Actor-director Adam Goldberg made a salient point about judging a candidate by HOW they campaign on last Friday night's "Real Time with Bill Maher." You can view the clip on YouTube by clicking on this link. Goldberg's comment starts at 6:00 and runs through 7:05.
Real Time Panel Discussion, Part 1, March 7, 2008
I agree that HOW a campaign is run provides a window into the candidate's management style. How attentive is the candidate to detail? Does the candidate delegate tasks appropriately? Does the candidate institute checks and balances that keep him or her apprised of the campaigns successes and failures? Are they able to facilitate disparate groups and personalities working together? Are staff members held accountable for their actions? In short, can the candidate manage and govern as an executive?
Today's New York Times publishes an expose by three of its national political reporters entitled "Sniping by Aides Hurt Clinton's Image as Manager." On Thursday, the Washington Post featured a Peter Baker and Anne E. Kornblut piece "Even in Victory, Clinton Team Is Battling Itself." Joshua Green penned an article for February's The Atlantic "Inside the Clinton Shake-Up". And perhaps most prescient of all, Michelle Cottle wrote "Putsch in Hillaryland: The Clinton Campaign's Silent Shake-Up" for the New Republic back in January. While each article emphasizes a slightly different perspective, there is one inescapable thread that runs through each of these stories. And that is the fact that the Clinton campaign has not been a paragon of efficiency, adaptability or competence. As one aide was quoted as saying in the WaPo story after her campaign-saving victories last week in Ohio and Texas, Senator Clinton won "despite us, not because of us."
On today's "Tucker" on MSNBC, billionaire publisher and real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman said
"Look, I think if you have to measure executive ability on the basis of the way each one managed his campaign, Obama clearly outshone Hillary Clinton and by a good margin. He ran a brilliant campaign. She blew a campaign lead she should have been able to maintain."
So MY question is simply this. Despite all her early fundraising edge, her institutional advantages as the quasi-incumbent, the head start push she inherited from her 16-year association with the vaunted Clinton political machine and her air of inevitability, why is she trailing a first-term senator whose only asset (supposedly) is a speech he made in 2002? Based on the managment of her campaign so far, is Hillary Clinton ready to assume the role of commander-in-chief from Day One??? And secondarily, can the Democratic Party afford to have her run this type of campaign again in the fall???