A ‘Cancer’ on the Clinton Candidacy

[Valin]

Politico Magazine:

Glenn Thrush and Annie Karni

November/December 2015

 

 

Halfway through her long and humbling summer, Hillary Clinton ran into an old friend who wanted to know how she was bearing up under the pressure of near-daily revelations about the use of her private email server during her time in the State Department. Clinton was unmistakably unhappy.

 

“I am having two problems,” she bluntly told the supporter at a social event. “On the one hand, I feel like I’m rolling out a lot of substantive programs on issues that people care about. We’re getting one day’s news coverage. But there’s nothing larger knitting it together. We’re not breaking through. … And my team needs to get their act together on the email response.”

 

Clinton’s frustration with her own campaign staff was striking. So was her refusal for much of the year to characterize the escalating email controversy as anything other than a failure of communications, messaging or the vast right-wing-and-media conspiracy. Both complaints were consistent with what other campaign advisers told us in dozens of interviews for this story—except some of them laid equal blame on the candidate herself.

 

Indeed, from the minute news of Clinton’s secret personal email server broke this past March, she had reacted by lashing out at her enemies—and repeatedly demanding of her inner circle, “How do we get past this?” Neither the campaign nor the candidate have definitively answered that question, and the months of indecision, uncertainty and mounting legal threat have left Clinton, for the second time in her two presidential campaigns, a deeply vulnerable front-runner.

 

From the start, the email controversy—and her campaign’s handling of it—has been an exercise in exasperation, according to people involved in the effort. The wiry and wily John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, thought right away that she needed to dump everything out in public as quickly as possible to avoid the deadly drip-drip-drip. “We need to throw the facts to the dogs, and let ’em chew on it,” Podesta told the candidate. But Clinton’s answer—and that of her lawyer David Kendall and her former State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills—was a “no” when Podesta and other advisers asked for some details. Foggy Bottom needed to review the emails, they were told, and besides, half of them, the ones deemed “personal,” had already been deleted.

 

(Snip)

 

“It sounds crazy, but I think she simply wasn’t equipped to deal with all this,” says one longtime ally who has been in regular contact with Clinton. “She’s never been a great candidate, OK? She needed time and campaigns don’t give you time. … She was blindsided, and I think only now, after all this crap, is she finally in the right headspace.”

 

Nearly every one of 50 advisers, donors, Democratic operatives and friends we interviewed for this story thought Clinton was a mediocre candidate who would make a good president, if given the chance. They painted a portrait of a politician who talked about learning from past mistakes while methodically repeating them—a far cry from the formidable shatterer of glass ceilings who had put such a scare into Obama late in the 2008 primaries.

 

(Snip)

 

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H/T James Woods