Process Stories By Any Other Name

I'll give this to the Times' inevitable "what happened to the Clinton campaign?" story, they've done a better job than the WP did of making the piece about "what this tells us about her" rather than simply a gruesome, crunch-by-crunch recounting of a train wreck. That said, I'm not sure that quotes like these, from people with no first-hand experience with the campaign, are especially insightful:

“She hasn't managed anything as complex as this before; that's the problem with senators,” said James A. Thurber, a professor of government at American University who is an expert on presidential management. “She wasn't as decisive as she should have been. And it's a legitimate question to ask: Under great pressure from two different factions, can she make some hard decisions and move ahead? It seems to just fester. She doesn't seem to know how to stop it or want to stop it.”

I'm really curious about what being an "expert on presidential management" even entails; while how one manages a campaign may tell us something about a candidate's personal style, being a candidate and being a president require different (if related) skill sets. So how a campaign is run doesn't necessarily tell us anything specific about what the candidate would be like as a president. By many accounts, Al Gore ran a muddled campaign, torn by different strategies and too many ideas -- traits that might give him, as president, an edge over the office's current occupant, about whom one can say many things, but "an over abundance of ideas" isn't one of them.

Not that these stories shouldn't be written, but we should be careful about overestimating what we think they tell us.

And now I've guilted myself into finding something substantive to post on. Back later.