Here comes ‘experience‘:
For all her years on the public stage, Mrs. Clinton has never come close to assembling and running an enterprise like the 700-person, $170 million-and-counting campaign organization that she has created. At times, her aides made assumptions about tactics and voters that turned out to be wrong. They nearly ran out of money at all the wrong times, like just after Mrs. Clinton’s victory in the New Hampshire primary and right before the 22 state nominating contests on Feb. 5.
The day after her loss in the Iowa caucuses, Mrs. Clinton took command of a long meeting in New Hampshire. “I’ll do whatever you guys need me to do,” she said, a participant recalled. “I get the message.”
But a month later, she described herself as stunned to learn the campaign was nearly broke — notwithstanding financial reports sent to her every week by e-mail — and was all but conceding the 11 contests that were to come over the next month.
Unlike Mr. Bush, Mrs. Clinton has shown no interest in having one strong person running all aspects of the campaign operation. And unlike her husband during the early part of his 1992 bid for the presidency, she does not try to keep a hand in everything, with lines of communications all through the campaign.
Instead, she talked daily to a few people: Mr. Penn, Ms. Solis Doyle and, now, Ms. Williams. Even Mr. Ickes, her longtime friend and adviser, says he speaks with her infrequently.
This approach, many of her associates said, had the effect of breeding resentment at campaign headquarters. Since there was no one person in charge, they said, it was hard to make decisions, and Mr. Penn would frequently use his personal connection with Mrs. Clinton to block the campaign from moving in directions he opposed, like putting an increased emphasis on trying to present a human side of Mrs. Clinton.
