Hillary was not beaten by Obama but by lethal habits that weren’t addressed

She played to one of her least likeable traits: a settled, self-righteous, prissy certainty

KNOWLEDGE is power? It wasn’t so, in the Clintons’ campaign. They had the knowledge. They failed to use it.

On the day she announced her candidacy, Hillary Clinton put a talk-to-camera on her website. In that one ad lay the seeds of her destruction. It was a smug, self-directed series of unlinked assertions, its delivery characterised by downward inflections preventing any build-up of rhetorical excitement. Worst of all, it centred on a patronising invitation to America to have “a conversation” with her.

That first ad ran counter to everything that had taken Bill Clinton to the White House and kept him there, post-Lewinsky. What was worse was the establishment of the key theme for her campaign: experience. Never mind that she didn’t have any. The theme itself was a mistake of mammoth proportions. A mistake almost gratuitously contradictory of what the Clintons knew about politics. Alistair Campbell’s memoir quotes Clinton on this topic: “He said there is no point saying what you’ve done, keep saying what you’re going to do, have a clear direction.”

Yet, from the outset, Hillary Clinton did precisely what her husband had said a candidate shouldn’t do. She talked about her experience. About her qualifications. About her capacity to hit the ground running. She made herself sound like someone going for a middle-management post in a manufacturing plant, rather than the aspirant leader of the United States of America. She played to one of her least likeable traits: a settled, self-righteous, prissy certainty.

The extraordinary thing is that this, too, was known to them. Long before the campaign, Bill Clinton had remarked on one of the key differences between the two of them. “I was born at sixteen and I’ll always feel I am sixteen,” he said. “And Hillary was born at age forty.”

They knew his great appeal had always been that boundless reckless bright-boy element, so exciting to be around, so inspiring to watch, so important when it came to seeking forgiveness for wrongdoing. Yet they allowed Hillary’s campaign to take on the tone of someone’s firmly reasonable mother embarking on a serious talk with her teenager about the roach found in the teenager’s room.

Almost all of Hillary’s many biographers have used the same phrase to describe her emotional intelligence. Tone-deaf, they have called her. Meaning that her capacity to read the emotional language of a situation is grievously limited in comparison with that of Bill Clinton. Yet, despite the millions of dollars spent on campaign consultants, they do not seem to have hired anybody who could address this pivotal deficit. Or, if they did, the deficit was so well established that nothing could be done about it. One way or the other, the outcome is clear. Nothing was done about it.

One of the consultants they should have hired is Professor Drew Weston, a psychologist and Democrat who has extensively studied the communications errors that crippled the campaigns of John Kerry and Al Gore. Weston might have caught Hillary, or her speech writers, warmly by the throat and said “Enough, already, with the lists”. Because every Hillary speech had lists. Every Hillary speech had the safe boring usefulness of a telephone book. Every demographic got mentioned, but no hearts were stirred. Her inability to tell stories that stuck in the mind was never seriously addressed. And that mattered.

“If you think the failure to tell a coherent story, or to illustrate your words with evocative images, is just the “window dressing” of a campaign and makes little difference to the success or failure of a candidacy, you’re missing something very important about the political brain,” says Weston. Political persuasion is about networks and narratives.”

Hillary patently believed that political persuasion was about process. She kept talking about the numbers of voters she had met and was going to meet. She would list the towns visited. And she would talk about herself, constantly, in the first person singular, long after Obama had begun to make a profound impact by talking much less about him than about the people he was addressing.

Here’s a classic example from an early Obama campaign speech. “We are choosing hope over fear. We’re choosing unity over division and sending a powerful message that change is coming to America. You said the time has come to tell the lobbyists who think their money and their influence speak louder than our voices that they don’t own this government — we do. And we are here to take it back…”

In contrast, in a segment (of similar length) of her concession speech Hillary Clinton, this weekend, referred to herself at least a dozen times: “I congratulate him... I endorse him... I throw my full support behind him... I have served in the US Senate with him... I have been in this campaign... I’ve had a front row seat…”

How could the emotionally intelligent, campaign-winning Bill Clinton and their team of seasoned advisers not spot all of these lethal habits and change them? The most obvious possibility is that they did spot them and attempted to change them without success. Hillary’s friends quote her as often saying “Coulda, shoulda, woulda”, in dismissal of criticisms made of any of her performances. Meaning, “Yeah, I know you’re going to tell me I coulda done better, I shoulda done X instead of Y”. It’s an understandable reaction to criticism. Too many political leaders are treated by their advisers as if the advisers owned the candidate, as if the candidate should just obey orders, learn lines and do what they’re told.

Hillary Clinton’s “coulda, shoulda, woulda” formula of resistance to change may simply reflect her age. At 60, habits of speech, of behaviour and of thought are pretty much hard-wired, and she may have realised that no matter how much effort she put into it, her instincts would surface from beneath newly implanted methodologies. As they did. She fabricated a story about having come under sniper fire and when the story was questioned, dug her heels in. And, while some consultant clearly taught her the trick of pointing into a crowd on the pretence of spotting an old friend, the resultant bulgy-eyed spurious enthusiasm captured on camera looked cliched and spurious. Her tight-mouthed ostentatiously patient smile during Obama’s contribution to their debates looked even worse.

A popular media motif used to explain her failure is that the political context has radically changed. It hasn’t changed at all. What Bill Clinton instinctively knew, a decade ago, still applies. What he used to do, back then, would still work. Humanity never loses the need to dream dreams, see visions, forgive mistakes, identify with promise and be lifted by laughter.

The really sad aspect of Hillary’s defeat is that she wasn’t beaten by Obama. She was beaten by her own campaign’s incapacity to utilise the gold mine of knowledge they had and play to the strengths they used to have.