Reflections on 5,400 hours with Hillary

Posted: Friday, June 06, 2008 10:27 AM by Mark Murray

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold...
Among the lessons learned over these many months: One, whatever the final judgment on Bill Clinton's effect on this race, which by most accounts was Hillary's to lose, and the value of his brand, one thing is sure, he is no longer the much-loved, well-respected king of the party in many people's eyes. (Nor is he likely to be referred to again as "the first black president," even in jest.) Two, as much as the media's hunger for metaphors may at times overreach, it turns out that a campaign's organization or lack thereof is a good indicator of the candidate's ability to win.

Iowa was a shock. It stung the Clintons. The former first lady managed to turn New Hampshire into the stage for a remake of "The Comeback Kid," but the campaign never truly recovered from that Iowa defeat. It never fully digested what the loss said about their assumptions and their strategy.

The size and scope of the loss also surprised many of us on the Clinton bus. And yet a week earlier, at an "Orphan Christmas dinner" for a dozen or so reporters stranded in Des Moines on an unusually balmy Christmas Day, most of those assembled -- many of whom had covered Obama extensively for months -- had been convinced he was going to win. Big.

The Clinton team tried to maintain their grip on the suddenly slippery cloak of inevitability. The dizzying spin began on the boozy, wee-hours flight from Des Moines to Manchester, when aides played down the small state and the amount of influence it would have.

If only. As is clear now, Iowa allowed Obama to catch fire, a fire gained speed and strength during the crucial month of February and ultimately proved fatal for the Clintons.

From the start, theirs had been a big-state strategy that paid little attention to caucuses. Bill hadn't done well in them either, the New York senator grew fond of reminding reporters in the midst of her series of losses in February.

They had hoped a win in that first crucial contest would send them on their way. The problem with Iowa was that the main lesson they took away from their devastating third-place finish was not that they had underestimated the youth vote, or Obama's ability to appeal to white voters in small Iowa towns, or that they needed to adjust their message.

Instead, they concluded that caucuses were a sham, all but ceding all future caucus states -- save Nevada -- to their rival and allowing him to rack up the kind of lead in pledged delegates, states won, momentum, and overall hype that seemed to invalidate their argument to superdelegates that she was the candidate best-poised to win in November.

At times, life on the trail felt like it was playing out in Bizarro World. There were explosions of laughter on the press bus during a February 16 conference call when Clinton aide Harold Ickes twisted himself into a pretzel trying to square his DNC vote to strip Florida and Michigan of their delegates with his then-position that they absolutely must be counted.

Reporters on the bus -- worn down by a brutal schedule of long days packed with multiple flights and back-to-back events -- grew to loathe the marathon calls (many lasted more than an hour) that became near-daily occurrences for a time, even though they offered the opportunity to ask questions of the team's top tier.

But back to those pesky caucuses. In New Hampshire -- a day or two after losing badly in the Hawkeye State and a day or two before women voters and teary eyes helped win her camp a reprieve from the political firing squad -- Clinton told the reporters jostling for position in a coffee shop that caucuses were undemocratic, and it was primaries that mattered.

Ouch. The problem: There were several more caucuses to go.

What are you trying to say?
Then there was the matter of the message and its messengers. Strength and experience seemed to be working at the beginning, but that was before voters began to tune into Obama's soaring, though vague, rhetoric and his calls for change.

So around December, Bill Clinton started calling Hillary a "world-class change agent" in his speeches, focusing on what he saw as his wife's proven ability to bring about change -- a valid but indirect argument when compared to Obama's clearer, simpler and apparently more inspiring one-word line: "Change." People know what change means, but what does "World-class change agent" mean exactly?

In a December 16 speech in Council Bluffs, IA, where she launched her abbreviated, "freezing fog"-hobbled Hill-a-copter tour, Clinton used some variation of the "change" or "new beginnings" theme 23 times in a 33-minute speech -- or about once every one-and-a-half minutes. But the Clintons' change argument didn't sell.

The logic was difficult to follow: How could someone who embraces her status as a throwback to the 90s -- even the booming, gilded 90s -- also represent change? It may have been possible to make a convincing argument, but the Clintons didn't. One reason was the legions of young Obama fans, the college students that few expected to actually show up on caucus day but who did. For many of them, Clinton was synonymous with the old school. Hillary as the status quo ante incarnate.

And there were the messengers, from Bill Clinton and Bob Johnson in South Carolina -- where their comments angered many black voters -- to message architect Mark Penn. Penn didn't see much value in emphasizing Hillary's "human side," even though she consistently wowed skeptical voters in face-to-face interactions and eventually proved to be warm, friendly and funny with the reporters on her campaign plane.

Clinton's campaign knew they had a charismatic orator as a rival, but it took them months to figure out what to do about it, as though it were enough to lament what they saw as media bias, stomp their feet -- metaphorically -- and wonder aloud why nobody but them could see that this guy was the embodiment of style over substance.

Around the time of the Wisconsin race, the Clinton campaign started trying to portray Obama's entire candidacy as one based on "just words." But it wasn't until Ohio that they threw a remix of Elvis' "A Little Less Conversation" onto their event soundtrack. It was a song that fit well with their talk vs. action, speeches-vs.-solutions line against Obama.
Clinton sometimes liked to say politics was a means to an end, not an end in itself, and it was clear in the more intimate moments on the trail that she believed she was the candidate most ready for the job of president, the one who would be the best at it if she could just get there.

Still, the means matter, and that's where much seemed to go wrong -- the muddled message, the staff shake-ups, the mindset that led to her money crunch and the lack of a post-Feb. 5 strategy, which kept her from competing effectively that month.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.....
Looking back, there were the emblematic moments on the trail, the turning points, the low points -- and moments not always picked up on by the national network desks or the folks in the newsrooms back in Washington and New York.

In December at a Hy-Vee supermarket in Des Moines, IA, the Clinton team memorably lost control of Bill Clinton, leaving him alone, surrounded by reporters and forcing them to convene a press conference to re-focus the ravenous media on the candidate. The former president later signed a dollar bill for a fan -- while acknowledging the illegality of his actions -- only to have his wife refuse to do the same.

There was that moment at the end of a New Hampshire roundtable when the former first lady's eyes welled with tears. That event had bored the exhausted press corps into a near coma, but when the response to a seemingly innocuous question turned out to actually be interesting, the sudden buzz was like someone had hit a bee hive with a baseball bat.
The rapid click, click, clicking of camera shutters, the frantic phone calls to news desks, the reporters darting to and fro chatting with the voters present, trying to measure the momentous-ness of the moment.

An early low point? The pseudo-victory bash in Davie, FL., after Clinton won that rogue state's non-consequential (at least according to DNC rules at the time) primary.

There were also a lot of good times. The late night drinks on the campaign plane and in hotel bars, the numerous karaoke outings with reporters and campaign staff, the inside jokes only political junkies would understand or find funny. Hillary's shot of Crown Royal, her dancing at the Y. The April Fool's joke she played where she challenged Obama to a bowl-off.

It seems I switched bubbles when the real fun was only beginning. The campaign had finally decided to try to woo the press some time around the Nevada caucuses -- a time that coincided with the debut of the campaign plane dubbed Hill-Force-One.

By late April, Clinton was making a lot more forays to the back of the plane, but it was after I left that the giant blow-up Hillary doll made its debut and the senator took to dancing publicly a little more often and began to be more free about imbibing alcoholic beverages in front of -- and with -- the press corps.

So what about Obama?
After covering some 300 Clinton events over seven-and-a-half months, I've now been the Obama plane for a little over a month -- armed with a press badge, which somewhat oddly broadcasts the "Change We Can Believe In" campaign slogan, along with a handy little map of America with a breakdown of electoral votes per state.

Obama is officially the presumptive nominee. Now what?

Early on, Clinton was fond of saying, "You can't be a leader if no one is following." You also can't be the nominee if not enough people are following, and that ended up being the case with her failed campaign.

At the Harkin Steak Fry last September, Obama arrived with an entourage that sounded like it came straight out of a U2 video. But even with all the talk of Obamamania, the Obamanon, and Martin Luther Obama, the question is: Will people keep following? And not just the young or the black or the college educated or the people in nearly all-white states, but the blue-collar workers, the Clinton backers, Appalachia?

Obama's candidacy has, in many ways, been a grand experiment with its own unique successes and its own challenges. Those challenges include a lack of legislative experience relative to McCain's and his wariness and distance from the media as contrasted with his voluble, personable Republican rival -- a man who embraces the press by comparison.
Has Obama been tested well enough in this long, sometimes brutal primary race, as some argue?

What about Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger? Will denouncing Wright and resigning his membership from Trinity United Church of Christ be enough to calm those angered by these men's messages and confused by whether Obama agrees with them?

What about William Ayers and Tony Rezko, flag pins and all the questions about the Pledge of Allegiance and his religion?

What about the unforced errors, like that disastrous bowling outing or the bitter-guns-religion comments? How long will those comments cling to him? How successful will the Republicans be in branding him as an out-of-touch elitist?

Won't the Republican Party have a field day with all of that? Can he stand the heat, as Clinton might ask?

What about race?

Finally, now that Clinton's campaign has joined those linking Obama to George McGovern -- in their case merely implicitly -- I can't help thinking about a passage in one of the many political books that have become required reading for anyone trying to tackle life on the bus.

In his 1973 treatise, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72', Hunter S. Thompson quoted Ron Dellums -- currently the Oakland mayor and a Clinton supporter -- during July 1972.

Thompson writes that Dellums released this statement when he switched his support from Shirley Chisholm to McGovern: "The coalition that has formed behind Sen. McGovern has battled the odds, baffled the pollsters, and beat the bosses. It is my conviction that when that total coalition of the victims in this country is ever formed, this potential for change would be unheralded, for it could pose a real alternative to expediency and status quo politics in America."

Obama's idealism and his appeal to young voters, if not victims, has been compared -- fairly or not -- to the failed candidacy of McGovern, who was an early Clinton supporter until he switched recently.

How will that comparison bear out? Will the freshman senator from Illinois go down to defeat in a landslide or disprove that analysis and emerge victorious?

We have five more months of gripping, cable-news-ratings-boosting drama before we find out.

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