The Clinton Campaign: What Went Wrong? [View All]

[Prophet 451]

After Hillary's excellent concession speech, perhaps we can now have a reasonable discussion about what went wrong with her campaign. Hillary entered the race with considerable advantages (not least, a large war chest, a decent Senatorial record and married to a popular ex-president (although that last was something of a double-edged sword, as I'll come back to)), so what went wrong?

1) Sexism

I mention this first not because I think it was the main reason teh Clinton campaign failed but because it seems the obvious place to start. Yes, there was sexism at work in this campaign. While never as all-pervasive as some seemed to believe, it did play a part. Some parts of the United States were always going to have a problem accepting a woman as a serious candidate, some people were going to actively insult her for it (special glare at Chris Matthews) and a few people even made money off it (i.e. that disgusting "bros before hoes" shirt and the nutcrackers (although here in England, there's a long tradition of satire like that. One of the things I remember from my childhood was a pair of nutcrackers my grandparents owned which depicted Sir Winston Churchill as a bulldog)). That leads nicely into...

2) The Media

To my mind, some form of singling out for condemnation should also go to those pundits months ago who actually spent precious airtime discussing the amount of cleavage Hillary was showing. When the news effectively runs a crawl saying "SHOCK! HORROR! Hillary has tits!", you know you've reached a new low. Discussion of the fact that a female politician has girl-parts aside, there was also a more insidious form of sexism operating which used the existing stereotypes of women and applied them to Hillary Clinton, such as the endless repetition of those moments where she became emotional (which probably had as much to do with being knackered by that point), playing into the image of the hysterical woman. While it never quite got to the point of portraying her as Glenn Close in Fatal Attractions, it's fair to say that the media played a big role in the Clinton campaign. Initially, that role was largely a positive but while the mass media portrayed Clinton as the inevitible candidate for years even before the campaign started, they never liked her for it. The coverage almost always had the air of vague disapproval. Bill was savvy at minimising that, Hillary less so. And that leads me to...

3) Bill

Contrary to what the right would have you believe, the mass media never liked the Clintons all that much. Really, go back and check the daily news from his first term and you'll find that the media really didn't like either Clinton very much (although they never hated them as much as they did Al Gore). Clearly, Hillary has benefitted from her marriage to Bill, both personally (at least, one would hope so) and professionally but it has also meant that the right's overwhelming, visceral loathing of Bill has transferred over onto Hillary (and, to an extent, Chelsea) as well. Bill's sometimes bizarre statements on the campaign trail sometimes backfired as well although it would have looked very odd if he hadn't been out there stumping for his wife. The simple fact is that Hillary's run for the presidency was always going to be compared to that of her husband and while she may be his equal in brains, Hillary does not have Bill's overwhelming charisma and likeability. Campaigns in the modern age are far more about personalities than policies (and trust me, I am NOT championing that fact) and, while not dislikeable, Hillary doesn't have the almost supernatural likeability which her husband and Senator Obama have. In addition, Bill was never as universally beloved by teh left as some may have believed. He wasn't a great liberal president, he was a moderate centreist and good at being one so while the left remembers the triumphs of the Clinton presidency, that memory is also tainted by things like NAFTA, DADT and DOMA. In short, Bill was too liberal for the right while not being liberal enough for many on the left.

4) Bad Advisers

If any one factor can be singled out as most responsible for Hillary's loss, I think it was this one. From very early in the campaign, Hillary's advisers gave her bad advice and you can see that through the decisions made by the campaign. there was the initial underestimating of Senator Obama which was a mistake but not a fatal one but far more importantly, there was also a long struggle to adapt when he proved to have traction. There was no plan in place for campaigning after Super Tuesday which left the campaign with logistical, strategic and financial problems. There was the decision to embrace victimhood late in the campaign which virtually everyone could tell was going to backfire. There was the rampant co-opting of the Michigan and Florida primaries which, regardless of the merits of the arguement, looked like trying to change the rules to favour the Clinton campaign in mid-game. Some form of special hell should await Mark Penn who seemed to take sheer delight in pissing people off. Terry McAuliffe (s.p.?) came across as a foul-mouthed buffoon, not least when he introduced Senator Clinton, on the evening Obama had clinched the nomination as "the next president". I have no idea if Mr. McAuliffe is a stupid man but that certainly sounded stupid (or possibly deranged).

5) Hillary

Now, some of HRC's supporters will insist that she never put a foot wrong throughout this race but to the rest of us, some of the things Hillary said were just plain weird. The seeming view that McCain would make a better president than Senator Obama; the allusion to RFK's assassination; the repeated twisting of teh Florida and Michigan situations, all of these came across as just plain weird. Senator Clinton is an intelligent woman and capable of giving one hell of a speech as she proved in her concession speech, so why her public statements during the race so often came across as alternately meek, indecisive or vergeful is something of a mystery. Likewise, the approach to the sexism issue. It would have been in Senator Clinton's favour if she had gotten out in front of the sexism and fought it from day one, instead, she raised the issue comparatively late in the campaign and seemed to be using it not as an opportunity to grow and learn but as a weapon. The attempt to reposition herself as blue-collar friend to the working man one-of-you looked, frankly, insane given that firstly, the people who actually cared about stuff like that were likely to be voting Repub anyway and secondly, she patently wasn't one of them. Her attitude in the early days of the primaries seemed to suggest she came expecting a coronation instead of a competition. People being people, they wanted to throw a spanner in the works. It's fair to say that, without taking anything away from Senator Obama, his victory was as much a result of the missteps of the Clinton campaign as it was about his own campaign.


I've tried to be fair here. I've never hated Senator Clinton and, for much of her political life, had the utmost respect for her, respect she won back with her superb concession speech. Nor am I going to hold her accountable for what her supporters said (with the exception of the Ferraro incident and Hillary's only crime there was not dealing with it quickly enough). This primary is going to go down in history, that much is certain and when the history is written, I'm sure there will be other factors noticed that I've missed but I've tried here to make a start on offering a dispassionate (well, as dispassionate as possible anyway) view of what went wrong.