Is It Too Late for Hillary?

By Karen Tumulty

T.S. Eliot may have thought that April was the cruelest month, but as far as Hillary Clinton is concerned, it's got nothing on February. As Barack Obama was racking up his sixth, seventh and eighth consecutive wins in the week that had passed since Super Tuesday -- trouncing her in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia and moving into the lead in the delegate count -- Clinton was doing her best to turn the page of the calendar in search of an early sign of spring. She spent primary day in her campaign headquarters in downtown Arlington, Va., doing interviews by satellite with radio and television stations in Ohio and Texas, states that don't vote until March 4. By the time the ballots were being counted in the Potomac primaries, Clinton had landed in El Paso, Texas, where she declared, "We're going to sweep across Texas in the next three weeks."

This is not the race that Clinton thought she would be running. Her campaign was built on inevitability, a haughty operation so confident it would have the nomination wrapped up by now that it didn't even put a field organization in place for the states that were to come after the megaprimary on Feb. 5.

Clinton's positions, most notably her support for the Iraq invasion and her refusal to recant that vote, were geared more to battling a Republican in the general election than to winning over an angry Democratic base clamoring for change. Not until last fall did she seem to acknowledge that she faced opposition in the Democratic primaries, so focused was her message on George W. Bush and the G.O.P.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the victory podium at the Democratic National Convention. While Clinton was busy running as a pseudo-incumbent, Obama donned the mantle of change and built a fund-raising and ground operation that has proved superior to hers by almost every measure. As a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns who is not affiliated with any candidate this time around puts it, the Clinton forces "get to every state later. They spend less. They don't get the best people."

And now Obama is making inroads with every Democratic constituency, including the ones that Clinton counted as hers. In deeply Democratic Maryland, for instance, Obama won rural voters, union households, white men, independents, African Americans and young people, and held his own among Hispanics -- the makings of a broad and tough-to-overcome coalition. Obama's campaign now claims a 136-vote lead among pledged delegates, those elected through primaries and caucuses. "We believe that it's next to impossible for Senator Clinton to close the delegate count," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe told reporters the morning after the Potomac primaries.

Much of the blame, from both within and outside the campaign, has been aimed at Clinton's chief strategist, Mark Penn. "He never adjusted," says a prominent Democrat. "I don't think he knows how to do primaries. He doesn't know how to do what is essentially a family fight." But that explanation misses a larger possibility: that Bill and Hillary Clinton, who came of age in politics a generation ago, no longer have the touch for the electorate they once did.

Now, having blown through more than $120 million, Clinton's campaign is struggling to build a campaign from scratch in Ohio and Texas, with political observers in near agreement that a failure to win both could be fatal.

Clinton has shaken up a campaign team whose top rung often seemed to function like the permanent membership of the U.N. Insecurity Council, with each of its often feuding members holding veto power over any move that diverged from his or her plan. Gone is campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, the former scheduler whose primary qualification seemed to be her long history with the candidate. Some of Clinton's closest advisers had argued against putting Doyle in such a high-wire role, but it was a characteristic move for a candidate who, like Bush, is known to value personal trust and loyalty above all other virtues.

The installation of Doyle as campaign manager was also a reflection of the Clintons' confidence in their political instincts, say those who have worked with them. So convinced were they of their superiority at charting a course to November that they were looking, first and foremost, for subalterns who would carry it out without question or challenge.

Doyle has now been replaced by another loyalist, Maggie Williams, who served as Hillary Clinton's chief of staff in the White House. Williams is someone to whom Clinton has turned in her moments of greatest peril. Former White House aides recall how in 1994 Williams planned and executed -- without telling the press office -- the famous soft-focus pink-sweater news conference, in which the First Lady talked about Whitewater and her cattle-futures trading for 66 min. Williams left the White House at the start of Bill Clinton's second term, saddled with more than $300,000 in legal bills, after having been called to testify before the Senate Banking Committee about her role in the Whitewater damage-control effort. On the night of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster's suicide, Williams and counsel Bernie Nussbaum combed Foster's office for personal papers, and she was later criticized for allegedly removing a sheaf of documents that were locked away before eventually turning them over to attorneys.

Williams' takeover of the campaign was greeted with almost universal jubilation by fund raisers, outside advisers and congressional allies -- many of whom had been complaining for months that they couldn't get their calls returned. Williams is considered far less likely to tolerate turf fights and insularity. Aides are hoping for more clarity in decision making and information-sharing. In each of her first two days on the job, Williams held meetings for the entire headquarters staff -- a simple enough move but one that was considered a dramatic change for an operation in which, as a campaign strategist put it, "nobody knew what was going on."

The campaign's inner circle has finally begun to expand. Austin, Texas, advertising man Roy Spence (who helped come up with the state's "Don't mess with Texas" slogan) will aid in shaping the candidate's message. Campaign deputy manager Mike Henry followed Doyle out the door, and his role is being given to field director Guy Cecil. Adviser Harold Ickes, who for months has been urging the Clintons to focus on ground-game vulnerabilities, is also ascendant, thanks in part to his close relationship with Williams. Moaned a top official: "The work on the ground was never done. We have been consistently outhustled in the field." And while chief strategist Penn's position appears secure, campaign insiders believe he will not be able to operate with as much unquestioned autonomy as he used to have.

One of the continuing challenges for the Clinton campaign in the lead-up to the March 4 primaries could be money. Political veterans say Clinton will need a minimum of $3 million to $5 million to compete in Ohio, and even more in Texas. Both states are large: Ohio has seven major media markets; Texas nearly three times as many.

Clinton's fund raising has picked up considerably since the day after Super Tuesday, when the campaign revealed she had been forced to loan herself $5 million to make it through January. "People know she really needs the money," says national finance co-chairman Alan Patricof. But her fund raising is still no match for Obama's Internet-fueled money machine, which has been bringing in about $1 million a day. On the invitation to a luncheon meeting on Feb. 13 in New York City, top Clinton fund raisers were "encouraged to bring at least one prospective Finance Committee member" and "asked to commit to raising a minimum of $25,000 for Hillary Clinton for President."

And the campaign's most effective fund raiser of all will be picking up the pace. Bill Clinton has scheduled more than a dozen fund raisers before Texas and Ohio. That included one on the night of the luncheon, at the Clintons' residence in Washington. The alert went out to money men: "We have a handful of slots available tomorrow evening for cocktails with President Bill Clinton at Whitehaven, the Clintons' home. Do you know of one person who would be interested in attending and contributing $1,000?" That, in politics, is what passes for hand-to-hand combat. The battle has been joined; the question for the Clintons, however, is whether it is already too late.

With reporting by Michael Duffy and Michael Weisskopf/Washington