. It’s only when she started to lose that all of a sudden she changed her position. </p>
<p>I am quite sure, btw, that back when she was the anointed favorite, most of the DNC consisted of <em>her</em> supporters.</p>
<p>All the rhetoric about the “New Democratic Party” aside, I don’t think, in the end, that Obama will do any worse among the demographic people have been discussing than, say, John Kerry did. And he will do better in other demographics.</p>
<p>Anyone who thinks there’s going to be an easy Republican victory is dreaming. Dream away.</p>
<p>Thanks for posting this article. Good read. Seems to me political candidates are so ‘packaged and marketed’ by people around them, you don’t really know who they actually are. It all appears to be very superficial, in order to get the votes in that county, in that state.</p>
<p>Here’s a heart-warming piece that I haven’t heard getting air-time to any large degree. Perhaps that’s the way Sen. Obama wants it. IMO, this is who Sen. Obama is.</p>