The Leak of a Leak
By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Political bloggers have been salivating over a forthcoming Atlantic article, detailing some 130 leaked Clinton campaign memos and e-mail messages. Now, thanks to a leak about the leak, politico.com gives us a tasty preview of Atlantic Senior Editor Joshua Green’s eight-page piece, “The Front-Funner’s Fall.”
Among other revelations, Green shows that HRC’s failure to secure the Democratic party’s nomination was caused not by sexism, but by her own staff, and her failure to act as a chief executive by taking control when they started fighting amongst themselves.
The article gives an unappealing picture of what kind of president Clinton would have been — and who, most likely, would have driven her administration:
The famous 3 a.m. ad, written by [chief campaign strategist Mark] Penn and approved by Clinton, almost didn’t run: “In the days leading up to Ohio and Texas, the campaign kept arguing over whether to air the [3 a.m.] ad. With the deadline looming, Bill Clinton, speaking from a cell phone as his plane sat on a runway, led a conference call on Thursday, Feb. 28, in which he had both sides present their case. As his plane was about to lift off, it was Bill Clinton — not Hillary — who issued the decisive order: ‘Let’s go with it.’ ”
If you don’t want to know how sausage is made (or not), you want to skip the rest of this post.
Clinton told to portray Obama as foreign
By MIKE ALLEN | 8/10/08 12:47 AM ESTMark Penn, the top campaign strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign, advised her to portray Barack Obama as having a “limited” connection “to basic American values and culture,” according to a forthcoming article in The Atlantic.
The magazine reports Penn suggested getting much rougher with Obama in a memo on March 30, after her crucial wins in Texas and Ohio: “Does anyone believe that it is possible to win the nomination without, over these next two months, raising all these issues on him? … Won’t a single tape of [the Reverend Jeremiah] Wright going off on America with Obama sitting there be a game ender?”
Atlantic Senior Editor Joshua Green writes that major decisions during her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination would be put off for weeks until suddenly Clinton “would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.”
Green reports that on a staff conference call in January where Clinton received “little response” or “silence” to several of her suggestions for how to recover from the Iowa loss and do better in New Hampshire, “Clinton began to grow angry, according to a participant’s notes,” Green recounts. “‘This has been a very instructive call, talking to myself,’ she snapped, and hung up.”
The rest of politico’s article is here.
Posted on August 10th, 2008 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Election 2008, Uncategorized
Always knew Mark Penn was overpaid. Instead of trying to think of ways to destroy the opposition, he should have considered 1. a gag order for former President Clinton, 2. encouraging Senator Clinton to show more of her human side ala that New Hampshire pre-primary moment that made a lot of us think better of her as a person and a candidate, 3. sending the campaign a credit on account to make up for not doing 1 or 2 instead of sending a bill with a balance due.
[...] has posted Joshua Green’s article. “The Front-Runner’s Fall,” to which I referred last Sunday, along with the entire collection of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s primary campaign [...]