Leaked Clinton Memo Advising Candidate to Skip Iowa Is Bad Advice and Bad News
Over the last 18 hours or so, the media has been abuzz with
news of a leaked memo from inside the Clinton camp, advising the candidate to skip Iowa to concentrate on New Hampshire and the later states. In response, the aide who wrote the memo is unavailable for comment (and is probably now manning the Clinton headquarters in Fairbanks, Alaska) and the campaign has announced that the candidate has no intention of skipping the first caucus test.
That's the right decision. The truth is that it's impossible to win the nomination without a 50-state strategy, with the occasional exception of those candidates who have skipped a state out of deference to a favorite son. Thus, Bill Clinton did skip the Iowa caucus in 1992 but only because Tom Harkin was on the ballot. That's not the case here. Voters don't like candidates who think they can "game" the process.
Moreover, losing in Iowa is bad but not necessarily fatal. Both Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George Bush in 1988 lost in Iowa and came back a week later to win in New Hampshire. The two states often don't vote in tandem.
Still, one has to wonder what's going on in the Clinton camp. As we wrote in a
column last week, on paper at least, Iowa should be friendly territory for Clinton, no matter what the polls show now (and some show her running in third). So, either some parts of the campaign are panicking way too early, or their internal polls are confirming a trend that others have picked up: When voters get to know her better, Hillary Clinton isn't as popular as she had hoped she would be.
In any event, even the intimation that the campaign was thinking of skipping the caucus will hurt Hillary slightly in Iowa. These people take their role in the process very seriously.
As we keep saying, there's a long way to go. But something is mildly rotten in the state of Clinton.
