8/17/08

Does Hillary Clinton suffer from stammering?






















It's not so much that we sneak around the hustle-bustle of Hillary Clinton Campaign's kitchen with those memos and e-mails provided by The Atlantic, because we don't give a... dime, but to see clearly this feeling we had so far taking shape : her inability to make decisions underlined by the newspaper:

"Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton has competed on the basis of its management skills, his ability, as she likes to put it, 'do the job from Day 1. In fact, it has never behaved in-chief and his own team has proved to be its Achilles heel. "

This careful analysis delivered by the journalist follows the contradictions, the power struggle in this divided team of advisers, never arbitrated, except once - about the airing of the famous 3:00pm call ad - and this is not Hillary but Bill who decides between the two camps.

But beyond this analysis after the fact, which talk sometimes about the notes informed by the defeat, proving that an "a posteriori" can also be an "a priori", it is quite another question that these stolen memos inspire me...

Whether this profusion of ideas in these notes are all deliciously circumventing Policy, to focus on communication, it is obviously the least marketing advisers can do. Policy is an entertainment like cinema or reality TV, and this is only to shock extremists purists, whose nostalgia makes them forget the immense boredom and the vanity of discussions which want to change the world. Purists will continue to die of boredom if they enjoy it, this is not our problem. What seems wonderful in this positioning crisis is how it reveals the collapse of the relationship of Hillary Clinton to her speech.

Because if this team argues over the best positioning to take, that means there is no clear, obvious, necessary positioning.

That's the confusion we felt, seeing Hillary Clinton hesitating between the emotion and the bossy cards, as she tore up in january or strongly attacked Barack Obama during their last debate, for instance.

What these few notes thus outline, since the sketch of a naive image that begins in 2006, when Mark Penn takes Margaret Thatcher as a fantasized reference point, to the invasion of doubts in the team about the choice of a single, clear message, is the krach, the complete sucking up of a speech by itself, its withdrawal and its insane tetany.

What we do not know, what we can not know is whether the speech of Hillary Clinton has been, during this campaign, a stammering, where the thought erupts and stumbles against the slowness and poverty of the communication, or a confused silence, vague or embarrassed, which gives back the floor she couldn't stand up on. Did she have too much to say or was she talking to say nothing?

Anyway, what is perfectly fine to see in these exchanges of notes, beyond a problem of management and beyond a deficit of communication strategy, is, suddenly, someone stumbling against completely arbitrary rules, as all standards, where at this times, the one who will be elected to the head of a country ought to be the best soap seller.

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