photo credit: Franco Folini

Politico writes “Looking forward, it is clear Clinton’s team has only a faint and highly improvisational strategy about what to do over the next seven days. Simply put, there is no secret weapon.” Simply put on my end, things aren’t looking good for team Clinton.

While Clinton gave a largely ignored “major foreign policy speech” yesterday which boiled down to, Barack Obama doesn’t have experience, her campaign spent the day trying to make an issue out of, not making an issue, over a photo, that they didn’t “believe” was from a staffer, but with 700 people employed, they didn’t have the time to really check, but it was probably Obama’s fault, no it was probably the media’s fault. It all seemed so, amateur hour.

From what I can tell, Clinton is in a bind. Every line of attack her campaign has is resoundingly rejected by the people who don’t support her and makes those that do a little queasy. Exit poll after exit poll shows one consistent thing, those who are supporting Barack Obama don’t care about electability or experience, they are going for change and “likes people”. So why does every attack focus on experience and electability? If I told a salesman I wanted a mac and he kept trying to sell me a PC, sooner or later I would just get pissed and walk away and go to the Apple store where I could live in harmony with my evangelical brethren.

Hillary Clinton has a lifetime membership to change and taking care of people. Every major issue she has been a part of has involved helping women, children, minorities and supporting human rights and yet, we never hear about it. That is something they might want to show through pictures, images, sound instead of a gaping black hole of “I will bomb whoever attacks, whether at 3:00AM, 4:00AM or 6:00PM.”

Speaking of Mac and PC, when I think of Clinton and Obama, I think of Bill Gates the overachieving and not so fashionable founder of Microsoft and Steve Jobs the brilliant and stylized founder of Apple. Jobs said of his rival “The problem is that Microsoft just has no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way.” The same can really be said about the bloated and bleeding Clinton campaign. They just have no finesse, no style, no way of working an issue. They just hit with blunt force and wait for the blowback, her campaign is the class bully, his the underdog.

The reality is, sometimes the underdog has it coming to them. They do things, say things that provoke the bully but ultimately they have the weight of popular opinion on their side out of mutual hatred for the opponent. The Clinton campaign just cannot see it, the don’t understand how every instinct they have creates opportunity for Obama. Like the great line on SNL when the nuanced Jon Lovitz as Dukakis turned away from the meandering Dana Carvey as Bush, looked to the camera and said “I cannot believe I am losing to this guy”, the Clinton campaign just doesn’t “get it”. They don’t see that having all the right answers isn’t enough in this weird pop-culture, reality-tv world of ours.

Clinton like an aging rotary phone hidden somewhere in the basement, just doesn’t understand why she cannot dial into the American public. It will all make sense later on, when the campaign is long over, but for now it just seems like the end of what started out as an amazing campaign.