At least in my inner circle, we've been discussing our amazement at how people are still voting for Hillary, believe she is fiscally responsible, and a good manager when her campaign has been falling apart since Iowa.
Politico has an article today about how Obama's campaign will now be capitalizing on this horrible mismanagement by merely pointing it out to undecided voters and superdelegates.
In the days and weeks ahead, the Barack Obama campaign is going to pose a simple question to the undecided voters and undeclared superdelegates who will decide the Democratic nomination for president: If Hillary Clinton can’t run a good primary campaign, how is she ever going to run a good campaign against the Republicans?
Jump . . .
In fact, I think more and more her campaign is becoming the butt of many jokes.
Mark Penn, who just got booted as her chief strategist, is only the latest problem in a campaign that has been heavy on drama and light on results.
"None of these folks have ever run anything, other than Hillary running a health care task force," David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, told me Monday. "But these campaigns are big, complicated, pressure-filled enterprises, and it is an important proving ground."
Like someone pointed out in an earlier diary, Obama was supposed to be the one that couldn't handle the national campaign. He had no organization to begin with, and hadn't appeared to manage anything like this other than his failed Congressional campaign and successful Senate campaign.
Axelrod told me that at a meeting in January 2007, a few weeks before Obama announced his candidacy, Obama assembled his top staff and laid down three "predicates" for the campaign.
"First, it was to be a campaign based on grass-roots politics," Axelrod said. "Second, there was to be no drama, that we were all on the same team. And third, the campaign should be joyful. That has really happened."
Axelrod is not, to put it mildly, a neutral observer. And I imagine the Obama campaign has not been all that joyful during the Jeremiah Wright controversy. (A controversy that, I believe, we have not heard the last of.)
But I remember the Time piece about the HRC not wanting to admit that Obama's campaign was having more "fun." After reading that I started paying attention, and on the whole they do seem to be enjoying themselves a lot more than her campaign, even with the Wright mess. For someone that considers the last month the "fun" part of politics, you'd think her campaign would be more joyful.
And finally they just put it out there:
"Hillary is a bad manager," a senior Obama aide told me. "Does it really look like she could deal with the Republicans?"
This is a completely legitimate question to raise seeing as how she has been touting herself as "Ready on Day One." I suppose another question would be "Ready for WHAT on Day One?"
UPDATE Thanks for the recs!! In honor of my first time making the rec list, here's last night's video from The Colbert Report about Obama and McCain's response to the 3 AM ads (I'd embed it, but for some reason the code won't work) :-)
UPDATE #2 To be fair, Barack has brought up the concept of using his campaign to demonstrate how he will lead the country:
From acxtodd and ayjaymay
Marc Andreesen (Founder of Netscape) interviews Barack Obama
From Interview:
Before I close, let me share two specific things he said at the time -- early 2007 -- on the topic of whether he's ready.
We asked him directly, how concerned should we be that you haven't had meaningful experience as an executive -- as a manager and leader of people?
He said, watch how I run my campaign -- you'll see my leadership skills in action.
From Nonie3234
The Natural
Perhaps the most telling critique of Obama, to my mind, is his lack of executive experience. (The same can be said for Clinton, of course, if you don't count the First Lady period, when she insists her husband was the president.) I asked him directly last year why a voter should back someone who has never run anything bigger than a legislative office.
He responded by pointing to his nascent campaign. He observed out that he was up against the full Clinton establishment, all the chits she and her husband had acquired over the years, and the apparatus they had constructed within the party. He had to build a national campaign from scratch, raise money, staff an extremely complex electoral map, and make key decisions on spending and travel. He asked me to judge his executive skills by observing how he was managing a campaign.
By that standard, who isn't impressed?
But in my opinion, he hasn't pushed it as much as he could have, so it's good to see that he is going to basically FORCE people to take notice :-)