I'm not talking about her delayed-reaction outrage to the memo, I'm talking everything. The last correct decision she made in her run for the Presidency was to run for the seat being vacated by Senator Moynihan in 2000. Ironically, she would run that race a lot better than she's run this one.
Never having lived in New York prior to deciding to run, she knew she would be accused of carpetbagging. So how to counter that? She began the campaign with a "listening tour" in which she traveled all over the state, (specifically making stops in every single county,) including spending a great deal of time in Republican-leaning sections upstate. Why did those counties count? One is tempted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but I suspect it had more to do with her opponent then it did with her.
As Mayor of New York City, Giuliani didn't have a much closer connection to upstate New Yorkers than Hillary did. And his efforts to win those voters over met with little success. Throughout the campaign, Republican observers that Giuliani showed a marked preference for city business over campaign business. Eventually, Rudy's sagging poll numbers and his marital (and extra-marital) difficulties would chase him out, leaving Rick Lazio, a Long Island Congressman who was closely associate with former Speaker Newt Gingrich, as the substitute nominee.
Only the $90M spent by the two Republican candidates (versus about $30M for Clinton) even kept it close. Hillary won the race 55%-43%, and this concludes the portion of her run up to the Presidency she got right. With increasing gains in both houses by the GOP, Hillary's strategy of triangulation began.
Wrong Decision #1: A sharp right turn
In early 2001, this took the form of her spearheading a 'crusade' against violent video games, the end result of which could be said to be the video game ratings system, which much like the MPAA's ratings system for movies, was undertaken by the industry itself to protect itself from the damage Congress could do if it got really interested in the subject. The video game ratings system does as good a job of keeping kids from playing violent video games as an 'R' rating does in keeping sixteen year-olds from watching violent movies.
Wrong Decision #2: AUMF
We all know about her Iraq vote, but we don't all know she voted against the Levin Amendment to the Resolution, which would have required the President to conduct vigorous diplomacy at the U.N., and would have also required a separate Congressional authorization to unilaterally invade Iraq. She did, however, vote for the Byrd amendment, which purported to limit the authorization to one-year increments, but the only mechanism necessary for the President to renew his mandate without any Congressional oversight was to claim that the Iraq War was vital to national security each year the authorization required renewal.
Wrong Decision #3-203: The Campaign
There's too many to enumerate, but the basics are:
* Assuming that frontrunner status was a certain ticket to the nomination.
Really, if nothing else, Bill could have told her that wasn't true.
* Not having a plan B if frontrunner status slipped away.
She simply wasn't prepared to contest this race. It's unimaginable the amount of arrogance you have to have to think you won't actually have to win an election. For all that she's claimed she was "vetted", she's never actually been in a contested primary before. Her Senate nomination was essentially handed to her by the party. I think she really expected the Presidential nomination to come to her the same way.
* Utterly failing to find a message that connects with voters.
She's not used to "finding her voice" as they called it in New Hampshire. And when she does find it, she's used to stuffing it back down in the trunk, because, Snifflegate aside, her voice is usually strident and singularly unlikeable, and she knows this. Look at what we've seen: "I'm the experienced candidate." "Ready on Day One." Well yes, so was Dick Cheney.
When it became apparent that Barack Obama was her primary opposition, she tried to out-wonk him in the debates. For the most part she succeeded, but it wasn't enough. For one thing it didn't contradict his message, and for another, it didn't convince anyone. It was what Kerry tried to do, and Obama clearly has far greater command of the issues than George W. Bush.
Niggling differences in policy didn't do the trick.
Attacks upon him rebounded, reflecting more negatively on her than they did on him.
The sniffle in New Hampshire being the sole exception, she has been consistently unable to convince any wavering voter to vote for her instead of him. The only way to win when you don't do that is to have a superior GOTV operation, and we've all seen who's been winning that fight.
Her campaign was about positioning herself as a centrist mainstream Democrat in the Senate, waiting for the Bush Administration and the GOP's general incompetence to turn the American people against them, then walking back to the White House on a red carpet covered with rose petals. At no time until 2008 did it occur to her that she had to earn America's votes. That, in the end, is where she went wrong.