The Magnitude of Failure

This started as something else but I can't write about why Hillary Clinton should not be Barack Obama's Vice-President unless I first write about why she lost.

There is no way Hillary Clinton should be losing the Democratic nomination right now. That is not to disparage Hillary herself as a candidate. Were it not for her personal acumen she would not have hung on as long as she has. She is losing, has lost, because the Clinton Campaign is the most throughly incompetent staff in the last quarter century of major league politics.

Last August Hillary had everything. A huge lead in the polls, more money than God, the backing of every significant branch of the party, and an air of inevitability. All she had to do was win the first two votes, or even just two of the first three, and the rest would have been a coronation. There is nothing Barack Obama or John Edwards could have done to stop her.

The key to Hillary defeat was Mark "Microtrends" Penn. Penn's philosophy, stripped of its jargon, is that the world is divided into scores of tiny little sub-groupings. There is no common thread that binds these sub-groupings together; they are distinct packets of people, each with their own separate issues. You make a majority by gathering together these little sub-groupings like picking flowers in a meadow.

In Penn's world true mass movements are impossible; the polyglot support surrounding Obama is impossible. Even the very idea of "organized labor" is an oxymoron. Workers belong to any number of unique sub-groupings and have no common cause motivating them.

Hillary's campaign in August was a mass of humanity dedicated to finding the strongest possible candidate to end Republican rule. Penn proceeded to break that mass into tiny cohorts, targeting each group with different, often contradictory, messages. Hence, free trade was sold to Hillary's New York financial supporters while "NAFTA Bad" was pitched to the Rust Belt. The problem was that the modern media mashed the various messages together. Not a flip-flopper (someone who holds to a clear position and changes it), Hillary began to appear to be someone who held every possible opinion about every possible issue simultaneously. As the debates began, this trait became apparent because debates, by their nature, cannot be microfocused. Consider how badly botched the driver's licenses for illegal aliens issue was.

Penn's campaign strategy was to weave a patchwork quilt of some sub-groups, called "firewalls," while ignoring other sub-groups. Therefore, Barack Obama's supporters could be dismissed as unimportant as they were part of the wrong sub-groups. The problem was that the quilt had holes in it. There were too many unimportant voters and calling them unimportant didn't make them go away. Also, the firewalls themselves started to unravel. They didn't always behave like the polling models dictated. Hispanics, according to the charts, were supposed to back Hillary but occasionally, as in Virginia, they didn't. Women were peeling away to Obama in numbers unsupported by the models. Confident that the polling models were flawless, it was concluded that some outside, evil, force was effecting the outcome. The Media.

The polling models had predicted that the campaign would end on Super Tuesday. When it didn't, Penn was faced with a dilemma - believe his own data or believe the facts on the ground. His data could never be wrong, it must be the facts that are in error. The Clinton Campaign wasted the entire month of February trying to twist reality so it would fit into their blueprint.

There was more to Clinton's loss that Penn's philosophical myopia but much can be laid at his feet. For example, Clinton's poor field operations in Iowa was wholly because of Penn's conviction that certain classes of people do not vote in caucuses and therefore no effort should be made to contact them. Penn made the pool of potential Hillary voters too small. And so it was, way back in Iowa, the meme that the "wrong people" were voting was born.

The truth is that Hillary Clinton would have won if she had Barack Obama's B-team. Her team lost it and still doesn't understand why they lost it. The worst thing Obama can do is pick Clinton as his Vice-President and bring her squad of screw-ups onto his team.

Ezra Klein's article on Penn's Microtrends written in September, 2007.