David Gergen, the former adviser to Presidents who is now an editor-at-large for U.S. News & world Report, believes the departure of top Clinton strategist Mark Penn from running the Clinton campaign could well influence the rest of the primaries.
His predictions: the Clinton campaign may start to focus more promoting Hillary Clinton’s positives and focus less on trying to raise rival Senator Barack Obama’s negatives. And, Gergen says, there have been rumors that the Clinton campaign had some negative material about Obama that it was sitting on…
Writing on Anderson Cooper’s CNN blog, Gergen looks at the Penn departure (Penn is still advising Clinton in other ways and is helping her prep for Saturday’s debate with Obama) and concludes this:
But [Penn’s] departure could indirectly impact not just Pennsylvania but the rest of the primaries to come. Only a few days ago, Carl Bernstein reported on CNN that the Clinton campaign was sitting on some nasty stuff about Obama – stuff they thought the media should have featured a long time ago – and the campaign was preparing to go hard negative with it. We have heard rumors of this kind before and nothing has materialized, but there was a sense that perhaps in a desperate, 11th-hour bid for the nomination, the Clintons would throw the rest of the kitchen sink at Barack, and maybe the bathroom, too.
All along, Mark Penn – along with President Clinton – has been portrayed as the chief advocate of going much more negative. But now with Penn gone, one wonders: has the prospect of an explosive negative attack disappeared with him?
For Democrats in general and Mrs. Clinton in particular, the Penn resignation may be a blessing in disguise. A no-holds-barred, negative fight to the finish within the party would have hurt both Barack and Hillary. What is now turning off voters (especially independents) is not the length of the campaign but the nastiness. The best strategy that Mrs. Clinton can follow now – one that would preserve the chances of a Democratic victory in the fall and preserve her reputation, too – is to pursue a gracious, warm, emotionally appealing campaign that draws people to her instead of trying to drive them away from Obama. Indeed, if she had pursued that strategy more consistently from the beginning, she would almost certainly be closer to the nomination now.
That has certainly been the Clinton campaign’s massive failure. By most accounts, Hillary Clinton has been a highly responsive and hard-working Senator from New York. When she started the campaign and was flying high in the polls, she largely eschewed a negative campaign. But once it looked like she fell behind (her handlers miscalculated on Iowa and the Clinton camp was also out-organized by Obama there) her campaign shifted into negative mode, Bill Clinton was unleashed, and a lot of the thrust of the campaign became persistently negative.
The problem: it played into stereotypes of Clinton sculpted by many conservative talk show hosts and other foes of Hillary Clinton. Rather than try to bring out the intellectual, policy and personal qualities that might make voters want to vote for Clinton, the focus has been mostly on her being the anti-Obama. The result: Hillary Clinton, who had made so much progress is steadily shedding her negatives, now sees her negatives back up again.
If some truly explosive info on Obama comes out in coming months — particularly if it surfaces on the Drudge Report which is widely-believed to now enjoy a mutually advantageous relationship with the Clinton campaign — part of the story will be where the info came from. If it comes from the Clinton camp, there will likely be a political price. And if it’s out there, presumably the Obama campaign is ready because the Republicans are bound to find it and use it if he’s the Democratic party’s nominee in November.
Hillary may not be ready to throw the whole sink at him — if Gergen’s reading is correct. But come November, the Republicans will throw the whole house at him to keep him from occupying the White House.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.