Top 13 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Lost

Posted by Ashish on 06.08.2008

It's easy to see them now, but playing Monday morning quarterback is half the fun...

13. A campaign stuck in the past. One of the basic things people who run for office know is that elections are won on the future. People want to know what you will do to solve their problems, not what's happened already. And yet the Clinton campaign was built largely on the past, hoping that positive memories of Bill Clinton's Presidency in the 90s was enough to get Hillary to victory.

12. Infighting. The Clinton campaign was a wreck from the start. High level people in the campaign often spent most of their time focusing on how to get their enemies in the campaign fired. Top level people didn't work together. Penn hated Ickes. Everybody hated Penn. People in the campaign were split in loyalty, some to Bill, some to Hillary. Reports even broke out that his (Bill's) people wouldn't let her (Hillary's) people travel on his plane to campaign stops. His people grew to be offended that her people wouldn't listen more to the group responsible for the big wins in the 90s. Campaign strategies changed almost weekly. It was never a team environment and never a smooth operation. On the other side, Obama's campaign never had a single episode of infighting get out to the media and as far as one can tell, they never had any drama. All the top people got along, everyone listened to Obama, and everyone stuck with the same strategy through good times and bad.

11. Reliance on "old" money. The Clinton campaign based their entire operation on "old school" fundraising, that being having chicken dinners, making nice with the rich and powerful, and getting them to dish out max contributions. But when Obama racked up over a million small donors and Clinton needed more money, her maxed out big wig list was no help while Obama kept tapping his small donor empire over and over again.

10. Reliance on "old" politics. The Clintons never really adjusted to running a campaign in the age of the internet. When Bill Clinton ran in the 90s, he could get away with saying stuff to certain crowds and not have anybody except that crowd hear it. Now, every word that comes out of a candidate's mouth is instantly accessible on the internet. It led to constant problems for the Clintons who seemed to think that their word would stand and that no video would pop up proving them wrong. Bill Clinton got caught playing racial politics in South Carolina but denied ever doing it even though video footage of him doing so was everywhere. Hillary tried to deny her way through her Bosnia lie even as networks ran video contradicting her statements. It's a new age, and the Clintons were stuck in the past.

09. Iowa. The first contest was a total disaster for Clinton. She spent way too much money and finished third. It's much easier to say this now, but had she not competed in Iowa, Obama and Edwards would have hammered away at each other and without Clinton competing for votes, Edwards probably would have won. Obama losing the first contest may have finished him off and Clinton would probably have had a far easier time beating Edwards who didn't have much money and had virtually no organization set up in future states.

08. Adopting the wrong messages. Clinton, despite everyone in politics knowing that this was going to be a change election, decided to run as an incumbent with a message of experience. That left change for Obama, and boy did he run with it. By the time Clinton finally found a message that worked -- the working class fighter -- it was too late.

07. Organization. Clinton, despite all the money and resources she had, never put the effort into building a 50-state grassroots organization like Obama did, and it caught up with her in the end.

06. Ignoring superdelegates until she needed them. Beyond the Clinton "loyalists" who endorsed her before Iowa, Clinton ignored virtually all the other superdelegates until after her massive losses in February. It was then that she realized that the only way she would win is if superdelegates saved her. So when she came calling, it was pretty obvious that she just wanted to use them for her gains. On the flip side, Obama had been calling undecided superdelegates well before Iowa, planting the seeds of friendship, knowing that he may need their votes at the end. He did need them at the end, and he got them.

05. Pettyness. The Clinton campaign came off as incredibly petty over and over again and this helped turn the media against them. When they thought they would win by the rules, all that mattered were the delegates. But that didn't last. Then it was big states. Then popular vote. Then some states didn't count because they had too many black people. Then caucuses didn't count because they were "unfair." Then red states didn't count because no Democrat was going to win them anyway. Then what mattered were winning swing states even though winning them in a primary had no connection to winning them in a general election. Then the superdelegates would come and save her. Then the media wasn't being hard enough on Obama. Then the media was being sexist. Then Florida and Michigan not counting was the greatest injustice in history even though Clinton herself played a role in them not counting and said herself that the results wouldn't count. It was a never ending list of complaining and whining and a lot of people just got tired of it. On the flip side, Obama's campaign stuck with the exact same message from the very beginning -- that the person with the most delegates would win. They never complained about racism. They never complained about big states or small states, caucuses or primaries, states with too many of this type of person or that type of person. They played by the rules and won.

04. Ignoring Barack Obama for too long. Clinton's chief strategist Mark Penn said in 2007 that Obama was a "flash in the pan" and that he considered John Edwards to be Clinton's real rival for the nomination. By the time they finally decided to take Obama seriously, he had already won Iowa and was on his way.

03. Her Iraq war vote. Clinton made a huge mistake voting for the Iraq war, a vote that most say she didn't want to make but one that Mark Penn convinced her to make so that she wouldn't appear weak on war in the general election. She and Obama had nearly identical positions and records on everything -- except that. And Obama used it to establish Clinton as an old Washington politician who sided with George W. Bush on an issue Democrats universally disagreed with. It gave Obama a real issue to contrast with Clinton on.

02. Ignoring states. If Clinton had of just planned for the February states (post February 5th) and competed in them, she may have still lost them all, but a 30 point loss may have instead been 20 points. A 20 point loss may have instead been 10 points. And she would have racked up enough extra delegates to where she would have been much closer in the end, close enough to possibly change the end result. The Obama camp, on the other hand, was criticized by many for opening offices in small caucus states like Colorado and Kansas instead of putting everything into big states like California and New York, like Clinton did. But it paid off. And it also paid off to have people in the campaign looking ahead constantly. The Obama camp was already planning their North Carolina strategy well before Pennsylvania even voted. They were always one step ahead.

01. A sense of entitlement and overconfidence. This lumps together all the above and explains everything that went wrong. The campaign just never took things seriously, never thought they could actually lose, and figured the Presidency was their right. And when they finally woke up, around the end of February, it was too late.

In any other year, Clinton probably would have won. But this year, her campaign problems as listed above, coupled with her hitting a political star in Barack Obama that refused to burn out, resulted in the defeat of inevitability. Hillary Clinton's career may be defined by bad timing. Her turn never came. She sat by the side of the great 90s political star, Bill Clinton, and has now stepped aside as the latest political star, Obama, ascends.

Many of the facts in this article came from the great New York Times article, The Long Road to a Clinton Exit.