The much-anticipated Atlantic article which looks at the Clinton campaign’s collapse from the inside is finally, blessedly up. Joshua Green managed to get his hands on copies of memos from people in Clinton’s staff — he even scanned them onto the Atlantic’s site. It’s worth the wait, folks; I’m only two pages in and some of the detais (like keeping tabs on Monica Lewinsky in Oregon to make sure she and HRC didn’t accidentally cross paths) are absolutely hilarisad. Were she not Hillary Clinton, her campaign would never have lasted past March — it was that dysfunctional.
Green:
Two things struck me right away. The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning. It sweated the large themes (Clinton’s late-in-the-game emergence as a blue-collar champion had been the idea all along) and the small details (campaign staffers in Portland, Oregon, kept tabs on Monica Lewinsky, who lived there, to avoid any surprise encounters). The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House. But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.
UPDATE: Some noteworthy tidbits.
-The word ‘prescient’ pops up alot. As in adviser saying, we think Iowa is gonna matter, but it’s gonna take a lot of dough and organizational muscles and might leave us bankrupt. Sure enough, the campaign spent $106 million there only to be outorganized, and was stuck in the red for the rest of the campaign. Also, Harold Ickes tried to get the rest of the campaign to recognize the importance that delegates would play, but nobody was tring to hear him.
-Bill Clinton made the call to run the controversial 3 a.m. commercial, not HRC.
-After Obama’s race speech, a Clinton surrogate urged her to give her own speech on gender. (We see you, QM.) Clinton wanted to do it, but her staff was split over whether she would even be able to keep up with Obama’s oratory skills. A prominent feminist supporter thought comparing sexism to racism was not a good look.
– Phil Singer, Howard Wolfson’s deputy, started spreading rumors about a female Washington Post reporter who had written an article about the Clinton campaigns propensity to blow through its money. Singer intercepted the formal complaint from the Post’s managing editor before it got to Maggie Williams, who he reported to, and stepped down. He was back with the campaign a week later.
-More on Singer: “On February 11, Williams’s first day on the job, Phil Singer …notorious for his tirades at reporters, blew up in Wolfson’s office and screamed obscenities at his boss before throwing open the door to direct his ire at the campaign’s policy director, Neera Tanden, an ally of Solis Doyle. “Fuck you and the whole fucking cabal!” he shouted, according to several Clinton staffers. In the end, he climbed onto a chair and screamed at the entire staff before storming out.”
-Penn’s ideal coalition for Clinton was ‘women’ and the white working and middle class, but by the time she came around to recognizing that, it was too late.
