Clinton, Obama and Presidential Maneuvering
This entry was posted on 1/10/2008 7:25 AM and is filed under Politics,Musings.
Gazing past the silver screen and into the real world, The Atlantic has up
a fascinating piece by Marc Ambinder in which he assays
the behind-the-scenes run-up and laid track of the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as some of their strategies and inner workings even now. It's the rich detail of involving novels, stuff you could never really cram into a film about politics, no matter how exacting and "inside-the-Beltway."
The article offers up a story of dueling war rooms, shrewd fund-raising battles and surprising allies (for one, the Hillary camp's
back-channel alliance with Matt Drudge, who helped break the Monica Lewinsky story,
and rode it with an unrivaled fervor), but also very much more than that. It's an allegorical story of plotting, entitlement, and not seeing the forest through the trees.
Clearly, Obama's populist candidacy has threatened to upend the Clintons' painstakingly constructed political applecart, as well as the way politicians have traditionally pursued
the presidency — through years of careful preparation and positioning.
"I think there’s no doubt that it would be easier for a lot of people in
Washington if I had decided that I was going to take a pass and wait my
appropriate turn," says Obama in the piece. "[That] might be, from their perspective, 10 years from
now — or at least once the Clintons had exhausted all possibilities of
running any further."
The above accompanying photo, from John Gress of Reuters, actually sums it up nicely — the Clintons' simultaneous disdain for and disbelief at Obama's meteoric rise. (In the preparatory months leading up to Hillary's campaign launch, they were focused on sharpening their talons to fend off the more obvious challenge by John Edwards.)
Part of the grand strategy for Hillary Clinton’s run at the White House
was to build a movement around her gender and the possibility of
electing the first female president. Mark Penn, the Clinton campaign's visionary pollster,
believed that presenting Clinton’s candidacy as a historic occasion
would re-inspire voters badly disillusioned after eight years of George
W. Bush. But
Obama —
the first nationally viable African-American candidate, and one possessing the charisma to enthuse potential voters about rising to make history, however implicitly — assumed the
symbolic role that Clinton’s team had in mind for her.
For the full read, click here.
