In the days and weeks after the 1994 election, working in the Clinton White House was a little surreal. After a 1992 campaign, transition, and first 22 months in office when we were moving at the speed of light, being asked to get a million things done, being driven relentlessly to work 18+ hours a day, seven days a week (and always on call!), all of a sudden we were directionless. The inner, inner circle was around Clinton night and day, trying to console him and buck him up simultaneously, taking the brunt of his frustration, trying to figure out what to do next. Those of us the next level down were quite literally adrift for a few weeks. I occupied my time analyzing the election results, writing a memo on what happened and where I thought we should go next, and keeping in touch with group leaders and donors and other democratic activists I was close to. But I wasn't doing any of this because I was being told to, I was just doing what I thought I should, and most of my colleagues were in the same boat.
Democrats on the Hill, having been in control for so long and utterly stunned by the results, were in even worse shape, completely adrift for weeks and weeks. There was no leadership to do anything for a long time.
Even though Scott Brown's victory merely means Democrats lack 60 votes in the Senate, I am getting much the same feeling right now from stunned Democrats. Partly because the path they thought they were on to get health care done suddenly blew up on them, and partly because a sense of panic has gripped a lot of members especially on the House side, Democrats are having trouble getting themselves together. There's a big difference this time, though: first of all, their fate is still in their hands, Democrats still control the Hill; secondly, we don't have time to wander around stunned in the wilderness for the next several weeks. What needs to happen, in a matter of days (not weeks or months), is that Democrats need to (a) calm down, and (b) stiffen their spines. If they make decisions in panicked mode, they will be decisions that seal their fate in terms of losing the House. If they calm down and look at things rationally, they will realize that voters don't like panicked wimps who can't get things done. Fortunately both Nancy Pelosi and Senate leadership seem to understand this, but the worry is that the House rank and file aren't there yet at all.
I have been surprised more than once in this campaign already, and I have been reminding all my Obama friends over and over again to not underestimate the Clintons. Anything could happen Tuesday. But all that said, this one sure has the feeling of it being over. I was talking to an old friend the other day who has raised over $100,000 for Hillary who said:
Well, of course, I want the candidate I've been helping to win, but, man, Obama is amazing, he's like Bobby Kennedy...
It's hard to keep going when some of your biggest fundraisers are in awe of the other guy.
Another sign: throwing Hail Mary passes like the ringing phone ad. We'll see that style of "Obama is scary" ads in the fall because fear is the only thing the Republicans have to run on. But in a Democratic primary after seven years of over-the-top Republican scare tactics that Democrats are sickened to death of? Yeah, I know it worked for Mondale 24 years ago, but the whole re-running the Mondale campaign hasn't been working for awhile now. And reinforcing Republican themes in the Democratic primary seems like a huge gamble. Maybe huge gambles are all they feel like they have left.
But the biggest sign of all that this campaign might be on the verge of being over is that senior Clintonites are already openly trying to persuade people as to why they aren't at fault for the loss. Check out these two articles from the New York Observer here and here, and this from the New York Times. This has become a bitter primary, alright, but not so much between Clinton and Obama as between Harold Ickes and Mark Penn for who made the Clinton campaign suck so badly.
Part of me feels badly for Hilary Clinton in all this. I know a lot of my fellow OpenLefters aren't fans of hers, but I still basically think she's a good person, Senator, and candidate whose campaign has made some fundamental mistakes (not that a candidate doesn't deserve a big share of the blame for a bad campaign).
I have to admit, though, that there is a part of me that can't but help the guilty pleasure of being entertained by this kind of open food fight. For an old Presidential campaign hand like myself, this kind of good juicy antagonism is a lot of fun to watch.
For my part, I'm on Ickes' side in this little war. I've never been close to Harold- I always had this impression that when I didn't yell back at him the first couple of times he yelled at me at the White House, that he decided I was a wimp and never trusted me again. In spite of that, I always admired his raw knuckle, sharp elbowed brand of power politics, and loved the way he would scream "fuck!" at people in those usually dignified White House staff meetings more times than Steve Martin at the rental car counter in the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
Harold, unlike so many Democrats in D.C., never was afraid of the Republicans- not even when they were threatening to indict him- and he got stuff done.
Penn, on the other hand, always seemed like an overrated, consistently pro-corporate egotist. I had met him on the 1996 campaign, but never thought he deserved the credit the punditocracy gave him for that victory. I thought Clinton won that election when he stood up to Gingrich on the budget battle in 1995, and that Penn never really mattered that much in that victory. I also worked with Penn on the impeachment fight, but I thought the ads and strategies that we at PFAW and MoveOn came up with were far better than anything Penn did. (When I last saw Penn about three years ago, he complained to me about $6,000 that he said PFAW still owed from that fight seven years prior. I felt so badly about that, that a man as poor as Mark Penn was so cheated.)
As I wrote here, Penn has been badly wrong about this campaign from the beginning, somehow convincing himself (and, sadly, Hillary) that this was not a change election. It was one of the worst judgment calls in recent Presidential campaign history, right up there with the decision not to respond to the Swiftboaters.
If Hillary loses this primary fight, as it increasingly looks like she will, I give Penn the lion's share of the blame. And while I will have mixed feelings if she does lose, I will not regret that Mark Penn will have no influence on the Democratic nominee.
And here are the comparative mentions of Penn and Aexelrod on blogs:
Apart from a period in late December and another in mid-January, senior Clinton advisor Mark Penn has consistently been more in the news than his counterpart at the Obama campaign, David Axelrod. That is not good for the Clinton campaign. Staff should not be the story. Even if Penn's higher profile can partially be blamed on the current wave of process stories being written about the Clinton campaign, it also clearly is Penn's own fault. Not only has he consistently been in the news more often than Axelrod, but he even gave a reading at the Strand bookstore in the West Village on the eve of the Potomac Primary. Penn is actively seeking the spotlight for himself even during a critical stretch in the campaign.
Even leaving aside the questionable clients for whom he has worked in the past, Penn acquired way too much power and attention within the Clinton campaign. If Clinton fails to win the nomination, he will be a reason why. In future Clinton campaigns, all staffers should probably be forced to read A passion for anonymity, the autobiography of FDR staffer Louis Brownlow.
I heard from a very reliable source that Chuck Schumer and Mark Penn are really pressuring superdelegates to come out for Hillary. They are also pushing hard to reinstate Michigan and Florida. I imagine the arguments they are using are that Obama can't win, and that Hillary is prepared to take on the right because she has credibility on national security.
I'm on a conference call with Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson of the Clinton campaign, and they are emphasizing how this contest is going to go beyond Tuesday, and may go until the convention. Wolfson is discussing party rules and proportional representation, and says that these rules have trumped the intended front-loading of the primaries to pick a nominee early on.
... Wolfson would not confirm the $10M January number.
Okay, that might be stretching it. Truman beating Dewey almost certainly beats it. But I can't remember ever being this stunned by an election result. Every indication was that it seemed headed toward a big Obama win.
You know, I got into politics to make the world a better place. But I also am not ashamed to admit it, I also love the game. Voters are independent cusses, and you just never know what they are going to do next, the rascals.
Here are some post-NH thoughts on the state of the race.
1. Each election has its own dynamics. I love fladem's historical data analysis, and I've used the averages she has developed in my analysis a lot. But her own chart here shows how wildly different the dynamics are in each race. A swing of 40 points in one race and 5 in another gives you a 22.5% average, but it certainly doesn't meant the 3rd election will have a 22.5% swing. Gary Hart's massive surge in 1984 came because so many Democrats in the country were looking for an alternative to Mondale, and his fade later was the result of his own mistakes over the course of the campaign. Other races had a different set of dynamics.
What NH showed is that, momentum and long-term trends aside, what happens in the course of a campaign really does matter. Voters are not sheep, and they are watching this campaign closely and making up their own minds. Hillary worked her ass off in NH, played to her strength- which is substance on the issues- showed her warmth and sincerity, and the voters were paying attention and liked that they saw.
2. Never, ever, ever count the Clintons out. As I discuss below, I still believe Obama is the most likely to win this race in the end, but the thing that always amazed me when I was working for the Clintons, and since then, is that they never give up, they are remarkably resourceful, they are tough as nails, and they are at their best when they are in the worst trouble. While I think the overall dynamic favors Obama, I would never bet real money against the Clintons.
3. The conventional wisdom now shifts back to the Clintons, but the dynamic in this race still favors Obama. Every campaign has one major question that is the biggest question for voters to answer. In the 2004 primary, it was who has the best chance of beating Bush, and primary voters decided, wrongly as it turned out, that it was Kerry. This year, that question is, who is most likely to deliver real change. I still think that over the course of a long campaign, Obama has a clear edge with voters on that question. And, by the way, that question is especially dominant with women voters, so Obama doesn't have to keep losing the women's vote to Hillary.
4. Both of these campaigns still have to overcome big flaws. You have to give both of these campaigns credit for impressive victories, and for coming from behind when everyone was writing them off. But they are both handicapped by big flaws.
Mark Penn has never understood what this race was about, and has left the Clinton campaign with an experience vs. change frame which is fundamentally wrong for the 2008 election. Clinton should not let herself be lulled by this upset victory into thinking that all is well in Hillaryland. They still need to rebuild their message if they want to win over the long haul.
Obama's message about change has become more mono-syllable than Edwards' pure populism. He has to show he has the grit and substance to actually deliver real change, not just preach about it. Part of the reason he kept things on such an inspirational level in the NH primary was caution: he wants to avoid making mistakes. But caution is a killer for a change message. He needs to retool as well.
5. Edwards could become the kingmaker. Edwards is dead as a Presidential prospect for 2008, but if this becomes a long, drawn out, fairly evenly-divided fight, and Edwards stays in and keeps drawing around 20% everywhere he goes, he could be the guy who decides the nominee. I could easily see this playing out where Obama wins a bunch of states and Clinton wins a bunch, and they both end up with about 40% of the delegates, and Edwards keeps playing to the end of the primary process and then delivers his 20% to one of them. Could make things interesting right up to convention day.
"We can't be a new story. There's nothing we can do. I can't make her taller, younger, male. There's a lot of things I can't do." - Bill Clinton yesterday.
Today, Hillary Clinton will lose New Hampshire to Barack Obama - and it will be a wider margin than most polls suggest. The question now is whether the nomination is already over and, if so, how soon will Clinton drop out. I believe it is over, but the Clintons will probably take a while to acknowledge it. While there are many ways that Obama could have overtaken her, progressives should be pleased that: (1) Obama's rise has not been at the expense of John Edwards, and (2) Bill Clinton has become her biggest liability. The Clintons won't give up yet, but they'll keep digging themselves into a hole - while consultants like Mark Penn continue to lose credibility.
The Clintons can't help it - they don't know any other way to campaign. Reeling from a 3rd-place finish in Iowa, Hillary Clinton arrived in New Hampshire on Friday with a vain attempt to reinvent herself as an "agent of change" - while pandering to young voters who were the key to Barack Obama's victory, and taking more questions from the audience. Meanwhile, her consultants promised to go negative on Obama - while Bill Clinton lamented that the "biased media coverage" against them means they'll have to sling mud. In the final New Hampshire debate, Clinton pursued a "divide-and-conquer" strategy by using John Edwards' rhetoric to attack Obama - as she accused the Illinois Senator of not being consistent about where he stands. But rather than take the bait, Edwards defended Obama by saying that they are both "powerful voices of change" against the status quo - which is what this election is all about. Clearly, the way that Clinton is responding to the current climate is dooming her nomination.
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