WOW --"Clinton Machine Shaken by Setback" - Time LINK

Clinton cannot change who she is.... there won't be a re-tooling of her persona.

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1700705,00.html


Saturday, Jan. 05, 2008 By KAREN TUMULTY

"The scope of Barack Obama's victory in Iowa has shaken the Clinton machine down to its bolts. Donors are panicking. The campaign has been making a round of calls to reassure notoriously fickle "superdelegates" — elected officials and party regulars who are awarded convention spots by virtue of their titles and positions — who might be reconsidering their decisions to back the candidate who formerly looked like a sure winner. And internally, a round of recriminations is being aimed at her chief strategist, Mark Penn, as the representative of everything about her pseudo-incumbent campaign that has been too cautious, too arrogant, too conventional and too clueless as to how much the political landscape has shifted since the last Clinton reign. One adviser summed up the biggest challenge that faces the campaign in two words: "Fresh thinking."

"Specifically, those inside the campaign and outside advisers fault Penn for failing to see the Iowa defeat coming. They say he was assuring Clinton and her allies right up until the caucuses that they would win it. Says one: "He did not predict in any way, shape or form the tidal wave we saw." In particular, he had assured them that Clinton's support among women would carry her through. Yet she managed to win only 30% of the women's vote, while 35% of them went for Obama."

"A modest rise in Iowa turnout from traditional levels — say by about 20,000 or 30,000 — might have been easy to write off as merely the result of superior tactics on the part of the well-funded Obama operation. But the fact that voters flooded the caucuses, and that Obama swept just about every demographic group, speaks to something larger that is going on in the electorate, Clinton strategists now acknowledge."

"That leaves them facing problems on two levels. The first, and easier one to grapple with, is how to deal with Obama. Even as the results in Iowa were still coming in, the Clinton campaign was mobilizing onto an attack footing. But it's possible that the most difficult problem is not Obama; it could be Clinton. How can she retool her message — and her identity as a virtual incumbent — to resonate with an electorate that seems to yearn more for change than any other quality? Says one longtime Democratic strategist, who is close to the Clintons: "Fundamentally, she is who she is; she can't change who she is, and maybe this is not her time."

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This part said it all:

How can she retool her message — and her identity as a virtual incumbent — to resonate with an electorate that seems to yearn more for change than any other quality? Says one longtime Democratic strategist, who is close to the Clintons: "Fundamentally, she is who she is; she can't change who she is, and maybe this is not her time."

Truer words have not been spoken.

Truer words have not been spoken.

Penn had the numbers

... he had THE math. :)

The shift in the media narrative from just a week ago to now is amazing. Hillary has gone from frontrunner to third place in a matter of days. But Hillary's fans said the Iowa Caucuses don't matter though. Hillary can even afford to lose NH, Nevada's her failsafe failsafe...

As a Deaniac in '04, I know all too well how quickly things can change after the Iowa Caucus. Hillary's loss in Iowa was just the beginning. I've got a feeling Obama's gonna easily win NH, then on to South Carolina...the momentum will carry him in Nevada and then he will sail to the nomination. Clinton is finished. Just my $.02

as your political strategist is like voting for the IWR..it's just wrong and nothing good will come from it.

And as a Deaniac..I hope you're right about your little scenario there:)

Right now, Obama's got everything going for him and Hillary's got nothing. She's struggling.

Her entire campaign failed, because she never had a real message or a strategy like Obama and Edwards do.

Hillary had memes: I'm inevitable. I'm the most electable.

Both of those things are not true. They were never true.

As Hillary keeps saying about Obama, "Candidates have to be vetted."

That's exactly what is happening to her "inevitability" (which is now destroyed) and her "electability" (which is falling apart).

Her newest meme is that she's the real change maker. She got by on inevitability and electability for
a while, but there's no way that "I'm for change too" will stick for more than five minutes.

Just for accuracy

Read all about it here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=2594440&mesg_id=2594608

but certainly an AIPAC follower. I do not see much difference between he and Hillary's views on the Mideast except perhaps for the K-L vote of hers. Was he there for that vote?

... "I love it when a plan comes together."



Ever since that http://www.google.com/search?as_q=mark+penn+corpgovactivist&hl=en&num=10&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&cr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=democraticunderground.com&as_rights=&safe=images">twit said Hillary had 360 Electoral Votes in the bag, I've been onto him.

Your link is cigar-worthy.

- Dave

I remember reading a similar article a day or two ago about Penn that mentions something missed here. It said that the biggest problem with Mark Penn is having him be both the chief strategist and chief pollster in the campaign, because people holding both jobs tend to go "the strategy must be right because the numbers for it are right", even though at times a good chief strategist will have to say "I don't care what the numbers say, we've got to try something different".

If Obama beats Hillary Clinton in the race for the democratic nomination then her and Penn will be remembered as screwing up and throwing away one of the biggest primary leads in history (a 20+ percentage point advantage nationally) and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. She'll join the long list of other previous democratic front runners for the presidential nomination who's lead fell apart in the end by the time it was time to vote.

as in Pelosi ought to rethink her table.

ALL Bush enablers should be quaking in their boots now.

:eyes:

implies that there are some big money people out there who are very unhappy. Maybe it is better to fionance your campaign $25 at a time instead of $2300!







PS - I'd love to know who the "donors" are!

look at what Edwards has achieved at a fraction of the money spent.

The USS Clinton is going down!

*bubbles*

of the public at large appear to have been wrong, wrong, wrong.