The TimesUK has an intriguing little snippet about conflict within the Clinton campaign that I want to highlight:

Privately, her mood has darkened after losing eight primaries and caucuses in a row. The realisation that without a series of huge victories in the remaining contests it is impossible for Clinton to win enough “pledged” delegates to clinch the nomination has sent her staff into shock.

…Tempers have been running high within the Clinton camp.

Her chief strategist, Mark Penn, got into a slanging match with the media consultant Mandy Grunwald at Clinton’s campaign headquarters. “Your ad doesn’t work,” he fumed.

“Oh it’s always the ad, never the message,” Grunwald shot back. Insiders say the atmosphere is dark, even though the fight is not over yet. Loyalty to Clinton remains strong, but there have been too many chiefs and not enough Indians, they complain.

The friends of Bill or “white boys”, as Penn and Terry McAuliffe, the campaign chairman, are known, have long viewed “Hillaryland” – the closed circle of female friends – with suspicion.

Patti Solis Doyle, who coined the term “Hillaryland” and was axed as Clinton’s campaign manager last week, found herself in the midst of rows. “There was a feeling that nobody was in charge,” said one observer. “She would try to play honest broker and go to Hillary with, ‘Mark says this, Mandy says that, Howard [Wolfson, her communications chief] says this’ when what they needed was a general.”…

Time that should be spent courting voters is now being devoted to fundraising after staff blew through a mind-boggling $130m and still ended up out-organised by Obama. In Wisconsin, a largely white working-class state that Clinton should be able to win on Tuesday, precious resources are being spent on a blast of negative advertisements challenging Obama’s refusal to debate with Clinton.  (emphasis mine)

Where have the strategists inside the Clinton campaign been on the issue of delegates? It’s long been apparent that the math is not trending in their direction. Which makes these reports on flubbing in Texas and Pennsylvania all the more troubling. And makes the reported snippy Mark Penn accusations above seem like a lot of CYA hot air. (More here from MyDD on the delegate issue.)

So much for the Penn power point mystique, I suppose.

One of the biggest gripes about the Kerry campaign, aside from the failure to immediately pushback against the myriad lies from Bush and his allies, was that there were far too many people calling the shots but with no real shots being taken. With the biggest error of all of these being the failure to put real efforts into the grassrots organizing on the ground in every battleground location early on, and to work at building those connections into a strong network of grassroots operations from there outward.

If strategists in the Clinton camp failed to heed these lessons on preventable errors, that is astonishing. What does Penn have to say about all of this? Recently he’s been quoted comparing the Clinton campaign to the surging Walter Mondale primary of 1984. (No, I’m not kidding.)

While Democratic participation has been up substantially in this primary season thus far — with energy in early primary states directed at both the Clinton and Obama campaigns.  The efforts that Obama’s staff have put into grassroots organization across the board, drawing in new voters including their fantastic success with the youth vote have been nothing short of amazing.

If the Clinton campaign only coordinated these efforts initially — as seems perhaps to be the case — in the early primary states, banking on a knock-out early in the primaries, then that was a huge error on the strategic end of things that no ad campaign is going to fix.

In the meantime, the scramble for voters and delegates continues, with a primary in Wisconsin and a caucus in Hawaii today, and lots of squabbling over who said what with whose permission in between. In the end though, it’s isn’t strategists or ad-makers who get the last say — it’s the voters. And we’re about to get the opinions of two more states this evening.

(YouTube of one of the Clinton ads from Ohio. I get where they are trying to go with this, but the script is choppy and the ad leaves me flat. What do you think?)


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