I know Andrew Sullivan is sort of a persona non grata among liberals these days, and not for no reason. And I know that the media's self-serving justification for covering horserace rather than policy is that a candidate's skill at running a campaign is predictive at how they'd perform as president (which is wholly untrue, by the way, as George W. Bush's campaigns were rather masterfully handled!). Still, I find Sullivan's post here to be rather accurate. Clinton's campaign was horribly run from the beginning, but it used to be the case that she had so much goodwill and institutional advantages that it didn't matter. Even if she does manage to pull this out, at least her campaign's weaknesses will be better known and will be improvable.
Does this necessarily mean that she would be a worse president? I'm unsure. I do think that the Obama campaign's success does speak well of his political abilities. But what I'd really be worried about is Hillary getting the nomination and running another terrible general election campaign, like she has in the primary. I'd be worried that, in the event of a win, she wouldn't learn the right lessons. I'd be worried that, despite all her talk about how she knows how to win, she has not exactly exhibited a tremendous amount of skill in that department. To some extent she overpromised things she couldn't deliver, but as I've said, frontrunners don't just give away delegates, even if they don't live in the right zip code. And the less said about Bill's role on the campaign, the better. Paul Krugman might like me to believe that the Jesse Jackson remark might open to multiple interpretations, but here's how it reads to me, "Barack Obama won South Carolina because he's Black. So did Jesse Jackson. And neither one will be elected president because of these facts." If anything, that's a reading that's overly charitable to Bill.
