On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton won the primary in West Virginia but it didn’t seem to matter. For whatever it’s worth at this stage, John Edwards gave his long-awaited endorsement to Barack Obama, as did the abortion rights group NARAL, adding to the air of inevitability around Obama. If you’re thinking, “poor, poor Hillary,” Libby Copeland at the Washington Post finds that you are apparently not alone. It can’t help that the postmortems have started on her campaign, including this interesting one in which Michelle Cottle at the New Republic gets Clinton staffers to reflect on what went wrong.
On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton won the primary in West Virginia but it didn’t seem to matter. For whatever it’s worth at this stage, John Edwards gave his long-awaited endorsement to Barack Obama, as did the abortion rights group NARAL, adding to the air of inevitability around Obama. If you’re thinking, “poor, poor Hillary,” Libby Copeland at the Washington Post finds that you are apparently not alone. It can’t help that the postmortems have started on her campaign, including this interesting one in which Michelle Cottle at the New Republic gets Clinton staffers to reflect on what went wrong.
Cottle catches this interesting moment of self-awareness from some unnamed Clinton staffer:
“The way we handled you guys was a mistake on our part. What we’re hearing is that we truly treated people badly and weren’t accessible enough or open enough. We had bad relationships with reporters, and it probably bit us on the ass.”
Uh, yeah. The “i don’t like your question so I’ll just cut off the conversation or email exchange” school of media relations is probably not the best approach. Though I also think press relations were among the least significant factors in the outcome of the campaign.