Op-Ed Columnist
The Audacity of Hopelessness
By FRANK RICH
Published: February 24, 2008
WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the
Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended
in the long dark shadow of Iraq.
It's not just that her candidacy's central premise -- the priceless
value of "experience" -- was fatally poisoned from the start by her
still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then
compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy
that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After
promising a cakewalk to the nomination -- "It will be me," Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November -- she was routed by an insurgency.
The
Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political
shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race
would "be over by Feb. 5," Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos
just before New Year's. But once the Obama forces outwitted her,
leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no
contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money
to recoup.
That's why she has been losing battle after battle
by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no
matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook,
stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark
Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance
than strategic brilliance. But he's actually not even all that loyal.
Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job
as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller.
His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a
demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo.
Clinton
fans don't see their standard-bearer's troubles this way. In their
view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a
lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press
and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were
Jim Jones's Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is
all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.
But it's the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the
Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and
mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has
been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its
candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is
self-immolating.
The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses
without ever matching Mr. Obama's organizational strength. In South
Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls,
she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability,
while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.
In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices
to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall -- the
March 4 contests -- she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters
that she "had no idea" that the Texas primary system was "so bizarre"
(it's a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had "people trying to
understand it as we speak." Perhaps her people can borrow the road map
from Obama's people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The
Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and
no Clinton offices as of five days ago.
For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania
on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it
couldn't file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.
This
is the candidate who keeps telling us she's so competent that she'll be
ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama
has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that
the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force
that was as botched as her presidential bid.
Given that Mrs.
Clinton and Mr. Obama offer marginally different policy prescriptions --
laid out in voluminous detail by both, by the way, on their Web sites --
it's not clear what her added-value message is. The "experience" mantra
has been compromised not only by her failure on the signal issue of
Iraq but also by the deadening lingua franca of her particular
experience, Washingtonese. No matter what the problem, she keeps
rolling out another commission to solve it: a commission for infrastructure, a Financial Product Safety Commission, a Corporate Subsidy Commission, a Katrina/Rita Commission and, to deal with drought, a water summit.
As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she
offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This
must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much
energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and -- talk about bizarre -- against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs.
Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as
unrepresentative of the country.
Bill Clinton knocked states
that hold caucuses instead of primaries because "they
disproportionately favor upper-income voters" who “don’t really need a
president but feel like they need a change." After the Potomac primary
wipeout, Mr. Penn declared
that Mr. Obama hadn't won in "any of the significant states" outside of
his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia,
Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of
Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the "insult 40 states" strategy.
The
insults continued on Tuesday night when a surrogate preceding Mrs.
Clinton onstage at an Ohio rally, Tom Buffenbarger of the machinists'
union, derided Obama supporters as "latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies." Even as he ranted, exit polls in Wisconsin
were showing that Mr. Obama had in fact won that day among voters with
the least education and the lowest incomes. Less than 24 hours later,
Mr. Obama received the endorsement of the latte-drinking Teamsters.
[read on...]
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