>> “I’ve never seen a campaign where everyone feels so bad about themselves,” says one campaign staffer, echoing others.
Could it be that there’s a tiny, vestigial conscience rattling around in those swelled heads? Who’dve thunk it?
Hillary made a drastic mistake in this campaign, sticking with an incompetent group at the top for way too long. Even Ronald Reagan decided to fire his campaign manager after he lost Iowa to George H.W. Bush. In 2000, George W. Bush fired the operative that had been in charge in New Hampshire after losing to John McCain, and completely retooled his campaign theme and message. Hillary fired nobody after Iowa and made no changes in her theme or message. Not only did that leave the troops further down dispirited, it led to a false sense of security at the top that there was nothing really wrong with their strategy.
This is going to go down as a clear case of campaign mismanagement, among the worst in modern political history. Sure, Hillary was a flawed candidate, but not so badly flawed that she should have lost the nomination to a neophyte like Barack Obama.