A Failure in Foresight

For all you fans of the HRC vs. BO heavyweight championship taking place in Iowa, I highly recommend you find a copy of The Atlantic and check out Marc Ambinder’s piece on how Hillary Clinton’s campaign didn’t see Barack Obama’s presidential bid coming, and that Team Clinton underestimated how well he would be received. After all, according to Ambinder’s reporting, Clinton had advised Obama when he entered the Senate on how to play down his celebrity, quietly get in line behind his more senior colleagues and get the right experience. Obama was thought of as a “possible apprentice, and perhaps one day, an heir” to the party’s natural leader. Ambinder writes: “Some of her top advisors exuded a sense of entitlement: Clinton deserved to be president; it was her turn. They did not perceive the threat until it was almost too late.”

It’s fascinating stuff, and now that she is fighting — not gracefully — to regain her lost momentum, it is even more relevant. I wrote about it and more in my column on Clinton’s frantic tactics this week.

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Should Clinton get back on the high road or just keep pounding Obama to win? Write to me at askab@digital-staging.thehill.com. We want to talk politics and have a few laughs. Spare us the offensive, unGoogleable, unthinkable or otherwise useless. I look forward to hearing from all of you, often.