Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell ordered a special extension of the deadline to help Hillary Clinton have the time she needed to put together a full slate of delegates for th state, but despite that she still fell short by about ten people. Marc Ambinder calls it "more evidence that the Clinton campaign simply did not envision a delegate hunt until it was much too late." But why didn't they plan for this? Sam Boyd, an unusually bright college student, figured it out so one would think an entire campaign full of veteran political professionals might have noticed what was happening.
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The Competence Campaign
19 Feb 2008 10:25 am
Comments (24)
Despite the arrogance factor, I'm almost starting to feel sorry for her. Her campaign is turning into an excruciating slow-motion train wreck. How humiliating.
Perhaps Team Hillary could spin this in their favor, as evidence that she's the anti-GWBush. The Bush Team was awesome at winning (or at least "winning") elections, but shit-all incompetent at governing.
It won't be humiliating until she actually loses.
Yeah, except... it doesn't seem that this actually makes a difference. If she wins extra delegates, she can name them later. Big deal.
What makes this particularly bad is that I'm pretty sure the Clinton Campaign has a staffer whose job for the last 9 months has been to make sure they get Clinton on the ballot in all states and to get delegate slates filed.
She keeps claiming that she is ready to lead on day one. It appears she is not leading her campaign very well.
Ready to win on day one!
She keeps claiming that she is ready to lead on day one. It appears she is not leading her campaign very well.
When you look at the facts, this is her first election test. She wasn't tested at all in her two NY Senate contests. So she is even less battle tested in that way than even Obama.
She wasn't tested at all in her two NY Senate contests.
I'm not used to this strange posture of having to defend Hillary, but that's just not true. Rick Lazio was a perfectly strong candidate in 2000 and many people expected him to win, even just a week or two before the election. That she wound up with a large victory margin is to her credit, not her detriment.
Why does she need her own slate of delegates? She can just grab Obama's after the fact: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8583.html
So she calls in a favor-- and still doesn't have her shit together? That's pretty impressive.
Did you read the article?
"Under Democratic Party rules (and does any organization on the planet have more rules or more complex rules?) a presidential candidate winning in a congressional district gets delegates from that district (assigned at a later date) whether he or she files slates delegates or not."
Pennsylvania may turn out to be an important battleground. After all, by tonight we'll know that Hawaii and Wisconsin don't count either.
Hillary expected to be greeted as a liberator by the American people. No one anticipated the breech of her electoral levies.
The people I'm sorry for are the feminist leaders who thought they had the first female president of the United States and are now slowly waking up to the fact that Senator Clinton is an incompetent loser who sucked up to George Bush as long as it seemed politically profitable. Like German generals in 1944, they're finding out that they've pledged themselves to someone who will not only destroy him/herself, but also leave a huge scorched crater where their organization used to be.
More than general notions of competence, this shows that Obama has a superior organization to compete in the general election. That she has no organization in a state that is vital to her nomination is truly stunning, but she has nothing in place in those 'meaningless' states that she ceded to Obama, whereas Obama has strong grassroots organizations in all 50.
Sam Boyd, an unusually bright college student, figured it out so one would think an entire campaign full of veteran political professionals might have noticed what was happening.
I'm sure they have noticed what's happening, but you can't build a campaign machine built for a long slog overnight. It takes time, lots of careful, detail-oriented preparation, and a great deal of money. The real question is: why didn't they prepare in advance for the worst. It's kind of a rule of thumb of successful living a lot of, um, adults, practice. You know, hope for the best, but don't count on it, and therefore prepare for the worst. Sure, they thought they'd blow any opposition out of the water in the early going and then move into presumptive nominee-hood. But what did they count on this scenario?
The Hillary campaign is now a full analog to her actions in Bill's first term, where she repeatedly chose and advocated for nominees to the Administration who looked good on paper, but who were quite problematic for a range of reasons. Mark Penn fits the bill. Experienced, and author, a man of ideas. And yet, not effective.
You see, Hillary's version of "experience" is the mainstream, concensus-reality version.
If Hillary was a Hollywood producer, she would ALWAYS hire the un-talented scriptwriter who has a string of produced flops behind him, over the very talented upstart.
Hillary represents the un-talented. She is one of them.
you can't build a campaign machine built for a long slog overnight.
True, but there's a difference between having a campaign machine that's ready to do full-on campaigning and GOTV, and one in each state that has sufficient clue to get a slate of delegates ready in time. That's something that ought to be delegated to the state chairs, and the state chairs for Clinton in PA have apparently treated their positions as more ceremonial than active.
right:
Rick Lazio was a nobody, a sacrificial lamb offered up only after Giulinai pulled out. Since his loss to Clinton has not run for any other office or been a player in NY politics. She massively outspent him and had vastly higher name recognition. That race was over before it started.
Apparently a few delegates had some personal issues and failed to file. But the article says she can add the delegates later so this is virtually meaningless except as Obama propaganda.
Is there any anti-Hillary spin that Matt doesn't repeat? However unless I missed it I notice he's avoided repeating the plagiarism charges against Obama.
She ran on competence but her campaign looks like it's being run by a poo-chucking ape.
You're doing a heckofa job Brownie!
See any similarities?
Good grief...not again...
Rick Lazio was a perfectly strong candidate in 2000 and many people expected him to win, even just a week or two before the election. That she wound up with a large victory margin is to her credit, not her detriment.
That's completely insane. Lazio was not expected to win by anybody in the week before the election--he'd been 10 points behind for the entire last month and a half of the race! 15 if you factored in the leaners!
Rick Lazio got into the race after Giuliani's trainwreck withdrawal in late May-which Giuliani dragged out for dang near a month, with headline-grabbers on his very public infidelities.
Lazio had a huge uphill battle.On top of being publicly labeled a second choice, he had about 25% name recognition in late July--after he'd been campaigning for nearly 2 months! Also, the issue on which he was most liberal on was gun control, which won him few friends downstate and lost him lots upstate. And he was close to Newt Gingrich, who was not at all popular in NYS.
With more money and time, if he'd been the orignal candidate, could he have become a strong candidate in a strongly blue state against a very popular president's very popular wife? Maybe.
But in the real world, he was a last minute replacement who never had a real chance to win the race--only to take office of Hillary somehow managed to lose it. She didn't.
Comments closed March 04, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Arrogance.
Plain 'n simple.
Posted by Brautigan | February 19, 2008 10:22 AM