Cochise
01-07-2008, 10:04 AM
My favorite Democrat lets us know (from experience) what will happen in her failing campaign and what will be done.
If (although I strongly suspect the right word is "when") Hillary Clinton loses tomorrow's New Hampshire primary, there will be a few proto-obituaries for her campaign and many more stories about how it will be "shaken up" or "relaunched." Scapegoats will be found and exiled: Mark Penn, the pollster and strategist, foremost among them.
I have to interject... shrum might be the world's most foremost authority on failing campaigns LMAO
After all, the candidate can't very well dispense with the überstrategist who also happens to be her husband and who was fully complicit in designing and driving her message.
The flaw wasn't just the attempt to go back to the future, to the 1990s, but that the Clintons picked the wrong year in that decade. Instead of 1992, when Bill was the personification of change, their model was 1996. So Hillary ran as a pseudo-incumbent, with a selection of bite-size proposals and an abundance of caution and transparent calculation. Why would any campaign ever explicitly announce a tour to make the candidate "likable"? Or, as happened when the beleaguered Clinton machine sputtered into New Hampshire, that they now had a plan for her to be spontaneous and actually answer audience questions?
The Clinton industry, encrusted with the beneficiaries and acolytes of the first and probably only Clinton presidency, has turned Hillary into a product whose sell-by date has passed. In a year of change, she has been positioned as the establishment candidate. The relentless appeal to "experience" reinforces that - and too often elides into a dubious attempt to take credit for some of Bill's accomplishments.
More fundamentally, Hillary seems to be making an argument about herself, not the future or the voters. No wonder she is losing to a young senator who comes across as the leader of a revolution in our politics.
There could still be a Clinton miracle, but by tomorrow night she is more likely to be the KOd Kid than the Comeback Kid.
She will have to get off the mat and recast her case. Contrary to the caricatures, Hillary Clinton is a real person, often funny in private, with engaging qualities that have been well-hidden in this campaign. But the hour is late and even if the real Hillary emerges, voters might see it as just another contrivance.
She can launch an all-out attack on Barack Obama - based on Saturday night's debate, that looks like where her campaign is headed - but what's there to attack that would convert rather than repel primary voters?
She could dis New Hampshire, as she dissed Iowa - with operatives saying the state "is so small, it's like a mayor's race in a medium-sized city" - and point to Tsunami Tuesday, when the megastates vote Feb. 5. But that would only make her sound like a sore loser.
Moreover, the wave that is rising across the country is steadily eroding her lead in national polls. She has probably spent much of the $100 million that she's raised, and last week her big givers were being urgently importuned to raise more. Incredibly, the one-time Dem juggernaut may struggle financially to reach Feb. 5.
So it's a long shot, with one and only one possible road to recovery: Let Hillary be Hillary. Throw away the product packaging - those poll-tested small-bites of policy - and set out a big case about what she wants to do in the next four years, not what she has done for the past 35.
The pursuit of the presidency is not a résumé contest. Otherwise a one-term congressman named Lincoln never would have beaten Stephen Douglas, "the little giant" of American politics; Kennedy never would have prevailed against Nixon, and the young Bill Clinton never would have ousted the first George Bush from the White House.
The conventional caveat is that things could change. World events could refocus voters on Hillary's strengths - or on Obama's weaknesses. Yet as of today, it is far more likely that Hillary Clinton won't be giving an acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Maybe Obama, the unifier, will let her speak in prime time.
Shrum, senior strategist in the 2000 Al Gore and 2004 John Kerry presidential campaigns, is the author of "No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner."
If (although I strongly suspect the right word is "when") Hillary Clinton loses tomorrow's New Hampshire primary, there will be a few proto-obituaries for her campaign and many more stories about how it will be "shaken up" or "relaunched." Scapegoats will be found and exiled: Mark Penn, the pollster and strategist, foremost among them.
I have to interject... shrum might be the world's most foremost authority on failing campaigns LMAO
After all, the candidate can't very well dispense with the überstrategist who also happens to be her husband and who was fully complicit in designing and driving her message.
The flaw wasn't just the attempt to go back to the future, to the 1990s, but that the Clintons picked the wrong year in that decade. Instead of 1992, when Bill was the personification of change, their model was 1996. So Hillary ran as a pseudo-incumbent, with a selection of bite-size proposals and an abundance of caution and transparent calculation. Why would any campaign ever explicitly announce a tour to make the candidate "likable"? Or, as happened when the beleaguered Clinton machine sputtered into New Hampshire, that they now had a plan for her to be spontaneous and actually answer audience questions?
The Clinton industry, encrusted with the beneficiaries and acolytes of the first and probably only Clinton presidency, has turned Hillary into a product whose sell-by date has passed. In a year of change, she has been positioned as the establishment candidate. The relentless appeal to "experience" reinforces that - and too often elides into a dubious attempt to take credit for some of Bill's accomplishments.
More fundamentally, Hillary seems to be making an argument about herself, not the future or the voters. No wonder she is losing to a young senator who comes across as the leader of a revolution in our politics.
There could still be a Clinton miracle, but by tomorrow night she is more likely to be the KOd Kid than the Comeback Kid.
She will have to get off the mat and recast her case. Contrary to the caricatures, Hillary Clinton is a real person, often funny in private, with engaging qualities that have been well-hidden in this campaign. But the hour is late and even if the real Hillary emerges, voters might see it as just another contrivance.
She can launch an all-out attack on Barack Obama - based on Saturday night's debate, that looks like where her campaign is headed - but what's there to attack that would convert rather than repel primary voters?
She could dis New Hampshire, as she dissed Iowa - with operatives saying the state "is so small, it's like a mayor's race in a medium-sized city" - and point to Tsunami Tuesday, when the megastates vote Feb. 5. But that would only make her sound like a sore loser.
Moreover, the wave that is rising across the country is steadily eroding her lead in national polls. She has probably spent much of the $100 million that she's raised, and last week her big givers were being urgently importuned to raise more. Incredibly, the one-time Dem juggernaut may struggle financially to reach Feb. 5.
So it's a long shot, with one and only one possible road to recovery: Let Hillary be Hillary. Throw away the product packaging - those poll-tested small-bites of policy - and set out a big case about what she wants to do in the next four years, not what she has done for the past 35.
The pursuit of the presidency is not a résumé contest. Otherwise a one-term congressman named Lincoln never would have beaten Stephen Douglas, "the little giant" of American politics; Kennedy never would have prevailed against Nixon, and the young Bill Clinton never would have ousted the first George Bush from the White House.
The conventional caveat is that things could change. World events could refocus voters on Hillary's strengths - or on Obama's weaknesses. Yet as of today, it is far more likely that Hillary Clinton won't be giving an acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Maybe Obama, the unifier, will let her speak in prime time.
Shrum, senior strategist in the 2000 Al Gore and 2004 John Kerry presidential campaigns, is the author of "No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner."