Knocked Off Balance, Clinton Campaign Tries to Regain Its Stride
By PATRICK HEALY and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
-snip-
The answers go to the heart of Mrs. Clinton’s current political challenge. She and her team showered so much money, attention and other resources on Iowa, New Hampshire and some of the 22-state nominating contests on Feb. 5 that they have been caught flat-footed — or worse — in the critical contests that followed, her political advisers said.
She also made a strategic decision to skip several small states holding caucuses, states where Mr. Obama scored big victories, accumulating delegates and, possibly, momentum.Her heavy spending and relatively modest fund-raising in January compounded the problems, leaving the campaign ill-equipped to plan after Feb. 5, advisers and donors say.
-snip-
In
Idaho, for example, Mr. Obama’s campaign started setting up nearly a year before the Feb. 5 caucus. By the day of the caucus, he had five offices in the state and 20 paid staff members.
Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, sent one of her supporters, Senator Maria Cantwell of neighboring Washington State, to drop by just before the caucuses.
In
Minnesota, “the Clinton campaign was in triage mode,” said Lawrence Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. He said Mrs. Clinton appeared to have allocated her dwindling resources to New York and California, the biggest prizes in the Feb. 5 contests (and which she won), investing almost nothing in media advertising in Minnesota and leaving her campaign there “like a M.A.S.H. unit.”
At the same time, Mr. Jacobs said, Mr. Obama “had developed almost a new style of campaigning.”
“He merges modern campaign technology — he has the list of names, the follow-up effort, all the literature distribution — with these phenomenal rock-arena political revivals,” Mr. Jacobs said. “In a caucus state, it’s formidable.”
Mr. Obama won Minnesota by 34 percentage points.
Three months before the
North Dakota caucuses on Feb. 5, the Obama campaign dispatched a staff member there to begin organizing. The campaign quickly expanded to include 11 full-time staff members, including one person solely for media outreach. And in
Utah, in preparation for Feb. 5, Mr. Obama opened an office months before Mrs. Clinton did, said Rob Miller, the vice chairman of the Utah Democratic Party.
Mr. Obama won both states.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/us/politics/14clinton.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=printANALYSIS
Clinton Camp May Regret Largely Turning Its Back on Caucus StatesBy Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 15, 2008; Page A08
Among the costliest decisions Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign has made this year was to largely cede caucus states to Barack Obama. It is one that, in retrospect, baffles Democratic strategists and, even more so, the operatives on Obama's team. -snip-
Here is a simple way to understand the consequences of that choice.
Take two states that held Super Tuesday contests on Feb. 5: big New Jersey, with 107 pledged delegates at stake, and tiny Idaho, with 18 delegates up for grabs. Clinton won New Jersey's primary and made headlines for doing so early on that night, while Obama won Idaho's caucuses long after many of those watching had gone to bed. But because of the rules of proportionality, Clinton netted just 11 more delegates than Obama from her New Jersey victory, while he gained 12 more than her by winning Idaho. That pattern held through other states on Feb. 5 and Feb. 9, as Obama rolled up substantial margins and, as a result, harvested delegates in numbers that belied the relatively small size of some of the states.
Eight states held caucuses during that period -- Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota and Washington -- and
together awarded 305 pledged delegates. By the Obama team's calculations,
the split out of those states is about 209 for him and 96 for Clinton -- an advantage of 113 delegates. After his big victories in Maryland, Virginia and the District on Tuesday, Obama has the overall delegate lead, including superdelegates, and a larger advantage among the pledged delegates awarded on the basis of primary and caucus results. Most of this margin comes from his performance in the caucus states.
There are two important features of the Democrats' sometimes incomprehensible system. The first is that,
because of proportionality, it is difficult for any candidate in a close race to gain much of an advantage. Winning states can still mean splitting delegates almost 50-50.
But the flip side is that once someone gains even a relatively small lead, it becomes more and more difficult for the other candidate to catch up. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/14/AR2008021403482.html?hpid=topnewsThe truly mind-blowing part - "
Eight states held caucuses during that period -- Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota and Washington -- and together awarded 305 pledged delegates. By the Obama team's calculations, the split out of those states is about 209 for him and 96 for Clinton -- an advantage of 113 delegates. "
According to Chuck Todd,
Obama is up in pledged delgates by 130+. Clinton would have to win the rest of the states by 25-30 points to catch Obama in pledged delegates.
What a terrible mistake it was to skip all those caucuses that they now say "don't count".
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