Staff "Loyalty" to Hillary Rodham Clinton
More and more these days I am hearing people say that the reason Hillary Rodham Clinton lost the Democratic nomination is that she hired people who were "loyal" rather than people who were competent for her campaign. First of all, she hasn't lost--I put her chances at 28%, Barack Obama's chances at 70%, and the rest of the field's chances at 2%.
Second--well, let's listen to what these "loyal" campaign workers, aides, and advisors have to say. Here they speak to two Washington Post stenographers:
Clinton Soldiers On Despite Setbacks: Anne E. Kornblut and Shailagh Murray: Inside Clinton's inner circle on Friday, the feeling was that the Thursday night debate in Austin was unlikely to slow Obama's momentum from 11 straight primary and caucus victories. Some supporters said they had discussed how to raise with Clinton the subject of withdrawing from the race should she fail to win decisively on March 4. One option was to wait a day or two and then dispatch emissaries to former president Clinton to urge him to make the case.
One adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely, said Obama's 17-point Wisconsin victory on Tuesday had started to sink in as a decisive blow, given that the state had been viewed weeks earlier as a level playing field. "The mathematical reality at that point became impossible to ignore," the adviser said. "There's not a lot of denial left at this point.... She knows where things are going. It's pretty clear she has a big decision. But it's daunting. It's still hard to accept."...
Here they speak to Patrick Healy:
Somber Clinton Soldiers On as the Horizon Darkens: Over take-out meals and late-night drinks, some regrets and recriminations have set in... several advisers have now concluded that they were not smart to use former President Bill Clinton as much as they did, that "his presence, aura and legacy caused national fatigue with the Clintons," in the words of one senior adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity to assess the campaign candidly....
Some aides said Mr. Penn and the former campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, had conceived and executed a terribly flawed campaign....
Her advisers said internal polls showed a very tough race to win the Texas primary -- a contest that no less than Mr. Clinton has said is a "must win."... [S]ome are burning out. Morale is low. After 13 months of dawn-to-dark seven-day weeks, the staff is exhausted. Some have taken to going home early -- 9 p.m. -- turning off their BlackBerrys, and polishing off bottles of wine, several senior staff members said.
Some advisers have been heard yelling at close friends and colleagues.... Mr. Penn and the campaign advertising chief, Mandy Grunwald, had a screaming match over strategy.... Others have taken several days off, despite it being crunch time.... And some of her major fund-raisers have begun playing down their roles, asking reporters to refer to them simply as "donors," to try to rein in their image as unfailingly loyal...
Joshua Green: [Patti] Solis Doyle... began as Clinton’s personal scheduler in 1991 (and who, as it happens, coined the term “Hillaryland”) was Clinton’s alter ego... the most revealing thing about Solis Doyle is her oft-repeated line: “When I’m speaking, Hillary is speaking.” It is revealing both because it is true and because it conveys—and even flaunts—an arrogance that I think is the key to understanding all that has gone wrong for the Clinton campaign.... It’s not unfair that she lost her job; but it is unfair that no other senior staffers appear to be in danger of losing theirs....
As much as Clinton touts her own “executive experience” and judgment, she made Solis Doyle her campaign manager because of Solis Doyle’s loyalty, rather than her skill, despite a trail of available evidence suggesting she was unsuited for the role... rivalry and factionalism in Hillaryland.... Tensions flared between advisers such as Penn and Mandy Grunwald, her media consultant, who wanted her to stick to the issues, and others, such as Jewson and Harold Ickes, who thought she should confront her chief shortcoming--the notion that she was power-hungry and calculating.... The battle between the camps intensified to the point that it began to go public... someone leaked Penn’s internal polling data to The New York Times Magazine. Penn and Ickes regularly erupted into shouting matches and eventually... stopped speaking to each other....
After the [senate] race, Solis Doyle was put in charge of fund-raising and later became campaign manager for Clinton’s Senate reelection bid in 2006... many of the staff members who worked under her left or were forced out, including several high-powered members of Clinton’s inner circle, such as Kelly Craighead and Evelyn Lieberman, the deputy chief of staff to Bill Clinton famous for banishing Monica Lewinsky to the Pentagon. The frequent turnover in the fund-raising shop was a significant measure of Solis Doyle’s unpopularity. Clinton staffers are notably loyal, and turnover among them tends to be much lower than it is among the staffs of other politicians. Fund-raising under Solis Doyle was a glaring exception, chalking up the kind of body count you’d expect from an episode of The Sopranos. She was infamous among her colleagues for referring to herself as “the queen bee” and for her habit of watching daytime soap operas in her office. One frequent complaint among donors and outside advisers was that Solis Doyle often did not return calls or demonstrate the attention required in her position.
Concerns about Solis Doyle have preoccupied many in the campaign for several years. Clinton insiders say that her campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe, launched an unsuccessful bid to remove Solis Doyle while on vacation with the Clintons two years ago. Two top campaign officials told me that Maggie Williams, Hillary’s former chief of staff (and, as of Sunday, her campaign manager), also sought and failed to have Solis Doyle removed two years ago. Last year, some of Bill Clinton’s former advisers, known as the “White Boys,” lobbied to oust her, too....
[A]bove all, Clinton prizes loyalty and discipline, and Solis Doyle demonstrated both traits, if little else.... By all accounts, Solis Doyle’s firing became imminent after the first loss, as the extent of the damage sank in.... She’d been dispatched to Iowa to oversee operations in the final weeks before the caucuses, and Clinton still finished third. She’d been placed in charge of the campaign’s relationship with John Kerry and hoped to get an endorsement, but he’d chosen to back Obama. And of course, the campaign had hemorrhaged money, which Solis Doyle had managed to conceal.... Solis Doyle’s departure took a near-mutiny to bring about. Williams and Lieberman left their jobs last week; this finally seemed to have influenced Clinton to oust Solis Doyle...
The senior HRC aides who are Green's, Healy's, Kornblut's, and Murray's sources--well, "loyal" is not how I would describe them. Their candidate still has a 30% chance of winning, and they are diminishing that chance by dishing "campaign in turmoil" dirt to reporters in the hope that it will get a knife stuck in the back of one of their competitors for future White House jobs and in the hope of gaining reporter points that they can use in some way at some future date.
I've seen this before. There are two kinds of people who get involved in politics--those who care about the substance of policy, and those who want to get White House Mess privileges, or as a consolation prize become media celebrities. The first kind--the policy people--will be loyal to a politician as long as he or she is trying his or her best to achieve the shared policy goals. The second kind--the spinmasters--will be loyal to a politician as long as he or she is a winner who favors them. If a politician stops looking like a winner, or if a politician starts favoring others for what they hoped would be their west wing job, they will jump ship as fast as they can--and you will start seeing the "infighting" stories.
The moral? A politician with an ideological policy compass is best off not hiring spinmasters as his or her senior aides. Hire people who care about the substance of policy instead.
