It's Lanny Davis logic. If the polls say she's ahead, she should be the nominee.

That memo sums it up perfectly.

Even if he didn't actually think that CA had a winner take all system, he DID think Hillary would win enough of a % in all those big states, so that Obama could not catch up.

Problem was, they either didn't account for Obama's massive wins in the OTHER states, or they just assumed if Hillary won the "big" states, the other states would follow.

Seems like a pretty bad assumption.

On another note:

How bad did Florida not counting hurt Hillary?

If she had the delegates from Florida at the time, and actually had the lead for awhile, would that have changed perception and made it harder for Obama to win?

Thoughts?

Dunno, SC. Would she have carried as big a margin there if they had both been able to campaign? He consistently cut into early poll leads for her when he was able to actually introduce himself to voters as they campaigned through the states.

It appears she was running against Al Gore a year ago.

It appears they were ignoring Obama even though the fundraising would indicate they should have thought otherwise.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-070404obama-money,0,7560926.story

I think they counted on quantitative data, without any qualitatitve insight. How shallow was Hillary's support a year ago? There weren't a lot of exciting alternatives. Except Barack, who looked like he was pitching in the minors at first. The pivots were that Philadelphia debate and the Iowa JJ dinner. She flailed in Philly, and the media went wow after the JJ. I don't think Clinton and her people realized how the ground and the narrative had shifted, by what, December 1? He took advantage of the moment, was poised for it, and then surfed the momentum. Hillary, meantime, stayed in the bubble.

The Clintons changed the game in '92. They didn't get the memo this time.

It is stunningly obvious that the Clinton campaign did not have a grasp on how proportional representation worked in practice. they didn't realize that what matters more than the size of the state is the size of the margin of victory. Obama took a bigger delegate haul from Georgia than she did with her solid win in California, and his wins in numerous small states were worth more delegates than her wins in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

How could any knowledgable person, much less the senior strategist for the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination rely on polls taken a year before an election, when you barely even know who you'll be running against and what events will transpire, as a reliable method to devise a strategy. It is hard to take this guy seriously

Awesome. Now I'll be humming that all day.

Just one more comment:

I give a lot of credit to Obama and his staff, but that's only half the story. In many places, volunteers for Obama were there before the official campaign was.

He won because we organized, campaigned, and voted for him. In the end, we the people made his candidacy a reality.

Now we just need to make him our President.

This Dem race is has drama only seen in the movies.
HRC campaign team was never unified from day one and when they did get unified it was too late in the campaign to make a difference.
I have said this before in a previous post and it bears mentioning again, Maggie Williams turned around Hillary's campaign at the end. the clock just ran out for hillary. If Maggie was there from the beginning, at the very least, this race may still be going on.

Florida and Michigan would have been a wash anyways had they gone ahead. Hillary would have won Florida by a smaller margin, and Obama would have won Michigan by a small margin.

If she can't run a campaign how can she run a country?

It's not clear from that quote if he was thinking in terms of the primaries or November. Anyway, if you're fascinated with the blame game, then pursue it.

I'm wondering more about who will be on the ticket with Obama. Can he afford not to pick Hillary? Would he offer? Would she accept? Would Nancy Pelosi have a stroke if she did?

Why are we still talking about this guy? Do the post-mortems after Obama's elected in the fall. We've known Mark Penn was an idiot for some time now.

Just a little meta-analysis here. We're entering the second stage of the media end-game analysis. The first stage was the "game over" announcement. The second stage is the "what happened" analysis. Going back to my sportscaster analogy: The time is ticking off the clock. The sportscaster, who had been drumming up upset scenarios to keep the game interesting, decides that the scenarios have become too farfetched and calls it for the winner. Then he starts the post-game analysis. So-and-so made this critical mistake, this big play changed the course of the game, etc.

Next phase is time and stats--how many seconds left, how many timeouts, how many plays. Look for the networks to show a delegate counter with the number that Obama needs to clinch the nomination.

Of all the mistakes Hillary has made during this campaign, her biggest mistake by far was having this muppet (Penn) run her campaign.

"The underestimated the intellect of the gullible people.

They never thought a radical liberal who has done nothing in the Senate would do well."

Gee gotalife - one would think you were talking about an inexperienced country bumpkin governor of a backwater Southern state called Arkansas circa 1992.

>>>insert eyeroll emoticon here

Lion's share? He really did think it was winner take all. If there is one thing i have learned is that you can win by 12 percentage points or so, and even in the big states come out with maybe a 12 to 14 delegate gain, for California, maybe 30 to 40 was it? but if you win a small state by a huge margin say 65 35, you can come out the same as a much bigger state...He had to think it was winner take all...the only way they could have won on super tuesday was to win convincingly in the media narrative, to basically sway the voters in the next states to accept the "inevitability meme".

No matter what the gain was on supertuesday, Clinton could never mathematically push Obama out. It always had to be slog after slog with each primary. So was Obama's strategy brilliant(which i like to think) or was it simply stupidity on Clinton's campain plan (ie Penn) to not really consider having to plan for states post super tuesday?

It's a weird day when I find myself agreeing with George Will, but his column in today's post is spot on:

"Hillary Clinton, 60, Illinois native and Arkansas lawyer, became, retroactively, a lifelong Yankee fan at age 52 when, shopping for a U.S. Senate seat, she adopted New York state as home sweet home. She may think, or at least would argue, that when she was 12 her Yankees really won the 1960 World Series, by standards of "fairness," because they trounced the Pirates in runs scored, 55-27, over seven games, so there.

Unfortunately, baseball's rules -- pesky nuisances, rules -- say it matters how runs are distributed during a World Series. The Pirates won four games, which is the point of the exercise, by a total margin of seven runs, while the Yankees were winning three by a total of 35 runs. You can look it up."

This is exactly the type of logic the Clinton campaign has been using since Iowa, and especially since the "Wrap it up by Super Tuesday strategy fell on its face"

Equally interesting was Will's closer:

"Tuesday night must have been almost as much fun for John McCain as for Obama. The Republican brand has been badly smudged by recent foreign and domestic policies, which are the only kinds there are, so McCain's hopes rest on the still-unattached cohort called "Reagan Democrats," who still seem somewhat resistant to Obama.

McCain's problem might turn out to be the fact that Obama is the Democrats' Reagan. Obama's rhetorical cotton candy lacks Reagan's ideological nourishment, but he is Reaganesque in two important senses: People like listening to him, and his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness -- the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits."

Is it any wonder the GOP has been pushing Hilary's candidacy so hard. As Gingrich, Will, Brooks, Scarborough, and many other Republicans know, despite his so-called liberalism, Obama has
real cross-party appeal to moderate Republicans and independents, and will do just fine with Democrats (white and black alike) come November. If anything, the Clinton campaign has helped surface Obama's vulnerabilities, in largely the same way the right wing attack machine would have, early enough for him to learn from them and deal with them more effectively in the fall, and not so late in the process that he can't recover from them.

To me this is an argument of form over substance. Say what you like about Clinton's strategy, but I think the reason she lost is a lot more simple - people liked Obama better. Clinton lead early based mainly on the fact she was the most recognizable candidate. As we all know, people won't vote for a pig in a poke. So she started out most states way ahead. But her support was always shallow. The fact is, people really don't like her much. Her famously high negatives were her eventual undoing. Once people got acquainted with Obama, he became a reasonable alternative, and people switched to him in droves.