The Impact of Bill Clinton & Howard Dean

Posted by Ashish on 06.06.2008

Hillary almost hired the Obama campaign mastermind, but Bill axed it.

Here's a pretty stunning story. Ben Smith has a post up today about how Hillary Clinton basically had offered David Axelrod, now the head Obama campaign strategist, the job of media adviser in her 2000 Senate race. But Bill Clinton stepped in and suggested that Mark Penn, the guy who came up with Clinton's failed strategy in the Presidential race this year, be media adviser in addition to already being the head pollster. And now, eight years later, Axelrod is being praised as a genius and one of the main factors in Obama's historic win, and Mark Penn is being blasted as an overpriced idiot who crafted Clinton's failed strategy. Funny how things work.

Meanwhile, Chuck Todd also raises an interesting note in that the first big loss for the Clinton campaign was the election of Howard Dean as the DNC head in 2005. The Clintons essentially ran the DNC before Dean got in. Had a Clinton-friendly person taken over the DNC, the primary schedule and what happened with FL and MI may have been handled in a more pro-Clinton way.

Hillary and Bill now have plenty of time to think about stuff like this over and over.