In an entry on Sept. 4 I quoted a Sound Politics blog writer who opined of Hillary Clinton’s campaign:
Disregard their politics for a minute. They’re efficient, they know what they’re doing, they perform, and they rarely make mistakes. Republicans worrying about the challenges of facing Hillary, Inc. – even with her high negatives – are not just whistling Dixie.
I was in lockstep with Sound Politics in its assessment then. I saw the Clinton campaign getting the endorsement of King County Executive Ron Sims as a brilliant example of a machine that couldn’t lose. I didn’t know if Clinton would beat the Republican nominee, but I had a difficult time seeing what we’re seeing today.
Time’s Karen Tumulty writes how what we’re seeing today came to pass. Ironically, one of them comes because of Mark Penn, who was the subject of another post of mine on Sept. 5. Tumulty pinpoints five mistakes.
As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state’s 370 delegates. It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all. Sitting nearby, veteran Democratic insider Harold M. Ickes, who had helped write those rules, was horrified — and let Penn know it. “How can it possibly be,” Ickes asked, “that the much vaunted chief strategist doesn’t understand proportional allocation?” And yet the strategy remained the same, with the campaign making its bet on big-state victories. Even now, it can seem as if they don’t get it.
George Will likens Clinton’s characterization of the Democratic Party results to those who would argue that the New York Yankees should have been world champs in 1960 because they scored more runs over seven games than the Pirates.
Unfortunately, baseball’s rules — pesky nuisances, rules — say it matters how runs are distributed during a World Series. The Pirates won four games, which is the point of the exercise, by a total margin of seven runs, while the Yankees were winning three by a total of 35 runs. You can look it up.
That is so true about the Yankees. I still get depressed and I was only 5 . Casey should have let Whitey Ford pitch that last game , even if he was tired the Pirates would never have scored as much in that last game .
Hillary wants to change the rules to fit her . It hurts her cause , the opposition uses it to beat her up with it . Look what the democrats did to Rossi here for trying to conmtest the rules , and what the Gop did to Gore .
As a Yankee fan I admit , sore looser .
Time for Hillary to admit it too .