I occasionally become amazed at how failed political operatives have this way of continuing to land on their feet.
They lose national elections and yet the TV news networks — cable and broadcast — seek them out for their “expert analysis” on all things political.
Robby Mook is the latest such example of that.
It puzzles me a bit.
Mook managed Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Clinton was the prohibitive favorite to win that election. Every pundit from coast to coast to coast said she’d clobber Donald J. Trump. Some of them predicted a landslide … for Hillary!
Well, it didn’t happen. She lost, albeit narrowly. Sure, she won the popular vote and finished ahead of Trump by about 2 percentage points, which is about where the polls had pegged it.
However, the campaign missed a number of key strategic opportunities in critical Rust Belt states. Trump captured those traditional Democratic strongholds.
Who’s to blame for all of that? You’ve got to lay it squarely in the lap of the campaign manager. Mook called the shots. He ran the show. He was supposed to ensure his candidate won. It was his job to make sure Hillary spent her time where it counted the most.
He blew it, bigly.
How does this guy hold up as an expert?
Oh, wait! He’s “telegenic.” That’s got to be it.
Mook is a poster child for what working-class America is not. No real surprise that Clinton so completely failed to capture the vote from that part of the electorate.
More broadly, Clinton’s loss appears tied to her party’s embrace of ideology at the expense of reality on the ground. If for no other reason, they will continue to employ people like Mook because they tell the Democratic Party what it wants to hear.