Taking stock of the early Hillary Clinton Campaign post-mortum
This is something of a preliminary skeletal framework for the story which will eventually end up being put together on the fall of the Hillary Clinton Presidential Campaign.  A few things strike me on the laying bare of the internal strategizing and the various junctures of the campaign. If you had asked at any juncture what was pounded in the strategy memos, anyone would have been able to hazard a reasonably accurate surmisation — such are the bright outlines of rather stark and unsubtle messaging. Which, I suppose, is fine. Advertising is a cynical business which purchases our dreams at a cheap price and sells them back to us at a steep mark – up, and political campaigns may be even more cynical in the way they slice and dice into our prejudices. But at least they take of our dreams, which is more than can be said about the Red Soviets!
Oh Kay.
More pointedly is the manner the pundit classes report with about the same terminology the themes of the campaign. Here we get into the theme of the “Forgotten Americans” and (ahem) Clinton being hte candidate for “People With Needs” — as opposed to the wistfully airy and ungrounded Obama and his danged “Movement”. This is something that Hillary Clinton and her surrogates were not going to speak explicitly — the Welfare State is nothing anyone wants to be defined as a part of and this fails the test of Aspirational Politics (and policy) — but nonetheless it was suggested strongly enough in the campaign that it could be picked up by a column by, say, Clinton supporter Maria Coe who can dissect the two candidates and say of the salt – of – the – earth Clinton supporters that they have zero interest in joining a so-called movement and are people “with needs”. I have every expectation that she did not receive the memo, and yet the message was so transferred as to be picked up in much the same language.
Or take the analysis of why the Hillary Clinton campaign nearing her last gasps seemed apathetic on the prospect of them hurting the then-probably Obama campaign’s general election chances. Stated simply, somewhere or other, in a published column, they don’t think Obama can win anyway and thus can’t harm the chances of a hopeless candidate. What do you know — Mark Penn states categorically that Obama is unelectable and the Republicans know it. Was this stated publically by any surrogate? Of course not. Yet to observe the campaign was to pick up on this essential tenant of the campaign’s strategic thinking, and to report it.
But I guess at this point we can just shout “Yes We Will” and be done with it. The great irony is that all through most of 2007 the conjealing conventional wisdom was that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was steady and sure and Obama had basically made that giant splash, wracking up a huge poll number which then dissipated against the sure steady Clinton machine — not letting those external issues get the best of her. As it turned out in the primary season, Obama’s campaign was the steady one, surfing easily and confidentally through Clinton’s late surge in Appalachia, and the Jeremiah Wright problem, pointedly squarely at his aim. But then again Clinton was in a position where she needed the reshuffling, so maybe things would look differently in an alternate universe.