Inside the Clinton Campaign

If you want to understand how Hilliary Clinton went from "l'etat c'est moi" to "I could'a been a contender," in about two weeks time, you need to read  Joshua Green's inside account of the Clinton organization in The Atlantic Online.  You also need to know that the author's reporting is part of the story he reports.  First for the content:

For the many people in and around Washington who obsess over the latest machinations in Hillaryland, the firing of Solis Doyle—and she was fired, several insiders confirm—is a big deal, but for reasons somewhat different from what the media coverage has suggested. Her title of “campaign manager” implies a loftier role than the one she actually played. She is the furthest thing from a Rove-like strategic genius (Mark Penn inhabits that role for Hillary), so her leaving doesn’t signify an impending change of strategy, as some reports seem to assume. Rather, Solis Doyle, who began as Clinton’s personal scheduler in 1991 (and who, as it happens, coined the term “Hillaryland”) was Clinton’s alter ego and was installed in the job specifically for that reason.

In other words Clinton had, as campaign manager, a woman who had no competence at that job.  She was there specifically because she was a perfect reflection of her boss's will and personality. 

I’ve always felt that the most revealing thing about Solis Doyle is her oft-repeated line: “When I’m speaking, Hillary is speaking.” It is revealing both because it is true and because it conveys—and even flaunts—an arrogance that I think is the key to understanding all that has gone wrong for the Clinton campaign. Such arrogance led directly to the idea that Clinton could simply project an air of inevitability and be assured her party’s nomination.

You can afford to conceal your real campaign staff behind an incompetent but a creature of your own devising if, and only if, you are holding a winning hand.  For a long time that looked to be true of the Clinton campaign, and that is why Green's reporting received little attention. But not so little that the Clinton's  were not moved to suppress it.  As The Politico reports:

Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland.

So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton.

This is pure Clintonism: instead of resolving the growing tensions within the campaign, spike the article revealing those tensions.  GQ went along, which I think was very bad for the Clintons.  If the disarray in her campaign had become public much earlier, she might have corrected it in time to do some good. 

But the real error of the Clinton campaign is one she shared with Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani: a failure to appreciate that, in the current techno-political environment, waiting can be fatal. The moment of crisis was back in 2006. 

Instead of launching her presidential campaign, even informally, Clinton and Solis Doyle insisted that no one so much as mention the possibility of a White House bid until after she’d been reelected to the Senate—a move insiders now concede was a serious tactical flaw that allowed Barack Obama’s campaign to take off unchallenged. The error wasn’t simply letting Obama get a head start in raising money. It was failing to realize that the world of political fund-raising had changed dramatically since Bill Clinton had last run for president, in a way that put a premium on different kinds of fund-raisers than the ones to which the Clintons had ties.

Perhaps the bigger problem than fund raising, it would turn out, was fund spending.  Here is how Senator Clinton's re-election bid went:

Here, too, Solis Doyle was disastrous; her lack of skill in areas other than playing the loyal heavy began to show. The first public sign of this came just after Clinton’s reelection to the Senate. Even though Clinton had faced no serious opponent, it turned out that Solis Doyle, as campaign manager, had burned through more than $30 million.

It didn't get better over the course of the campaign. 

[D]espite her late start, Clinton did not lag on the money front: she has raised $175 million since winning her Senate seat in 2000, which should have been enough to fund a formidable campaign... That the money was so obviously mismanaged and Clinton was essentially left helpless to compete in last weekend’s primaries and caucuses is the reason Solis Doyle ultimately had to go. The problem, as before, was mismanagement—only this time against a worthy enough opponent that the cost was obvious to everyone.

The Clinton campaign is now in full tilt crisis.  Yesterday, as he was racking up Virginia, Maryland, and Washington DC by large margins, Senator Obama was not in any of those states.  He didn't need to be.  He was in Wisconsin, which votes next Tuesday.  Ms. Clinton wasn't on the Potomac either.  It wouldn't have done her any good.  But neither was she in Wisconsin.  She was in Texas.  It may do her campaign some good to remember the heroism of the Alamo.  It would also do to remember that the defenders of the Alamo all died.