Miss Management

"Since December, I have been hearing a steady stream of worries from Clinton partisans who took Barack Obama's challenge seriously from the start. These loyalists felt her campaign was misreading the nature of the political year, the state of the Democratic Party, the organizational requirements of a long struggle for the nomination and the complexity of the party's attitudes toward both the candidate and former president Clinton."

At Salon, Camille Paglia has--how shall I put this?--a more personal take, questioning whether HRC is surrounded by "girly men":

"There is a strangely static and claustrophobic quality to the fiercely loyal cult she has gathered around her since her first lady years . . .

"I agree that the male staff who Hillary attracts are slick, geeky weasels or rancid, asexual cream puffs. (One of the latter, the insufferable Mark Penn, just got the heave-ho after he played Hillary for a patsy with the Colombian government.) If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say Hillary is reconstituting the toxic hierarchy of her childhood household, with her on top instead of her drill-sergeant father."

Uh, whatever you say.

There's also a major split among the McCainiacs (remember the big showdown last summer when longtime adviser John Weaver left?) But you hear less about that because John McCain won.

"The reality of McCainland . . . is that, despite its inhabitants' loyalty to McCain, they don't have much loyalty to one another," says Jason Zengerle in the New Republic. " 'The McCain internal world is very dysfunctional,' says one McCain adviser. 'But the overwhelming function is the huge love everyone has for McCain. That's the functional part that holds it all together.'

"Indeed, it's precisely the passion McCain's advisers feel for him that causes them to fight with one another. Less a politician captaining a team of rivals than a patriarch presiding over a brood of squabbling children vying for Daddy's affection, McCain has built a political family that has served him well enough to carry him to the threshold of the White House. But now, as that family tries to carry McCain over that threshold, the animosities within McCainland continue to persist. And, as much as ever, they have the potential to violently erupt."

Beore I move on, check out this Politico piece about Oprah:

"Seventy-four percent of Americans reported favorable impressions of Oprah in a January 2007 Gallup/USA Today poll."

Then she endorsed Obama.

"Almost instantly, Oprah's popularity in America plummeted. An August 2007 CBS News poll showed only 61 percent of Americans were favorably disposed to her -- a considerable drop of 13 percentage points from a similar survey conducted just seven months prior."