Jun 4, 2008 10:20 pm US/Eastern
The Clinton Campaign: What Went Wrong?
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
The day after Senator Barack Obama's historic win as the Democratic presidential nominee, we still don't know what role if any, Senator Hillary Clinton might play in Obama's fight to win the White House.
So what went wrong with the Clinton campaign?
CBS4's Jim DeFede boils it all down with the four key mistakes of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Mistake #1: The Wrong Message. Clinton based her entire campaign on one word, competence. She believed the country was tired of the blunders of the Bush Administration, whether it was overseas in Iraq or at home in New Orleans. She promised she was ready on Day One. But with 82 percent of voters saying this country was on the wrong track, they weren't interested in finding a better engineer to run the train. They wanted to tear up the track and go in a different direction.
Mistake #2: Preparing for a sprint and not for a marathon.
Clinton strategists believed the campaign would end in early February on Super Tuesday. They weren't ready for it to drag on for months, especially when it came to having an organization up and running in those early caucus states, where Obama ran up 11 straight wins.
Mistake #3: Clinton had a chronic case of foot-in-mouth disease.
Clinton came into this campaign with high negatives and a large number of voters saying she couldn't be trusted. Unfortunately for her, she fueled those fears with her tales of sniper fire and how Obama won't appeal to hard working white Americans
Finally,
Mistake #4: the Bill Factor.
Try as they did to contain the former president and keep him on message, Bill Clinton had a way of stirring up trouble. Whether he was dismissing Obama's win in South Carolina or wagging his famous finger at reporters, Bill Clinton made folks uneasy with the prospect of having him back in the White House.
Yet it is worth noting that with all of these problems, Hillary Clinton still received nearly 18 million votes, so she must have been doing something right.
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