Thursday, February 21, 2008

Why Hillary is Losing - In Addition to Being the Lesser Candidate

I have been critical of Hillary Clinton's campaign on a number of occassions. Perhaps having worked on a number of campaigns and having had the opportunity to see a portion of Obama's ground troops in action (the Tidewater field coordinator and others worked out of my office for the better part of two days), the plan and simple truth is that Hillary's staff is doing an absolutely horrendous job when it comes to getting the local grass roots organization up and running. Campaign events and turn out do not happen all by themselves. Much planning and coordination is required. That seems to be where Hillary's campign just doesn't seem to know what it's doing as highlighted by Mayhill Fowler's column on the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/clintons-texas-ground-ga_b_87723.html). Here are some highlights:
Although the Clinton Campaign has been telling the press that they have the ground operations to pull off a win in Texas, those ground operations have not been in evidence when I've traveled to small towns to see how Bill Clinton is doing on the Texas stump. Wednesday evening in Victoria, down in the southeastern part of the state, incipient chaos threatened to overwhelm the "Early Vote" Rally precisely because there was no ground operation. The well-oiled, beautifully constructed state-level HRC campaign machine, focused and determined in Iowa, Nevada and California, is beginning to break down.
"It's a clusterfuck! Just a clusterfuck!" the Corpus Christi producer for a local news affiliate shouts into his cell phone. He's telling his boss that there will be no coverage of Bill Clinton's visit to Victoria for the 6 o'clock news. "Who's running this campaign anyway?" the producer asks, of no one in particular. "And now five hundred people have stomped away mad." He shakes his head.
The debacle in Victoria illustrates why a ground operation is important. The details of planning have been left to a local volunteer, and she has been overwhelmed. How was she to know the needs of the live press? Or that live press often arrive before the print media? (This confusion led to some journalists being locked out.) Or the possibility of having to entertain a restive audience, because this former president typically runs very late? But the anger of the locals was nothing compared to that of the Texas press. The press had been waiting for hours, too; it had taken time to lay cables and run through all the fussing and tweaking cameramen typically do. And when the press trudged out the auditorium doors, they discovered that their umbrellas, which had been confiscated as some kind of security measure (the only one), had been appropriated, undoubtedly by the disgruntled locals.
More importantly, there was no Clinton organizer on the ground ahead-of-time in Victoria to make the right decision about the venue and to have the clout to tell Bill Clinton and his entourage, when they arrived, that moving the rally to the street was a bad idea. Poor decision-making likely cost Hillary Clinton more than a few votes in Victoria.

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