Clinton weighs staff shake-up after New Hampshire
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The talk of shake-up echoes what happened in 2008 – when Hillary Clinton was on the verge of sacking her campaign manager and several top communications officials – before her surprise win here bailed out her beleaguered staff. | Getty
'The Clintons are not happy, and have been letting all of us know that,' one Democrat says.
By Glenn Thrush and Annie Karni
02/08/16 02:04 PM EST
Updated 02/08/16 02:18 PM EST
Hillary and Bill Clinton are so dissatisfied with their campaign’s messaging and digital operations they are considering staffing and strategy changes after what’s expected to be a loss in Tuesday’s primary here, according to a half-dozen people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Clintons -- stung by her narrow victory in Iowa -- had been planning to reassess staffing at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters after the first four primaries, but the Clintons have become increasingly caustic in their criticism of aides and demanded the reassessment sooner, a source told POLITICO.
The talk of shake-up echoes what happened in 2008 – when Clinton was on the verge of sacking her campaign manager and several top communications officials – before her surprise win here bailed out her beleaguered staff. Over time, however she slowly layered over top officials, essentially hiring old hands – like Hillaryland stalwart Maggie Williams and pollster Geoff Garin – to run the campaign while the previous staff were quietly relegated to subsidiary positions.
It’s not clear if that will happen again, but several people close to the situation said Clinton would be loathe to fire anyone outright and more inclined to add new staff.
“The Clintons are not happy, and have been letting all of us know that,” said one Democratic official who speaks regularly to both. “The idea is that we need a more forward-looking message, for the primary – but also for the general election too… There’s no sense of panic, but there is an urgency to fix these problems right now.”
Ultimately, the disorganization is the candidate’s own decision-making, which lurches from hands-off delegation in times of success to hands-around-the-throat micromanagement when things go south.
At the heart of problem this time, staffers, donors and Clinton-allied operatives say, was the Clinton’s decision not to appoint a single empowered chief strategist – a role the forceful but controversial Mark Penn played in 2008 – and disperse decision-making responsibility to a sprawling team with fuzzy lines of authority.
“There’s nobody sitting in the middle of this empowered to create a message and implement it,” said one former Obama 2008 aide. “They are kind of rudderless… occasionally Hillary grabs the rudder, but until recently she was not that interested in [working on messaging]… Look, she going to be the nominee, but she’s not going to get any style points and if she isn’t careful she is going to be a wounded nominee. And they better worked this shit out fast because who ever the Republicans pick is going to be 29 times tougher than Bernie.”
The focus of their dissatisfaction in recent days is the campaign’s top pollster and strategist Joel Benenson, whom one Clinton insider described as being “on thin ice,” as the former first couple vented its frustrations about messaging following Clinton’s uncomfortably close 0.25 percent win in last week’s caucuses. Benenson, multiple staffers and operatives say, has been equally frustrated with the Clintons’ habit of tapping a rolling cast of about a dozen outside advisers – who often have the candidate’s ear outside the official channels of communication.
The result is a muddled all-the-above messaging strategy that emphasizes different messages – and mountains of arcane policy proposals – in stark contrast to Bernie Sanders’ punchy and relentless messaging on income inequality.
“He’s a good pollster, and they promised him a lot more authority… but, you know, we are talking abut the Clintons,” said one veteran operative who acts as a surrogate with the campaign.
In President Obama’s two successful campaigns, access to the candidate was carefully monitored by campaign manager David Plouffe and other top advisers to ensure that the messaging and communications teams had coherent and cohesive short- and long-term plans. So far Clinton ’16 – which is supposed to be modeled on the Obama efforts – has functioned sloppily, with the Clintons absorbing off-the-books advice – even strategy memos – from family friends and advisers like Sidney Blumenthal, branding expert Roy Spence, current Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and even Penn, who speaks exclusively to the former president, according to multiple sources.
In recent days, Hillary Clinton has tasked her campaign manager Robbie Mook – an expert at field organizing who commands the nearly unanimous loyalty of his staff – to expand his role from primary-and-caucus-state ground game logistics to messaging, with an additional emphasis on beefing up the campaign’s underperforming digital operation, which is seen as a key to challenging Sanders’ primacy with Democrats under 30.
The pressure on Mook comes at a time of what was arguably his greatest triumph: The 35-year-old campaign manager ran, what was by all accounts, a first-rate ground operation in the caucuses that maximized Clinton’s voter turnout in rural areas and among older voters — an effort that was barely able to beat back the overwhelming support the Vermont socialist senator got on Iowa’s college campuses and among the state’s cadre of progressive voters.
Moreover, several staffers told POLITICO Mook’s data and analytics operation was so well run, he was able to tell Clinton herself that she had won — even as the networks were declaring the race too close to call. “Get over to the hotel now!” he told the former secretary of state, according one aide who was at campaign headquarters on caucus night. “We need to beat Bernie!” — a mad rush to declare victory before Sanders took the stage to declare the contest a draw. Eight years ago, Mook played the same role when he ordered then Sen. Clinton to declare victory in the Indiana primary over Barack Obama — despite network projections that she might lose the state.
As the new year began, Clinton operatives were eager to take credit for the lack of internal drama; many credited Mook and the loyalty he inspires among his staffers with creating a leak-proof and seemingly functional team -- there had been no stories chronicling the internal turmoil, split factions, public spats and overhauls that defined Clinton’s dysfunctional 2008 campaign team.
But from the beginning, there have been deeper issues simmering within the cheerfully-decorated Brooklyn headquarters -- and much of that had to do with a disconnect between the candidate and her campaign. Over the summer while her campaign was bogged down in the email controversy, Clinton was deeply frustrated with her own staff, and vice versa. The candidate blamed her team for not getting her out of the mess quickly, and her team blamed Clinton for being stubbornly unwilling to take the advice of campaign chairman John Podesta and others to apologize, turn over her server, and move on. The entire experience made her a deeply vulnerable frontrunner out of the gate, and underscored a lack of trust between Clinton and her operatives, many of whom were former Obama staffers that she didn't consider part of her inner circle of trust.
Her advisers were also frustrated by having to play roles they hadn’t been hired for and were ill-suited for. From the beginning, Benenson was frustrated that he was forced to split his time between defending his boss on emails and defining a path for her candidacy. Clinton, meanwhile, longed for a chief strategist in the Mark Penn mold who could take on a more expansive role than playing pollster.
Insiders said the problem remains her message. “The message is, she’s fighting. She’s fighting for you,” said one ally. “We have to drive that.”
Glenn Thrush is POLITICO's chief political correspondent.
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