Some people want to tell the epic story of a heroic woman brought down by her foolish love of a no-good man, who kept her mired in scandal during his own Presidency, and wouldn’t butt out of her own run. Some people want to tell the story of a massive uprising for Change and Hope defeating The Establishment.
But the fact is, she almost won. She just barely lost. Her vote for the Iraq war and subsequent failure to say it was a mistake opened her up to an anti-war challenger, and her campaign’s failure to have any plan for the primaries after February 5th’s “Super Tuesday” is what eventually sunk her. Change any one of those things and she probably wins.
But she voted for the war, she never said it was a mistake, and her campaign assumed it would blow away the competition in the Winter and have it all wrapped up by February 6th. They failed to plan for Spring and Summer. In a lot of the post-February-sixth states, the Clinton campaign didn’t even have an office set up until they lost Super Tuesday and realized that it was going to be a long campaign.
“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.” — Hillary Clinton, February 2008
Indeed there were.
One other reason is probably hired-gun Mark Penn, who reportedly didn’t even understand that the Democratic Party primaries were not winner take all. He reportedly believed that if she won California early, that she’d have enough delegates to coast to the finish. He was her campaign manager. Delegates are not handed out that way. That story sounds too goofy to be true, but it would explain their big state strategy. Maybe she simply blew one of the surest things in U.S. political history by hiring an incompetent manager. With a better campaign manager (and it’s hard not to be better than utter incompetence) she probably wins too.
Post a Comment