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What went wrong in the Clinton campaign?


This is an interesting article from today's LA Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-clintoncamp3mar03,1,3784251.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Not exactly a flattering portrait (but, no, I don't think they are beating up on Hillary either...Facts is facts!)

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Nice catch. Everyone knows that there were problems in her campaign, but this article gets into the nitty gritty.

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I should add, this speaks to Obama's point that a candidate's management ability is reflected in the quality of his or her campaign organization. Picture these kind of squabbles in a white house administration.

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I agree, this was an awesome read. This also goes along with Frank Rich's column in NYT about Hillary's abyssmal campaign ground game -
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/opinion/24rich.html
(excerpt)
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.

Sounds like GWB's Iraq War strategy doesn't it?

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clearthinker

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