Behind the scenes, the long knives come out
Just a few days before voters head to the polls in Ohio and Texas, two contests Hillary Clinton has to win big, it’s surprisingly unhelpful to see top Clinton aides start to point fingers at one another.
Harold Ickes definitely doesn’t buy the argument that Mark Penn isn’t responsible for everything that has happened to the Hillary Clinton campaign. “Mark Penn has run this campaign,” said Ickes in a brief phone interview this morning. “Besides Hillary Clinton, he is the single most responsible person for this campaign.
“Now, he has been circumscribed to some extent by Maggie Williams,” said Ickes, who then pointed out that that was only a recent development.
When asked about the assertion by one senior Clinton official the campaign was effectively run by committee, diluting Penn’s authority, Ickes was incredulous.
“I don’t know what campaign you’re talking about,” said Ickes. “I have been at meetings where he introduces himself as the campaign’s chief strategist. I’ve heard him call himself that many times, say, ‘I am the chief strategist.'” Asked if Penn preferred the title of chief strategist to pollster, Ickes said, “Prefer it? He insists on it!”
Ickes specifically held Penn responsible for the campaign’s strategy: “Mark Penn,” Ickes said, “has dominated the message in this campaign. Dominated it.”
For his part, Penn blamed Ickes for the campaign’s questionable spending priorities. “Every single expenditure is reviewed and approved by the campaign, by Harold Ickes and his team, one by one,” Penn said. “I have absolutely no budget authority or any administrative control.”
There have been several reports about the Clinton campaign having morale problems at this point, but having two of her top campaign aides feuding, on the record, is really not a helpful sign.
For what it’s worth, Ezra Klein had a good item suggesting the finger-pointing among the top Clinton aides is rather pointless.
Oddly, I actually think Mark Penn is right to say that he gets a bum rap among those who blame him for creating a microtargeted, small-bore effort. His book may have been about microtrends, but the campaign he helped run really did stake its success on broad themes, large arguments, and big policies. It just hasn’t been enough.
Insofar as the campaign made big mistakes, they were tactical and organizational in nature. They didn’t realize how long the primary would go on, and weren’t ready to compete after Super Tuesday. They did a terrible job organizing in caucus states, and began opportunistically questioning the legitimacy of the process. They didn’t control their surrogates, and let Bill Clinton, Mark Penn, and others trash Hillary’s image by going too negative. Those were all errors, and some of them had a pretty large impact. If the campaign hadn’t turned so many folks off in South Carolina, Obama may not have registered the win that revived his momentum after losing New Hampshire.
Sounds right to me.
Penn and Ickes—the “Push-Me” and the “Pull-You” of the Clinton campaign—devouring each other?
Pass the popcorn….
While it “ain’t over yet,” it sure feels over.
I think the Democratic Party has been spared a Mark Penn-run national election that would have come completely apart at the seams. If this was the general, and if it was September, Clinton’s campaign would be wheels up in the ditch thanks to the infighting, the messed up spending priorities and the lack of coordination. When I cast my vote for her, I honestly didn’t see this kind of debacle coming.
The fact that she didn’t have a ground game on Super Tuesday and that her organization in Texas is a joke right now indicates she ran the wrong kind of campaign this year.
God Bless Howard Dean and his 50 State Strategy–the Clintons ran away from it, denigrated it through their proxy Paul Begala, and then watched the wisdom of organizing everywhere and spending wisely run them over and leave them broken down by the side of the road.
Pale Rider nails it. Thank God this is happening now.
Good news for Obama supporters is he may well win the nomination. Bad news is that he still has his work cut out for him Hillary isn’t going anywhere any time soon. At least not until after PA. The plan is that their are 7 weeks between TX and OH until PA votes and he will start to be vetted according to a democratic stratgist this morning on MSNBC.
The buck stops with Hillary – as Pale Rider states above, the Clintons ran away from the 50-state strategy. But they did so with Hillary’s blessings.
Believing the blame goes to Ickes or Penn is an insult to Hillary – she is nobody’s puppet. If she loses, I hope she gracefully accepts defeat and maintains her legacy as a great policy expert and leader albeit a flawed campaigner.
I think the Clintons got exactly what they deserved. Rather than offering inspirational message (a la Obama, whom they ridicule) they triangulate, calculate, focus group and poll with a vengeance. Just like Tracy Flick, they do everything a traditional politician does to win.
But that’s precisely the problem. After two stolen terms of Rovean cynicism and organized crime, not to mention Cheney’s deranged slaughter in Iraq and Constitution-shredding at home, the country needs inspiration more than it needs anything else.
Penn and Ickes and the Clintons just don’t get it. If, after all this, they should manage to somehow screw Obama in the smoke-filled back room, I’m not sure they can even recover enough to beat McCain when it comes to traditional (i.e., uninspired) politics-as-usual. With little to love about the Clintons or McCain, the electorate may think that old grandpa looks as homey and comfy as Ike looked fifty years ago.
Jim,
Bad news is that he still has his work cut out for him Hillary isn’t going anywhere any time soon. At least not until after PA.
Bill Clinton himself said that Texas is a must-win, and right now she’s losing it in the polls. Intrade.com has a 75% chance for Hillary to drop out in March.. and a 15% chance to win the nomination. The implication is that if she doesn’t win Ohio/Texas, she’ll drop out soon after. I agree. I think you’re underestimating her realism and decency, Jim.
The plan is that their are 7 weeks between TX and OH until PA votes and he will start to be vetted according to a democratic stratgist this morning on MSNBC.
That has been the mantra, hasn’t it? “Next week he’ll be vetted”. “OK next week”. “Next week”. “After this tuesday, that’s it, he’ll be vetted.” “Here it comes.” I have news, HE IS BEING VETTED, and HAS been vetted, it just doesn’t seem like it because there is so little dirt to vet.
How about this? “Harol. Mark. You both suck.”
Hillary is ultimately to blame here, as the buck should stop somewhere…Whoever is the person most responsible for her somehow pulling in $35 mil last month should be put in charge and everyone else canned.
I am pretty astonished they managed to pull that kind of haul off, but If she doesn’t win both Ohio and Texas on Tuesday there’s no way people pour that kind of money into her campaign anymore if she stays in.
What Pale Rider said.
This is just about over. And after that it’s time to pull together, as the Republicans will behave like a pack of cornered animals this cycle and we will need all the help we can get.
Did Tommy Boy Cleaver post the Reagan comments?
Plus, there’s nothing more hilarious than watching Bob Shrum tell people that Mark Penn is incompetent.
The worst thing Obama could ever do is hire Shrum, Brazile, Carville, Begala, Penn or Grunwald this fall. He needs to hire someone to specfically manage any criticism those people level at his campaign because Washington is addicted to letting those buffoons serve as concern trolls.
Now is not the time to hand the party back to the concern trolls who keep losing campaigns based on their need to enrich their consultant friends at the expense of building a Democratic Party apparatus in all 50 states.
And Harold Ford Jr. shouldn’t be part of his campaign or his future plans, either.
The finger pointing between Ickes and Penn needs to point to another area as well: overconfidence. Despite a Democratic field rich in talent with any number of candidates who could have caught fire but didn’t, one gets the feeling that the Clintons felt they were always going to walk away with this one handily. They underestimated their competition.
Obama’s campaign, on the other hand, looks to have taken the attitude that they were going to have to earn every single vote. Not only that, they were going to try to earn everyone’s vote, even the ones that people wouldn’t have thought they would get.
Clinton’s team seems to have looked at poll numbers and figured they had certain constituencies locked-up: the larger and traditionally liberal-voting states like California and New York, women, voters earning under 50K. Clinton took them for granted.
If Obama’s team continues to keep up their work ethic, come November John McCain will be wondering why his expected base evaporated as well.
“Every single expenditure is reviewed and approved by the campaign, by Harold Ickes and his team, one by one,” Penn said.
Right, how much was approved for the Penn expenditure.
The problem from the beginning was Obama and Clinton’s platforms are very close, too close, there is virtually no difference. So, for me, it’s coming down to who can get the job done. It was dead even, then came Texas. If Texas is any indication, Hillary will never get anything done due to the hate hardcore conservatives have for her. 10% of Obama’s primary vote are coming from conservatives.
My point is I am going with Obama. He has deflected conservative criticism like no one in present day politics. Obama in my mind will be more effective in getting liberal ideas out there. I believe Obama will get more done as president then Hillary.
As much as we (especially me) bitch about the overlong campaign season, the ridiculously overcomplicated primary/caucus systems, and the need for candidates to raise vast sums of money, the whole came together to eliminate the weaker establishment candidate and strengthen the insurgent, giving us a much better shot at winning the general. Obama is sharper, and tougher than he would otherwise have been, and we’ve dealt a huge blow to the DLC/loser-consultant nexus that helped bring Bush to power.
Despite a Democratic field rich in talent with any number of candidates who could have caught fire but didn’t, one gets the feeling that the Clintons felt they were always going to walk away with this one handily. They underestimated their competition.
I think a big part of that problem was just that they made the classic mistake of getting high off their own supply. They wanted to project an air of invincibility, and so they had to act that way the whole time; pretending to be so strong that they didn’t need to worry about their opponents. But one of the secrets of good spin is that you still know what the truth is. I don’t think they did.
Rove made that exact mistake in 2000, which is why he thought it was brilliant for Bush to campaign in California, which he had no chance of winning, rather than Florida, which he desperately needed to win (as we all are well aware). But again, it’s one thing for a general to use headfakes and misdirection to fool his opponents. It’s quite another to actually move your troops into a bad position as a way of psyching your enemy out. Penn really followed Rove’s strategy too well, and unfortunately for him, didn’t have any Supreme Court justices to bail him out.
Penn’s other mistake is that he didn’t realize that Rove’s only real talent is being an underhanded ballbreaker, and that all the political genius stuff is just for his ego. It really doesn’t payoff to copy Rove if you’re only going to copy the stuff that doesn’t work.
Jim,
Hillary’s continued presence in the primary, without resounding victories on March 4th, will only damage the Party by attacking the nominee. The longer she’s in, the more the coverage is about her and Barack.
I happen to think the more exposure MCain gets between now and November, the worse he will do. It’s the Giuliani effect.
Honestly, I don’t think she will stay in after the fourth.
Maybe she should have hired Penn & Teller. She’s going to need some kind of magic trick to pull off a win now.
Now that even the Imperial Minions can see that the guerillas have left the Purple Mountains and are marching on the capitol, they fight among themselves as their servants pack the bags with all the gold, art objects and cash they can find and stuff them into the trunks of the waiting limousines, ready for the race to the airport to catch the last plane out.
Hillary’s campaign would have been successful if it had not been for the oratorical gifts of Barak Obama.
There were other excellent candidates besides Obama and Hillary (Biden and Dodd come to mind immediately), but they couldn’t break out of the pack. Obama did. Once he got some momentum going, he has been unstoppable.
Who could have foreseen that an extremely attractive candidate like Obama could rise to the top so quickly during such a compressed campaign season? Certainly not Mark Penn, and certainly not Hillary or Bill. They ran a sensible campaign based on her inevitability. It probably would have worked 99 times out of 100.
In politics, you’re a genius if you win. And you’re a dummy if you lose.