A Look Back At Clinton's Two Biggest Blunders

Posted by Ashish on 05.12.2008

Failure to reintroduce herself to voters, overconfidence cost her...

Hillary Clinton's fall from inevitable Democratic nominee to stunning loss is one that political pundits will be talking about for years if not decades. She had every advantage in the world and still managed to lose. And while there are literally dozens of things that now, looking back, she probably would have done differently, two things stand out to me as the biggest blunders and both were things she decided on well before the first vote was cast.

First of all, Clinton never reintroduced herself to voters. Despite poll after poll showing that nearly half the country had already decided they'd never vote for her, most of that based on the Clinton people knew from her days as First Lady, she ignored the need to try and change her image. She instead played into it -- a fighter who had taken on the Republicans and was still standing, a hawk who voted for the Iraq War and wouldn't be weak on terrorism. Fair enough. But for all the money Mark Penn has made as her pollster, it was obvious that she had to change her image and get herself a bigger window of opportunity. Starting with half the country against you isn't a good place to be.

And voters kept giving her chances. After she lost Iowa, her tearful moment in New Hampshire resulted in a stunning win. Why? Because she showed the country a piece of her that wasn't soaked in political calculation or a desire for power. For the first time, people saw vulnerability in her, they saw a real woman doing something that no other woman had done before, and struggling, and trying to cope with that. And when she won New Hampshire, she promised that she had "found her voice." But instead of letting voters in on who she was as a person, her likes, her dislikes, her personality, she went straight back into projecting an image of perfection, an image of someone who could do no wrong. Ask any writer, any storyteller, any movie producer, what kind of characters do Americans rally behind? FLAWED characters. Characters who win inspite of their imperfections. It is these characters that Americans relate to.

And with Clinton refusing to paint herself as a regular person (she did at the end of her campaign, particularly in Pennsylvania, but it was too late), she marched on trying to convince people that she was perfect and couldn't lose. Obama, on the flip side, told people he did drugs as a youth. Everyone knew about how his father had left him when he was two. His wife told crowds about how his breath smelled in the morning and how he left his underwear on the floor. These things branded Obama as a normal man, as a person among people, not a ruler waiting to be appointed. Suddenly, his story became that of a largely imperfect man who overcame struggles and was now in a battle against the Clinton Goliath that couldn't be beaten. It was a Hollywood script where Clinton was cast as the villain, and the media ate it up.

It didn't have to be that way. Clinton was the first woman with a legitimate shot at the Presidency. Had she played up a bit on her struggles, on what it felt like to go through what she did as First Lady, about her youth, about the mistakes she had made along the way, she could have came to stand for everything Obama did. But she chose inevitability. She chose perfection. She chose to try and be above the people, not one among them. And right then, when that decision was made months before Iowa, she gave Obama the ace of allowing him to play the underdog hero in the story that became the Democratic race.

Clinton's other big mistake is the obvious one -- overconfidence. Clinton should not have lost this race. But she went with a big state strategy and even after a split of the early states, still refused to plan for the post-February 5th states. And ultimately, it was February that killed her. Had she put effort into the February states, she probably still would have lost them all, but by much smaller margins, meaning she would have gained several delegates, meaning she wouldn't have been so far back at the end of the month. Same thing with the caucus states. She may have still lost them, but maybe a 40 point loss would have been a 20 point loss if she had taken the time to plan for it. And if she was 50 delegates closer at the end of March, she would be the frontrunner right now because her money would not have dried up so fast and her wins in TX, OH, PA, and IN would have taken on larger importance.

But history will remember that Clinton lost this race in the caucus states and in the month of February, as she opted to wait for a knockout punch on February 5th that never came, and then just put her gloves down and took shot after shot from Obama. Her overconfidence led to bad planning and as anyone who follows campaigns knows, planning and organization is largely what wins races.

There are dozens of other blunders the Clinton camp made -- relying on old money, running a 90s campaign a decade too late, not understanding how to use the Internet, horrible communications with the media, acting like sore losers after every loss, etc. -- but all of that wouldn't have mattered had she not made the two fatal mistakes of bad initial branding and bad initial planning.