WASHINGTON — The morning after Senator Barack Obama shook the Clinton campaign by winning five contests in one weekend, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new campaign manager — Maggie Williams, who had taken over in a shake-up the night before — assembled the curious if demoralized staff.
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Sniping by Aides Hurt Clinton’s Image as Manager
“You may not like the person next to you,” Ms. Williams told dozens of aides who ringed the conference room at the campaign’s Virginia headquarters last month, according to participants. “But you’re going to respect them. And we’re going to work together.”
Ms. Williams’s demand was dismissed as wishful thinking by some in her weary audience. But in the view of many Clinton supporters, it accurately reflected the urgent need to overhaul a campaign that at that point had set itself apart for its level of disorder and dysfunction.
The divisions in her campaign over strategy and communications — and the dislike many of her advisers had for one another — poured out into public as Mrs. Clinton struggled in February to hold off Mr. Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
But even as Mrs. Clinton revived her fortunes last week with victories in Ohio, Rhode Island and Texas, the questions lingered about how she managed her campaign, with the internal sniping and second-guessing undermining her well-cultivated image as a steady-at-the-wheel chief executive surrounded by a phalanx of loyal and efficient aides.
“She hasn’t managed anything as complex as this before; that’s the problem with senators,” said James A. Thurber, a professor of government at American University who is an expert on presidential management. “She wasn’t as decisive as she should have been. And it’s a legitimate question to ask: Under great pressure from two different factions, can she make some hard decisions and move ahead? It seems to just fester. She doesn’t seem to know how to stop it or want to stop it.”
Over the last month, Mrs. Clinton, of New York, has become much more involved in the day-to-day operation of her campaign. In addition to Ms. Williams, she brought in two experienced political hands from her husband’s White House: Doug Sosnik, who was a political director, and Steve Ricchetti, a deputy chief of staff.
And Ms. Williams has sought to calm tensions in the headquarters through steps like opening the morning conference call to more aides to foster a greater sense of teamwork. One of her first acts, aides said, was to instruct Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist and a polarizing figure in the campaign, to stay off television.
Still, interviews with campaign aides, associates and friends suggest that Mrs. Clinton, at least until February, was a detached manager. Juggling the demands of being a candidate, she paid little attention to detail, delegated decisions large and small and deferred to advisers on critical questions. Mrs. Clinton accepted or seemed unaware of the intense factionalism and feuding that often paralyzed her campaign and that prevented her aides from reaching consensus on basic questions like what states to fight in and how to go after Mr. Obama, of Illinois.
Mrs. Clinton showed a tendency toward an insular management style, relying on a coterie of aides who have worked for her for years, her aides and associates said. Her choice of lieutenants, and her insistence on staying with them even when friends urged her to shake things up, was blamed by some associates for the campaign’s woes. Again and again, the senator was portrayed as a manager who valued loyalty and familiarity over experience and expertise.
Mrs. Clinton stood by Mr. Penn and Patti Solis Doyle, who was until last month her campaign manager, even as her campaign was at risk of letting Mr. Obama sew up the nomination. When some of her closest supporters pressed her to replace them, arguing that the two were clearly struggling with their jobs and had become divisive figures in the campaign, she responded by saying she would “think about it.”
When Mrs. Clinton finally pushed out Ms. Solis Doyle, she chose Ms. Williams, like Ms. Solis Doyle, an old friend who had never before managed a presidential campaign.
Mrs. Clinton’s ability to manage the one person with whom she spoke most often, former President Bill Clinton, was also questioned by some of her advisers and supporters. Mr. Clinton moved in his own orbit — he heatedly argued with his wife’s advisers who wanted to write off South Carolina, defying them to campaign there — and took no direction from the campaign about what to say or where to go, some of them said. (Mr. Obama defeated Mrs. Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic primary by nearly 29 percentage points.)
Several aides, donors and supporters, who requested anonymity to recount private conversations with the candidate, said they had warned Mrs. Clinton that her husband’s attacks on Mr. Obama were demeaning to her and hurting her campaign. Mrs. Clinton replied that her husband became “carried away” at times but that she did not see any real harm from his approach, they said.
Mrs. Clinton’s top advisers said that while her management style might be untidy, it showed her to be comfortable with conflicting ideas among her aides. They said she had pronounced herself “ready to learn” from her mistakes and was resistant to placing too much power in the hands of a single political adviser in the mold of Karl Rove in President Bush’s two campaigns for the White House.
“She thinks the way to manage effectively is to get a lot of smart people around who don’t agree and let them work out their differences creatively,” said Howard Wolfson, her communications director. “Let them hash through things, and as a result, you come up with the best process.”
A senior adviser, Harold Ickes, joined the campaign full-time in January as Mrs. Clinton’s aides began to realize that the contest was not going the way they had planned. Mr. Ickes cautioned about drawing firm conclusions about her from this period, when she faced the demands of being a candidate.
“It’s hard to draw conclusions about her management style,” he said, “because she is, in fact, not the manager of her campaign.”
Still, some of her senior advisers said Mrs. Clinton was left with little option but to become more assertive in getting her campaign back on track, a shift highlighted by her decision to push out Ms. Solis Doyle, one of her closest and longest-serving aides. Her husband changed his advisers at regular intervals as he faced various troubles and shifting political demands while president; Mrs. Clinton, in contrast, has relied on a relatively unchanging cast since she was first lady.
For all her years on the public stage, Mrs. Clinton has never come close to assembling and running an enterprise like the 700-person, $170 million-and-counting campaign organization that she has created. At times, her aides made assumptions about tactics and voters that turned out to be wrong. They nearly ran out of money at all the wrong times, like just after Mrs. Clinton’s victory in the New Hampshire primary and right before the 22 state nominating contests on Feb. 5.
The day after her loss in the Iowa caucuses, Mrs. Clinton took command of a long meeting in New Hampshire. “I’ll do whatever you guys need me to do,” she said, a participant recalled. “I get the message.”
But a month later, she described herself as stunned to learn the campaign was nearly broke — notwithstanding financial reports sent to her every week by e-mail — and was all but conceding the 11 contests that were to come over the next month.
Unlike Mr. Bush, Mrs. Clinton has shown no interest in having one strong person running all aspects of the campaign operation. And unlike her husband during the early part of his 1992 bid for the presidency, she does not try to keep a hand in everything, with lines of communications all through the campaign.
Instead, she talked daily to a few people: Mr. Penn, Ms. Solis Doyle and, now, Ms. Williams. Even Mr. Ickes, her longtime friend and adviser, says he speaks with her infrequently.
This approach, many of her associates said, had the effect of breeding resentment at campaign headquarters. Since there was no one person in charge, they said, it was hard to make decisions, and Mr. Penn would frequently use his personal connection with Mrs. Clinton to block the campaign from moving in directions he opposed, like putting an increased emphasis on trying to present a human side of Mrs. Clinton.
Ms. Williams had been among those who lobbied Mrs. Clinton to remove Ms. Solis Doyle, arguing that the campaign lacked a plan or a message despite starting out with an overwhelming advantage in money and name recognition, campaign officials said. After resisting for much of the winter, Mrs. Clinton, before the vote in Iowa, told aides that she would replace Ms. Solis Doyle but that she wanted to wait until after New Hampshire.
But when Mrs. Clinton won the New Hampshire contest, the decision was pulled back. Ms. Williams was brought in to work alongside Ms. Solis Doyle, but without an obvious portfolio. The move was widely seen at campaign headquarters as a slap at Ms. Solis Doyle.
Offended, she threatened to leave and had to be courted to return, agreeing to do so only on the condition that she would be in charge. She was finally dismissed after more losses and the news that the campaign was running out of money.
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