Prometheus 6

Atlantic Scores Internal Clinton Campaign Emails
By Anne E. Kornblut

Just when you thought everyone had moved on... former advisers to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton are in a tizzy over an upcoming piece in the Atlantic Monthly that chronicles the inner workings of the now-defunct campaign. Of particular concern are nearly 200 internal memos that the author, Josh Green, obtained -- 130 or so of which he plans to scan in and post online. When the piece is published sometime next week, readers will be able to scroll through the memos, from senior strategists such as Mark Penn, Harold Ickes and Geoff Garin, and see what exactly was going on inside the infamously fractured Clinton organization. That has some former team members in a panic. And we thought the Abramoff e-mails were fun....

Even better, it's been leaked to The Politico (hat tip to Ta-Nehisi Coates) .

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?”

This goes back before Bill Clinton's attempts to diminish Obama's various wins. It goes back to Bill Shaheen suggesting Obama may have been a cocaine dealer . It goes back to Bob Kerrey talking about how he attended a "secular madrassa." It goes back to "Pig" Penn interview that was so smarmy it disgusted the guys standing next to him. All that created the atmosphere into which Bill Clinton dropped his diminishments of Obama.

THAT is why he and she were called racists, and nothing in Black people's reactions to the Clintons makes sense if you ignore that. So people have been ignoring that. Hopefully this article will rectify that.

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.”

That's because this was her first competitive campaign...and she didn't even know it was a competition. 

Blame PUMA. No one would have embarassed Clinton any further if they had sut the hell up like you're supposed to when you lose.