It pays to be nice to the press

We're now beginning to see the post-mortem on the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign for president circa 2007 and 2008. My guess is that there's plenty of blame to go around within the Clinton campaign. But the biggest problem came in the phenomenon known as Barack Obama. Clinton (and so did I, frankly) thought a win was in the bag. Just show up in Iowa and, presto, President Hillary.

Of course, it is not going to work out that way. The New Republic has a piece from anonymous Clinton folks who take a first stab at explaining what went wrong. It's worth the read at:
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=f7a4a380-c4a4-4f84-b653-f252e8569915

Not the least of her problems, the sources said, was her problems with the press corps.

"What we're hearing is that we truly treated people badly ... and weren't open enough. We had bad relationships with reporters and it probably bit us on the ass," said one insider.

"We ran a press operation that lost all credibility with the press through endless and pointless memos ..."

I can attest to that. I finally put the Clinton campain in my spam filter because their unimportant e-mail came so often.