How Clinton Lost

**jaypeesmith** · 06-09-2008, 01:34 PM

06-04-2008 10:48 AM

The Associated Press has a story out on some of the biggest mistakes made by the Clinton campaign that cost her the nomination.

Honestly, I had thought for the longest time that she was poorly-served by the people around her, not the least of which was her own husband, former President Bill Clinton.

She has said some things that caused me to raise an eyebrow but, for the most part, it was the management of her campaign and the surrogates that spoke for her that left me most taken aback.

One section of this article stood out for me. It was how the actions of Bill Clinton ended up costing Hillary Clinton the black vote when, at the time, she enjoyed a significant advantage with black voters. It sums ups what I saw quite nicely:

Until January of this year, former President Clinton had been viewed as an asset for his wife among her aides and supporters. Although reviled by conservatives for his affair with a White House intern, Bill Clinton remained a beloved figure among Democratic audiences, particularly blacks, who remembered the 1990s as relatively prosperous and his efforts on their behalf.

That changed in South Carolina, where the former president campaigned vigorously for his wife. Her advisers, aware of his tendency to go off message, had urged him to stay positive and talk up her accomplishments, not criticize Obama.

But Bill Clinton chafed at the campaign’s reluctance to take on the Illinois senator, particularly over what the former president viewed as conflicts between Obama’s rhetoric of opposition to the Iraq war and his voting record. So he took it on himself to speak out, with calamitous results.

Obama soundly won South Carolina, and Bill Clinton then made things worse. He seemed to diminish Obama’s triumph by noting that civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, never the presidential contender that Obama had already become, had also won the state’s primary years earlier.

Once so popular among blacks he was dubbed the first black president by author Toni Morrison, Bill Clinton had helped drive those voters away from his wife. Obama’s already strong black support would climb to as much as 90 percent of the black vote in subsequent contests.