Hillary's pretty darn good campaign: Jill Lawrence

When it comes to running a campaign, Hillary Clinton doesn’t make the same mistake twice. Compared with Donald Trump’s operation, hers looks positively brilliant. It looks pretty good compared with her 2008 campaign, too.

Clinton and her team face their toughest test to date this week in how they manage the lingering tensions of her primary battle with Sen. Bernie Sanders at the Democratic convention. The job became much harder when WikiLeaks released a cache of Democratic National Committee emails suggesting the party was hostile to Sanders and was weighting the scales for Clinton. One official even raised the idea of questioning whether Sanders believes in God. 

Under mounting pressure to resign, party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz said she would play a limited role in the convention and step down when it ends.

The other convention challenge is how Democrats can make clear the risks they see in Donald Trump’s candidacy without sounding as apocalyptic as he does — without having their convention descend into gloom and darkness as his did. Clinton displayed near perfect pitch at a Tampa rally by mixing dire warnings with humor. “It was kind of perversely flattering. It’s hard to believe they spent so much time talking about me,” she said of the GOP spectacle, which regularly went off the rails with calls to imprison or even execute her.

Admittedly, the bar to run a better campaign than Trump 2016 — or Clinton 2008 — is low.

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From a purely political standpoint, the most obvious contrast this year is Clinton’s selection and introduction of Sen. Tim Kaine as her vice presidential pick. The process was so buttoned down that though he seemed the obvious choice, it wasn't leaked; no one was 100% certain until the announcement. The first Clinton-Kaine event was a well-reviewed rally in Miami, where she praised him specifically and at length. He then told America about himself, demonstrated his Spanish-language skills and showed off his ability to seem like a nice next-door neighbor even while lacing into Trump.

Trump canceled his initial event to introduce VP pick Mike Pence, ostensibly because he “emotionally reacted” to the terror attack in Nice, France. He kept saying his decision wasn’t final even though it was. Leaks from the Trump camp suggested he was having second thoughts about the Indiana governor. When Trump finally committed, the event was at his office building. He clearly didn’t know much about Pence, he talked twice as long as Pence and mostly about himself, and if photographers weren’t really quick, they would have missed the seconds the pair were in the same frame. The music said it all — “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.” Team Trump quickly abandoned its initial Trump-Pence logo because it had a distinctly X-rated look. And the Rolling Stones are demanding that Trump stop using their music.

Could a campaign do any worse? Maybe.

Clinton’s 2008 operation was a morass of conflict, indecision, bad decisions, constant talk about strategy and leaks about all of the above. There was the decision to bypass caucuses in “red” general-election states, one that arguably lost the nomination for Clinton as Barack Obama vacuumed up delegates in places like Idaho. There was the departure of her campaign manager during a particularly bad primary week. There was also an explicit likability initiative featuring testimonials from people saying how much they liked Hillary and why. That’s far less effective than simply picking a likable partner like Kaine and letting people judge you by the company you keep.

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One indicator of Clinton’s much different 2016 operation is that there have been few if any complaints from anyone “close to the campaign” about her tendency to shout her speeches, or about the media coaching she is or isn’t receiving or heeding. “Someone, at long last, needs to urge her to let the mic do the work!” former Obama strategist David Axelrod tweeted Saturday. It’s encouraging that he doesn’t seem to have inside information about what’s going on.

For all its professionalism, there is a glaring, consequential failure on the Clinton ledger — how she and her campaign have handled the investigations and fallout from her decision as secretary of State to use a private email server instead of an official State.gov account. Her default response has been defensiveness, evasion and deliberately missing the point. An explicit and humble mea culpa at the first presidential debate, one that makes clear Clinton understands the risks she took and the mistakes she made, would be very helpful.

Kaine is the one partner she could have picked with gravitas and experience approaching her own. Maybe he can persuade her to do what she has spent months resisting.

Jill Lawrence is the commentary editor of USA TODAY. Follow her on Twitter.

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