Jackie Calmes Tells Us Why HRC Was Unable to Recover from Super Tuesday...
The news pages of the WSJ show why they are must reading:
Clinton's Road to Second Place - WSJ.com: Inside the Clinton campaign and out, the finger-pointing has begun. The bottom line is this: She called the biggest plays, and she got them wrong.... [T]he second-term New York senator and former first lady was smart, substantive and tireless. The surprise was how good a campaigner she grew to be....
The mistakes boil down to mismanagement, message, mobilization failures and the marital factor.... [C]ontrol over the campaign resided with a small clique of loyalists close to Sen. Clinton but at odds with each other.... [S]he wanted Mr. Penn to serve as both chief strategist and sole pollster. Virtually no one else in the campaign did....
For campaign manager, Sen. Clinton chose the more popular Patti Solis Doyle.... [E]ven friends say she had little to prepare her to lead what would become a $200 million presidential campaign with nearly 1,000 employees.... Sen. Clinton was shaken by her third-place finish in the first contest, Iowa's Jan. 3 caucuses. Big donors demanded a management shake-up. The morning of the New Hampshire primary Jan. 8, she told Ms. Solis Doyle she wanted another manager. Other staffers protested. The senator hesitated. Her headquarters was rattled for a crucial month up to the 20-plus Super Tuesday contests in early February. When she ousted Ms. Solis Doyle in mid-February, it was done so coldly and publicly that hardened colleagues say they were stunned. Ms. Solis Doyle -- who still has a Hillary Clinton sign in the yard of her Washington home -- and Sen. Clinton haven't spoken since, an associate said....
Critics' bigger complaint was that from the campaign's start Mr. Penn had been its only pollster.... Sen. Clinton told advisers Mr. Penn is "brilliant," and multiple pollsters would slow consensus on strategy. But top aides chafed that Mr. Penn used his control of "the numbers" to win most disagreements....
The campaign's most inarguable mistake was its failure to organize voters in states with caucuses rather than primaries. That left Sen. Obama to build what proved an insurmountable lead in convention delegates.... [T]he failures started at the top with the Clintons' bias against caucuses and an ignorance of key party rules.... [I]n Iowa especially, Democratic caucuses were dominated by grass-roots activists, many of them antiwar liberals who resented Sen. Clinton's Iraq vote.... [T]he Iowa loss hardened both Clintons against caucuses. With money getting tight and polls in caucus states discouraging, Sen. Clinton scaled back spending and appearances in places such as Idaho and Nebraska, effectively forfeiting them.
Mr. Ickes, a rules expert, had long argued against the strategy. Last June at a meeting at the Penn home, Mr. Penn suggested Sen. Clinton would get all 370 state delegates when she won California's primary, attendees say. Mr. Ickes, they say, mocked him: "The vaunted chief strategist" doesn't know that party rules aren't winner-take-all? Mr. Penn calls the account "totally false."...
Finally, the campaign failed to acknowledge the "Clinton fatigue" felt by many Democrats. Mr. Clinton's controversies on the stump only fanned it.... Among the party leaders Mr. Clinton alienated over time by his angry tirades was South Carolina's Rep. Jim Clyburn, the third-ranking House leader and a civil-rights-movement veteran. Before South Carolina's primary, Mr. Clyburn admonished Sen. Clinton for suggesting President Johnson deserved more credit than Martin Luther King Jr. for civil-rights laws. On primary night, Mr. Clinton called Mr. Clyburn and they spoke for 50 minutes. "Let's just say it wasn't pleasant," Mr. Clyburn says...
