Politcal Operatives Never Forget

Here's an interesting snippet, cut from a forthcoming book about Hillary Clinton - HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton.  Honestly, it is what it is. I can't judge what is detailed, as I know the Clinton folks really are no different than any seasoned, national politician from either major party. If Hillary runs in 2016, she will have my support.



I pulled out the portion pasted in below, to show you how political minds tick. If you didn't get my point above, the Clinton folks are neither better, or worse, than most campaigns at that level. And, know this; they think like this, in a watered down way, locally.

As one of the last orders of business for a losing campaign, they recorded in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet the names and deeds of members of Congress. They carefully noted who had endorsed Hillary, who backed Barack Obama, and who stayed on the sidelines—standard operating procedure for any high-end political organization. But the data went into much more nuanced detail. 

“We wanted to have a record of who endorsed us and who didn’t,” said a member of Hillary’s campaign team, “and of those who endorsed us, who went the extra mile and who was just kind of there. And of those who didn’t endorse us, those who understandably didn’t endorse us because they are [Congressional Black Caucus] members or Illinois members. And then, of course, those who endorsed him but really should have been with her … that burned her.” 

For Hillary, whose loss was not the end of her political career, the spreadsheet was a necessity of modern political warfare, an improvement on what old-school politicians called a favor file. It meant that when asks rolled in, she and Bill would have at their fingertips all the information needed to make a quick decision—including extenuating, mitigating, and amplifying factors—so that friends could be rewarded and enemies punished.

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Meeting Senator Obama at Agganis Arena - March 2007