Vanity Fair: Bill Clinton, Infighting Destroyed Hillary's Campaign

This might explain why Bill is so bitter. He has destroyed his legacy. But then again Bill Clinton has always been a disaster to those around him.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign had it all: near-death moments, hard-won triumphs, dysfunctional relationships—and a staff consumed with infighting over how to sell their candidate. It was a battle that revealed why she came so close to victory, as well as why she didn’t make it.

[...]For weeks she had been pulling 12- to 18-hour days, bouncing back and forth between Ohio and Texas in a plane full of national press who were writing drafts of her political obituary. “Senator Clinton has been carrying this campaign on her own back for a long time,” sympathized Geoff Garin, the easygoing pollster who would later be hired to try and rein in Hillary’s bullying chief strategist, Mark Penn. The campaign had slammed into a wall on February 5—Super Tuesday. Her brain trust had hoped to pocket most of the 24 states that day and force her competition to fold. Clinton herself had publicly proclaimed on December 30, “I’m in it for the long run. It’s not a very long run. It’ll be over by February 5th.”

[...]Any campaign is a mirror of the candidate. Hillary’s need for a bulwark against all the secrets she’d kept over the years prompted her to surround herself with a tight cabal of loyalists, mostly scandal-scarred survivors of the Clinton White House bunker. “People who go through a battle together basically bond. They know their survival rests with staying together,” explains Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, but he adds, “It probably diminishes their efficacy as staff, because they’re more like family.”

[...]ckes was the only member of the Big Five to have ever run a national presidential campaign. “The rest hardly knew a delegate when they saw one,” says a top adviser sarcastically.

But the real flaw in Hillary’s presidential campaign was the lack of any clear lines of authority. Her “team of rivals,” as she thought approvingly of them, assured she would remain in total top-down control. But it is often necessary to tell a candidate what she doesn’t want to hear in a cold, hard, neutral manner. With Hillary, the word among her staff was “I don’t want to get spanked by Mama.”