http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/09/politics/politico/main4002927.shtmlPolitico: Shake-Ups, Miscalculations And Financial Woes Cause Some To Question Her Leadership Ability
April 9, 2008
Hillary Rodham Clinton wants voters to decide the nomination based on who can coolly and competently run the country. She had better hope they don’t study her recent campaign too closely for the answer.
Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday.
It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling - if she hadn’t made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign.
But since she has, a growing number of Democrats are comparing the Clinton and Obama campaigns - their first real exercise in executive leadership - and rendering harsh assessments of her stewardship.
In twin columns in Tuesday’s Washington Post, left-of-center columnists Peter Beinart and E.J. Dionne Jr. condemned Clinton’s overall management of the campaign and inability to build a durable message and infrastructure. It’s a common theme in Democratic circles these days.
“Any time you are involved in a long campaign, there are going to be major substantive and procedural gaffes,” says former Democratic Rep. David Bonior, an uncommitted superdelegate who served as the campaign manager to John Edwards. “The question is how a campaign handles those gaffes and how a candidate handles them. And I think it’s fair to say that Sen. Obama has handled
problems better than Sen. Clinton.”
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