It's Also the War, Stupid

Jon Margolis [1], former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 [2]," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

After the fatality came the post-mortems: diverse, but in broad agreement as to the cause of death.

The patient, on life support for some weeks, finally succumbed to a multitude of ailments and wounds, some of them self-inflicted. Among them were strategic errors, inadequate support, ill-advised oral eruptions, marital complications and an inability (or disinclination) to appreciate just how sick she always was.

Shed no tears, for no one has actually died. The decedent here is Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, not the candidate herself, who seems hale and hearty. The pathologists were political journalists who covered her campaign and who explained why it failed, not six months after they had confidently proclaimed that it could not.

Well, nobody’s perfect, and with one little exception, the accounts of Clinton’s failure were informed and incisive. In this case, “one little exception” does not refer to one account that was wronger than the others, but to one topic that was absent – or at least minimized – in almost all of them.

What was maximized in most of them was the political version of inside baseball: Mark Penn was the wrong guy to run the campaign. Clinton and her top advisers were foolish to assume that the nominating contest would effectively be over on February 5, that Superest of all Tuesdays, when more than 20 states chose their delegates. Her campaign “was a top-down operation in which decision-making rested with a small coterie of longtime aides” (Karen Tumulty [3] in Time magazine ) in contrast to Barack Obama’s more “bottoms-up” organization. Using that grass-roots structure, Obama ended up raising more money than she did. She had more of the big-money bundlers; he had small donors via the Internet. Until it was too late, she didn’t appreciate how strong a contender Obama would be.

There were strategic errors. She should not have started out touting her experience in a political climate more receptive to transformation. Perhaps, suggested Chuck Todd [4] of MSNBC, she “should not have avoided being labeled ‘the woman candidate’ for president.” And maybe it would have been better not to suggest that her first term would effectively be Bill Clinton’s third. True, most Democrats think the eight Clinton years were better than the eight that followed. But some of them remembered the downside of the middle-late ’90s, too, and more were reminded as the former president expressed himself, not always gracefully, in the course of the campaign.

Then there was that huge, inexplicable, tactical error – disregarding the caucus states. As Jackie Calmes [5] put it in the Wall Street Journal, “The campaign’s most inarguable mistake was its failure to organize voters in states with caucuses rather than primaries.” That allowed Obama to build up his huge delegate lead, which even Clinton’s late surge in big primaries could not overtake.

All that makes sense, as perhaps does many of the other possible causes of death that political pathologists have suggested: sexism (from several commentators, mostly female), unfair treatment by the media (Bill Clinton and others), Obama’s ability to combine African-American voters with “white, highly educated, reform-minded Democratic elites” (Mark Halperin and John E. Harris [6] in the New York Times). Plus, of course, the dumb things she said, from the sniper fire that it turned out she did not face in Bosnia to the reminder that Bobby Kennedy was killed in June. All that is why she lost.

Hello. Does anybody remember that there’s a war going on?

Hillary Clinton made her first political mistake of the 2008 campaign years before she hired Mark Penn or figured out her strategic approach. She made that mistake in 2002 when she voted to authorize President Bush to use force in Iraq. That’s what gave Obama his opening. All the other “real” Democratic contenders (that doesn’t include Dennis Kucinich or Mike Gravel) had supported the war. Barack Obama had not. Neither had most of the folks who vote in Democratic primaries.

OK, there might have been a few weeks there, right after the war started, when even devout Democrats reluctantly supported it. After all, once a war starts, nobody wants to lose it. But as soon as that “mission accomplished” euphoria faded (the mission, manifestly, not having been accomplished), so did the pro-war sentiments of rank-and-file Democratic voters. Otherwise, Howard Dean could not have become the 2004 front-runner in early 2003, based entirely on his passionate anti-war position.

Sure, had she not made all those other mistakes, Clinton might have won anyway. Considering how close she came, a few more delegates in the caucus states, some shrewder (and less arrogant) advisers, a little more thinking before opening her mouth, all that could have put her over the top. Nor is it possible to say with certainty that she would have won even if Obama had not run. Nomination contests create their own dynamic. Especially in Democratic contests, there is always one “establishment” candidate and an “anti-establishment” competitor. At some point an “anyone but Hillary” movement would have emerged, and united behind John Edwards or Bill Richardson or someone else. And then who knows what would have happened?

But we know what did happen. Clinton voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, enraging millions of Democratic voters. Organized and inspired (but not limited to) the liberal blogosphere, these voters wanted a candidate who had opposed the war from the start. No doubt they never thought that they’d get a candidate this good. But without them, Obama could not have won. Knowing that, he probably would not have run.

But all of this – the political foundation of Obama’s success and Clinton’s failure – was all but absent from the post mortems. There were a few exceptions. Chris Cillizza [7] in the Washington Post’s “The Fix” blog put Clinton’s Iraq vote in a long list of the reasons she lost. But in Sunday’s New York Times, 13 commentators, six of them journalists, answered the question of “What Went Wrong” [8] with Clinton’s campaign. The only one who mentioned the war vote was not a reporter but Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an academic.

And in an interesting article in Time titled “Why didn’t more women vote for Hillary?” Amy Sullivan [9] completely ignored the war, which women oppose more than men. Isn’t that one reason?

Bizarrely, even the few reporters who mentioned Iraq did so briefly and obliquely. In his piece for the MSNBC Web site, NBC Political Director Chuck Todd [4] insightfully noted that the 2006 election results were not a good omen for Clinton.

“Consider the fact that Democrats won back Congress in ’06 with a majority of candidates opposing a war Hillary Clinton voted to authorize,” Todd wrote. But he left it there. In explaining Clinton’s decision to give short shrift to caucus states, the Wall Street Journal’s Calmes noted that in Iowa, “Democratic caucuses were dominated by grass-roots activists, many of them antiwar liberals who resented Sen. Clinton's Iraq vote.”

But that was the only mention of Iraq in the story, which focused on the campaign’s “message, mobilization failures and the marital factor.”

We are not dealing here with fools. Calmes in particular is as good a political reporter as one is likely to find within the confines of this earth. So we are left with the question of why so many good reporters ignored or downplayed the first and arguably the biggest factor explaining Clinton’s loss.

No doubt there are several reasons, but let’s confine ourselves to two. First, like everything else around us, political reporting has become specialized. On the campaign trail, reporters are covering a process. It’s an intricate and complex process, and covering it is a full-time job. So it’s easy to forget that this process does not proceed out of context. Its context is the actual world of governing the country. That’s the point of presidential elections. With the media – indeed, with the broader culture – focusing on cackling, cleavage and flag pins in lapels, this truth can get lost.

The second reason is that in both the broader culture and the media world, the personal now overshadows the political. Led by the cable news networks, which increasingly set the tone of political coverage, the campaign is seen as drama.

It is, of course, and this year’s has been more dramatic than most. But like the process, this drama does not take place in a vacuum. This one takes place in reality, a reality in which millions of voters care about what is happening in the world. They care about themselves – their jobs, their health care, what they have to pay for a gallon of gas. But many have broader concerns. For Democrats, especially those who make sure they vote in primaries and/or attend caucuses, one of those concerns is the war in Iraq. The polls show – correctly, no doubt – that the war is no longer the most important issue to most voters. It’s still an important enough issue for many of them.

That fact that contains ample dramatic implications, come to think of it, if perhaps more cerebral drama than the cable news networks want to consider. More Ibsen than “Days of Our Lives.” What passes for drama in too much political coverage these days is actually soap opera.