Monday, February 25, 2008

Hillary loses to Obama's Asymmetric Political Campaign Strategy

Frank Rich has a good piece in the NyTimes which assesses the outcome of the Democratic horse race between Obama and Clinton and offers a number of explanations for why the latter appears to have lost.

Link.

I found the allegory between the democratic race and the Iraq war to be pretty witty (tho perhaps a little snobbishly so):
The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.

That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn.

1 comment:

dj-jas said...

hmm, i'm not sure what to think about the NY Times anymore.. first they hire bill kristol to write op-eds (the ludicrousness of that move need not be explained). then they suddenly start writing semi-sympathetic pieces about clinton when she starts losing, trying to make up for all the bullshit they put her through while pretty much letting obama off the hook. (until a few days ago, i couldn't find anything on the NYT website about his pakistan gaffe, for instance. compare that to 10+ stories mentioning clinton's cleavage.) whatever, i finally decided, now that edwards is out, that i'm for hillary. it's a bit half-hearted, but barack seems so stilted and vacuous to me. he's also boring. but i guess he will be our next commander in chief... can't wait.