The Clinton campaign's initial and fatal mistake
With the Clinton campaign almost done, the post-mortems are starting. There’ll be lots of hand-wringing about why the Clintons ceded a bunch of states to Obama, why the message was so confused until March and why the campaign shied away from humanising her. But I think the campaign’s fundamental error actually happened at the very start of the process, just after Obama declared he was running. At that point, the Clinton campaign had two options: kill him by kindness or just take him down. The former would have been the best option as it would have avoided bad feeling within the party and racial polarisation.
If Hilary from the beginning of her run had praised Obama as a future leader of the party and dropped heavy hints that she would pick him as her VP, primary voters wouldn’t have felt that they had to pick between hope and experience. Such a strategy, would also have made it more difficult for Obama to go after Clinton as hard as he did in the run up to the Iowa caucuses. Seeing as she was the de facto incumbent in this race, he had to make the case against her—which he did effectively—but it would have been difficult to do this without appearing churlish if she had been busy showering him in compliments.
Now, the reason she didn’t do this was that the Washington conventional wisdom was that a woman and an African American on the same ticket would have been too much. All the talk of her running mate back in 2007 centred on white Southern or mid-Western males who it was thought would reassure precisely the white working class voters who are now, ironically, her base.
The other option was to hit Obama so hard early that he never recovered. This was possible. When you think about the stories that have done the most damage to Obama , they were already out there in 2007. Obama had written about Jeremiah Wright in his books and Wright’s church has long sold videos of his sermons, how did no Clinton staffer think to buy a job lot to see what was said? Equally, Obama’s connection to the unrepentant leftist terrorist Bill Ayers was also in the public domain, if the Clintons had gone looking for it.
Obviously, knee-capping Obama like this would not have been pretty. Many of those turned off by the Clintons would have been disgusted by it, many party big-wigs would have thought it excessive and undignified but it would have been effective: Obama wouldn’t have been able to get out of this box if he had been put in it early.
Instead, the Clinton camp—perhaps lulled into a false sense of security by Obama’s unimpressive early polling numbers—let Obama get airborne. The rest is history.