Clinton Campaign Strategy

The Atlantic has quite an interesting piece on Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy, as well as some of her memos.  These are fascinating looks behind the scenes at quite a dysfunctional campaign, and are well worth the time to read them.  Mark Penn’s strategy seems to have been correct — Clinton’s coalition toward the end was exactly what Penn laid out — but he didn’t see the threat from Obama soon enough.  He thought the real threat would have been John Edwards.

Penn did lay out a way to attack Obama — to paint him as not American enough.  He wanted to raise voters’ doubts in Obama due to his “lack of American roots” — the time spent in Indonesia and Hawaii — “his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited.”  Penn went on to say:

I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values. He told the people of NH yesterday he has a Kansas accent because his mother was from there. His mother lived in many states as far as we can tell—but this is an example of the nonsense he uses to cover this up. 

How we could give some life to this contrast without turning negative: 

Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back. 

Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.

That’s quite a striking strategy.  Penn wanted to paint Obama as un-American.  It’s astonishing, really, that a serious candidate and campaign for the presidency would think about trying to paint a rival this way.  Clinton didn’t do this, though, to her credit.

The Atlantic piece (linked above) chronicles well how Clinton’s campaign burned through money, suffered from infighting, and suffered because many people simply didn’t like the candidate.  For all that, though, this was Clinton’s election to win.  She didn’t count on a once-in-a-lifetime candidate like Obama, either; but even allowing for that, if she’d spent her money wisely we would be talking about Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech in Denver later this month.

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