Ready from Day One???
Click to viewActor-director Adam Goldberg makes a salient point about judging a candidate by HOW they campaign in this clip from last night's "Real Time with Bill Maher." (Goldberg's comment starts at 6:01) I agree that HOW a campaign is run provides a window into the candidate's management style. How attentive is the candidate to detail? Does the candidate delegate tasks appropriately? Does the candidate institute checks and balances that keep him or her apprised of the campaigns successes and failures? Are they able to facilitate disparate groups and personalities working together? Are staff members held accountable for their actions? In short, can the candidate manage and govern as an executive.
Today's New York Times publishes an expose by three of its national political reporters entitled "Sniping by Aides Hurt Clinton's Image as Manager." On Thursday, the Washington Post featured a Peter Baker and Anne E. Kornblut piece "Even in Victory, Clinton Team Is Battling Itself." Joshua Green penned an article for February's The Atlantic "Inside the Clinton Shake-Up". And perhaps most prescient of all, Michelle Cottle wrote "Putsch in Hillaryland: The Clinton Campaign's Silent Shake-Up" for the New Republic back in January. While each article emphasizes a slightly different perspective, there is one inescapable thread that runs through each of these stories. And that is the fact that the Clinton campaign has not been a paragon of efficiency, adaptability or competence. As one aide was quoted as saying in the WaPo story after her campaign-saving victories last week in Ohio and Texas, Senator Clinton won "despite us, not because of us."
So MY question is simply this. Despite all her early fundraising edge, her institutional advantages as the quasi-incumbent, the head start push she inherited from her 16-year association with the vaunted Clinton political machine and her air of inevitability, why is she trailing a first-term senator whose only asset (supposedly) is a speech he made in 2002? Based on the managment of her campaign so far, is Hillary Clinton ready to assume the role of commander-in-chief from Day One???