Friday Muse; Media Coronates Obama, Clinton Makes Controversial Comment

May 9, 2008

Is It Over? Time Magazine Seems To Think So

The media had been the only reason Hillary Clinton was still in the race, so it is fitting that the media is the group now trying to push her out of the race. Time Magazine, the NY Daily News, MSNBC, and much of the Washington Post, to name just a few outlets, have declared the nomination process over in light of senator Clinton’s lackluster finish on Tuesday, losing by over 200,000 votes on a day where she was expected to win by 150,000 votes according to her internal polls. Perhaps most telling is that she now trails among superdelegates, a group that she has led by margins of over 100, 272 to 271. She is now all but mathematically eliminated from the presidential race. The Muse will provide a timeline of where her historic collapse, which will undoubtably be considered one of the biggest upsets in electoral history, began and what mistakes she made along the way.

1) Hiring Patti Solis Doyle and Mark Penn. Patti Solis Doyle was, by all accounts, the worst campaign manager of any campaign in either party, never putting effort in or returning calls. Furthermore, she was reputed to try to make executive decisions without the go-ahead of Clinton and Penn, saying that when she spoke, Clinton was speaking through her. With another campaign manager, Clinton likely would have been able to fundraise much better early on. Doyle was finally fired in February after Clinton’s Super Tuesday Disappointment. Mark Penn was the man who was responsible for the “big states only, inevitability” strategy, which failed both Clinton and Giuiliani. Penn also had many shady personal connections, said things in opposition to his employer, and charged millions upon millions of dollars per month, hamstringing her campaign financially. Penn was fired last month.

2) Relying on Big Money Supporters. Hillary Clinton’s campaign never tried to reach out to small donors on a large scale until February, instead preferring to tap the typical large corporate bundlers for her money. As a result, despite a campaign that started out making large amounts of money, Obama was doubling her fundraising by 2008 because of the 2,300 dollar maximum donation that was reached early by so many of Clinton’s donors.

3) Making “Experience” Her Top Asset - Hillary Clinton was probably about the 50th most presidentially experienced person in the country, and had spent only 8 years in elected office. Her line, “35 years of experience,” became a laughingstock. Furthermore, she underestimated the fact that the country was looking for change, not the same old people who have been running the country for 20 years, and that basic dichotomy of change v. experience came to define the campaign.

4) The Inevitability Strategy. Hillary Clinton thought Obama was more similar to Howard Dean than John F. Kennedy, and that he would fizzle, and as such ran a campaign disregarding the small states and fully expecting to force all candidates out of the race on February 5th. Because of this, she had no post-super Tuesday campaign offices, and allowed Obama to run off a huge string of landslide victories after super Tuesday.

5) Throwing Black Voters Under the Bus. 2 million blacks have voted during this primary cycle, and Obama has gotten 90% of their votes. Now while it’s unrealistic to think Clinton could have won a majority of black votes, she was running even with Obama in black support until she started racebaiting. If she hadn’t run a racially motivated campaign, she could have gotten 30% or so of black voters, which would have been enough to put the campaign within reach.

6) Disregarding Groups That Didn’t Vote For Her. Clinton was so confident that her coalition was bigger than Obama’s that she frequently said that the votes from Caucus states, red states, small states, and educated voters didn’t count. By the end of it, only working class whites, old women, and latinos’ votes counted.

7) Not Having an “Every Delegate Matters” strategy.  Obama racked up delegate margins in Idaho and Kansas bigger than Clinton’s margins in “firewalls” like Pennsylvania and Ohio because Clinton didn’t feel the need to campaign in states like Idaho and Kansas early on. She also didn’t campaign much in states that it was clear she would lose, early on, and as a result there was probably a total of 50-60 delegates that she didn’t get just because of her selective campaigning.

Not Making a Big Deal of Florida and Michigan When They Happened. When Hillary Clinton “won” Florida and Michigan, she claimed victory, but didn’t demand for their votes to be counted, because she didn’t think she’d need them. The fact that she didn’t start arguing that “every vote needs to count” until she was losing undercut any weight the Florida and Michigan argument might have carried.

9) The Bosnia Sniper Gaffe. Hillary Clinton’s base consists mostly of the type of people who don’t follow politics that closely and only tune in to tabloid-like stories. This tabloid-like story was both the type of thing that those who don’t follow politics would read and a story that read like a caricature of Clinton’s personality.

10) The Shotgun Approach to Campaigning. While Obama’s campaign had a very consistent and easy to digest message from the very beginning, Clinton’s campaign tried every possible message to get votes. She started out as the heir to the throne (all of 2007, early 2008), then became the victim of sexist men (starting prior to New Hapshire), then became the comeback kid (post-new hampshire), the candidate battling the forces of the establishment (Nevada), the other candidate of change (right before Edwards dropped out), the traditional Al Gore, John Kerry candidate (around super-tuesday), The unofficial ex-president (February ‘08), The protectionist protector (lead-up to Texas and Ohio), the family values candidate (month of March), the candidate who can beat McCain (April), the firebrand populist (lead-up to Pennsylvania), and finally settled into her current role as “candidate of the working class whites.” With such an inconsistent message, voters had a hard time finding her trustworthy, with the majority of Democrats finding her untrustworthy.

Clinton Makes Comments Interpreted as Racist

While she’s run a campaign with surrogates who have made what many call racially divisive comments, Hillary Clinton herself had never been quoted as saying anything flat-out racist, until yesterday. In an interview with the NY Post, Clinton said that she was getting most of the votes of “working, hard working Americans, white Americans.” The implication in the comment is that only white Americans are hard working. Yet of course the media isn’t giving it nearly the coverage of the significantly less severe “bittergate.”

And that’s the Muse.

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