A writer at the Atlantic basically got a hold of about 150-200 Clinton campaign internal memos/strategy emails. I think they are going to publish them in bits and pieces this week, so I figured I'd make a thread dedicated to that. It will be interesting to see what was really going on inside the campaign (or really, any campaign). It will also probably give us a good sense of the strategies McCain will use. Here's a preview from Politico: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0808/12420.html Clinton told to portray Obama as foreign Mark Penn, the top campaign strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign, advised her to portray Barack Obama as having a “limited” connection “to basic American values and culture,” according to a forthcoming article in The Atlantic. The magazine reports Penn suggested getting much rougher with Obama in a memo on March 30, after her crucial wins in Texas and Ohio: “Does anyone believe that it is possible to win the nomination without, over these next two months, raising all these issues on him? ... Won’t a single tape of [the Reverend Jeremiah] Wright going off on America with Obama sitting there be a game ender?” Atlantic Senior Editor Joshua Green writes that major decisions during her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination would be put off for weeks until suddenly Clinton “would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.” Green reports that on a staff conference call in January where Clinton received “little response” or “silence” to several of her suggestions for how to recover from the Iowa loss and do better in New Hampshire, “Clinton began to grow angry, according to a participant’s notes,” Green recounts. “‘This has been a very instructive call, talking to myself,’ she snapped, and hung up.” The eight-page blockbuster, “The Front-Runner’s Fall,” draws on internal memos, e-mails and meeting notes to reveal what the magazine’s September issue calls “the backstabbing and conflicting strategies that produced an epic meltdown.” Penn, the presidential campaign’s chief strategist, wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article: “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.” A key take-away from the article is that Clinton received a lot of accurate advice, including from Penn. He wrote a remarkably prescient memo in March 2007 about the importance of appealing to what he called “the Invisible Americans,” specifically “WOMEN, LOWER AND MIDDLE CLASS VOTERS” — exactly the groups that helped Clinton beat Obama in key states nearly a year later. But no one synthesized and acted on the good advice. “The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men,” Green writes. “[H]er advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. ... he never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. “What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make.” Geoffrey Garin, a well-known Democratic pollster who helped direct the campaign’s strategy team for Clinton’s presidential campaign during its final two months, wrote in a memo to at least 10 top campaign aides that he wanted to stop “end runs” around communications director Howard Wolfson. “I don’t mean to be an *******, but ... changes to important statements and other critical campaign communications simply have to go through Howard,” Garin wrote on April 12. “Howard is the person who is ultimately responsibility for making sure that we deliver our messages the right way, and I hope everyone will support and respect him in that role.” Robert Barnett, the superlawyer and longtime Clinton adviser, e-mailed about 20 Clinton aides on March 6, with the subject line “STOP IT !!!!”: “This circular firing squad that is occurring is unattractive, unprofessional, unconscionable and unacceptable. ... After this campaign is over, there will be plenty of time to access blame or claim credit.” Another part of that e-mail was quoted in The New York Times in a June article by Peter Baker and Jim Rutenberg. The Penn memo suggesting that the campaign target Obama’s “lack of American roots” said in part: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. “Save it for 2050. ... Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America American to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back “Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.” That last paragraph was paraphrased in the New York Times article. Other highlights: • Of all the materials The Atlantic received, the first mention of delegate counts came in a memo that senior adviser Harold Ickes sent out just 12 days before the Iowa primary, after the campaign had nearly run out of money campaigning in Iowa, where Clinton would finish third. He predicted, correctly, as it turned out: “Assuming after Iowa and New Hampshire the presidential nominating contest narrows to two competitive candidates who remain locked in a highly contested election through 5 February, the focus of the campaign will shift to the delegate count.” But the campaign, Green notes, had already ceased polling in states they didn’t expect to win, so it had a limited ability to narrow the margins in states that favored Obama. • Green reports that on Feb. 11, the day that Clinton finally replaced campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle with Maggie Williams, Wolfson aide Phil Singer cursed out first Wolfson, then Policy Director and Solis Doyle ally Neera Tanden, yelling: “[Expletive] you and the whole [expletive] cabal” before climbing on a chair, berating the entire staff and leaving. The same day, Washington Post Managing Editor Phillip Bennett wrote Williams to complain Singer had spread rumors about one of his reporters. Williams eventually saw the letter after Wolfson intercepted it, and Singer left for a week. On his return, Green reports that Wolfson explained to a colleague, “When the house is on fire, it’s better to have a psychotic fireman than no fireman at all.” • Green writes: “The internal discord over whether to attack Obama led some of her own staff to spin reporters to try to downplay the significance of her criticisms. The result for Clinton was the worst of both worlds: The conflicting message exacerbated her reputation for negativity without affording her whatever benefits a sustained attack might have yielded.” • The famous 3 a.m. ad, written by Penn and approved by Clinton, almost didn’t run: “In the days leading up to Ohio and Texas, the campaign kept arguing over whether to air the [3 a.m.] ad. With the deadline looming, Bill Clinton, speaking from a cell phone as his plane sat on a runway, led a conference call on Thursday, Feb. 28, in which he had both sides present their case. As his plane was about to lift off, it was Bill Clinton — not Hillary — who issued the decisive order: ‘Let’s go with it.’ ” • “On Feb. 25, a pair of Clinton advisers began sending a series of increasingly urgent memos, which were given to me by a recipient sympathetic to Solis Doyle as a way of illustrating that strategic mistakes continued even after her dismissal [announced Feb. 10]. The first memo, from Philippe Reines and Andrew Shapiro, worried that Clinton’s anticipated wins in Texas and Ohio on March 4 would not meaningfully narrow Obama’s delegate lead — a fact sure to sap momentum once the initial excitement of victory passed.” • "They proposed that Clinton, from a position of strength immediately after her wins, challenge Obama to accept Michigan and Florida revotes. Such a move ‘preempts Obama’s reiteration on March 5 that they are still up 100-plus delegates and that we can’t win,’ they noted. ‘The press will love the rematch, like Rocky II.” Three major takeaways from this: (1) Hillary was not a good manager/CEO type, (2) her staff had serious, serious problems and (3) they didn't plan to explicitly use race, but they did plan to explicitly use "foreignness" against Obama. That's also what McCain is doing today.
It's nice to see confirmation of the xenophobic, Rovian smear campaign that we knew Mark Penn was quietly pushing on Hillary. It didn't work for Hillary, it's not going to work for McCain.
I'm looking forward to them in the sense of seeing inner details of how a campaign runs. What I'm not looking forward to is the months or years it'll take until Bush, Gore, Kerry, Obama and McCain memos are leaked, and everyone can see that any campaign in modern politics -- especially when trailing or facing adversity in a short timeframe -- is exactly the same. I suppose I should be used to the double standards when it comes to Hillary, but it still makes my blood boil. To me, the most critical (and expected) detail of that is that "delegate count" wasn't even mentioned until 12 days before Iowa. What made the race work for Obama was incredible attention to detail by his staff -- maximizing margins in which he had the edge and minimizing the deficit in states where he clearly wasn't going to win. Clinton's campaign took the state-by-state approach of a general election, whereas Obama's campaign took a district-by-district approach, maximizing every last delegate within the system even in states he was going to lose. For the life of me, I can't figure out why the Clinton campaign didn't do that. Arrogance, I suppose.
I think it was pretty much the "inevitability" idea. I don't think they honestly thought delegate count would matter. From their perspective, no matter what happened early, they would sweep the big Super Tuesday states and that would be the end of it.
I disagree with this - I think different campaigns are certainly winning to go to different lengths to win. For example, the Huckabee campaign, even when losing traction, refused to go after McCain on a personal level. The Edwards campaign never was willing to go the xenophobia route against Obama. Romney could have dragged out his candidacy for many months - he was certainly mathematically more likely to win than Hillary was when he bowed out - but chose not to. Every campaign has limits and restrictions on what extremes they will go to win.
I hope Obama's campaign isn't that arrogant. It didn't work for Hillary for a number of reasons. First, regardless of what her detractors make it seem, there were some lines she couldn't cross and areas she couldn't go on a regular basis because she's a member of the Democratic Party. McCain has no such limitation. Second, this isn't the primary campaign. By any other measuring metric besides the unique delegate system used in the Dem primary, the race was extremely close -- particularly in the state-by-state, winner take all setup of a general election. So while the broad, state focus was a hindrance to Clinton based on the fact that it was a primary, it's not necessarily the case in the general. Finally, Hillary actually won a majority of the delegates after starting what some of you termed the "kitchen sink" phase of her campaign. (I disagree with that, but that's for another discussion.) The point is that the increasingly desperate tone of Clinton's campaign (beginning after the Wisconsin primary) did not correlate with the campaign "not working." If anything, it was more successful than before -- it just happened too late in the game. That's not to say I enjoy that kind of campaigning. I expect Obama to win and I hope he does. But it seems blissfully naive to dismiss McCain on those grounds, given how different the landscape is in the general.
Does this tell us that Hillary herself may not be the monster we all think she is, but yet it was her campaign staff and the people around her who are the animals?
I've got to disagree there. Romney trailed 707-294 when he dropped out -- a margin of 413 delegates. And with a fewer number of delegates required to win the Republican nomination, you'd really need to multiply by that by about 1.5 to have a fair comparison to the Dem party. While Clinton was certainly a longshot, the odds were never that long until May. By that point, the campaign was so historic and had gone on for so long that it made complete sense to let it finish.
Of course, all of the campaigns that were not willing to "stoop to" those tactics all have one thing in common. They were losing campaigns.
... Mr. McCain is known to sign off on big campaign decisions and then to march off his own reservation. Two weeks ago, he publicly disagreed with his own spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbaker, after she used a line of attack against Senator Barack Obama that he had approved after careful strategizing within his campaign. Ms. Hazelbaker raced out of the Virginia campaign headquarters and refused to take Mr. McCain’s calls of apology, aides said, and a plan to have Republican members of Congress use the same critical line about Mr. Obama’s foreign trip fell apart. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/us/politics/10mccain.html?em
But the key in the GOP race was that it's primarily winner-take-all. Instead of losing states 33-31-30, he just had to win them 33-31-30. It's far as easier to catch up in the GOP because of that. All he needed to do was gain about 3-5% on McCain and he could have come all the way back. Clinton, as of mid-February, had to win all the remaining states 60-40 or so to even have a chance.
Sure - I'm not suggesting that xenophobic campaigns don't work. Just that not all politicians are willing to go that far to win. Some have higher or lower ethical limits than others. Certainly the ones with lower standards are more likely to win because they have all the options available to the one with the higher standards, plus some additional options. That's a big part of why our political leaders fairly universally suck.
The Cat: We didn't coin the term "kitchen sink" as it related to the Clinton campaign; the Clinton campaign did. Go back and check the record. If you disagree with that characterization, your disagreement is with them. You are correct that the deficit was larger between Romney/McCain than between Clinton/Obama and that their nominee had a lower threshhold to reach, but you leave out the crucial difference between the Dem/GOP nominating contests: The GOP had winner-take-all states, which made the likelihood of coming from behind far more feasible. Interestingly (frankly amazingly), the Clinton campaign was somehow unaware of this distinction until it was too late. In fact, they said as much. I can't remember if it was Ickes, Penn or Wolfson, but one of them actually said it. They were likewise unaware until it was too late of Texas' primary/caucus hybrid system and were too late to even field a full slate of delegates in PA. They were simply unprepared for any situation whatsoever in which she would face a serious challenge. And by the time they realized she did face one it was too late. Regardless, your apples to apples comparison of the GOP/Dem processes is pretty far off the mark (as was the Clinton campaign's) and is probably the main reason Obama was able to pull off the upset. Due to Dem party rules, which were known to all campaigns even if the frontrunning campaign chose to ignore them, Obama had this thing virtually locked up in February not May. And I defy anyone to present a mathematical model by which, under proportional allocation rules, Hillary had a realistic path to victory after February. As I recall, by February, she would have needed average wins of like 30% in all remaining states then (even Obama favored states - and if you left out Obama favored states that needed margin rose to something like needed wins of around 50%) as well as needing to run the table with uncommitted super delegates. No reasonable person thought at that time that that was possible. So it was not close. Hillary's only true path to victory after February was an utter Obama meltdown scandal of the sort where he'd be forced to drop out of the race. It was in Hillary's power in February to make it very, very close by May (and she succeeded in that) but it was not in her power to win without a catastrophic event from Obama -- a fact that made the kitchen sink stuff so troubling on two major fronts. Number one, she was providing the GOP talking points, which they are using today, long after she was a truly viable candidate. (And her C-in-C quote appeared, as predicted, in a recent McCain commercial, a thing that I said way back then would make it very difficult to choose her for the VP spot.) Number two, she took great efforts to demonize the (very) likely nominee in the eyes of her supporters and built, stoked and threw fuel on the fire of the completely dishonest idea that he was cheating her out of the nomination when, as these memos remind us, her campaign was simply outworked and outstrategized by Obama's. These problems exist still today and the onus is still on her to correct the damage her campaign caused then to our nominee. She has largely been doing a good job with that, though she and Bill both stumbled badly on it last week. I take some exception too to the idea that Clinton found the right strategy but only found it too late. That strategy was the kitchen sink strategy, by their own reckoning, and it absolutely included tactics that "as a Democrat" most candidates would have considered beyond the pale. It is heartening to learn via these memos that some of those worst acts were proposed by Penn and quashed by Hillary and also that there was internal consernation over the 3 a.m. ad and that it was Bill, not Hillary, that approved it. All of that makes it easier for me to blame her campaign (which I mightily disdained) rather than the candidate herself (whom I am inclined to like). But the main thing that's wrong with this theory of having found the right strategy too late is that it was a strategy of repeatedly tearing down the opponent, going harshly negative even within the positive stuff (i.e. understanding and fighting for working class voters) and presumes Obama wouldn't have had a response to that. If Obama's nomination had been in truly serious question anywhere along the way he would have been forced to respond in kind. And he would have. Because, as we know from all sorts of evidence now, Obama's team was simply better at strategy. As it was, he never needed to do that and so he refused to. He knew that he could stay largely above the fray while he took all sorts of hits and still eke out the nomination. Had Hillary resorted to that strategy earlier there's no reason to believe the Obama camp would not have outmaneuvered hers as it did throughout the process. (For those who would suggest Obama did respond in kind with negative attacks I refer them to the long list of things I posted repeatedly during the primary battle that Obama could have said and done but didn't.) But the main takeaway for me here is that I am able to believe Hillary was less responsible than Penn or Bill Clinton (at least in that one instance) for the unfortunate tactics her campaign resorted to. I am glad to know that. I never liked blaming her personally for all that as I've always had affection for her. It seems instead that her worst 'sin' in all this was a slightly less effective management style and a tremendously worse eye for hiring than her opponent. A lot of this is really a shame to me. If Hillary's campaign had stopped short of just a few moves (the Commander in Chief "test" chief among them) and if Bill Clinton had been just slightly less nasty (or at least had corrected for it, as Hillary did so well, when the thing was finally over), I think I'd be inclined right now to support her for VP. It would definitely be an historic and incredibly exciting ticket. But just a few of these desperation plays, made at a time when the nomination was truly out of reach by any reasonable standard, seem to make that impossible.
My mistake on the origin of the term, but I still believe in the point I was making. It was the kitchen sink, in the sense of the parameters of the Dem primary. But it could've been much worse -- and I think Obama will see much worse from McCain, who isn't bound by certain lines. I don't know what more I can say. Is it easier to come back in a winner take all system? Yes, of course. But the margins weren't even close. To suggest Romney had a realistic chance of flipping every state (no, the margin wasn't 3 to 5 percent across the board) -- which is practically what he'd have to do -- just isn't realistic. It also amazes me that you still look at the Dem primary as though it's only made up of pledged delegates. Superdelegates are in place for a reason -- if they were supposed to simply mirror the vote count, they wouldn't be there. The system isn't perfect, and they have the opportunity to fix certain mistakes. Clinton had a very realistic chance of taking the popular vote lead. She didn't, and thus her arguments weren't persuasive and carried little weight. But if she had, there was a very compelling argument to tip them to her side. If I were a superdelegate, I'd have done it -- and it has nothing to do with my feelings on Hillary Clinton. I'd also do it if the completely reverse had happened (Clinton leading pledged delegates, Obama winning popular vote). Maybe you don't agree with superdelegates being a part of the process. That's fine. For what it's worth, I don't agree with the delegate distribution rules. But it's the system we have, and in it, they are a part and they presented a very mathematically-sound option to overcome Obama's edge.
The Cat: Is it unlikely that Romney could have virtually swept the remaining states? Sure. But remember, he only needed to sweep them by one vote a piece to take the nomination. Hillary, on the other hand, needed to sweep the remaining states by 20+ percentage points. And, in every state where she didn't (read: all but WV and one or two others), that percentage went up. After she failed to win TX and OH by 20 points, she needed more than 30% margins in the states that were left. That's why, as expressed in the memos, winning TX and OH didn't really matter because the margins were so close that she was actually further from victory than she had been on March 3. This is a losing argument for you. The math shows that Romney needed a net of less votes to overcome McCain when he dropped out than Hillary did to overtake Obama as far back as February (not May). It's precisely for this reason that we started hearing, late in the game, that if we played by the GOP rules Hillary would be ahead. Of course that was true, but we don't. And, if we had, Obama would have employed a very different strategy, as he is doing in the general. It is also false to suggest that Obama supporters oppose the idea of super delegates. What we opposed is the idea that super delegates should wait til the last minute and then come in to overturn the clear will of the voters. But to the extent that we opposed it what we were saying was that we didn't like it and we didn't think it would play well at the convention or with voters in the general -- we never suggested it would be a violation of the rules. Regardless of my feelings toward Dem primary rules, I have always been for following them to the letter, even if that meant the supers did come in and overturn the will of the people -- because the rules are the rules and we all knew them from the outset. This is patently untrue. You keep bringing up this popular vote idea and marrying it to "the rules," which is incredibly ironic since every argument for Hillary having had a chance at winning the popular vote was predicated by a retroactive reinstatement of FL and MI -- a thing they didn't even consider pushing until the nomination was totally out of reach by the standards imposed by THE RULES. And the memos show that too.
But he didn't have to do that - if he won five states by 1% each (TX, OH, PA, IN, NC), that made up the entire deficit. Then he just had to split the remaining states. And given that Huckabee's 30+% was out there to be claimed and that McCain was consistently even getting only 70% of the vote in some uncontested primaries, it was by no means impossible by any stretch. Moreover, Romney could have used the "kitchen sink" strategy to eat at McCain's support as well. For example, bringing up his infidelity and the like - that could certainly push Huckabee supporters to him. And Romney had media support from the right-wing (the Dobsons and Limbaughs of the world). All in all, there were many more opportunities for Romney to win the nomination than Hillary had - as Batman said, the math made it impossible for Hillary unless Obama collapsed on himself. But the superdelegates showed ZERO sign of moving to her. She never had a single week in 2008 when she gained more supers than Obama. To suggest she could collect enough to overturn the pledged delegate count requires an enormous leap of imagination. Despite what she kept claiming, superdelegates never moved an inch towards her. You'd have been one of the few, though. Plenty of unpledged superdelegates came out and said they'd support the delegate winner. And the Dem party leadership (congressional and Dean) all publicly stated the importance of not overturning the pledged delegate count. Not a single super came out and said they'd support the popular vote winner. And, as 538 notes, the superdelegates that hadn't yet committed are the ones most concerned about party - and Obama's once-in-a-generation ground game would impossible to pass up. The superdelegates were never going to change the results because they weren't going to risk an intra-party fight that would, frankly, be the beginning of the end the party.
Especially in Michigan, I didn't want a retroactive reinstatement. Like many, I favored a re-vote. Obviously, that didn't happen, and that was one of many reasons that her arguments failed to be persuasive. Also, it's ironic that you continually link reinstating FL and MI with breaking "the rules," when the rules have always said from day one that those decisions could be challenged and appealed, and were thus subject to change.
Hear hear, Major. I'd go a step further, as I did during the actual race, and say that not only was Hillary making no progress with supers but that the math showed she needed first (in Feb.) 20%+ victories and, by the end, 50% victories to overcome her pledged delegate deficit, but she also needed an entirely unlikely advantage in unpledged supers. The bottom line is that the idea that the race was actually close is a myth. It became close, yes, but only through "kitchen sink," Obama's refusal to go as negative as the frontrunner (and virtually assured nominee) as his challenger did, an insistence on retroactively counting MI/FL and a successful campaign to convince a multitude of supers who had privately agreed upon Obama to just wait to announce. We knew as early as March that there was a large contingent of supers ready to announce for Obama and that they held off out of respect for the Clintons. As early as the day after the Iowa caucuses, it was a poorly kept secret that Obama enjoyed an advantage with uncommitted superdelegates while Hillary needed to run the table with them. One thing and one thing only could have given Hillary the nomination after February and that was for Obama to have exited the race. That was why the kitchen sink stuff was so deplorable.
