The Misunderestimators

[OhioChick]

Hillary Clinton and Mark Penn never took Barack Obama seriously enough. That's why her chances look so grim.
Post Date Tuesday, April 08, 2008

WASHINGTON--The most striking critiques of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign have come not from her opponents or her enemies, but from her most loyal friends.

Since December, I have been hearing a steady stream of worries from Clinton partisans who took Barack Obama's challenge seriously from the start. These loyalists felt her campaign was misreading the nature of the political year, the state of the Democratic Party, the organizational requirements of a long struggle for the nomination, and the complexity of the party's attitudes toward both the candidate herself and former President Clinton.

The immediate cause of Mark Penn's departure as Hillary Clinton's chief strategist was his private work on behalf of a Colombian free-trade agreement that Clinton opposes. But the fact that Penn could not hold on to his privileged position is a reflection of problems that plagued the Clinton campaign even before it lost the Iowa caucuses in early January.

The failure in Iowa, which allowed Obama's candidacy to take off, was Clinton's original strategic sin. Clinton's advisers were ambivalent about competing in the state. They worried that her vote to authorize the war in Iraq would make it hard for her to win in a place whose caucus-going Democrats are, on the whole, staunchly anti-war.

According to a leaked internal memo, Clinton advisers actually considered skipping Iowa altogether. Instead, her lieutenants were sluggish in organizing the state and then, realizing the dangers of losing it to Obama, poured in resources--thus depleting her coffers for the later fights to come. Her campaign seemed to have only two speeds: overconfidence and panic.


http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=74c11f70-f581-4050-baff-b73b71c9db58

[crankychatter]

1. Their real issue with Barack Obama - he WINS

they hate it when he does that

[babylonsister]

2. Rec'd! I loves me some EJ Dionne-tellin' it like it is. nt

[grantcart]

3. Her campaign seemed to have only two speeds: overconfidence and panic.

From the article and says it all

[Window]

4. K/R.

:kick:

[AtomicKitten]

5. The Clinton campaign has been hamstrung at every turn by their own hubris and bullshit.

Obama's "stealth" candidacy was always right in front of their faces, but they were too blind in their arrogance to take him seriously. Well, they're taking him seriously now as they flail about in their final death throes.