What went wrong with the HRC campaign

Michelle Cottle, a senior editor of The New Republic, today reports What went wrong, as told by more than a dozen anonymous members of the campaign. This was the post-mortem:

IOWA

"If you ask the Iowa folks, I'm sure they would tell you she wasn't there enough...."

"It was obvious talking to people on the ground there that they simply did not get the Iowa caucus from a field perspective. That's where the thing was lost. They didn't have a good idea of the horse-trading that makes caucuses work for you."

"Mark Penn and Mandy Grunwald dismissed the possibility of youth turning out heavily in Iowa for Obama, saying on the record after the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, 'They don't look like caucus-goers.'"

"Clearly [Obama] was a phenomenon. He was tapping something really different than anyone had ever seen before. ....We didn't lay a serious glove on him until the fall. We tried to a little bit, but we weren't successful."

IMAGE

"Running as an incumbent, as the inevitable candidate, was probably our biggest mistake, particularly in a time when the country is really hungry for change."

"We ran a frontrunner campaign in a party that punishes frontrunners...."

"She never embraced the mantle from the beginning of being a different kind of candidate.... There's no reason why she's not a change agent also."

"...the public turning point was the Philadelphia debate. Her non-answer on the driver's license issue. Again, it spoke to the character issue: The sense that she will say anything and do anything to get elected...."

"Her dense and wonky speaking style...."

LOCATION

"... the campaign was based in the D.C. area, rooting its perspective in the fishbowl and echo chamber nature of the capital."

STRATEGY

"There was not any plan in place from beginning to end on how to win the nomination. It was, 'Win Iowa.' There was not the experience level, and, frankly, the management ability, to create a whole plan to get to the magical delegate number. ...."

"Harold Ickes's encyclopedic understanding of the proportional delegate system was never operationalized into a field plan. The campaign inexplicably wrote off many states entirely, allowing Obama to create the lead of 100+ delegates that he has today...."

"We would just cringe. Ugh. Such an out-of-touch corporate run kind of campaign--exactly what you'd expect from Mark Penn.... running a campaign to capture the nomination in a change environment is something he had never done...."

"...making our chief strategist our one and only pollster...."

PERSONNEL

..."Hillary assembled a team thin on presidential campaign experience that confused discipline with insularity; they didn't know what they didn't know and were too arrogant to ask at a time early enough in the process when it could have made a difference...."

"[Original campaign manager] Patti and [her deputy] Mike [Henry] sat up there in their offices and no one knew what they did all day...."

"Keeping the same team in place [after New Hampshire] ... Too much damage had been done by the time Maggie Williams took the helm."

"[the campaign] was overstaffed with hired guns with no real allegiance to HRC..."

"There were so many consultants, instead of full-time staff ...."

THEMES

"There were more themes in this campaign than anything I've ever seen."

"What we failed to do is pivot when we needed to. We stuck on the same thing. ... We didn't say, 'OK, everybody gets that she can do this job.' We repackaged the old message and sent it back out. Instead of 'Ready on Day One,' we changed to 'Solutions.' It was a very IBM approach."

MONEY

"There was financial mismanagement bordering on fraud. A candidate who raised more than a quarter of a billion dollars over the years had to pump in millions more of her own money to stave off bankruptcy."

THE PRESS

"The way we handled [the press] was a mistake on our part. What we're hearing is that we truly treated people badly and weren't accessible enough or open enough. We had bad relationships with reporters, and it probably bit us on the ass."

BILL

"[Bill's] behavior that started off in Iowa, carried on in New Hampshire, and culminated in South Carolina really was the beginning of the end. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, he just kind of imploded. I think, if I had to look back on it, it became more about him than about her. It really was destructive overall."