Below The Beltway

We’ve barely started the General Election campaign, but I don’t think it’s an understatement to say the 2008 Presidential Election is going down in history as one of America’s most memorable, perhaps, in the end, one of the most important, elections of the past two centuries.

And one of the things historians will be talking about is why the campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton, which seemed to be coasting to victory as recently as last November and December, went so wrong so quickly.

To get things rolling, Shaun Mullen at The Moderate Voice comes up with a list of reasons why Hillary’s campaign fell apart:

First and foremost, Hillary Clinton never seemed comfortable with herself in stark contrast to Barack Obama, who as one speech analyst put it, can sound rousing while being conciliatory. Clinton’s discomfort sometimes translated into a sense of phoniness and was exacerbated by her mood swings – from crying on cue early in the primary season to angrily pounding the podium as she became increasingly beleaguered

This much is true, Hillary Clinton isn’t half the campaigner, or half the politician, that her husband was in his prime. While Bill Clinton’s performance and behavior during the course of this campaign hasn’t shown it, Clinton was clearly a better campaigner in his first run for the White House than his wife has been. Part of it is personality, and part of it is how the candidate interacts with people. Bill Clinton circa 1992 excelled at empathy, and the crowds ate it up. Hillary played at empathy, and it came across as phony — and people noticed.

Most importantly, though, is the fact that Clinton based her campaign on experience when the public wanted change:

Clinton painted herself into a corner by stressing her Washington experience in a campaign in which many change-hungry voters viewed that has a handicap and a some already suffered from Clinton Fatigue. Compounding this problem was that some of her experience, notably the Tuzla Incident, were figments of her imagination.

(…)

When Clinton’s initial strategy of campaigning as an incumbent flopped in the face of Obama’s seductive hope-and-change mantra, she was ill prepared to shift gears. There followed a series of ill-conceived course corrections, first with her as Ms. Policy Wonk, then as Ms. Race Baiter and finally as Ms. Voters Are Idiots in which she pandered by backing a gas-tax holiday scheme that no economist will touch, emptily threatened to destroy OPEC, and prattled that elitists are what ails America.

The one thing I noticed when the Obama phenomenon really took off in January, was the fact that the Clinton campaign, and even Clinton herself, seemed clearly irritated and frustrated over the fact that this guy was passing them by and that their initial strategy of playing up Clinton as the “experienced” candidate (a strategy that was easily defeated once opponents started pointing out that her experience up until 2001 consisted entirely of being married to the right person) was falling apart before their eyes.

The rise of Barack Obama was like a punch in the solar plexus for the Clinton campaign, and they never really recovered from it.

And, finally, there’s Hillary’s biggest problem — the guy she’s married to:

Beyond her own negatives, Clinton’s biggest handicap was her inability to come to terms with Bill Clinton both as her husband and a campaigner, and he with his own role. It almost seemed as if he was out to sabotage her campaign with his angry outbursts,

It may well be the case that Bill Clinton single handedly destroyed his wife’s chances to win the nomination when he attemped to downplay Obama’s win in South Carolina by comparing him to Jesse Jackson, but that was only the first of many examples of Bill Clinton going off the rails in a way that made you wonder if he really wanted her to win. Back in 1992, Bill Clinton called his campaign a “buy one get two” campaign. This time around, that may have hurt a lot more than it helped.