Clinton Campaign Disarray Casts Doubt on What Her “Experience” Really Means

Factions. Infighting. Pathological loyalty. It sounds like the Bush administration — but it’s not. Those descriptors apply equally to another political institution that has recently come under heavy fire: the Clinton campaign.

In a scathing National Review article published today, Michelle Cottle writes of the internecine fighting amid Clinton’s various advisers from different periods of her and her husband’s career:

Rife with big egos and competing centers of influence–veterans of Hillary’s First Lady days, relative newbies from her Senate office, Bill’s ‘92 people, Bill’s ‘96 people–Team Hillary has never been a comfortably cohesive group.

Particularly problematic, longtime Clinton communications adviser Mark Penn is clearly what some of my colleagues like to call a “toxic tomato” — an office presence that sews discontent and plays teammates off one another for his own benefit. He seems far more concerned with his own petty turf wars than with the ultimate success of his team and his candidate.

Why would anyone keep such a player around? It seems that the Clintons are incapable of ridding themselves of Penn because, “[he] is a known and trusted quantity to a candidate for whom loyalty is a primary concern.”

If there’s one lesson we’ve learned from the catastrophic failures of the Bush administration, it’s that loyalty at the expense of competency creates utter chaos. Bush’s greatest failure as an executive was relying on advisers from his father’s administration to the exclusion of even his own limited critical thinking skills. A key example is Bush’s most toxic display of pathological loyalty: his repeated refusals to accept disgraced then-Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld’s resignation.

Perhaps it’s time to admit that political dynasties are not good for America — especially when they masquerade as “experience.” If the Clinton campaign is so rife with mixed loyalties, decade-long resentments and agendas that have nothing to do with doing right by the American people, what will would the a Clinton administration be like?