Why She Lost
Hillary's message man, Mark Penn, gives us the exclusive postmortem…and still wonders where all the money went
By Lisa DePaulo
Okay, but specifically. What are the one or two or three things that you wish you’d done differently?
I wish in reality that I had a team of people, you know, who was with me, that I organized, as I had in ’96. Look, remember, a big difference between me and a lot of people is that I’ve been doing this for thirty years. I’ve run the successful strategy of a presidential campaign in ’96. I’ve run overseas campaigns like Tony Blair’s and, you know, been through this on the big scale. And in ’96, I had a close-knit team that really ran everything. And this was not organized that way.
Why couldn’t you bring your team this time?
I think this was organized in a way which, you know, some people think is a better organization—to have, instead of a team, almost a group of rivals. And you know, one would say, overall it worked pretty well. Till October.
What happened in October? How was that the turning point?
Well, October of ’07 we were forty points ahead. What happened in October, or really the beginning of November, was that Barack Obama personally attacked Hillary Clinton. Called her disingenuous. They attacked her in the debate on the driver’s licenses.
Long interview.
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