February 15, 2008--Putting the Blame on Patti
Yesterday, someone very close to me said that she was certain that Hillary, if elected, "would make a great president." I asked how she could be so certain and she said that Clinton had had 35 years of "effective experience." That she saw that experience as effective impressed me since most who cite the senator's experience usually speak about it quantitatively—they talk primarily about the number of years rather than what she accomplished during that time.
Since I have been skeptical about the quality of that experience, I often challenge those who mention it as the reason to vote for Hillary Clinton to give me a specific list of her actual accomplishments as opposed to things she has advocated. Most have not been able to do that; but, in spite of this, they still say that they plan to vote for her.
But, if one wants to get a current look at how effective Senator Clinton is when she is the CEO of something, all they need to do is take a close look at how she has run her campaign. After all, she is in full command of it and is thus responsible for how well it is managed and run. It could serve, then, as a fair microcosmic window through which to judge how successful she has been when in charge of a huge operation with thousands of employees. This might give us a clue as to how she might do if she becomes CEO of the USA.
According to a report in yesterday' NY Times (linked below), her campaign is nothing short of a managerial disaster.
Let me cite a few examples since I think this may very well be the most important story to emerge from her campaign in regard to the quality of her experience because it reveals a great deal about her ability to run something complicated.
It is clear that all along Clinton assumed she would be the inevitable winner with the nomination sowed up no later than Super Tuesday. Thus she deployed virtually all of her resources in the early states, primarily Iowa, New Hampshire, and a few of the Super Tuesday primaries. Virtually all of her money, staff, and her own attention were devoted to them. She did not set aside funds or staff capacity for an extended campaign. To quote one of her supporters, Governor Ed Rendell of the now-crucial state of Pennsylvania, “It sure didn’t look like they had a game plan for after Super Tuesday.”
Time Magazine this week said that this short-cited strategy indicates an “arrogant” approach: Clinton underestimated the power and velocity of the Obama campaign and when he did begin to roll up victories and surged in the delegate count the Clinton campaign has not been able, up to this point, to respond. There was no Plan B.
Having a Plan B and a Plan C and a D is Management 101 stuff. They are thus now having to scramble to ply catch-up.
Further, the Times reports, Hillary Clinton did not make provisions for a robust ground game in all but a handful of states. With Texas and Ohio now looming as do-or-die for her, her campaign is just this week beginning to open offices and round up the volunteers and paid workers needed to mobilize voters in the just two and a half weeks before those critical primaries.
In contrast, if you want to see how well the CEO of the Obama campaign has exerted leadership (Obama himself), the Times quotes Lawrence Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, as saying that Senator Obama “has developed almost a new style of campaigning. He merges modern campaign technology—he has the list of names, the follow-up effort, all the literature distribution--with these phenomenal rock-arena political revivals. In a caucus state it’s formidable.”
In Idaho, to take one example, not a state one would normally think of as an Obama state, he set up offices almost a year before February 5th. By the day of the caucus he had five offices there with 20 paid employees. His appearance in Boise attracted 14,000 to the Taco Bell Arena, the largest political rally in Idaho history. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, had a surrogate, Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington State, drop in for less than a day right before the caucus. The candidate herself never set foot in the state.
CEOs are supposed to have the vision needed for success, hire the best people to carry out that vision, and ultimately take responsibility for the outcomes. They are then rewarded if things go well and when they don’t are expected to take responsibility and fix things.
So when the Clinton campaign began to falter, what did Senator Clinton do? Rather than step up and take responsibility for the evident fact that her leadership had not produced the desired results, she got her long-time confidant and senior assistant, who had also been her campaign manager for years, Patti Solis Doyle (referred to by many as her “adopted daughter” because of the closeness of the relationship), to take the hit for her. If Patti, rather than Hillary, had been so at fault, a real CEO-type would have fired her. That’s what we expect of commanders in chief.
Rona says, “Since Chelsea has been her mother’s surrogate in Wisconsin and Hawaii, if Hillary loses there, she may be in danger of joining her adopted sister in limbo.”
Since I have been skeptical about the quality of that experience, I often challenge those who mention it as the reason to vote for Hillary Clinton to give me a specific list of her actual accomplishments as opposed to things she has advocated. Most have not been able to do that; but, in spite of this, they still say that they plan to vote for her.
But, if one wants to get a current look at how effective Senator Clinton is when she is the CEO of something, all they need to do is take a close look at how she has run her campaign. After all, she is in full command of it and is thus responsible for how well it is managed and run. It could serve, then, as a fair microcosmic window through which to judge how successful she has been when in charge of a huge operation with thousands of employees. This might give us a clue as to how she might do if she becomes CEO of the USA.
According to a report in yesterday' NY Times (linked below), her campaign is nothing short of a managerial disaster.
Let me cite a few examples since I think this may very well be the most important story to emerge from her campaign in regard to the quality of her experience because it reveals a great deal about her ability to run something complicated.
It is clear that all along Clinton assumed she would be the inevitable winner with the nomination sowed up no later than Super Tuesday. Thus she deployed virtually all of her resources in the early states, primarily Iowa, New Hampshire, and a few of the Super Tuesday primaries. Virtually all of her money, staff, and her own attention were devoted to them. She did not set aside funds or staff capacity for an extended campaign. To quote one of her supporters, Governor Ed Rendell of the now-crucial state of Pennsylvania, “It sure didn’t look like they had a game plan for after Super Tuesday.”
Time Magazine this week said that this short-cited strategy indicates an “arrogant” approach: Clinton underestimated the power and velocity of the Obama campaign and when he did begin to roll up victories and surged in the delegate count the Clinton campaign has not been able, up to this point, to respond. There was no Plan B.
Having a Plan B and a Plan C and a D is Management 101 stuff. They are thus now having to scramble to ply catch-up.
Further, the Times reports, Hillary Clinton did not make provisions for a robust ground game in all but a handful of states. With Texas and Ohio now looming as do-or-die for her, her campaign is just this week beginning to open offices and round up the volunteers and paid workers needed to mobilize voters in the just two and a half weeks before those critical primaries.
In contrast, if you want to see how well the CEO of the Obama campaign has exerted leadership (Obama himself), the Times quotes Lawrence Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, as saying that Senator Obama “has developed almost a new style of campaigning. He merges modern campaign technology—he has the list of names, the follow-up effort, all the literature distribution--with these phenomenal rock-arena political revivals. In a caucus state it’s formidable.”
In Idaho, to take one example, not a state one would normally think of as an Obama state, he set up offices almost a year before February 5th. By the day of the caucus he had five offices there with 20 paid employees. His appearance in Boise attracted 14,000 to the Taco Bell Arena, the largest political rally in Idaho history. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, had a surrogate, Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington State, drop in for less than a day right before the caucus. The candidate herself never set foot in the state.
CEOs are supposed to have the vision needed for success, hire the best people to carry out that vision, and ultimately take responsibility for the outcomes. They are then rewarded if things go well and when they don’t are expected to take responsibility and fix things.
So when the Clinton campaign began to falter, what did Senator Clinton do? Rather than step up and take responsibility for the evident fact that her leadership had not produced the desired results, she got her long-time confidant and senior assistant, who had also been her campaign manager for years, Patti Solis Doyle (referred to by many as her “adopted daughter” because of the closeness of the relationship), to take the hit for her. If Patti, rather than Hillary, had been so at fault, a real CEO-type would have fired her. That’s what we expect of commanders in chief.
Rona says, “Since Chelsea has been her mother’s surrogate in Wisconsin and Hawaii, if Hillary loses there, she may be in danger of joining her adopted sister in limbo.”
posted by Steven Zwerling at
2:28 PM
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