The long road to a Clinton exit

By the time the campaign tracked down the small-city Indiana mayor, Bill Clinton was in a lather. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had lost the North Carolina primary that evening and was eager to offset it with a win in Indiana. But a vote-counting delay in one county threatened to rob her of a prime-time victory speech.

The Clinton campaign called a supporter for help. "I've got an angry president here and a candidate who wants to know whether or not she won," a local campaign representative told the mayor, Thomas McDermott Jr. of Hammond, Indiana McDermott could hear Clinton railing in the background. "It's not very often you basically have a former president yelling at you to get the numbers out," he recalled.

The yelling was for naught. McDermott said he had no control over the vote count and, in the end, the late results cemented a negative narrative for an evening dominated by the North Carolina defeat with little attention focused on the eventual Indiana victory. The night of May 6 became the moment that Clinton's desperate comeback bid for the Democratic presidential nomination finally crashed against the reality of delegate math. All she had left was the perception of momentum, and suddenly, that was gone.

Hers was a campaign of destiny that fell achingly short, garnering nearly 18 million votes in her quest to become the first woman to hold the presidency. "Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it," Clinton said as she ended her campaign on Saturday.

Yet while she emphasized its trailblazing nature as she exited the race, her campaign also represented a back-to-the-future effort to restore the Democratic dynasty of the 1990s that could never quite escape the past. Although Clinton proved a more agile candidate than many had expected, she built a campaign that was suffused in overconfidence, riven by acrimony and weighted by the emotional baggage of a marriage between former and would-be presidents.

As she flew from town halls to rallies on the road, she did little to stop the infighting back home among advisers who nursed grudges from their White House days. The aides grew distracted from battling Senator Barack Obama while they hurled expletives at one another, stormed out of meetings and schemed to get one another fired.

The Clintons struggled to adapt their successful formula to a new era against a new kind of opponent. They found their message of hope and change co-opted, and they found it hard to break out of the news media's old image of them. Clinton variously tried presenting herself as the friend having conversations with the American people, then the experienced hand and tough warrior before settling on heroine of the working class.

Clinton vented frustrations and, still not one to use e-mail, much less a BlackBerry, found his famed instincts inadequate in a blogosphere age that amplified every intemperate outburst.

While Obama had mastered Internet fund-raising, it took Clinton a year to do the same.

And as they tried to master a new political era, the Clintons demanded loyalty from those who once surrounded them and felt betrayed by people they assumed would be with them again.

"What hurt them was their sense of entitlement that the presidency was theirs and all the acolytes should fall in line," said Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a former Clinton cabinet officer who endorsed Obama only to be branded a Judas by James Carville, the architect of Clinton's original rise to power. "Instead of accepting it, they turned on the acolytes. It was their war room mentality, to attack when something doesn't go their way, and it just reminded me of the old days."

In those days that mentality combined with grit and perseverance usually proved enough to win the day. If Gennifer Flowers, Newt Gingrich and Monica Lewinsky taught the Clintons anything, it was never to give in, no matter how many people told them to. This time, it was not enough, as Clinton's three-month effort to salvage her campaign after a cascading series of defeats in February fell short.

"Bill and I share a character trait of being determined and committed and not easily deterred or discouraged," she said in an interview in the waning days of the race. Asked about onetime friends who had abandoned her, she said, with a note of resignation in her voice, "That happens in politics."

These past three months played out with classic Clintonian drama. Her staff conducted rival polls while debating how much to campaign in North Carolina. Unlike her opponents, Clinton refused to make solicitation calls to donors and had to be talked into calling the party officials known as superdelegates. Aides busily blamed one another for strategic mistakes that put her so far behind.

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