Can She Run Anything?

The Clinton campaign’s chaotic, poorly planned, ill-managed organization suggests the Clintons have learned nothing since the structural chaos of their first two terms:

Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday. It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling — if she hadn’t made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign.

I think I’m behind on the Clinton compliments, aren’t I?

Andrea Scores

Too right:

This campaign, right now, is not the greatest example of why women should rule the world.

I would dearly love to see a woman president. I hope to see one soon. And Clinton has many qualities – extraordinary intelligence, remarkable stamina, policy mastery and the kind of ambition men and women need to succeed in politics. But she lost her soul somewhere along the way, has become consumed with process rather than principle, and has forgotten the difference between truth and falsehood. If she were the only option, I still couldn’t bring myself to back the Clintons. But I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who did. But when you have a transformative option with the talent and timing of Obama, you go with the best candidate. Here’s hoping for an American Thatcher – a woman who wins the presidency whose husband did not precede her and who has forged her own path in her own way. But not this woman. Not now.