I'm a little behind, this column is from February 24th, but I was busy looking for pictures of Beyonce in African garb. They're surprisingly hard to find, given what I can only describe as her tribal flailing at the end of the "Baby Boy" video. But I digress.
The highlights from Mr. Rich's column:
- "The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done."
- South Carolina: "where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots."
- Kansas: "three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3."
- Wisconsin "the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11."
- Vermont: "There were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago."
- Pennsylvania: "the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline."
- I'm going to add that she also admitted in debate at being baffled by the Texas primary system which had "grown men crying." Huh? The grown men on your campaign, Hillary? Not your best, or most competent-sounding, sound bite.
In other words, Hillary: You took the nomination for granted and didn't work hard enough to make sure you had it. You had no post-Febrary 5th contingency plan. You, the supposed workhorse candidate, are getting superbly outworked by your opponent. And just because he has the charisma to make it seem easy doesn't mean that it is.
Because, Hillary, it's not easy. As you should know better than anyone. A number of people very close to me work part or full time on Obama's campaign, and they are earning every vote they get. And it's just wack that some members of the media, and you, are equating the Obama support base to a bunch of kids on some political acid.
Here's Frank again, expanding on the organizational failure of her campaign:
Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid.
This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.
After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn’t won in “any of the significant states” outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the “insult 40 states” strategy.
Haha, that is hilarious. Go blogs!!
Anyway, given that my last post was about how fed-up I am with everyone scrutinizing Hillary's lack of charisma, lack of ability to publicly seem "consistent" and "in control of herself," and pitting that against Obama's sea of calm and cool...God if I read the word "cool"--pejorative or not--to describe Obama I'm gonna... Anyway...
Thank you Frank, for bringing us back to the nuts and bolts of what these two candidates are doing, what campaigning for president is and should be about, and how their actions are, and are not, working on us. And if you happen to read this, I'm that girl you almost hired to be your assistant whom you told to finish college instead.
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