Clinton and Obama on Their Campaign Leadership

Jim VandeHei and David Paul Kuhn in Politico write Clinton leadership a study in missteps.

"Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday. It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling — if she hadn’t made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign.   "

"Obama can rightly claim he has run a more consistent, disciplined and technologically savvy campaign. While Clinton has blown though nearly a half-dozen campaign slogans and failed to put concerns about her credibility to rest, he has clung to essentially the same leadership and governing message he outlined in his 2004 speech at the Democratic convention. There has been little drama inside his operation — or at least if there was, it has been kept largely concealed. "