One of Hillary Clinton’s mantras during her primary campaign against Barack Obama was her claim of being more experienced in governing. If that claim is worth anything, then why was her campaign so dysfunctional as compared to his?
Many others are offering their analyses of “What went wrong,” but I’ll mention a few obvious ones:
- She assumed she would have the nomination locked up on Super Tuesday. Based on that assumption, she had no strategy for the day after when her lock was nowhere to be found. It’s the same kind of best-case-only planning that we’ve seen elsewhere — say, in the planning for the invasion of Iraq.
- How many different staff shake-ups did her campaign have? I stopped counting a while ago.
- Although she clearly has major policy differences with the Republicans, she all too often borrowed some of their worst policy, personality and pandering traits if she thought it would help her defeat Obama. I don’t think she fully understands how much Americans detest the poisonous partisanship that our politics have endured over the past few decades. Obama does.
During his concession speech on election night of 1992, George H. W. Bush stated (paraphrasing), “If Bill Clinton runs the country as well as he ran his campaign, we’ll be okay.”
Sixteen years later, one could easily say, “If Hillary Clinton were to run the country as well as she ran her primary campaign, it’s a good thing she didn’t win.”