Those of you who have seen me speak at events the last year have probably heard my long-running theory on why Hillary would inevitably collapse (since I never did a Q&A where I wasn't asked about how to take down Clinton). It went something like this:
Hillary has put together a sort of "coalition" team of consultants and advisors, spanning the ideological spectrum of the party. My reasoning was that this coalition would hold so long as she was in the lead. But as the other candidates got better known and she started slipping, that coalition would fray and they'd start using the press to fight their internal turf battles, further accelerating her decline.
Well, the initial decline (like Lieberman's in 2003) didn't happen. Even as Obama and Edwards became better known, Clinton increased her leads. She was defying gravity. Her debate performances were stellar and she was running a tight ship. She had effectively eliminated her Iraq vote as a negative. And given how safe Obama was playing it, I thought, "Damn, she's going to pull it off."
But then Hillary made mistakes, the biggest being her Iran vote -- suddenly telegraphing to everyone that she had not, in fact, learned her lesson from the Iraq debacle. It's a vote I'm sure she wishes she could have back, because suddenly her campaign was on the defensive, and -- this was a shocker -- she stumbled (and a gleeful press piled on). And now, as her poll numbers are sagging and her inevitability in serious doubt, the second half of my prediction is starting to play out. The knives are certainly out:
On the eve of the final Iowa debate before the Jan. 3 caucuses, Clinton campaign insiders are increasingly questioning the cautious, poll-driven approach taken by Mark Penn, Hillary Rodham Clinton's top political aide, sources familiar with the situation say.
With Clinton barely holding her own against Barack Obama and John Edwards in Iowa, dissatisfaction is growing with Penn, who some say has mistakenly run Clinton as a de facto incumbent.
"There are two people who have come up with this strategy -- one Hillary Clinton and one Mark Penn," said a top Clinton ally, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Mark wanted to run her, basically, for re-election, and we are seeing what happened."
Said another Clinton camper: "The heat's on Mark. ... He's got a lot of enemies."
Ezra, criticizing a Penn media appearance, piles on:
[Penn] really does a poor job here, and he's hampered not merely by his shortcomings as a speaker, but by the absence of message within the Clinton campaign. When the rationale for your campaign is that you're the frontrunner with the experience to win, losing your lead in the polls doesn't only put you in second place, it actually shreds the argument for your candidacy. What we're beginning to see here is how underdeveloped the arguments for Clinton were when separated from her aura of inevitability.
Keep an eye on whether more of the campaign's internal battles are fought in the press. There's likely a furious effort right now to clamp down on the public recriminations. But the union-busting Penn certainly has a lot of enemies, and deservedly so. And they smell blood in the water.