Quote:Voices in Her Head
Inside Hillaryland's fatal psychodrama.
The New Republic
by Michelle Cottle
This devastating portrait of the complete and bitter chaos that reigned in the Hillary campaign's apparatus makes you reflect with some concern about just what kind of governance a Hillary presidency would have yielded.
Cottle provides much intimately informed detail - juicy detail, yeah. But by far the single thing that stands out is the utterly destructive role of Mark Penn. Penn is yet again cast as an ever ****-disturbing, ruthless roiler of intrigue, undermining his colleagues at every turn, throwing tantrums as well as cellphones, pagers and take-out food if he doesnt get his way, and above all devoted to just one thing above all: his own position. He has succeeded, through trick and threat, to enmesh himself so deeply throughout the operation that he can't be ejected anymore except pro forma -- but when faced with the choice of what is good for Hillary '08 and what is good for himself, he will choose what's good for himself every time.
But the rot goes much deeper than Penn. The campaign has become a mastodont of multiple, layered on, parallel structures of authority, working against each other more often than with each other, often openly despiseful of each other, and ever again rolling out into the open with their fights. As Cottle writes, "Some days, it's hard to remember that, just six months ago, the campaign was regarded as a highly disciplined machine. More and more, it resembles an unruly rock band plagued by dysfunction and public infighting."
Makes you realise how little you ever hear about the workings of the Obama campaign... and how incompetent a manager Hillary has proven herself to be at least in this campaign.
Not that the Obama campaign has been wholly without flaws. On Cogitamus, on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, Obama-sympathiser Nick Beaudrot was disturbed by the campaign's "serious lack of hustle in the final days of campaigning":