Hillaryland

A really interesting article by Gail Sheehy in Vanity Fair, describing some of the internal dynamics in Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign as it foundered this spring. My favorite part:

Clinton’s stance on the Iraq war turned out to be an albatross around her neck that no amount of spinning could shake off. Penn, a superhawk on Iraq and with a strong allegiance to the security of Israel, reinforced Clinton’s own instinct not to admit she had made a mistake. “She felt it wasn’t her mistake,” says a campaign official. “It was Bush’s mistake.” Other senators, such as Florida’s Bob Graham, had gone into the national-security vault, read the National Intelligence Estimate on Saddam’s W.M.D. for themselves, and found the evidence to be unpersuasive. Clinton took the safe, see-no-evil, hawkish road, arguably a precaution necessary for a female with presidential ambitions.

Hillary’s campaign had failed to understand that America was in the midst of a national passage from the old-style confrontational politics of the boomer generation—a divisiveness perfected by both the Clinton and Bush administrations—into a new style of Netroots politics, open-sourced and inclusive, multi-racial and multicultural.

“By presenting her as the virtual incumbent, the insider who knew how to make the wheels of government work from day one, she was being inferentially positioned as running for the third term of Bill Clinton,” says a senior adviser. “We unwittingly set it up for Obama to play not only the anti-Clinton but the outsider, who was going to come in and clean out the gray-haired, patronage-laden gumshoes of Washington’s shadow government.”

Clinton’s people had no idea how excited a whole new cohort of voters would become by a youthful figure who tapped into their vital hunger for change from the ground up. Obama started cultivating these new voters at low-cost events. The turnout amazed even his own team. What began as I.M.’s and campus meet-ups developed into a genuine social movement.

Such was the hubris of Hillary’s team that they discounted Obama as a passing pop star to non-voters. Politico.com reported that at a November 2007 Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa, where 9,000 people showed up, 3,000 were already for Obama. “Our people look like caucus-goers,” Mandy Grunwald sniffed, “and his [Obama’s] people look like they are 18. Penn said they look like Facebook.”

“Did they sleep through the 2003–4 election cycle?” asks an incredulous Joe Trippi, referring to Howard Dean and his new form of communication. As the pioneer who kick-started the bottom-up, low-dollar style of campaigning, tapping grassroots organizers and “newbies” for Dean through the Internet, Trippi was appalled that the Clinton machine stuck with a top-down, status-quo campaign. But the Clintons were out of touch with new forms of communication. Bill Clinton still doesn’t use e-mail or own a BlackBerry.

Why hadn’t they been using the Internet all along as a bulging cash register the way the Obama forces were doing? Hillary’s team had held a retreat in the fall of ’07 to huddle with propeller heads from Google and Yahoo, hoping to update their Internet savvy, but basically gave up on trying. “We tried direct mail but we couldn’t come close to him,” admits one member of Clinton’s brain trust. “Obama tapped a different sensibility. They had a more, uh, viral [i.e., spreads by itself] campaign.” The very word “viral” in his mouth sounded foreign.