| I actually wrote a much more lengthy postmortem on our statewide contests a week or so ago, but the sheer size of Mitch Daniels' margin of victory over Jill Long Thompson -- and the unfortunate, yet inevitable narrow losses that followed for our two other statewide candidates -- speaks for itself in a lot of ways. For that reason, I'll offer only a few thoughts.
In order to properly understand the failure of Jill Long Thompson's campaign, you really have to look at the surprising demise of Jim Schellinger's. The first 3-6 months of his effort provided a perfect blueprint of how a lackluster campaign structure can screw up a seemingly great opportunity. I gave credit to Jim at the time for recognizing when changes needed to be made and for making them -- something that nearly saved his campaign -- but there is no denying that his effort was lost in those critical first few months. In the end, the presidential primary factors really dictated the eventual outcome of that race, but the tone was set far before that circus ever rolled into town.
And yet, after being an active observer of all of this, Jill Long Thompson and her staff turned around and repeated the mistakes of history nearly misstep-for-misstep, a sin made even more inexcusable when you consider the number of oft-maligned "establishment" voices who reached out to them in the formative post-primary period when her campaign began its long, consistent journey into the wilderness. There will undoubtedly be a lot of finger pointing in the coming days, at least behind closed doors and on background with reporters, but the simple, inescapable fact is that this race was hopelessly, needlessly lost in the four to six weeks after the primary election.
The media cameras were on, the electorate was engaged, and our gubernatorial campaign simply went into hiding in Argos, not to be seen or heard from again until the state convention in June. By that point, the die had been cast, and history had repeated itself in the most horrific of ways.
Ultimately, this effort was salvageable for much longer than it ever should have been thanks to Barack Obama's stellar campaign, but the insular stubbornness of the candidate and top-level staff -- and the irrational bitterness that seemed to motivate much of the internal decision-making process -- precluded a changing of the strategic guard that at just about any point pre-September could have likely put Long Thompson in the Governor's Mansion.
It's sad, it was unnecessary, but that battle is behind us. Learning from the mistakes of your predecessors is one of the basic building-blocks of any successful political campaign, and if there is one silver lining to all of this, it is that we have a lot of educational material to peruse for the next four years. |
