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Sniping by Her Aides Hurt Clinton's Image as Manager •
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Clinton Attacks on Obama May Boost McCain
By Sarah Baxter
The Australian
Monday 10 March 2008
Fresh from her victories in three out of four states last week and surging
back in the national polls, Hillary Clinton has crafted a new strategy for winning
the Democratic nomination that she believes will legitimise her claim to be
president.
Clinton thinks she can win a majority of the popular vote in primaries and
caucuses, even if she cannot overtake Barack Obama, her rival, in the number
of "pledged" delegates who will vote to choose the candidate at the
Democratic national convention in August.
The New York senator has unnerved Obama, who has been left reeling by a series
of errors from senior policy advisers. The two opponents face an ugly six-week
battle in the run-up to a potentially pivotal primary in Pennsylvania next month.
Former senator Bill Bradley, a leading supporter of Obama and who ran for president
in 2000, accused the Clintons of "lying" in pursuit of victory. "The
bigger the lie, the better the chance they think they've got. That's been their
whole approach," he said. "She's going to lose a whole generation
of people who got involved in politics believing it could be something different."
Bradley believes Clinton will stop at nothing to tear down Obama even if it
boosts John McCain, who was confirmed last week as the Republican nominee: "The
Clintons do not do long-term planning. They're total tacticians and right now
their focus is on Obama, not McCain."
Obama, 46, is threatened by a pincer movement from Clinton, 60, and McCain,
71, as they try to halt his progress with similar arguments about his lack of
national security and foreign policy expertise. An Obama insider admitted: "Whenever
there's one person versus two, it always makes things more difficult."
Clinton's big win in Ohio has convinced her that she can repeat her success
next month among white working-class voters in Pennsylvania, another populous
swing state. It could put her on course to overtake Obama in the total number
of votes cast, giving moral legitimacy to her claim that super delegates - the
796 party leaders, governors and congressmen expected to hold a casting vote
- should back her.
A senior Clinton official said: "The momentum is shifting to us right
now. If we are the leader in the popular vote and we have closed the gap in
pledged delegates, that's a very persuasive argument."
The argument is being made privately as winning the most votes still presents
a formidable challenge. She might, in the end, have to rest her case on her
ability to win key battleground states.
Clinton's team is divided by backbiting over how to confront the difficulties
ahead.
However, the new strategy explains why Clinton is prepared to mount an assault
on Obama that risks handing victory to McCain. It is worth badly wounding her
rival as she believes she has found a way to win. "If she wins big in Pennsylvania,
she can rack up a majority of several hundred thousand votes and be in hailing
distance of Obama. So stay tuned," said Brookings Insitution election expert
William Galston, who is backing Clinton.
Clinton's new tactics depend on clearing up a mess in Florida and Michigan,
which are banned from seating delegates at the convention because they defied
party rules by holding early primary contests.
Obama leads Clinton by nearly 600,000 in the number of votes cast to date,
but trails her by 30,000 if the votes of the two "rogue" states are
counted. These states are now likely to stage some form of rerun.
Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives who will play a critical
role in the event of a near-tie at the convention, met leading Clinton officials
last week to discuss Florida and Michigan "do-overs", the role of
super delegates and the campaign's increasingly vitriolic tone.
Tad Devine, a senior Democratic strategist who has overseen bitter convention
battles, said Obama was still the favourite. "He has a 50-state strategy
and she has a 15-state strategy and in the end that may be decisive," he
said. "The most important factor for the super delegates will be who has
the most pledged delegates."
Clinton will need improbably large victories in the remaining contests to narrow
the 100-plus delegate gap that Obama has established. His lead is likely to
grow after Mississippi votes on Tuesday (local time).
The former first lady is pummelling Obama hard in the expectation that he will
abandon his signature politics of "hope" for a dirty fight. Her team
has accused Obama of behaving like Kenneth Starr, the chief inquisitor of the
Clintons over the Whitewater affair in the 1990s, for demanding she make her
tax returns public.
The explosive subject of race is not far from the surface. The internet is
buzzing with claims Clinton's team made Obama's face look blacker on a recent
TV advertisement challenging his foreign policy credentials. Clinton mucked
in by denying rumours Obama was a Muslim - before adding, "as far as I
know".
Obama cannot publicly blame racism for his slowing momentum, but his team has
little doubt in private that it was a factor in Ohio last week. "He has
to take a good hard look at why he failed to connect with so many working-class
voters," said Galston.
Closing the gap with working-class voters is essential to persuading super
delegates that Obama is capable of going head-to-head with McCain.
McCain, meanwile, has produced an ad comparing himself with Winston Churchill.
Just as Britain's wartime leader vowed to "fight them on the beaches"
so McCain, accompanied by grainy film of him in pain as a young prisoner of
the North Vietnamese, promises: "We shall never surrender. They will."
The clip emphasises his patriotism. Karl Rove, former adviser to President
George W. Bush, observed in The Wall Street Journal: "The interesting intellectual
phenomenon is the emergence of the 'McCainocrats' - Democrats backing McCain
... In three recent polls, almost twice as many Democrats support Mr McCain
as Republicans support Mr Obama."
An adviser to Obama admitted his candidate was running into opposition from
the kind of blue-collar workers who once supported Ronald Reagan, the Republican
president: "Right now, Barack is not connecting with the children of the
Reagan Democrats. That's a real concern."
The question for Clinton is whether the white working-class voters will desert
her for McCain in the general election, even if she is now basking in their
support.
Some cynics believe she is willing to undermine Obama sufficiently for him
to lose to McCain in November, freeing her to take another shot at office in
2012.
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Sniping by Her Aides Hurt Clinton's Image as Manager
By Adam Nagourney, Patrick Healy, and Kate Zernike
The New York Times
Monday 10 March 2008
Washington - The morning after Senator Barack Obama shook the Clinton campaign
by winning five contests in one weekend, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's
new campaign manager - Maggie Williams, who had taken over in a shake-up
the night before - assembled the curious if demoralized staff.
"You may not like the person next to you," Ms. Williams told dozens
of aides who ringed the conference room at the campaign's Virginia headquarters
last month, according to participants. "But you're going to respect
them. And we're going to work together."
Ms. Williams's demand was dismissed as wishful thinking by some in her
weary audience. But in the view of many Clinton supporters, it accurately reflected
the urgent need to overhaul a campaign that at that point had set itself apart
for its level of disorder and dysfunction.
The divisions in her campaign over strategy and communications - and
the dislike many of her advisers had for one another - poured out into
public as Mrs. Clinton struggled in February to hold off Mr. Obama in the race
for the Democratic presidential nomination.
But even as Mrs. Clinton revived her fortunes last week with victories in Ohio,
Rhode Island and Texas, the questions lingered about how she managed her campaign,
with the internal sniping and second-guessing undermining her well-cultivated
image as a steady-at-the-wheel chief executive surrounded by a phalanx of loyal
and efficient aides.
"She hasn't managed anything as complex as this before; that's
the problem with senators," said James A. Thurber, a professor of government
at American University who is an expert on presidential management. "She
wasn't as decisive as she should have been. And it's a legitimate
question to ask: Under great pressure from two different factions, can she make
some hard decisions and move ahead? It seems to just fester. She doesn't
seem to know how to stop it or want to stop it."
Over the last month, Mrs. Clinton, of New York, has become much more involved
in the day-to-day operation of her campaign. In addition to Ms. Williams, she
brought in two experienced political hands from her husband's White House:
Doug Sosnik, who was a political director, and Steve Ricchetti, a deputy chief
of staff.
And Ms. Williams has sought to calm tensions in the headquarters through steps
like opening the morning conference call to more aides to foster a greater sense
of teamwork. One of her first acts, aides said, was to instruct Mark Penn, Mrs.
Clinton's chief strategist and a polarizing figure in the campaign, to
stay off television.
Still, interviews with campaign aides, associates and friends suggest that
Mrs. Clinton, at least until February, was a detached manager. Juggling the
demands of being a candidate, she paid little attention to detail, delegated
decisions large and small and deferred to advisers on critical questions. Mrs.
Clinton accepted or seemed unaware of the intense factionalism and feuding that
often paralyzed her campaign and that prevented her aides from reaching consensus
on basic questions like what states to fight in and how to go after Mr. Obama,
of Illinois.
Mrs. Clinton showed a tendency toward an insular management style, relying
on a coterie of aides who have worked for her for years, her aides and associates
said. Her choice of lieutenants, and her insistence on staying with them even
when friends urged her to shake things up, was blamed by some associates for
the campaign's woes. Again and again, the senator was portrayed as a manager
who valued loyalty and familiarity over experience and expertise.
Mrs. Clinton stood by Mr. Penn and Patti Solis Doyle, who was until last month
her campaign manager, even as her campaign was at risk of letting Mr. Obama
sew up the nomination. When some of her closest supporters pressed her to replace
them, arguing that the two were clearly struggling with their jobs and had become
divisive figures in the campaign, she responded by saying she would "think
about it."
When Mrs. Clinton finally pushed out Ms. Solis Doyle, she chose Ms. Williams,
like Ms. Solis Doyle, an old friend who had never before managed a presidential
campaign.
Mrs. Clinton's ability to manage the one person with whom she spoke most
often, former President Bill Clinton, was also questioned by some of her advisers
and supporters. Mr. Clinton moved in his own orbit - he heatedly argued
with his wife's advisers who wanted to write off South Carolina, defying
them to campaign there - and took no direction from the campaign about
what to say or where to go, some of them said. (Mr. Obama defeated Mrs. Clinton
in the South Carolina Democratic primary by nearly 29 percentage points.)
Several aides, donors and supporters, who requested anonymity to recount private
conversations with the candidate, said they had warned Mrs. Clinton that her
husband's attacks on Mr. Obama were demeaning to her and hurting her campaign.
Mrs. Clinton replied that her husband became "carried away" at times
but that she did not see any real harm from his approach, they said.
Mrs. Clinton's top advisers said that while her management style might
be untidy, it showed her to be comfortable with conflicting ideas among her
aides. They said she had pronounced herself "ready to learn" from
her mistakes and was resistant to placing too much power in the hands of a single
political adviser in the mold of Karl Rove in President Bush's two campaigns
for the White House.
"She thinks the way to manage effectively is to get a lot of smart people
around who don't agree and let them work out their differences creatively,"
said Howard Wolfson, her communications director. "Let them hash through
things, and as a result, you come up with the best process."
A senior adviser, Harold Ickes, joined the campaign full-time in January as
Mrs. Clinton's aides began to realize that the contest was not going the
way they had planned. Mr. Ickes cautioned about drawing firm conclusions about
her from this period, when she faced the demands of being a candidate.
"It's hard to draw conclusions about her management style,"
he said, "because she is, in fact, not the manager of her campaign."
Still, some of her senior advisers said Mrs. Clinton was left with little option
but to become more assertive in getting her campaign back on track, a shift
highlighted by her decision to push out Ms. Solis Doyle, one of her closest
and longest-serving aides. Her husband changed his advisers at regular intervals
as he faced various troubles and shifting political demands while president;
Mrs. Clinton, in contrast, has relied on a relatively unchanging cast since
she was first lady.
For all her years on the public stage, Mrs. Clinton has never come close to
assembling and running an enterprise like the 700-person, $170 million-and-counting
campaign organization that she has created. At times, her aides made assumptions
about tactics and voters that turned out to be wrong. They nearly ran out of
money at all the wrong times, like just after Mrs. Clinton's victory in
the New Hampshire primary and right before the 22 state nominating contests
on Feb. 5.
The day after her loss in the Iowa caucuses, Mrs. Clinton took command of a
long meeting in New Hampshire. "I'll do whatever you guys need me
to do," she said, a participant recalled. "I get the message."
But a month later, she described herself as stunned to learn the campaign was
nearly broke - notwithstanding financial reports sent to her every week
by e-mail - and was all but conceding the 11 contests that were to come
over the next month.
Unlike Mr. Bush, Mrs. Clinton has shown no interest in having one strong person
running all aspects of the campaign operation. And unlike her husband during
the early part of his 1992 bid for the presidency, she does not try to keep
a hand in everything, with lines of communications all through the campaign.
Instead, she talked daily to a few people: Mr. Penn, Ms. Solis Doyle and, now,
Ms. Williams. Even Mr. Ickes, her longtime friend and adviser, says he speaks
with her infrequently.
This approach, many of her associates said, had the effect of breeding resentment
at campaign headquarters. Since there was no one person in charge, they said,
it was hard to make decisions, and Mr. Penn would frequently use his personal
connection with Mrs. Clinton to block the campaign from moving in directions
he opposed, like putting an increased emphasis on trying to present a human
side of Mrs. Clinton.
Ms. Williams had been among those who lobbied Mrs. Clinton to remove Ms. Solis
Doyle, arguing that the campaign lacked a plan or a message despite starting
out with an overwhelming advantage in money and name recognition, campaign officials
said. After resisting for much of the winter, Mrs. Clinton, before the vote
in Iowa, told aides that she would replace Ms. Solis Doyle but that she wanted
to wait until after New Hampshire.
But when Mrs. Clinton won the New Hampshire contest, the decision was pulled
back. Ms. Williams was brought in to work alongside Ms. Solis Doyle, but without
an obvious portfolio. The move was widely seen at campaign headquarters as a
slap at Ms. Solis Doyle.
Offended, she threatened to leave and had to be courted to return, agreeing
to do so only on the condition that she would be in charge. She was finally
dismissed after more losses and the news that the campaign was running out of
money.
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Adam Nagourney reported from Washington, and Patrick Healy and Kate
Zernike from New York.
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