You know how Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign was undone by ridiculous amounts of kindergarten-style infighting among her senior advisors? Well, actually, you don't know, not really, if you haven't yet read this extraordinary new Atlantic article, The Front-Runner's Fall, which is accompanied by this treasure trove of memos from inside the campaign, in which purportedly calm and sensible Washington insiders unleash their "anger and toxic obsessions" at each other, and Mark Penn, Clinton's former chief strategist, proposes launching an attack on Barack Obama's "lack of American roots" -- but never admitting it publicly.
The short version: Clinton's advisors clashed over the campaign's most fundamental principles, and she failed to decide whose vision would prevail. It's all rather messy and horrible and sad, and not vicariously amusing in any way whatsoever.
(TPM Election Central has a further dissection of Penn's "brutally negative" proposed strategy, and Marc Ambinder wonders what it'll mean for future relations between Team Obama and former Clinton staffers.)
