Nicholas B. Jackson

In the L.A. Times this morning, staff writer Peter Nicholas tracks the breakdown of the Clinton campaign. The piece begins:

As they mapped out a campaign schedule for Bill Clinton, top aides to Hillary Rodham Clinton kept his time short in South Carolina. They were probably going to lose the state, they figured, and they wanted their most powerful surrogate to move on to Georgia, Alabama and other Southern states.

But the former president shelved the plan, according to campaign aides. Day after day he stayed in South Carolina, getting into angry confrontations with the press and others. In the end, Hillary Clinton lost the Jan. 26 vote there by a 2-to-1 margin and saw her standing with African Americans nationwide become strained.

As the story unfolds, Nicholas documents how several senior staffers are beginning to point fingers and distance themselves from what they see as a campaign that is quickly unraveling.

Mark Penn, who has certainly received more press than either campaign manager and is seen by many as the voice of the Clinton campaign “said in an e-mail over the weekend that he had ‘no direct authority in the campaign,’ describing himself as merely ‘an outside message advisor with no campaign staff reporting to me.’”

• Originally published: Texas Monthly 2008.03.03