The Atlantic’s HRC Blowout
The most excellent Josh Green’s document-dump-driven expose of the decline and fall of the Hillary Clinton campaign is a must read tonight.
A few thoughts:
It’s amazing just how broke the campaign let itself get, to the point of not even being able to poll in February 5 states it didn’t think it would run away with.
The most astounding detail is that it wasn’t until mid-December — weeks before Iowa — that the campaign first contemplated that the race to the nomination might be a battle for delegates, instead of states.
The most intriguing bit of untried strategy: Some in the campaign pushed to use Clinton’s victory in Ohio and (half-victory) in Texas as a springboard for demanding a revote in Florida and Michigan. This “Florigan” strategy is the only thing to emerge from the piece that seems like it could have altered the outcome… but it wasn’t tried until weeks later when the ploy smacked of desperation.
An odd note: Chief strategist Mark Penn gets off easy — too easy — in this otherwise unvarnished retrospective.
The campaign memos themselves are posted, in part, here. A note to the eagle-eyed, not all of the email addresses of the principles are expertly blacked out.