Hillary Clinton’s White House Hopes Unravel

January 8, 2008

Hillary Clinton's hopes of winning the White House continued to unravel today as her camp privately conceded that she is set lose the next key battleground, South Carolina, after failing to block the rise of Barack Obama.

Amid recrimination, squabbling, soul-searching and speculation about a shake-up of staff within her campaign team, Clinton is all but abandoning her original strategy in favour of a Plan B.

The new strategy is an all-or-nothing fight for the big six US states - Florida, California, Illinois, Ohio, Texas and New York. Victory in all, or almost all of them, would still give her the Democratic nomination.

At the start of the campaign, the Clintons had anticipated an orderly procession, picking up the smaller states from Iowa to South Carolina.
The primary in the southern state is normally one of the toughest battlegrounds of the presidential election campaign for both Democrats and Republicans, and has turned out to be the graveyard for many White House hopefuls.

Clinton began last year with a strong lead in the state, in which about half the Democratic vote is African-American. But Obama has since built up a strong network in the state, and the African-American vote - despite lingering affection for Bill Clinton - has gradually shifted towards Obama.

"It is essentially a black primary," a source in her camp said.

The Democratic and Republican candidates are fighting state by state for delegates to this year's party conventions, which will choose the candidate to contest the presidential election in November.

Within hours of the polls opening in New Hampshire today, Bill Clinton all but conceded defeat in the state, saying the unusually short stretch between the vote in Iowa last Thursday and today's in New Hampshire presented little chance to counter Obama's momentum. "It takes some time to undo that …" he said. "If this were 10 days after Iowa, instead of five, I believe we would have no doubt about what the outcome would be."

Hillary Clinton, too, appeared to acknowledge defeat but said she would fight on until the closing hours of Super-Duper Tuesday, February 5, when about 20 big states, including California and New York, vote.

"I view the defining moment in this process as midnight on the West Coast, February 5th, because I think it's going to take until then to really sort this out," she said.

The New York Times speculated today that Clinton might reshuffle her long-standing campaign team - Mark Penn, chief strategist; Patti Solis Doyle, campaign manager; Mandy Grunwald, advertising adviser; and Howard Wolfson, communications director - and was sounding out former aides to Bill Clinton, James Carville and John Podesta, about taking over.

A source inside the Clinton camp admitted there was soul-searching inside the camp over the failed campaign message but that it was unlikely that either Carville, who is a full-time television pundit, and Podesta, who heads a Washington think-tank and is already a part-time adviser to Clinton, would give up their jobs.

The Clinton camp accepts that her message last year of stressing her experience over Obama had lost out to his message of change. She has since retooled her message, stressing that while he is promising change, he cannot deliver it.

The campaign team also hopes that, with Obama as front-runner, the US media will subject his life and policies to greater scrutiny, having given him a soft run so far.

Bill Clinton, though popular with Democrats, has often appeared drained, has frequently diverged from the agreed campaign line and been a constant reminder of the past. But her campaign team, while admitting there have been "glitches" with him, are not putting the blame on him.

The Clinton strategy now is based on the calculation that she will claim victory in next week's primary in Michigan, albeit a potentially hollow one given she is the only name on the ballot, and hopefully Nevada on January 19, Florida on January 29 and New York, California, Ohio and Texas on February 5. Obama is expected to take his home state, Illinois.

She is banking on winning support from the huge Hispanic populations in Florida and California, who, the Clinton campaign claims, do not like Obama because of his stance on illegal immigration.

But that strategy could become unstuck as a result of the nationwide publicity Obama has received since his Iowa win. After holding a healthy lead in nationwide polls over Obama throughout last year, Clinton is now tied with him on 33% according to a USA Today/Gallup poll.

Behind the scenes, some Clinton operatives are looking even further down the road than Super Tuesday - at the prospect of trying to turn the nomination convention in Denver next summer into a last-minute battle for votes.

Michigan has been stripped of its convention delegates by the Democratic national organisation because it broke party rules by holding its primary early, but Clinton, as winner in that state, could seek to have these delegates reinstated to boost her vote at the convention.

Other Democratic strategists have weighed in with criticism of her campaign. Bob Shrum, the Democratic operative who was responsible for John Kerry's losing presidential campaign in 2004, wrote what amounts to the campaign's obituary in a piece for the New York Daily News. "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," he wrote.

Source: Guardian

Posted by Justin Thyme · Filed Under Hillary Clinton, News

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