Re: Clinton War Stories

Ana, if there's any paper in the country that has an eager audience for political process stories, it's the Washington Post. As a former newspaper reporter myself (and, yes, still one at heart), I think this was a good call on the part of the editors.

I also would bet, given the amount of reporting that went to that double truck, that this was a story the paper originally assigned so that it could be prepared for the not-unlikely possibility that Tuesday would be the end of the Clinton campaign. It would have been a how-it-all-fell-apart obit for the campaign. That, obviously, didn't happen. But in the meantime, there was growing competitive pressure, given that the Los Angeles Times has taken a bite of this apple over the weekend. So they decided they had better go with what they had or risk losing the exclusivity of all that string they had gathered. Again, a smart call.

UPDATE: One more point, and I guess a glaringly obvious one. Voters in this election are going to be choosing among three candidates who have virtually no executive experience, for a job that involves running the most complicated enterprise in the world. I think you have to go pretty far back to find a similar situation in a presidential election. So it's worth spending some time looking at how they are managing their campaigns, as a possible indicator of what that management style might mean in the White House. One of the points I found fascinating in the story by Peter Baker and Anne Kornblut was the suggestion that all this turmoil has been deliberate on Hillary Clinton's part:

One of Clinton's favorite books is "Team of Rivals," Doris Kearns Goodwin's account of Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet, and she assembled her own team of advisers knowing their mutual enmity in the belief that good ideas come from vigorous discussion. But while many campaigns are beset by backbiting and power struggles, dozens of interviews indicate that the internal problems endured by the Clinton team have been especially corrosive.