Clinton told to portray Obama as foreign

Mark Penn, the top campaign strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign, advised her to portray Barack Obama as having a “limited” connection “to basic American values and culture,” according to a forthcoming article in The Atlantic.



The magazine reports Penn suggested getting much rougher with Obama in a memo on March 30, after her crucial wins in Texas and Ohio: “Does anyone believe that it is possible to win the nomination without, over these next two months, raising all these issues on him? ... Won’t a single tape of [the Reverend Jeremiah] Wright going off on America with Obama sitting there be a game ender?”



Atlantic Senior Editor Joshua Green writes that major decisions during her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination would be put off for weeks until suddenly Clinton “would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.”



Green reports that on a staff conference call in January where Clinton received “little response” or “silence” to several of her suggestions for how to recover from the Iowa loss and do better in New Hampshire, “Clinton began to grow angry, according to a participant’s notes,” Green recounts. “‘This has been a very instructive call, talking to myself,’ she snapped, and hung up.”



The eight-page blockbuster, “The Front-Runner’s Fall,” draws on internal memos, e-mails and meeting notes to reveal what the magazine’s September issue calls “the backstabbing and conflicting strategies that produced an epic meltdown.”

Penn, the presidential campaign’s chief strategist, wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article: “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”


A key take-away from the article is that Clinton received a lot of accurate advice, including from Penn. He wrote a remarkably prescient memo in March 2007 about the importance of appealing to what he called “the Invisible Americans,” specifically “WOMEN, LOWER AND MIDDLE CLASS VOTERS” — exactly the groups that helped Clinton beat Obama in key states nearly a year later.

But no one synthesized and acted on the good advice.



“The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men,” Green writes. “[H]er advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. ... [S]he never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel.



“What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make.”



Geoffrey Garin, a well-known Democratic pollster who helped direct the campaign’s strategy team for Clinton’s presidential campaign during its final two months, wrote in a memo to at least 10 top campaign aides that he wanted to stop “end runs” around communications director Howard Wolfson.



“I don’t mean to be an asshole, but ... changes to important statements and other critical campaign communications simply have to go through Howard,” Garin wrote on April 12. “Howard is the person who is ultimately responsibility for making sure that we deliver our messages the right way, and I hope everyone will support and respect him in that role.”

Robert Barnett, the superlawyer and longtime Clinton adviser, e-mailed about 20 Clinton aides on March 6, with the subject line “STOP IT !!!!”: “This circular firing squad that is occurring is unattractive, unprofessional, unconscionable and unacceptable. ... After this campaign is over, there will be plenty of time to access blame or claim credit.”



Another part of that e-mail was quoted in The New York Times in a June article by Peter Baker and Jim Rutenberg.

The Penn memo suggesting that the campaign target Obama’s “lack of American roots” said in part: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.

“Save it for 2050. ... Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America American to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back

“Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.”

That last paragraph was paraphrased in the New York Times article.

Other highlights:

• Of all the materials The Atlantic received, the first mention of delegate counts came in a memo that senior adviser Harold Ickes sent out just 12 days before the Iowa primary, after the campaign had nearly run out of money campaigning in Iowa, where Clinton would finish third. He predicted, correctly, as it turned out:

“Assuming after Iowa and New Hampshire the presidential nominating contest narrows to two competitive candidates who remain locked in a highly contested election through 5 February, the focus of the campaign will shift to the delegate count.” But the campaign, Green notes, had already ceased polling in states they didn’t expect to win, so it had a limited ability to narrow the margins in states that favored Obama.

• Green reports that on Feb. 11, the day that Clinton finally replaced campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle with Maggie Williams, Wolfson aide Phil Singer cursed out first Wolfson, then Policy Director and Solis Doyle ally Neera Tanden, yelling: “[Expletive] you and the whole [expletive] cabal” before climbing on a chair, berating the entire staff and leaving.

The same day, Washington Post Managing Editor Phillip Bennett wrote Williams to complain Singer had spread rumors about one of his reporters. Williams eventually saw the letter after Wolfson intercepted it, and Singer left for a week. On his return, Green reports that Wolfson explained to a colleague, “When the house is on fire, it’s better to have a psychotic fireman than no fireman at all.”

• Green writes: “The internal discord over whether to attack Obama led some of her own staff to spin reporters to try to downplay the significance of her criticisms. The result for Clinton was the worst of both worlds: The conflicting message exacerbated her reputation for negativity without affording her whatever benefits a sustained attack might have yielded.”

• The famous 3 a.m. ad, written by Penn and approved by Clinton, almost didn’t run: “In the days leading up to Ohio and Texas, the campaign kept arguing over whether to air the [3 a.m.] ad. With the deadline looming, Bill Clinton, speaking from a cell phone as his plane sat on a runway, led a conference call on Thursday, Feb. 28, in which he had both sides present their case. As his plane was about to lift off, it was Bill Clinton — not Hillary — who issued the decisive order: ‘Let’s go with it.’ ”

• “On Feb. 25, a pair of Clinton advisers began sending a series of increasingly urgent memos, which were given to me by a recipient sympathetic to Solis Doyle as a way of illustrating that strategic mistakes continued even after her dismissal [announced Feb. 10]. The first memo, from Philippe Reines and Andrew Shapiro, worried that Clinton’s anticipated wins in Texas and Ohio on March 4 would not meaningfully narrow Obama’s delegate lead — a fact sure to sap momentum once the initial excitement of victory passed.”

• "They proposed that Clinton, from a position of strength immediately after her wins, challenge Obama to accept Michigan and Florida revotes. Such a move ‘preempts Obama’s reiteration on March 5 that they are still up 100-plus delegates and that we can’t win,’ they noted. ‘The press will love the rematch, like Rocky II.”