The long road to Hillary Clinton’s exit

The old team
As Mrs. Clinton assembled her campaign to take back the White House, she brought together much of the old team, led by her chief strategist, Mark J. Penn, who had orchestrated her husband’s 1996 re-election. Just as they did in 1992, the Clintons were offering two for the price of one. As Mr. Clinton surveyed the field, he could not quite believe that an upstart, inexperienced senator from Illinois could be a serious alternative to such an accomplished figure as his wife.

The campaign was built on the assumption of overwhelming force. Strategists believed that the first four contests would be decisive and that she would wrap up the nomination by Feb. 5, when more than 20 states were to hold nominating contests.

Mr. Penn shaped a message that she was "ready to lead" a nation "ready for change," talking in early meetings about her need to spark a "movement" and dismissing Mr. Obama as a glamorous personality who would not connect with working-class voters the way she could, campaign officials said. "He may be the J.F.K. in the race," Mr. Penn told Mrs. Clinton last year, according to an insider, "but you are the Bobby."

Backed by Bill Clinton, Mr. Penn pushed for aggressive attacks on Mr. Obama, something other advisers resisted. At one point, Mr. Penn argued that Mrs. Clinton should find subtle ways to exploit what he called Mr. Obama’s "lack of American roots," referring to his Kenyan father and his childhood years in Indonesia and even the offshore state of Hawaii, the campaign officials said. Mr. Penn recommended that Mrs. Clinton own the word "American" — she should talk about the "American century" and her "American Strategic Energy Fund," and so forth. She should add flag symbols to her logo, he suggested.

Along the way, though, the campaign succeeded in defining Mrs. Clinton as a leader but not as an agent of change, and it hesitated in attacking Mr. Obama, who became the one leading a movement. Her logo was adorned with a flag, but her energy fund remained just an energy fund. Her strategists underestimated Mr. Obama’s strength and spent too much money before the voting even began.

In a March 2007 memorandum summing up the campaign’s consensus "key assumptions," the Clinton adviser Harold Ickes wrote that Iowa would be better for Mrs. Clinton than New Hampshire and projected that the campaign would raise $75 million in 2007 with $25 million left at the end heading into the first contests. In reality, she finished third in Iowa while winning New Hampshire. The campaign raised $100 million in 2007 but spent so much in Iowa that it was broke soon after the new year.

The Clinton team that had been so successful in the 1990s arrived at that moment bearing all the resentments of the old days. Mr. Penn, a sometimes brusque number cruncher with centrist corporate sensibilities, had few friends inside the campaign other than the candidate and her husband. Mr. Ickes, a bare-knuckled liberal friend of labor, had despised Mr. Penn since their days in the Clinton White House and did nothing to hide it, regularly mocking "our vaunted chief strategist" and at least once engaging in a profanity-laden shouting match with him.

There were other fault lines. Aides to Mrs. Clinton took umbrage at Mr. Clinton’s freelancing and deemed his office uncooperative — at one point, they complained, his people would not allow one of her people to ride on his plane to campaign stops. His aides, on the other hand, stewed over what they saw as her people’s disregard for the advice of one of this generation’s great political minds and bristled at surrendering control of his schedule.

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The squabbling got so bad that it spilled into public view. "This makes me sick," Robert B. Barnett, Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer and debate coach, wrote in an e-mail message to top campaign advisers, according to someone who read it. "My message is simple: Stop it, please."

As for Mr. Clinton, he boiled with resentment that a candidate with as little experience as Mr. Obama was given what he considered a free pass by the news media. Yet his tone struck some as dismissive. When Mr. Clinton referred publicly to Mr. Obama as a "kid," Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, recalled in an interview that a fellow black congressman said, "I don’t know why he didn’t just call him ‘boy’ and get it over with."

In private, Mr. Clinton was making matters worse. On the night of the South Carolina primary, Mr. Clinton called and Mr. Clyburn said he told him to tone down his rhetoric against Mr. Obama. Mr. Clinton responded by calling him a rude name that Mr. Clyburn would not repeat in an interview. Mr. Clinton called back a few days later for what Mr. Clyburn called "a much more pleasant conversation," but the damage was done. "Clinton was using code words that most of us in the South can recognize when we hear that kind of stuff," Mr. Clyburn said.

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