1. The Clintonites were so confident of an early victory that they spent money like drunken sailors (one of the biggest beneficiaries of all this spending was Mr Penn's own political consultancy). The campaign was all but bankrupt by late January—though Patti Solis Doyle, the campaign manager, failed to tell her boss the bad news—and the Obama campaign outspent them two or three to one on Super Tuesday, February 5th.2. The Clinton machine was so confident of victory in the big states such as California, Ohio and Pennsylvania that it failed to plan for the smaller caucus states, or for the primaries and caucuses that were to follow immediately afterwards. Mr Obama was thus given free rein to rack up huge victories in places like Virginia. After Super Tuesday, Mr Obama scored a series of 11 wins in a row. Without those, he would never have secured the nomination.
3. Bill Clinton's decision to belittle Mr Obama's victory in South Carolina by pointing out that Jesse Jackson had also won the state? The only logical implication of that was the slur that a black candidate somehow could not win. The ex-President started out being the country's "first black president", and morphed into a bitter racist in the eyes of the very black community that put Bill into office.
4. The silence of Nobel prize winner, Albert Gore. His silence spoke volumes. The one administration member who could have vouched for Hillary's abilities and sideline experience sat smugly on the sideline watching the Clinton's fail for the first time in twenty years.
5. The lack of a coherent message....Mrs Clinton, without a compelling story to sell to the Democratic electorate, tried fitfully to co-opt Mr Obama's “change” message (and she charged Obama with plagiarism). She alternated between being an iron lady, ready on day one, and a put-upon woman, bullied by mean boys. She reinvented herself as a working-class hero, Rocky in a pantsuit. But this created an impression of slipperiness and opportunism.
6. Mark Penn, her chief strategist, ran her campaign just like Bill's in the 90's. His inability to judge Obama's charisma caused him to underestimate his campaign as the true singular threat until it was too late (IOWA). During her inept bid Mrs Clinton fell back on all the worst instincts of Democratic politics—denouncing free trade, stirring up the resentments of blue-collar America, and adding a flirtation with racism to the brew. Add to this, while Hillary was denouncing free trade, including her husbands NAFTA program, Penn was quietly lobbying for free trade.
7. At a time when even the gigantic coffers of the Clinton machine needed refueling, Hollywood mogul David Geffen, someone who was of great help to Bill in the past, not only turned his back on Hillary, he led the way for other Hollywood mogul types such as Reiner and Spielberg (who somehow found the stomach to back him despite Obama's clear cut stance backing Palestine). Adding injury to all of this, he gave the following deathblow quote which got major play early on in the campaign..."Everybody lies in politics, but the Clinton's do it with such ease, that it is troubling." And for the Clinton machine, the Hollywood "ATM machine" dried up in significant ways.
8. Mrs Clinton stood head and shoulders above Mr Obama when it came to experience—she had been one of the two most influential first ladies in American history and had proved to be a diligent senator, a “work-horse, not a show horse”. But Mrs Clinton's “experience” included her decision to vote in favor of invading Iraq, a decision that was radioactive to many Democrats.
9. Mr Obama was the first to grasp that this is an election about change, not experience, which left Hillary's boasts of experience a negative rather than the positive she thought it would be. Americans have had enough of experience in the form of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Seventy per cent of them say America is headed in the wrong direction.
10. In a campaign devoted to "change," Mrs Clinton surrounded herself with familiar faces from her White House years—people like Mark Penn, her chief strategist, Terry McAuliffe, her chief fund-raiser, Howard Wolfson, her principle spokesperson, and, of course, her husband. But these people were all deeply enmeshed in a Washington establishment that most voters despised.
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