The NYT has a long piece analyzing the Clinton campaign which makes for some interesting reading (or, perhaps, too close a look at the sausage-making process, depending on your tastes). This, in particular, caught my eye:
Unlike her opponents, Mrs. Clinton refused to make solicitation calls to donors and had to be talked into calling the party officials known as superdelegates.
Nothing is offered to back this up. Still, if true, it does not at all jibe with my impression of Hillary Clinton. She's been in politics virtually her entire adult life, she (her campaign) raised enormous amounts of money for her initial bid for the Senate in 2000, she's been a key player in everything her husband has done from the late 1970s through the late 1990s, she has a rep for building bridges in the Senate, and on and on. I can certainly imagine why making such phone calls would be tiresome or even unpleasant, but I'd think if anyone would have had had a chance to get used to it, it would have been her.
Huh.
[added] The article does say, later on, referring to the time around the Pennsylvania primary:
Mrs. Clinton was too far behind to catch up to Mr. Obama among delegates selected by primaries and caucuses, so she hoped to persuade the superdelegates that she would be the stronger candidate in the fall. Only then did she agree to start calling superdelegates personally, something Mr. Obama had been doing for months.
2 comments:
Seems to me it all works into the "entitlement" theme, like HRC thought Supers should be calling her. Still, I agree with you that it runs counter to what one woud expect from such a legendary operator.
Or, at least an attitude of "If I have to do this work, what am I paying Penn, Ickes, McAuliffe, et al all this money for?"
I wouldn't think that she's so in the bubble that she'd expect SDs to be calling her to beg for the privilege of voting for her. Surely, she's a much more rational politician than that.
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