A stash of internal memos and emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign on Tuesday exposed a toxic mix of indecision and infighting that destroyed her chances of winning the White House.
The 26 documents, posted online and to be published in Atlantic magazine, suggest Clinton failed to face up to tough decisions and act — while campaigning on the slogan of ”Ready to lead on day one”. They also suggest the Clinton campaign struggled to come up with a coherent strategy against Barack Obama, even when she was undisputed front-runner.
Mark Penn, Clinton’s chief strategist, repeatedly pushed for Clinton to attack Obama. ”His roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited,” Penn wrote in a March 2007 memo. ”Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programmes, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t.” In the same memo, Penn writes: ”The right knows Obama is unelectable, except perhaps against Attila the Hun.”
Penn pushed for Clinton to emphasise her toughness. In a December 2006 memo laying out his launch strategy, he advised her to use Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, as a role model. ”Regardless of the sex of the candidates, most Americans in essence see the president as the ‘father’ of the country. They do not want someone who would be the first mama, especially in this kind of world. But there is a yearning for a kind of tough single parent.”
But Clinton alternated indecision with flashes of temper. In December 2007, an enraged former first lady demanded her campaign go on the attack, after learning she was trailing Obama in Iowa. Within four minutes, according to the email trail published in the Atlantic, her press operation decided to attack Obama for overweening ambition on the basis of a comment he made as a five-year-old. The attack backfired on Clinton.
But by late February, after Clinton had had 12 consecutive primary defeats, she was again torn over attacking Obama, withholding her approval on the ”3am” ads touting her fitness to deal with a national security crisis in the White House. According to Atlantic, it was Bill Clinton who finally issued the order to run the attack ads.
That mindset of paralysis alternated with too-hasty decisions extended to fund-raising and delegate strategy. Warnings from Harold Ickes, a senior adviser, to keep $25-million in reserve for the February contests went ignored, leaving the campaign without the money it needed to compete against Obama.
Suggestions from a staffer, Philippe Reines, that the campaign raise the issue of the disputed Florida and Michigan primaries, which could provide enough delegates to win the nomination, went ignored for three months.
The sheer quantity of email and memos produced by the campaign suggests a bureaucracy mired in its own infighting. By March, Clinton’s friends were appalled. ”This circular firing squad that is occurring is unattractive, unprofessional, unconscionable and unacceptable,” the Clintons’ lawyer, Robert Barnett, wrote.
But the campaign clung on. The final memo from Penn in June lays out an argument to superdelegates, or senior and elected Democratic officials, for giving support to Clinton over Obama.
Some of Clinton’s supporters have adopted the same die-hard approach, launching a signature petition this week to put her name on the ballot at the party’s convention in Denver.
Meanwhile, Obama’s campaign on Tuesday highlighted his ability to win over moderate Republicans and independents by producing endorsements from former Rhode Island senator Lincoln Chafee and Iowa congressman Jim Leach. — guardian.co.uk