In case you somehow missed it, Hillary Clinton decided over the weekend to replace her campaign manager. There had been talk after Iowa that this would happen, but the unexpected victory in New Hampshire apparently put the reshuffling on hold. But the split decision on Super Tuesday, combined with Obama's big sweep over the weekend, forced Clinton to act. And what's interesting about this is not so much that it happened but why.
Hilzoy and Marc Ambinder have provided excellent overviews of some of the behind-the-scenes action, but I want to focus in on one or two parts in particular. As several different sources have made clear, the Clinton campaign took for granted that Obama's insurgency would not last past Super Tuesday. They were so confident about this, in fact, that they made two crucial mistakes. First, they didn't bother to do any grassroots organization and campaign infrastructure development in the post-Super Tuesday states. Second, not only did they not save any money for these contests, prior to Super Tuesday they actually spent more than they had brought it. Even worse, until the very last minute they kept their financial difficulties a secret from the candidate herself!
Hilzoy is absolutely right about this - if we go back 10-12 months, this strategy makes sense. But by the end of last year I thought it was clear to everyone that Obama's campaign represented a real threat to the Clinton's. Given their reputation for running a political machine, you would think that at that point they would have changed tactics and done everything possible to meet Obama head on. But judging from the reporting we're getting today, that shift didn't take place until after Iowa.
By December, everyone knew Obama had to post an early win to prove that he was for real. If he was going to survive to Super Tuesday, an early win in Iowa was absolutely essential. You would think that would have prompted the Clintons to try to bury him before then, but apparently not. They were so supremely overconfident that they apparently didn't recognize the magnitude of the threat until after it had already hit them. So much for their legendary campaign skills!
And Hilzoy's point about pre-Iowa polling and horse race coverage cannot be emphasized enough. In the months preceding Iowa, the polls shows the Clintons with a huge lead. Those were national polls, of course, and as a result were utterly meaningless in Iowa. Iowa is a caucus state - everyone knows that - which means grassroots organizing is essential. It may not have been clear in September that Obama was building a deep organization, but by December that was obvious. Were the Clintons so confident in their polling meaningless numbers that they didn't bother to take this threat seriously? Apparently so.
And that translated into their disastrous money management practices. Tribune:
But even more problematic was the campaign's money crunch. Over the last seven years, Clinton had raised $175 million for her reelection and her presidential campaign. But Solis Doyle didn't tell Clinton that there was next to no cash on hand until after the New Hampshire primary.
"We were lying about money," a source said. "The cash on hand was nothing."In turn, Clinton didn't tell Solis Doyle that she was lending her own money to keep the campaign afloat. Solis Doyle found out third-hand. And when she asked Clinton about it, the senator told her she couldn't understand how the campaign had gotten to such a point.
Clinton's campaign manager didn't tell her that they had run out of money? And Clinton did tell her campaign manager that she was loaning her campaign 5 million dollars? If I hadn't seen this confirmed by multiple sources, I wouldn't believe it. And it isn't just their financial management that is disfunctional. Ambinder:
Hillary Clinton's inner circle tends to make decisions based collaboratively, and interviews with campaign advisers and aides suggest that the departure was both a needed turning of the page and a recognition by Solis Doyle that she could best serve her family, and Clinton, by taking a different role.
I had assumed that Hillary's "let's have a conversation" thing was just a campaign strategy, but apparently I had underestimated them. Apparently it is also her method for managing her entire campaign. And this is critical, because it doesn't just tell us something about how she runs her campaign, it also tells us something about how she is likely to run the White House.
Managing by committee is difficult at best. Managing by committee when you aren't requiring full and open communication among all team members - yourself included - is a recipe for absolute disaster. And yet that's precisely the management style that Hillary has adopted for the most important organization she has ever decided to run. Judging by this series of episodes, I think it is now safe to say that she is not particularly adept at managing large organizations. If that's not a relevant consideration in deciding who should be our next president, I don't know what is.
One last point and then I'll move on. Having not set out a post-Super Tuesday strategy, the Clinton camp has essentially been forced to make things up as they go along. And so far at least, they've shown very little ability to creatively improvise. Several different campaign staffers have offered several different - and at times even contradictory - excuses for why they lost so big this past weekend.
One excuse was that Obama won because he outspent them in every state, an explanation that sounds dangerously close to Giuliani's nonsensical "I'm waiting for Florida" strategy.
Then there was the "Hillary wins the primaries, Obama wins the caucuses" argument, but given that they have evenly split the primaries, this excuse obviously and immediately falls flat.
There was the "Clinton wins the big states, and that's all that matters" argument, a strategy that minimizes the electoral importance of a solid majority of the states while bringing to mind of Kerry's failed 2004 bid.
Next was the "Clinton is driving huge increases in voter turnout around the country" argument, a line of thinking that directly undercuts their anti-caucus argument. In Maine, for example, turnout this year was double the previous state record for the Dems, and nine-times the turnout for the GOP caucus just a few weeks earlier.
And finally, there was the "caucuses discriminate against working folk" argument put forward by Bill himself, which as I explained yesterday would be fine were it not for the fact that he made the opposite argument in Nevada, a caucus they (sort of) won.
None of these arguments are any good, and all of them show a complete lack of understanding for what is actually going on. Obama is building a national movement, something that many professional observers - the Clintons included, apparently - thought would be impossible. They were wrong. He's rebuilding the party from the bottom-up, a strategy that has effectively neutralized whatever advantage their decade-long control of the old school political machine might have once provided.
This leaves some key questions for us going forward. How extensive is the Clinton campaign's ground game in the upcoming states, and how does it compare to what Obama has built? If they are behind, do they have enough time, money, and manpower to catch up? And if not, how far behind will they be come election day?
DC, MD, and VA all vote tomorrow, with WI and HI just one week later. If Clinton can keep at least a few of these contests close, she may be able to hold him off heading into the early March contests in OH,TX, VT, and RI. But if Obama pulls off big wins in the next four contests, and if he already has a significant lead over her in building up the local grassroots, her theoretical advantage in OH and TX may simply evaporate. Stay tuned.....
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