The New York Times assembled a group of thirteen corners political pundits in an effort to determine what went wrong with Hillary Clinton’s once-inevitable campaign for the White House.
Of particular interest is the confusing and disjointed contribution from former Clinton campaign guru Mark Penn, who claims it was lack of money, or at least that’s what I think he says:
While everyone loves to talk about the message, campaigns are equally about money and organization. Having raised more than $100 million in 2007, the Clinton campaign found itself without adequate money at the beginning of 2008, and without organizations in a lot of states as a result. Given her successes in high-turnout primary elections and defeats in low-turnout caucuses, that simple fact may just have had a lot more to do with who won than anyone imagines.
Well, yea, it’s true that by the end of 2007 Obama was out fundraising Clinton by an amazing degree, but that really doesn’t tell us why he was doing so. Penn discounts conventional wisdom criticisms of the message by claiming Hillary did have the right message:
So let’s take on a few of the myths. Even schoolchildren got the message that Mrs. Clinton was ready to be president on Day One. As a result of her campaigning and ads, people saw her as a strong commander in chief, a good steward of the economy and a champion for people who needed one.
(…)
Experience was a major part of the campaign message, but far from the only one. She talked about the strength it takes to make change happen. Her campaign plans were bold: universal health care, universal preschool, new retirement accounts, a strategic energy fund. She was the first to jump on the housing crisis. She showed a relentless focus on substance and issues, which appealed to working-class and middle-class voters.
Well, yea, Mark, but still, she lost. What does that tell you ? To me, it’s one of two things — either the message wasn’t resonating or the campaign wasn’t being run right in the first place.
While we ponder exactly what Mark Penn meant, Mark Halprin and John Harris argue that, for two important reasons, the Clinton campaign was doomed from the moment she lost the Iowa Caucuses:
Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa established two trends that were decisive. The first was his organizational prowess, which he would repeatedly demonstrate in later caucus states. The second was more profound. He showed African-Americans that he could win among white voters.
Before Iowa, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama were competing vigorously for black support, with Mrs. Clinton winning her share of elected officials and party leaders. After Iowa, black voters saw Mr. Obama as a viable candidate, and he won African-Americans overwhelmingly in every state.
(…)
Mr. Obama’s narrow victory came from a powerful combination of two constituencies. The first was white, highly educated, reform-minded Democratic elites. It’s easy to forget how skeptical this bloc historically has been toward the Clintons, whom they view as slick and scandal-stained opportunists. They rooted for the improbable Paul Tsongas in 1992, and for Bill Bradley over Al Gore in 2000.
The second was African-Americans. Bill Clinton overcame political adversity in 1992 and throughout his presidency in large measure because of support from African-Americans, but this time they went for Mr. Obama.
A collection of Hillary Clinton’s tactical campaign mistakes would be a thick book. But she lost the race because Mr. Obama summoned the support of one group that never much liked the Clintons — and of another group that always did until now.
The shift of the black vote away from the Clintons was dramatic and, in some sense, I don’t think that Hillary or Bill ever really understood why it happened or accepted the fact that it did.
Ana Marie Cox, meanwhile says that Hillary lost because she looked at the campaign as an us vs. them race and treated those who criticized her as members of a conspiracy against her.
Kathleen Hall Jamison, on the other hand, says that it was Clinton’s initial support of the Iraq War that did her in:
Mrs. Clinton failed to persuade Mr. Obama’s antiwar coalition that she had voted to give President Bush the authorization to go to war as leverage to force weapons inspectors back into Iraq. She failed as well to make real the context of a vote cast after the president declared that “approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable.” As a result, key groups of Democrats tagged her as a candidate who abetted a Republican president’s unwarranted pre-emptive action.
This may have been the reason that some people voted against her, but I doubt that it motivated large percentages of the people who flocked to Obama and rejected her. More importantly, it’s difficult to accept this argument for the simple reason that, by February if not sooner, it was the economy, not the war, that was on the top of the list of issues that voters were most concerned about. Clinton’s vote on the war may have mattered to party activists but I doubt it decided the nomination.
Christie Todd Whitman, on the other hand, seems to be among the group blaming the fact that Hillary lost on sexism:
The press presented Barack Obama with his two years in the Senate as an agent of change, not a novice. In contrast, ABC’s Charles Gibson asked Mrs. Clinton if she would “be in this position” if it weren’t for her husband.
To this day, a businessman with no elected experience is considered qualified for high public office; a woman with the same background is called unprepared.
Mrs. Clinton’s sex was not solely responsible for her loss, but the implicit and explicit challenges that women face are such that we as a country must take notice if we want all people represented in public service.
I’ve got to call bullshit on this one. If anything, Hillary Clinton’s gender benefited her, both over the course of her lifetime and during this campaign, far more than it hurt her. The press didn’t “present” Barack Obama as an agent of change, his campaign did. Hillary raised the experience issue, which was valid, but her problem was that she didn’t have any more real experience than Obama did.
Yes, she’s been a Senator for 6 years, but there’s a truth that Charlie Gibson’s question raises which makes her pleas to sexism meaningless — unlike other women in politics including Christie Whitman, Hillary Clinton would not be where she is if she hadn’t been married to a man who was elected President of the United States. In all likelihood, if Bill Clinton had lost the election in 1992, the name Hillary Rodham Clinton would have become an historical footnote. For anyone to blame her loss on the fact that she’s a woman is to ignore the fact that she never would have been a candidate for President but for the fact that she was a woman married to a particular man.
Michelle Cottle points to an incident in a debate in October as the reason for Hillary’s downfall:
At the Oct. 30 debate in Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton could not explain whether she supported a proposal to provide driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants in New York.
No candidate could have survived this primary’s 1,018 debates without the occasional misstep. But her refusal to take a clear stand fit too neatly into the image of her as a slippery operator willing to say and do anything to win. And just like that, the 16-year stockpile of public ambivalence about and obsession with the Clintons boiled over.
I think it’s difficult to point any single thing, whether it’s this issue or the Iraq War, and say that this alone was the reason the campaign failed. The waffling about driver’s licenses may have reinforced the doubts that people had about Hillary Clinton, but it didn’t create them, and those doubts wouldn’t have led to anything at all if it weren’t for the fact that there was a viable alternative (and Barack Obama really was the only viable alternative to Hillary Clinton; none of the other candidates could have done what he did).
It’s former Virginia Governor Doug Wilder, though, points to the one thing that explains Bill and Hillary Clinton’s behavior throughout this campaign:
Hillary Clinton’s campaign was done in by a sense of entitlement and hubris.
Wilder’s right about that. It explains the dismissive way that Hillary treated Obama when the campaign started, it explains Bill Clinton’s actions and statements in places like South Carolina, and it explains why it took Hillary Clinton four days to withdraw from a race she had clearly lost.
There are other contributions from Heather Wilson, Jane Swift, Carl Bernstein, and Michael Kinsley, but it’s Bob Kerrey who comes away with the best line of the series:
[T]he most accurate answer to the question of which of Mrs. Clinton’s mistakes was most costly is probably one I have heard from a number of people and has been written by many others: She and President Clinton should have moved back to her home state after they left the White House. By doing so, she would have been elected the junior senator from Illinois in 2004, thereby reducing the chances that Mr. Obama would have been in a position to run against her.
And, unfortunately for Hillary, time travel isn’t an option.
