Miss Management

After Howard Dean flamed out in the 2004 primaries, I wrote a lengthy piece about the "nasty civil war that crippled decision-making and devastated morale" in his campaign. Some aides "just plain despised each other." There were tales of temper tantrums, lying, internal spying, mismanaged money and retaliation against reporters, with the campaign manager repeatedly threatening to quit.

All this conflict was a disservice to Dean, although the former Vermont governor was responsible for the operation. But imagine if Dean had won Iowa and rolled to the nomination, as seemed likely at one point. Would anyone have cared if his campaign was one big dysfunctional family?

I exhume this history because a new, post-Penn narrative in the media says Hillary Clinton has run such a lousy campaign that she'd probably be a lousy president. Had she won Iowa, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

While I think most campaigns are riven by strife and infighting, this is absolutely fair game for criticism and analysis. In the course of long and brutal elections, voters get a chance to glimpse how the candidate operates under pressure. No one is really making national-security decisions after 3 a.m. phone calls, so we look at how the contenders deal with debates, ads, sinking polls, shrinking treasuries and staff gaffes--all of which give us a rough approximation of how that person would manage a huge bureaucracy and cope with difficult decisions. Running for president is in some ways an absurd marathon that deters all but the most insanely ambitious, but it is, on some level, a character test.

Jim VandeHei and David Paul Kuhn make that case in Politico (which, you may recall, contends that the race is basically over anyway):

"Hillary Rodham Clinton wants voters to decide the nomination based on who can coolly and competently run the country. She had better hope they don't study her recent campaign too closely for the answer. Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday.

"It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling -- if she hadn't made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign."

In other words: Ready on Day One?

Peter Beinart hits the same theme:

"Of the three candidates still in the 2008 race, Obama has run the best campaign by far. McCain's was a top-heavy, slow-moving, money-hemorrhaging Hindenburg that eventually exploded, leaving the Arizona senator to resurrect his bankrupt candidacy through sheer force of will. Clinton's campaign has been marked by vicious infighting and organizational weakness, as manifested by her terrible performance in caucus states."

As does E.J. Dionne:

"The most striking critiques of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign have come not from her opponents or her enemies but from her most loyal friends.