How Hillary Clinton’s Power Play Failed

June 7, 2008

By Tim Shipman

On Tuesday night, as his wife Hillary's hopes of winning the Democratic presidential nomination were going the way of the Titanic, Bill Clinton was on his mobile telephone.

He was not discussing how Mrs Clinton could leave the race with dignity and congratulate Barack Obama on his historic victory in the primary elections.

Instead, the former president was shouting at his wife's aides urging them to pressure superdelegates to stand by her and cajole others to defect from Mr Obama. It was the political equivalent of rearranging the deckchairs on that doomed ship.
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Hillary Clinton's attention was on finalising a concession speech in which she conceded nothing, save her belief that she is still a stronger candidate than Mr Obama.

Many close to the Clintons believe that the events of that night were the inevitable culmination of both Mrs Clinton's dysfunctional campaign and her personality, that the manner of her exit explains all you need to know about the reasons for her demise.

It was all on display: the seemingly boundless quest for power, a self-belief that one pundit dismissed as "deranged narcissism", the disorganised campaign staff and the husband rampaging around like a rogue elephant projecting his own rage on to his wife's bid for the White House.

A Democrat strategist who has close friends at senior levels of the Clinton camp, explained: "Hillary wasn't interested in Obama. She was only interested in her voters. She thought that they were hers to trade for the vice presidency. There was never any discussion of her conceding.

"President Clinton wanted to put the heat on superdelegates. He was full of ideas about how she could fight on. There was shouting and chaos."

Within 24 hours Mrs Clinton was drummed out of the contest, abandoned by her friends who openly voiced exasperation at her refusal to bend her ambition to the good of her party.

The reasons why her historic bid for power failed are still being argued over. She allowed her aides to paint her as an inevitable establishment candidate in a change election. She spent too much money early and unwisely, failed to compete properly in the Iowa caucuses, the first electoral test in January, and then ignored the other caucus states, where Barack Obama ran up the vote. By the time she found her voice, as a defender of the rights of the working class, it was too late.

When you're looking for the moment it went wrong, aides point to the moment in October when Mrs Clinton's chief strategist Mark Penn betrayed a total misunderstanding of the rules that would apportion delegates on a proportional basis in each state.

Peter Fenn, a spokesman for both Al Gore and John Kerry, said: "That's the one meeting I've been hearing about for months. Folks were expressing nervousness about Iowa and the early states. Mark Penn said: 'Don't worry about it because there's Super Tuesday and we'll win 370 delegates out of California.'

"Somebody in the meeting looked across the table and said: 'Hey Mark, it's not winner take all. We don't do it that way.' If that is right, it's devastating. I believe she was ill-served by her campaign operation. There was drama and craziness. They made a whole host of mistakes."

On January 3, Mrs Clinton came third in Iowa. Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster, said: "They had the money to compete and they allowed themselves to be outspent there by Obama. If Hillary Clinton had won in Iowa the election would have been over the next day."

Mr Fenn blames that loss on message and money mismanagement. "There was the inevitability nonsense. And the fact that they had to go to the Clintons for (an injection of) $5m before Super Tuesday is just unconscionable."

So too was Mr Clinton's contribution. His wife's comeback, begun in New Hampshire, stopped dead in the South Carolina primary, where the former president's clumsy interventions sparked claims of race baiting and drove African American voters into Mr Obama's arms for good.

Peter Fenn said: "Every time he made the slightest statement someone blew it up and discussed it 24/7 on cable news shows for three or four days. That's not the kind of campaign he's used to." Neither Clinton appeared able to grasp the appeal of Mr Obama, stuffily dismissing the hordes of young people who were drawn to the polls as naïve kids who had swallowed the kool aid.

There were attempts to modify that image of Mrs Clinton, but not early enough. The Democrat strategist said: "There was a meeting when everyone said that they had to play up her human side and Mark Penn said that being human was overrated. That's the whole campaign there in that moment, if you ask me."

But it was not just Mrs Clinton's personality that rang false. Before the crucial North Carolina primary, which she had billed as a "game changer" she got caught falsely claiming that she had braved sniper fire on a trip to Bosnia.

The result was indeed a game changer, but not of the kind she had wished for. She lost by more than 20 points and commentators proclaimed her campaign dead. That was on May 6.

But still she did not quit. The final throw of the dice last week saw Mrs Clinton over play her hand again, wielding her votes like weapons, while sanctioning her supporters to press for her to be vice president.

Even her backers were incredulous.

Ed Rendell, the governor of Pennsylvania, and Charlie Rangel, the New York congressman, went public with their dismay. "You don't bargain with the Presidential nominee," Mr Rendell said. "Even if you're Hillary Clinton and you have 18 million votes, you don't bargain."

"It showed a total lack of class," the Democrat strategist said. "They read her the riot act."

In the words of Daniel Koffler of the Huffington Post blog: "The Clintons' power play failed because, like Gorbachev, Honecker, and Ceausescu before them, they grossly miscalculated both the breadth and depth of their power."

That might stand as the perfect epitaph for Hillary Clinton's campaign, were it not for this. For her despairing admirers, it denies the Clintons the genuine credit they are owed for making Mr Obama's victory possible, after years of campaigning for racial equality in the US.

Hilary Rosen, a leading Democrat activist, said: "The life's work of Bill and Hillary Clinton is as responsible for Barack Obama's success as our first African American nominee as anyone. And yet, that joy is being denied for them by themselves. It is so sad."

Source: Telegraph

Posted by Hillary · Filed Under Bill Clinton, News, Top Story

Comments

One Response to “How Hillary Clinton’s Power Play Failed”

CW on June 9th, 2008 12:30 pm

You can fool some of the people some of the time; but never all of the people all of the time. I really thought the Clintons had everybody fooled. My faith in America
has been renewed! Bill’s Legacy has finally ended!

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