McClatchy News - "If Clinton Can't Run a Campaign....."

....can she run the White House?"

Didn't see this diaried yet.  It's a story in McClatchy that talks about what Obama himself has mentioned as a good criteria for judging his "Executive experience"

Obama has said, from early on in the campaign, to "watch how he runs his campaign" if you want to see the kind of manager he is.  And, conversely, to watch how Ms. "Ready-on-day-one" Clinton runs hers.

By most counts, Obama is winning this important metric as well as he's winning....:

1. Number of contests

2. Popular votes

3. Money raised

4. Pledged delegates

5. New voters registered.............

..............and on and on and on.......

WASHINGTON — Despite Hillary Clinton's big win in Pennsylvania last week, the story of her campaign is often one of mismanagement and missed opportunities, and it raises questions about how she'd organize and run the White House.

But Obama seems to refuse to mention anything about this (unless I'm mistaken).  So, if Obama won't touch this, then we must.  And it looks like a few stories in major news outlets can't hurt.

But her campaign tumbled from riches to rags to rebounds — and now to hanging on for dear life. It wasn't supposed to be that way.

Not many months ago, Clinton was the consensus front-runner, with a 30-point lead in national polls, $118 million raised in 2007 and the backing of most Democratic power brokers.

Today she trails Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in convention delegates, campaign cash and the popular vote.

How'd that happen?

The McClatchy almost seems like it was written by one of us.  It's a must read.

Here's the kicker:

Her team had expected her to sew up the nomination on Feb. 5, Super Tuesday. It burned through more than $118 million trying to make that happen, spending so furiously that Clinton even lent herself $5 million at the end of January.

But when Obama fought her to a draw that day, Clinton seemed to have no Plan B.

A-freaking-men!!

UPDATE:  4:17 - Just thought I'd add some other stories from the past on this same subject.

Clinton leadership a study in missteps
By JIM VANDEHEI & DAVID PAUL KUHN | 4/9/08 4:38 AM EST

The Clinton campaign has been marked by strategic missteps, financial uncertainty and personnel drama.

Hillary Rodham Clinton wants voters to decide the nomination based on who can coolly and competently run the country. She had better hope they don’t study her recent campaign too closely for the answer.

Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday.

UPDATE II:  4:44 - I missed this one.  A good show of contrast in the two campaigns, also from the McClatchy article:

As the Des Moines lawyer tried to decide on a candidate last year, Clinton would call him occasionally, but when he said that he wanted to go out on a campaign bus for a day, he said, "No one ever got back to me."

Obama's campaign did. Fischer spent a day going to a barbecue with 15 people and six other events. He signed up with Obama in late September.