Frank Rich has another brutal column for the Clinton campaign to face. He takes the campaign apart piece by piece, and the lead is a comparison with Bush's Iraq strategy. Bush didn't have a Plan B strategy and neither did Clinton. It's the type of thing we've talked about here for awhile, but it's the first time I recall seeing a columnist put it in print.
But he doesn't stop there. He hits her on Mark Penn (calls him her "Rumsfeld"):
And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance.
My personal favorite is the way he turns around the Kool-Aid Drinkers theme they've been pushing:
But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.
He hits her on organization:
The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.
In a particularly painful (for Clinton) passage, he hits her directly on experience:
This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.
I'll stop excerpting now. The whole thing is a must-read. He hits her on dismissing any state she hasn't won (and has a shout-out for Markos and his "Insult 40 States" post). He hits her on squelching hope. He calls out the hypocrisy in the press with regard to Clinton: as we all know, no other candidate could be in her position and still be considered "in it." And he hits Bill Clinton particularly hard at the end as well.
The end of an inevitable campaign is never pretty.
Update [2008-2-24 1:1:33 by lapis]: Rich links to a WaPo article from late-Jan that includes Clinton advisers making clear statements about their strategy, and dismissing Obama's efforts in smaller states. They so completely underestimated the advantage they were giving him by not contesting those states:
"It's very hard to gain a big advantage in small states," said one Clinton strategist, who noted that Clinton is concentrating her early fire on four states -- California, New York, New Jersey and Arkansas -- that will produce 44 percent of the Feb. 5 delegates. She will go head-to-head with Obama in a string of sizeable states, while limiting her ground efforts elsewhere.
Update [2008-2-24 12:32:7 by lapis]:
We've been trying to turn Iowa Blue for a while now, and at this point, Obama has the best shot. The Des Moines Register poll, as we all know at this point, knows how to poll the voters in their state. Obviously things can change, but at this point Obama crushes McCain while Clinton gets crushed.
This is what happens when hours after leaving a state, you tell them (and the world) through the media that they don't matter:
DMR Poll for POTUS:
Obama - 53%
McCain - 36%
McCain - 49%
Clinton - 40%
The campaign work and infrastructure Obama put into place in Iowa really seems to have given us a huge advantage in the GE. The same may be true for other purple states like VA, MO, CO, WI and now, OH. In my opinion, we are set back for years in Florida because of this year's election nightmare, so we need to turn every other purple state we can Blue.