Postmortem on Hillary

Joshua Green of The Atlantic has written a postmortem on the Clinton campaign. It's fascinating reading, and it shows the ways that communication campaigns can explode. But it also affirms what I've thought for some time: that running for presidency itself is a far better display of presidential capacity than the specific policies that the candidate endorses or any perceived "experience" for the position. "Two things struck me right away," Green writes after reading the hoards of interoffice correspondence preserved by the senior campaign team.

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.

Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.

Yet, I feel for Clinton and her team. They did have a plan, and it was a good plan. The problem was that it wasn't good enough, and no one could figure out how to crack the Obama code. (And to be fair, I'm not sure how I would have cracked the Obama code, either.) But in the moment of confusion, Clinton made the biggest mistake of all: She started beating her staff.

In the hours after she finished third in Iowa, on January 3, Clinton seized control of her campaign, even as her advisers continued fighting about whether to go negative. The next morning’s conference call began with awkward silence, and then Penn recapped the damage and mumbled something about how badly they’d been hurt by young voters.

Mustering enthusiasm, Clinton declared that the campaign was mistaken not to have competed harder for the youth vote and that—overruling her New Hampshire staff—she would take questions at town-hall meetings designed to draw comparative,” but not negative, contrasts with Obama. Hearing little response, Clinton began to grow angry, according to a participant’s notes. She complained of being outmaneuvered in Iowa and being painted as the establishment candidate. The race, she insisted, now had “three front-runners.” More silence ensued. “This has been a very instructive call, talking to myself,” she snapped, and hung up.

Not that the staff didn't deserve a beating, of course, but here they needed a sense of direction and leadership that only Clinton herself could have provided. She was the one who hired Mark Penn, she was the one who ultimately decided on the direction of the campaign, and she needed to be the one who righted it. But she didn't. And so she lost.

She could have won, but this campaign is not about competence in running the federal bureaucracy but about vision. Americans are uncertain about the new world where they now find themselves: a world of terrorism, a shrinking middle class, a plugger economy, and environmental uncertainty. They don't want a policy wonk who can give them better policy programs. They want a visionary who can help them understand what those policies and programs mean. Or, as Obama put it: “It’s true that speeches don’t solve all problems. But what is also true if we cannot inspire the country to believe again, it doesn’t matter how many policies and plans we have.”

Obama has given his vision, but McCain still hasn't. And if he can't, he'll have a Hillary problem, too.