What the heck happened to Hillary?

Howard Fineman • E-mail

MANCHESTER, N.H. - On Elm Street this morning, there were scores of young people lining the sidewalks waving signs at passing motorists.

All the kids and all the signs were for one candidate: Sen. Barack Obama.

Maybe it’s too early to ask, but I am going to anyway... What the heck happened to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton?

Nearly a month ago in this column I wrote that Hillary’s campaign was “teetering on the brink.” Still, I didn’t think the free fall would be this dramatic and potentially irreversible. Maybe she can pull it out, but I tend to doubt it at this point.

The saving, cautionary analogy is the near-death campaign of Walter Mondale, who survived Gary Hart’s charge in 1984. But politics doesn’t work the same way it did in those days.

The unions who saved Mondale have far less clout; the internet has and will give Obama far more resources than Hillary; and Hart – a praiseworthy figure (one of the brightest strategic minds the Democrats have ever had) – wasn’t exactly a user-friendly campaigner. He certainly was no Obama. Also, the national media of the day turned on Hart; they are unlikely to do the same to Obama.

Much of Hillary’s travail is her fault, but some of it is just bad luck and bad timing – not to mention the presence of two skilled foes in Obama and former Sen. John Edwards.

Here is my short list of reasons for her travails:

• Hiring the topmost insiders
  Hillary underestimated the hunger for change outside the Beltway. Nothing proved that more than the professionals she chose to run her campaign. They were brilliant, but had grown wealthy in their work and perhaps had lost a fingertip feel for the urgency and everyday fear that grips most of middle-class America these days.
  
• Running on experience
  The fact is, she doesn’t really have that much experience that is truly hands-on as an official. It was too easy for her opponents to question its validity.
  
• Ignoring Obama
  In some ways, Obama isn’t quite the outsider and systematic change agent that he claims to be. Yes he is an African-American who now calls the South Side of Chicago home – and that will always make him an outsider to some extent. In many other ways, however, he is just a new wave of what Bill and Hillary were years ago – an on-the-make, Ivy League-educated, Democratic lawyer eager to seize power in Washington. If Hillary was going to say that, she needed to have done it months ago. She did not.

• Waiting too long to get specific
  The Clintonistas held a conference call yesterday to point out some relevant things: that Obama’s New Hampshire co-chair was a drug-company lobbyist; that the senator had vehemently opposed the Iraq war but then voted repeatedly to fund it; that he had said he wanted to scrap the Patriot Act and start over, but then voted for it. As I listened to the conference call, I couldn’t for the life of me understand why the Clinton folks didn’t highlight these and other items much earlier. By the time they did so, it was too late. You can’t do things by half in politics; if you are going to go after an opponent you have to do it with gusto.

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