Another must-read for political junkies

Peter Baker and Anne E. Kornblut have a fascinating story in today's Washington Post about the ongoing turmoil within the Clinton campaign, with a heavy focus on how everybody hates Mark Penn.

A lot of focus will inevitably fall on the portion of the article that quotes Clinton aides shouting the f-word at one another, but I actually think the buried lede is this:

[The campaign] essentially did not compete in smaller states holding caucuses [on Super Tuesday]. Clinton, feeling burned by Iowa, had become allergic to caucuses, deeming them unfair.

Ickes and political director Guy Cecil argued that such states were important because even if she lost, she would pick up delegates with a strong showing. That would soon become clear. Clinton racked up big wins in California, New Jersey and even Kennedy's Massachusetts. But she lost the caucus states, and because of the party's proportional rules, it cost her.

"That was one of the biggest blunders we had," a senior official said.

We already knew that the decision to "skip" the caucuses was a huge blunder, but the general assumption up until now has been that it was a sign of arrogance on the campaign's part -- they skipped the caucuses because they made a fatally flawed calculation that they didn't need 'em, they could win without 'em. In contrast to that CW, this article makes it sound like it was not really a strategic decision by the campaign at all, but rather a fit of personal pique by Hillary herself, who "deemed "caucuses "unfair" because she lost one.

And thus it emerges that the Clinton campaign's strategy of marginalizing the caucus states -- to the
point of twisting the results in a way that totally disenfranchises the voters of caucus states, arguing that merely that caucuses should count for less than primaries, but that they shouldn't count at all -- is not so much a spinmeister's gambit as a position based on Hillary's actual, deeply held beliefs. I'm not sure which is worse!

P.S. A secondary "buried lede": the Clinton campaign spent $7 million in South Carolina... and only $300,000 in Wisconsin!!