It is 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 authorise the fiasco. Hillary then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan.
The Hillary 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,” 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.
Hillary 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 naive young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’ Kool-Aid. Or as Hillary frames it, Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.
But it’s the Hillary strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vapourous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Hillary 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.
In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Hillary campaign was six days behind Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Hillary clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being out-hustled.
Given that Hillary and Obama offer marginally different policy prescriptions — laid out in voluminous detail by both, by the way, on their websites — it’s not clear what her added-value message is. As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
If the press were as prejudiced against Hillary as her campaign constantly whines, debate moderators would have pushed for the Hillary tax returns and the full list of Hillary foundation donors to be made public with the same vigour it devoted to Obama’s “plagiarism”. And it would have showered her with the same ridicule that Rudy Giuliani received in his endgame.
The New York Times
