Clinton's staff was 'Achilles' heel'

A much-awaited article on Hillary Clinton's ill-fated campaign says that her divided staff didn't serve her well, that she didn't make hard choices, and that she rejected her chief strategist's suggestion to go after Barack Obama on his "lack of American roots."

"Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to 'do the job from Day One.' In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel," Joshua Green of The Atlantic magazine writes in the piece, which was posted online Monday evening and appears in the magazine's September issue.

"What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.

Green obtained a raft of internal memos, including one from strategist Mark Penn about going negative against Obama:

"All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light," Penn wrote. "Save it for 2050. It also exposes a very strong weakness for him -- his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values. He told the people of NH yesterday he has a Kansas accent because his mother was from there. His mother lived in many states as far as we can tell -- but this is an example of the nonsense he uses to cover this up."

Penn continued: "How we could give some life to this contrast without turning negative: Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back. Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds."

Clinton refused to go along.

The article also says that the Clinton campaign ignored a series of memos by Harold Ickes about the party's complicated delegate allocation system -- on which Obama capitalized by winning a string of caucus states from Super Tuesday in February to the March 4 primaries in Ohio and Texas
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"Assuming that after Iowa and New Hampshire the presidential nominating contest narrows to two competitive candidates who remain locked in a highly contested election through 5 February, the focus of the campaign and press will shift to the delegate count. The dedication of resources (including candidate time) should be influenced, in part, by factors that will afford HRC an advantage in acquiring more delegates compared to her opponent(s)," Ickes wrote last December.

Green writes that Clinton advisers also couldn't agree on whether Clinton should give a speech specifically on gender: "In the aftermath of Obama’s historic race speech on March 18, Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas congresswoman, urged Clinton to deliver a speech of her own on gender. Clinton appeared very much to want to do this, and solicited the advice of her staff, which characteristically split. The campaign went back and forth for weeks. Opponents argued that her oratory couldn’t possibly match Obama’s, and proponents countered that she would get credit simply for trying, inspire legions of women to her cause, and highlight an issue that everyone in the campaign fiercely believed was hurting them — sexism. But Clinton never made a decision, and seemed troubled by the concern of Ann Lewis, perhaps her most venerable feminist adviser, who opposed such a speech for fear that it would equate sexism with racism — another contrast with Obama that Clinton feared she would lose."

Clinton didn't give that speech until it was part of her address in June when she suspended her campaign, endorsed Obama, and paid tribute to her supporters: "Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it."