The ultimate indignity: Hillary gets public advice from Bob Shrum. And actually the advice isn’t that bad.
But there’s a point he makes that’s a good one and brings up something I’ve long thought about what I’ll call the Late Clintonites. There’s a good deal of overlap to be sure. But there was always a pretty substantial difference in personnel between the folks who worked for Clinton in 1992 and those who helped win his reelection in 1996 and, to a significant degree, worked for Hillary in 2000, 2006 and now 2008.
Mark Penn is perhaps the best example, though there are a lot of others who fit the model. To some degree a lot of these guys got a great reputation and big egos based on stuff they did in the late 1990s when it was really just that they had Bill Clinton as their candidate. But it’s bit more than that.
There’s a particularly kind of politics — ideological and tactical — when you’re king of the hill, the guy or gal on the high ground parrying competitors trying to unseat you. This was particularly the case in the unique politics of the late 1990s when you had this great and very canny politician, Bill Clinton, holding the bundle of powers and prerogatives of the presidency squaring off against an emboldened but frequently unpopular and overreaching Republican Congress.
There are certain dynamics unique to that particular situation. Many Dems now bewail and reproach Clinton’s ‘triangulation’ and micro-initiatives. But they had a great deal of political logic in that context.
The problem is that the experience created a generation of Democratic operatives — pollsters, flaks, campaign workers and more — who thought they’d discovered the key to successful campaign work, the consultatory midas touch. Often they just fell in love with their own pretended genius.
But that model doesn’t work for a damn when you’re in opposition, as has been the case since 2001. And it was a ridiculous model for Hillary to follow in this election.
