Gail Sheehy’s lengthy post-mortem on the Hillary Clinton campaign, for Vanity Fair, is at once a fascinating and — for anyone who followed the particulars of the Democratic primary race the past six months — familiar read. Screw Primary Colors, this may be the real political psychodrama of our time, ripe for its own roman a clef treatment. It’s all there — the perpetual bafflement at Obama’s non-­belligerence; the serial campaign mismanagement and bickering between Clinton’s “Big Five” (Patti Solis Doyle, Harold Ickes, Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Mandy Grunwald); the ravings of pollster Penn, convinced that Hillary needed to throw around more weight than any
man in order to meet the commander in chief threshold test, and how this approach was normalized by the experience of the Clintons’ White House years; and yes, even the “dark clot of wishful thinking” that broke loose with Hillary’s invocation of Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June of 1968.

A lot of this piece is re-tilled Earth in the macro sense, but it’s got great detail. Among the notable revelations is news that, long before the Bosnia sniper-fire issue, another one of Clinton’s signature stories — about a young woman who worked for minimum wage,
was uninsured, and who got pregnant — was apocryphal at best, riddled with inaccuracies that seem to indicate a willful neglecting of facts. And then there’s this quote from Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff: “There are moments when [the Clintons] want to hear from the
dark side because that may be the only way to win. …Losing is not part
of their vocabulary. They know no limits when it comes to the energy
and tactics they will use — no matter how distasteful.” For the full read, click here.