A THOUGHT ABOUT HILLARY'S CAMPAIGN

Hillary's loss to Trump has many fathers, but one rarely mentioned is the professional campaign staff that she assembled. I have occasionally been around such people, and from those experiences have formed a rather dour view of campaign professionals.They are guns for hire, little else. First and foremost, being a campaign professional is a business, not a calling, and consequently the prime goal of campaign professionals is maximizing their earnings. Secondarily, they want to be known. Thirdly, they want to be respected. And lastly they want their candidate to win, partly to gain respect for themselves, partly in the hope of gaining a lucrative position for themselves, and partly because winning is the reward for their work.  For true campaign professionals, the quality of the candidates and positions that they promote plays little role.

I suspect, therefore, that the bad campaign by Clinton was not entirely her fault. A campaign is like a business startup. It needs a leader with clear and knowledgeable ideas of what to do. That leader may be the candidate, like Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Barrack Obama, or Donald Trump, or it may the campaign manager. Hillary, who plainly admitted that she's a bad campaigner (and perhaps, like Gore, mistakenly tried to distance herself from the one terrific campaigner who was totally on her side, Mr. Clinton), assembled and depended on a huge and well-credentialed campaign team, fully equipped with all the most modern paraphernalia.

But plenty of bad campaigners have gotten elected when backed by really good managers, people who were not just political professionals but who also had a personal commitment to the candidate and the candidate's political goals. Look at the genial but clueless GW Bush with Karl Rove; Warren Harding with Harry Daugherty; Silent Calvin Coolidge with Will Hays, or George HW Bush with Lee Atwater. They were all themselves unappealing campaigners, but their smart and committed campaign managers put them in the White House. Hillary's staff of hired guns served her very badly--as did the staffs of other losing Democratic candidates So let the Dems either nominate great campaigners, or find committed managers who know how to run a campaign.