Miscellaneous

Obama and Clinton

By jeremyblachman

Just a pragmatic thought for the Democrats that I haven't heard or read anywhere, although it seems pretty obvious to me.  It's fairly clear that, whatever anyone thinks of Hillary Clinton, her campaign has been run pretty poorly.  Lots of articles about fighting between Mark Penn and her other advisers, and a pretty good sense that she was supposed to win the nomination without much trouble but somehow bungled it, made a bunch of strategic blunders, isn't spending her money efficiently, lost huge leads in a whole bunch of states, and has had to rely on a bunch of unexpected close calls to even still be in the race.  On the other hand, Obama wasn't really expected to be a factor, but his campaign seems to have hardly made any mistakes at all, he's certainly outperformed original expectations, and doesn't seem to be any negative media at all about infighting among his advisers, or anything like that.  If you take it as a given that whoever wins the nomination will probably stick with their team, or at least with a lot of their team, then, in a vacuum, could there be anyone who thinks that Hillary Clinton's team is showing themselves to be more capable than Obama's team?  Especially after 2000 and 2004, when much of the post-mortem election analysis blamed the poor campaigns run by Gore and Kerry, I would think the Democrats would be very scared of Hillary Clinton's team running the general election campaign, given their performance to date.

Okay, some flaws in my reasoning -- (1) I have no idea how good or bad the two campaign teams actually are, I'm only relying on what I've read in the media, and what I assume given that Clinton was seen as the front-runner for so long.  (2) Much of the failure of Clinton's "team" or success of Obama's "team" can probably be attributed to the candidate himself or herself, so none of this actually matters.  (3) If Clinton is the nominee, maybe she retools her staff completely, and then none of this matters.  (4) Maybe it doesn't matter how they got there, but if Clinton is able to pull this one out, that's proof enough that despite a bad start, her team is able to make it work when it counts, and the result matters more than the process.

But it's just a thought I had.

Full post as published by Jeremy Blachman's Brand New Weblog on March 06, 2008 (boomark / email).