Face reality, Creep. The Dem party is a disorganized mess:
Sniping by aides hurt Clinton's image as manager
By Adam Nagourney, Patrick Healy and Kate Zernike, iht.com
Published: March 10, 2008
WASHINGTON : The morning after Senator Barack Obama shook the Clinton campaign by winning five states in one weekend, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's new campaign manager — Maggie Williams, who had taken over in a shake-up the night before — assembled the curious if demoralized staff.
"You may not like the person next to you," Williams told dozens of aides who ringed the conference room at the campaign's Virginia headquarters last month, according to participants. "But you're going to respect them. And we're going to work together."
Williams's demand was dismissed as wishful thinking by some in her weary audience. But in the view of many Clinton supporters, it accurately reflected the urgent need to overhaul a campaign that at that point had set itself apart for its level of disorder and dysfunction.
The divisions in her campaign over strategy and communications — and the dislike many of her advisers had for one another — poured out into public as Clinton struggled in February to hold off Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
But even as Clinton revived her fortunes last week with victories in Ohio, Rhode Island and Texas, the questions lingered about how she managed her campaign, with the internal sniping and second-guessing undermining her well-cultivated image as a steady-at-the-wheel chief executive surrounded by a phalanx of loyal and efficient aides.
"She hasn't managed anything as complex as this before; that's the problem with senators," said James Thurber, a professor of government at American University who is an expert on presidential management. "She wasn't as decisive as she should have been. And it's a legitimate question to ask: Under great pressure from two different factions, can she make some hard decisions and move ahead? It seems to just fester. She doesn't seem to know how to stop it or want to stop it."
Over the last month, Clinton, of New York, has become much more involved in the day-to-day operation of her campaign. In addition to Williams, she brought in two experienced political hands from her husband's White House: Doug Sosnik, who was a political director, and Steve Ricchetti, a deputy chief of staff.
And Williams has sought to calm tensions in the headquarters through steps like opening the morning conference call to more aides to foster a greater sense of teamwork. One of her first acts, aides said, was to instruct Mark Penn, Clinton's chief strategist and a polarizing figure in the campaign, to stay off television.
Still, interviews with campaign aides, associates and friends suggest that Clinton, at least until February, was a detached manager. Juggling the demands of being a candidate, she paid little attention to detail, delegated decisions large and small and deferred to advisers on critical questions. Clinton accepted or seemed unaware of the intense factionalism and feuding that often paralyzed her campaign and that prevented her aides from reaching consensus on basic questions like what states to fight in and how to go after Obama, of Illinois.
Clinton showed a tendency toward an insular management style, relying on a coterie of aides who have worked for her for years, her aides and associates said. Her choice of lieutenants, and her insistence on staying with them even when friends urged her to shake things up, was blamed by some associates for the campaign's woes. Again and again, the senator was portrayed as a manager who valued loyalty and familiarity over experience and expertise.
Clinton stood by Penn and Patti Solis Doyle, who was until last month her campaign manager, even as her campaign was at risk of letting Obama sew up the nomination. When some of her closest supporters pressed her to replace them, arguing that the two were clearly struggling with their jobs and had become divisive figures in the campaign, she responded by saying she would "think about it."
When Clinton finally pushed out Solis Doyle, she chose Williams, like Solis Doyle, an old friend who had never before managed a presidential campaign.
Clinton's ability to manage the one person with whom she spoke most often, former President Bill Clinton, was also questioned by some of her advisers and supporters. Clinton moved in his own orbit — he heatedly argued with his wife's advisers who wanted to write off South Carolina, defying them to campaign there — and took no direction from the campaign about what to say or where to go, some of them said. (Obama defeated Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic primary by nearly 29 percentage points.) |
