Matt is right, the MOST interesting thing about the article is what was not said: Hillary's vote on the war. As Matt points out:
Her support for it was a mistake. What's more, it's inconceivable to me that Obama's campaign could have gotten off the ground had Clinton spent 2002 and 2003 as a lonely liberal voice speaking out against the war, then spent 2005 and 2006 being completely vindicated in her judgment. It's not just that Obama wouldn't have beaten her, he wouldn't have run at all -- it would have been preposterous. She would have faced a from-the-right challenge in the primary that would have gotten some attention but never posed any real threat.
I find it interesting that her campaign staff has such a blind spot for this. It may be their preception of the question, they consider her record to be past business beyond their control, they had a winnable campaign and the "what went wrong?" question is asking about process not legislative record. On the other hand, it may be symptomatic of a certain strain of conventional wisdom and/or beltway thinking in her campaign that any vote for war is politically smart and "tough" and any stand against a war must be "weak" on national security. It's just a given that voting for a war that was popular at the time the vote was cast couldn't be a mistake.
It seems inevitable to me that any discussion of "what if" scenarios must surely consider her war vote as a POLITICAL as well as a policy mistake. If you poll the staff anonymously and no one mentions it, then maybe "what went wrong" was that her campaign was full of people that thought this way in the first place.
PS: For those that don't get the reference, it's from John Clease's excellent but short running post-python sitcom "Faulty Towers" where he plays the proprietor of a bed and breakfast.
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