Frank Rich, The New York Times, February 24, 2008
When people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.
It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.
The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.
That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. But he’s actually not even all that loyal. Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo.
Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.
Ten Reasons Obama Didn’t Finish Off Hillary In Texas and Ohio
Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, March 5, 2008
As it became clear that Hillary Clinton was gaining ground on Obama, especially in the last week, his usually flawless campaign made several blunders. Here, in order of importance, are ten reasons why Obama slipped.
1. NAFTA Flap
When Obama’s leading economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, met with a Canadian official and allegedly told him that Obama’s stated views on NAFTA during the campaign amounted to “political posturing,” this was a huge blunder. It undercut Obama’s attack on Clinton for NAFTA, where she was vulnerable, especially in Ohio. It raised serious issues about Obama’s credibility with the American public, which is just getting to know him. (Especially since Obama first denied that the comment was ever made.) And the NAFTA flap called into question his leadership abilities. As I’ve been saying for days, and as Paul Begala said Tuesday night on CNN, as soon as this story surfaced, Obama should have said that Goolsbee was not speaking for the campaign and should have given Goolsbee the heave-ho. Instead, the Goolsbee comment keeps stinging him.
2. Rezko
It certainly didn’t help the Obama campaign that Tony Rezko’s trial began on Monday. The Rezko story has been lying around like a pulled hand grenade next to Obama’s headquarters for months now. Rezko is the Chicago wheeler-dealer who stands accused of money laundering and extorting bribes. He’s a longtime friend, funder, and supporter of Obama’s. And he helped Obama buy his house in Chicago. The Rezko ties, which the media finally began digging into, cast a shadow not only on Obama’s judgment but on his claim to want to clean up government.
3. A Blunder in the Last Debate
The Clinton camp wisely picked up on an Obama error in the Cleveland debate. Clinton had criticized him for never holding an oversight hearing on NATO’s role in Pakistan, even though he chairs a subcommittee on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that deals with NATO. All Obama could say to that was, “I became chairman of this committee at the beginning of this campaign, at the beginning of 2007. So it is true that we haven’t had oversight hearings on Afghanistan.” He all but admitted he shirked his duties to run for President! Clinton used this footage of Obama’s answer in an effective ad against him in the final week.
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