Why Obama won and Clinton lost in the Primaries!

I found this to be interesting. It showed the flaws of the Clinton campaign team more than the flaws of Clinton as a candidate.

Interesting!

http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2008/08/how-obama-won-and-hillary-clinton-lost.php

How Obama Won: Clinton Lost

Politico's Roger Simon has a massive, six-part bangeroo of a story today looking back on the Democratic primary that produced nominee Barack Obama. It's billed as a "How Barack Obama Outsmarted Hillary Clinton" piece, but the tome's defining characteristic is undoubtedly its exhaustive chronicling of Hillary Clinton's many missteps and how much everybody on her campaign team hated each other so, so much. Some takeaway points from Simon's piece:

Missed opportunities
A high-ranking Democratic operative who was interviewed and rejected by Clinton early on as a campaign manager later caught the Obama bug and "was the person who told Obama—insisted!—he should run for president."

Obama goes for it
Obama decided to run in January 2007, saying, "OK, let's run. Let's try to win. Let's put our chips in the middle of the table and see how we do." An Obama advisor later says that, "One reason we won is we didn't have a playbook on the shelf. We were making it up as we went along."

Ominous symbolism
Obama's campaign headquarters overlooked "one of the most beautiful (and audacious) parks in America." Clinton's was an old Immigration and Naturalization Service building in the the D.C. suburbs that had "no sense of place" where staffers half-joked about "getting shivved in the shower."

Hillary's dysfunctional team
"Many of her top people had little or no real experience in presidential campaigning," according to Simon. "Loyalty," Clinton aide Howard Wolfson said, "was very important to her." Clinton aides dared mention their concerns to Hillary about the campaign, but were subsequently told to "shut the **** up" by campaign manager Patti Solis-Doyle. While writing the piece, Simon "was told that Patti Solis Doyle stayed in her office watching soap operas and refused to return the phone calls of governors, members of Congress and Bill Clinton. I was told that there were suspicions that Mark Penn, the campaign's pollster and chief strategist, 'cooked the books' in presenting his polling results." A top Clinton fundraiser admitted that "We assumed they [Clinton political aides] knew what they were doing. They didn't know jack."

Hillary's hatred of caucuses
A staffer recalls, "I talked to Hillary in Nevada [a caucus state] before an event, and I thought venom was going to shoot from her mouth. She hated caucuses: They underrepresented the working poor, her supporters had jobs to go to, they were waitresses and day care workers. 'We should have fixed the rules! The caucus system skews to the wealthy!' she said. But the bottom line is, the rules are the rules...We looked like whiny babies."

Hillary's ignorance of delegates and superdelegates
One Hillary aide reports that "People didn't know about superdelegates. Nobody figured it out. They thought it was all about winning states and not delegates. That was [Mark] Penn. He was always talking about national polls, he was preoccupied with them." According to Clinton ally Harold Ickes, "There was a lack of experience, knowledge and appreciation of the role of delegates. The delegate operation was viewed as completely separate from the political operation. This, coupled with a very weak -- extraordinarily weak -- staff was the real fault of the campaign."

Hillary's failed team-building exercises
At a 2007 Clinton retreat, "some of those in attendance at the retreat felt the campaign was lacking something: an actual plan to win the Democratic nomination for president. Another recalled that, "It was eye-opening. The political and field operations were dysfunctional. There was not enough staff, the staff that existed was too junior, and there was no plan. There was no political or field plan on how to win the nomination." Another recalled it as "totally **** up."

Hillary's refusal to apologize for Iraq war vote
One aide recounts that "There was plenty of discussion in the spring of 2007 about her apologizing for her war vote. But she didn't want to apologize because she didn't think she had made a mistake. And from a political standpoint, apologizing would have been inconsistent with her strength and experience message." Also, "Mark [Penn] did not believe in it. And we always had to keep an eye towards the general election. In a general election, her support for the war would have been great."

Hillary goes with the "tough ****" message
A Hillary aide states, "For the last 16 years, she had been portrayed as the caricature of a tough ****. So we decided her image should be: 'Let's roll up our sleeves and get to work! Maybe she's a **** because she's competent!'" Another recalls that, "Ironically, our early research found the Hillary attributes that tested the highest were masculine. The attributes were 'tough, ready, strong.'"

Hillary's campaign staff regarded as kind of like Jezebel?
"As first lady and in her Senate office, she had a very female-centric, matriarchal environment." One member of Congress "who was being wooed furiously by both Clinton and Obama, declined a meeting with Hillary's campaign team, saying. "That's OK. I've already seen The **** Monologues."

Hillary refuses showing her soft side
After her famous teary-eyed moment in a New Hampshire diner, Clinton rejected requests by aides to show her softer side. "We went to her and we said: 'Look, you showed your human side in New Hampshire and it worked. So let's keep doing that.' And she still didn't want to do it."

Hillary starts sinking in Iowa
A Hillary aide recalls that "Obama had people willing to lay on railroad tracks for him, and we had old ladies on oxygen tanks. We had to work twice as hard to get over the enthusiasm gap." Also, memories of the past still haunted Clinton there. One Iowa aide said "Barack Obama had only to do one message: 'Here is who I am,' We had to do two messages: One, 'Hi, I am not the mean, cold-hearted **** who screwed up health care' and, two, 'Here is who I am.'" Obama's message was clearly favored: Obama and manager David Plouffe visited a caucus site near Des Moines and found "a guy dressed as Gandalf [from Lord of the Rings] with an Obama video playing on his staff."

Obama delivers coup de grace in South Carolina
Clinton aides knew winning the state was impossible, but "the campaign competed in South Carolina because the Clintons, chiefly Bill, insisted on competing there." An advisor claims, "Competing in South Carolina was bigger than any Mark Penn blunder and bigger than the experience versus her softer-side blunder. It was the central decision that lost the election."