Clinton's slow march to defeat ...

Atlantic has a fascinating piece of investigative journalism that recaps, through a history of correspondence within the campaign, how Hillary Clinton lost the primaries.

One of the undercurrents highlighted by the article is Hillary's reluctance to get down and dirty. In some of these memos, her advisers were asking her to tear Obama down, and while she never disavowed it as a strategy, she doesn't appear to have been entirely comfortable with it either, leading to confusion.

There are two interesting insights for me.

One is that this highlights for me why very smart people often make poor leaders. Hillary could foresee the downsides to every option, and suffered from analysis paralysis. The campaign lurched from one strategy to another. In the end though, the one that really worked was the one Mark Penn had laid out.

The other was that a lot of the infighting was basically not just about strategy, but about who Hillary should be or should appear to be. This is the second campaign in this round of elections, where a campaign's attempt to reinvent a candidate has proved its Achilles heel, the other being Mitt Romney. In this case, her indecision between the Howard Ickes' strategy and the Mark Penn's strategy, suggests a lack of comfort with her own view of herself, almost as if she didn't know who she was, or she knew what she had to appear to be and wasn't really comfortable with it. If she had been entirely comfortable with who she believed she was or needed to be, she could have asserted that view on the campaign. Ultimately, she may have been defeated by moral qualms, which seems a bit weird for a Clinton, but oddly, makes her more likable.