Mark Penn decided to grace the Op-Ed page of the New York Times yesterday to offer his own 'inciteful' analysis of what went wrong with Hillary Clinton's campaign. He was the senior adviser for the crucial portion of the campaign, so he should know best looking backwards, right?
From Mark Penn in the NYT:
Perhaps the most frustrating part of losing a close race is thinking about what else you could have done to win. You replay the campaign over and over again in your head. As an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, I sure do.
But the endless armchair chatter often obscures what actually needed to be done.[...]Are there a lot of other things the campaign could have done differently? Of course. We should have taken on Mr. Obama more directly and much earlier, and we needed a different kind of operation to win caucuses and to retain the support of superdelegates. From more aggressively courting young people earlier to mobilizing the full power of women, there are things that could have been done differently.
While everyone loves to talk about the message, campaigns are equally about money and organization. Having raised more than $100 million in 2007, the Clinton campaign found itself without adequate money at the beginning of 2008, and without organizations in a lot of states as a result. Given her successes in high-turnout primary elections and defeats in low-turnout caucuses, that simple fact may just have had a lot more to do with who won than anyone imagines.
In between those two sets of paragraphs Penn "breaks down the myths" that critics have charged Senator Clinton with. He says that Clinton had more than just a message of experience. Thats right, but it was her main message and everything else she said was all over the place and therefore her message remained inconsistent. Though for the most part, once she fell behind in the pledged delegate count in February, her message was one that attacked Obama and remained mainly negative of him and the press that supposedly cushioned him and offered him pillows. The reality of how the press treated both candidates was actually far different.
Penn also mentions that she was both a warrior and warm by campaigning with her mother and daughter. If Penn thinks anyone is going to buy that line, he clearly doesn't understand the nature of the American electorate. That, and the fact that he did not map out a full primary campaign past February was the real problem. It wasn't about not having enough money as Penn claims, it was that there was no real grassroots movement behind Clinton. Sure, 18 million people voted for her but Obama was running a strategy that involved all 50 states, not just the most populous. His message reached out to all 50 states and his organization was unmatched. If Penn had taken all of this into consideration, then maybe things would have turned out differently.
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