On her health care fiasco, the way she did it was an example of her leadership style, which is to have a close cadre of advisers, cook a stew in private and then shove it down everyone's throat. If someone else comes with a slightly different idea, even if they are in the SAME PARTY, do everything you can to discredit and destroy them so your idea is the only one that is debated. If anyone in the party disagrees with you on that, add them to your enemies list and show just how vindictive you can be. [How dare anyone try to steal your thunder]. One thing that set me off about the whole thing was how Hillary ran and hid after it all crashed and burned. Republicans were blasting her and she was nowhere to be found. Ultimate jerks like Chris Dodd shot back to the GOP, "Don't criticize the president's wife". What a loser! What went wrong? Her sense of entitlement wasn't the sole reason she lost, but it didn't help. It was a combination of things: 1 Her unpopularity among many Dems which helped fuel the huge campaign donations to Obama all last year despite him getting trounced in the polls up until Iowa. I kept wondering and wondering why are so many people sending him money yet he stays 20-25% behind with no movement upwards. 2 Her strategy of betting the farm on Iowa and on Super Tuesday and falling flat both times. 3 The failure to have a coherent plan for post-Super Tuesday. 4 Bill's hatchet job and racial remarks after NH and before SC basically sent the entire black vote to Obama. This is where Hillary really looked small by calling on her "big brother" to fight for her. I can't decide whether it was over when Obama won Iowa or when Bill started yapping. If Hillary's win in NH was a complete aberration because of the tears, then Bill's words might not have mattered. If Hillary had true momentum after NH, then Bill might have cost her the nomination. All will be forgiven, but his negative role in this campaign will be talked about forever. No way Obama has a chance if Hillary ran her campaign better. No way in the world. She gave him several openings and that's all he needed. Once his train started moving, it was tough to slow down. It's mostly on her that his train left the station.
I don't like Hillary at all, but with Obama only 70 delegates ahead isn't it a little early to anoint him the winner?
Its hard when you have a voting record. This is why senators never win. Plus a spending bill is hard, you either give soldiers money = you are for the war you don;t give them money = you don;t support the troops, you are the reason they don;t have equipment a lot of votes are no win votes.
I don't mean to be asinine, but since she was married to the POTUS, wasn't she entitled to be First Lady? And she worked on health care because her husband the President of the USA appointed her to work on it. Just like he appointed the Undersecretary of Defense, or the Assistant Secretary of the Interior without consulting you. Should he have been required to divorce her before he appointed her to a position? If the fact that there are people who you didn't directly vote for working on policy in the White House is distressing for you, I'm afraid that you are in the wrong country. That's the way we've been working the Executive branch since the beginning. The only person who was voted into the White House is the President and the Vice President. Everybody else is appointed. At least that's how it worked the last time I checked. I don't like Hillary at all, but the 'entitlement' argument is an old Republican AM Radio talking point from way back that never made any meaningful sense to me.
I don't think much went wrong - and this is not over by any means - I think she is inherently challenged by a lack of ability to connect with people at a time when it is important to do so. She is not an authentic communicator, and it hurts her terribly. Many smart people are not - many decent presidential candidates are not - but that resonance (reagan, biff clinton) is a real boon in a campaign. She's not Obama on this, he brings out every one of her pimples. She's not even Edwards on this. Bush communicates like crap too, but he was lucky to run against two of the least inspiring nominees in the history of planet earth. And in a way, he connects. I think it is important. Very important, and not in a phony way. The president has power, but ultimately, the most memorable and revered presidents are able - somehow - to be leaders by articulating and proposing a new vision and convincing people to rise to it, rather than pandering to voters and hoping for the best. Hillary Clinton is a smart smart woman, but she has the Gore / Kerry / Mondale / Dukakis / Gephardt / etc leadership disease - decent policymakers maybe probably, but not able to articulate a vision at all. Against the backdrop of an extraordinary communicator who happens to have shown better judgment in crucial matters of the past eight years, she is too vulnerable. Plus, Clintonism has its drawbacks. we all know that. Her time is just not now. Even if she is elected president, she is not of this moment. It is not her time to make her mark; the country's 'action' is not where she is - in that wonky Washington policy briefing space - it is in a place where its moral fiber and character are being challenged and pulled in different directions. Her weaknesses happen to be Obama's strengths, and those points of difference are exactly where the country is at this moment. Go get 'em Barack.
Hillary hung tough, fought and articulated well. Only two others have been better Dem candidates in the last 25 years or so, Bill and Barack. Just real bad timing. And yes it is over barring a blunder by Obama. It is like the Chuckster losing to Jordan or DR losing to Hakeem. In the end it is a credit to the opponent.
While it was mainly her opponent, she did have some strategy flaws. Of course it's easy to say that after the fact. But she had front-runneritis. They were staying in luxury suites at the best vegas hotels, because they believed they could wrap it up. That's why they didn't have anything organized in states post super tuesday at first. Then when Hillary needed to stop Obama's momentum in WI. she was outspent 5-1. So there were errors made, but as others have said, in just about any other primary campaign it wouldn't have mattered. This is all hindsight.
A very nice post. Thanks. I much prefer that answer to the hysterical "she's a harlot, tha b****!!!" sexist rants (with all due respect to those making them) I've been reading here all too often. And they are sexist. Make no mistake about it. If a man were running a campaign like Ms. Clinton has, the response would be far different, and anyone who denies it is simply fooling themselves. We frequently see emotional reactions to Ms. Clinton that far surpass the real impact of the statement she made, the issue she discussed, the campaign commercial complained about, or the general tone of her campaign. I really find amusing the constant rant I hear (and not just at the BBS, for sure) about how "negative" she's been. Memories here are very short. Her campaign has been one coming from a very high ground indeed when compared to the GOP campaigns of the last several years, or what we'll see from the GOP this Fall. Make no mistake about it... there has been a big overreaction to Ms. Clinton's campaign from many of those who support Obama. They better get a grip and suck it up. It's going to be vicious in the general election campaign and those whining about Ms. Clinton today are going to be many of the same people calling for Obama to take names and kick ass in September and October. And you better hope he does. Bending over when the Rove inspired McCain attack squad goes into full attack mode is not going to cut it. One of the reasons I've not been bothered by Ms. Clinton's campaign nearly as much as some here is that I have no doubt that she'll give as good as she gets, if not more. Well, she's not going to be the nominee. We better hope that Mr. Change can dish it out if he needs to. Impeach Bush.
Here is a very biting commentary on how it slipped away from Hillary http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/opinion/24rich.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin February 24, 2008 Op-Ed Columnist The Audacity of Hopelessness By FRANK RICH WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq. It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency. The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup. That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. But he’s actually not even all that loyal. Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo. Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work. But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating. The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3. In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline. This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid. Given that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama offer marginally different policy prescriptions — laid out in voluminous detail by both, by the way, on their Web sites — it’s not clear what her added-value message is. The “experience” mantra has been compromised not only by her failure on the signal issue of Iraq but also by the deadening lingua franca of her particular experience, Washingtonese. No matter what the problem, she keeps rolling out another commission to solve it: a commission for infrastructure, a Financial Product Safety Commission, a Corporate Subsidy Commission, a Katrina/Rita Commission and, to deal with drought, a water summit. As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country. Bill Clinton knocked states that hold caucuses instead of primaries because “they disproportionately favor upper-income voters” who “don’t really need a president but feel like they need a change.” After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn’t won in “any of the significant states” outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the “insult 40 states” strategy. The insults continued on Tuesday night when a surrogate preceding Mrs. Clinton onstage at an Ohio rally, Tom Buffenbarger of the machinists’ union, derided Obama supporters as “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies.” Even as he ranted, exit polls in Wisconsin were showing that Mr. Obama had in fact won that day among voters with the least education and the lowest incomes. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Obama received the endorsement of the latte-drinking Teamsters. If the press were as prejudiced against Mrs. Clinton as her campaign constantly whines, debate moderators would have pushed for the Clinton tax returns and the full list of Clinton foundation donors to be made public with the same vigor it devoted to Mr. Obama’s “plagiarism.” And it would have showered her with the same ridicule that Rudy Giuliani received in his endgame. With 11 straight losses in nominating contests, Mrs. Clinton has now nearly doubled the Giuliani losing streak (six) by the time he reached his Florida graveyard. But we gamely pay lip service to the illusion that she can erect one more firewall. The other persistent gripe among some Clinton supporters is that a hard-working older woman has been unjustly usurped by a cool young guy intrinsically favored by a sexist culture. Slate posted a devilish video mash-up of the classic 1999 movie “Election”: Mrs. Clinton is reduced to a stand-in for Tracy Flick, the diligent candidate for high school president played by Reese Witherspoon, and Mr. Obama is implicitly cast as the mindless jock who upsets her by dint of his sheer, unearned popularity. There is undoubtedly some truth to this, however demeaning it may be to both candidates, but in reality, the more consequential ur-text for the Clinton 2008 campaign may be another Hollywood classic, the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy “Pat and Mike” of 1952. In that movie, the proto-feminist Hepburn plays a professional athlete who loses a tennis or golf championship every time her self-regarding fiancé turns up in the crowd, pulling her focus and undermining her confidence with his grandstanding presence. In the 2008 real-life remake of “Pat and Mike,” it’s not the fiancé, of course, but the husband who has sabotaged the heroine. The single biggest factor in Hillary Clinton’s collapse is less sexism in general than one man in particular — the man who began the campaign as her biggest political asset. The moment Bill Clinton started trash-talking about Mr. Obama and raising the specter of a co-presidency, even to the point of giving his own televised speech ahead of his wife’s on the night she lost South Carolina, her candidacy started spiraling downward. What’s next? Despite Mrs. Clinton’s valedictory tone at Thursday’s debate, there remains the fear in some quarters that whether through sleights of hand involving superdelegates or bogus delegates from Michigan or Florida, the Clintons might yet game or even steal the nomination. I’m starting to wonder. An operation that has waged political war as incompetently as the Bush administration waged war in Iraq is unlikely to suddenly become smart enough to pull off that duplicitous a “victory.” Besides, after spending $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts in January alone, this campaign simply may not have the cash on hand to mount a surge.
It's way too early to start the autopsy, but if things don't turn around... Blame it on that guy. As inhuman as Karl Rove, as inept as Bob Shrum.
kind of funny, you're mking the point for me. The undersecretary of defense probably isn't related to the president or his/her spouse and so shouldn't the person working on a major piece of legislation. you're still making my point, thanks
So if they got a divorce beforehand it would be cool? Is the president allowed to be really good friends with the people he appoints, or does that somehow invalidate the appointment? And ultimately, wouldn't that be more a problem that you would have with Bill for appointing her?
I'll offer you another perspective. I had no problem with Bill appointing Hillary. But I had a big problem with her going ape when another Democrat had a different health care plan for consideration. She used her strings in the White House to destroy the guy (Jim Cooper of Tennessee). The secretive and exclusionary way Hillary went about putting her plan together and the plan itself were subject for intense criticism. So instead of being accountable and taking the heat, she ran, hid and disappeared. More than anything else early in the Clinton administration, this fiasco put her on my negative side. If someone is going to make policy and take credit if they are successful, he/she should have the guts to take flak for the big, embarrassing, flaming failure. She didn't. If Hillary had gone down with the ship, I would have given her more credit for trying. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/opinion/05brooks.html
Another thing too was that during the 1992 election Bill Clinton frequently played up the role that Hillary Clinton would play in his Admin.. He often talked about this his election as a "two for one deal." The electorate was well aware that Hillary Clinton would play a big role in the Clinton Admin..
No...that would be cronyism. Don't you know that the President should have little or no ties to their cabinet, and that while they are to be experts, they are to have no ties to anybody who has business interests in the given field? These are the complaints made about Bush anytime he appointed anybody to any post. True, Bush made some HORRIBLE appointments, but the above complaints that seem to have been made a lot....were unfair.
