The Errors Haunting Clinton

E.J. Dionne, Jr. writes in The Washington Post:

The failure in Iowa, which allowed Obama's candidacy to take off, was Clinton's original strategic sin. Clinton's advisers were ambivalent about competing in the state. They worried that her vote to authorize the war in Iraq would make it hard for her to win in a place whose caucus-going Democrats are, on the whole, staunchly antiwar.

According to a leaked internal memo, Clinton advisers considered skipping Iowa altogether. Instead, her lieutenants were sluggish in organizing in the state and then, realizing the dangers of losing it to Obama, poured in resources -- thus depleting her coffers for the fights to come. Her campaign seemed to have only two speeds: overconfidence and panic.

And Penn committed another sin that, in truth, affected the entire Clinton apparatus: believing that Obama would be trumped by Hillary Clinton's "inevitability" and that media messaging could overpower organization. This meant that the Clinton campaign was, to be charitable, underorganized.