Submitted by ELSA, Feb 21, 2008 09:42

Why the feeling that Clinton is best qualified? For both Clinton and Obama, their campaign organizations represent the largest body they've presided over thus far. Neither has run a business or held executive office so their campaign gives us the best picture of their ability to run things.

Clinton has run a campaign that racked up enormous money in 2007 ($130mil), blew it all before the Iowa caucuses and found itself dead broke. Clinton appointed long-time friend Solis Doyle to manage her campaign regardless of Solis Doyle's ability. Sure enough, Solis Doyle managed to blow through the $130mil and not tell Clinton that her campaign was broke. Clinton, on the other hand, never told Solis Doyle (her own hand-picked manager) that she was loaning the campaign $5mil from Clinton's own pocket just to keep the campaign afloat. There are several stories of unpaid bills for hotels and cleaning services still in Iowa and New Hampshire. Call it intentional lack of payment or accept the campaign stories that they just lost the bills and no one knew they had to pay. Neither speaks well of the campaign.

Part of the fiscal fiasco was because Clinton and her chief strategist Mark Penn never had a plan past Feb. 5th. Clinton completely expected (and is quoted several times saying) that the whole process would be over by midnight Western time, Feb 5th. When Clinton failed to shut out Obama, the campaign was caught flat-footed without a plan or money. Clinton made her loan public as an appeal to her supporters to quickly get her some more cash. She didn't make a point of mentioning that her supporters were on the hook to pay Clinton back the $5mil Clinton gave since it was a loan and not a gift.

Clinton made the decision fairly early on to ignore the red state votes and caucus states. This decision meant that Obama not only won those states but won them by large, delegate sweeping margins which negated her Large Blue State strategy of winning New York, New Jersey, California, etc. Again, Clinton was caught unprepared and lacking in organization or field offices to make even a token defense.

Now Clinton is cornered into Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania. It is mathmatically improbable that Clinton can win a majority of pledged delegates (she'd need to win 53% in every remaining state or 60% in the remaining states that are competative). She is forced to clamor for the delegates in MI & FL to be seated despite her agreements to not count them. Likewise, she has been belittling and trying to diminish the importance of valid Obama wins in caucus states saying that those votes don't represent Democratic America and shouldn't affect how superdelegates cast their vote.

So, in short, Clinton has run a political machine managed by long-time friends which managed to nearly bankrupt itself, was engaged in a web of lies among its members as to the situation and proved to have no Plan B when things went wrong and has been limping along since. Honestly, I got enough of cronyism, lies and failure to plan out of the Bush administration.

I won't go on at length about Obama except to state that he has run a fantastic grass-roots campaign, out-manuvered the Clinton machine repeatedly and continues to break contribution records by using wide-spread approach not considered by the other campaigns. Obama gets castigated for joking about his messy desk but has a winning campaign that has overturned the once-inevitable nomination of Clinton. Clinton tells us she's ready to lead the nation on "Day One" but, so far, has led an incompetant political machine that has made the Queen Bee an underdog who needs to try to game the rules to get herself seated. Who do you want as president? REALLY???

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