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Despite all the great minds involved in the campaign such as James Carville, Terry McAuliffe, Harold Ickes, and both Clintons (see the rest here), their Achilles heel did them in. And what was that? Arrogance!

Their original plan appears to have been:

1. Raise a bunch of money from a few rich donors
2. Make speeches carefully worded to pander to voters without saying anything substantive that might be used against her
3. Put an organization in place to go after the big primaries, and ignore those annoying little caucus states for the most part
4. Be so far ahead after ‘Super Tuesday’ (Feb 5, 2008, a day that will live in infamy) that money will continue to roll in for the general election and coast to the nomination and crowning!

So what went wrong? Well everything really! Obama won the first ‘event’, a caucus, in Iowa. I’m sure the Clinton team thought “pfft, it’s a caucus, big deal, and we only just lost (well, ok, third), and we’ll be ahead shortly, stay the course”. She wins New Hampshire and they must feel like they’re back on track (remember ‘comeback kid’ in 1991?). February 5 comes along, and she doesn’t get the big lead. Money is POURING into the Obama campaign and the organizations are getting put together in EVERY state. Maybe they realized team Clinton had ignored the caucuses and went after those. Edwards doesn’t drop out which probably hurt Clinton further.

After a string of losses in caucuses and small state primaries, despite winning some HUGE STATES (CA, NY, PA, TX sorta, etc.), she still found herself behind, but the strategy had STILL NOT CHANGED except perhaps by highlighting her ‘experience’ over Obama’s message of ‘change’. ‘Experience’ came across as “more of the same” and “old”. Meanwhile Obama got a GIGANTIC push from Oprah Winfrey. “He is the one” she said, over and over. The crowd went nuts. Even I got goosebumps.

After it was already too late, her stump speeches began to get more specific, less boring, and less condescending and self-congratulatory. After agreeing that the results in Florida and Michigan, two HUGE and IMPORTANT states, wouldn’t count because they moved their primaries before Super Tuesday, team Clinton THEN decides they want to fight for them. Everyone saw through this as typical Clinton old school spin. But it was too late. Despite Obama scandals and distractions, he would not be denied. CNN, NBC, MSNBC, most bloggers, and idealistic twenty somethings had already fallen madly in love with him.

And then there’s Bill. The ex-President who is loved by so many as the creator of peace and prosperity in the 90’s. Well he quickly reminded people he has a temper and a mean streak too, and, like Hillary, is astoundingly arrogant. He did his wife NO FAVORS in this campaign, and without question cost her a ton of votes.

Other nails in the coffin were Hillary and Bill’s ‘flubs’, probably the most notable was her claiming to have landed in Bosnia under sniper fire when video showed she was greeted casually by smiling children with flowers! Unfairly or not, I think in people’s minds this might have subconsciously become linked to Bill’s “I did not have sex with that woman…” finger wagging bold faced lie. So she faced a credibility gap too.

And so today she finally conceded. Ms. “Inevitable” barely smiled. She wanted the speech to be historic, but it was still painful for her to deliver. She now clearly wants the VP spot, and I currently think it WOULD help Obama win the Presidency, BUT once he’d won it, then he’d have to put up with Hillary AND Bill for 4 or 8 years, a prospect he is no doubt thinking about.

It’s incredible that she and her oh so talented team blew this perfect opportunity. It just shows… you never know.

I have conflicted feelings about this. On the one hand I am glad she lost as I don’t like the calculating, cynical, manipulative, poll-driven way the Clintons operate. On the other hand, I’m sure this loss is very painful for Hillary Clinton and I feel bad for her. I do believe she was treated VERY poorly by the media.

Complain? You want to complain? It’s tax return time and the forms are SO annoying! The grass has started growing fast and that means I’m going to have to spend a lot more time cutting it than I want to. …

Complaining is expressing grief, pain, or discontent. It’s a complaint if you express how you feel something shouldn’t be the way it is, and usually you don’t offer a solution as to how it could be the way you want it.

We all complain, but does it do any good? No! Not only doesn’t it help, in fact it often just makes us feel worse about things and not just emotionally, but physically. We seem to think it will help ‘get it off our chest’ or maybe subconsciously we justify some perception of superiority by complaining about other things and people, but overall there’s NO benefit to it, to ANYONE, including the complainer.

Will Bowen, a reverend serving at a church in Kansas, talked about this in a sermon on finding prosperity, and this lead to him giving out little purple bracelets to his congregation and he told them to be ‘complaint free’ for 21 days, and if someone with a bracelet complained, to put the bracelet on the other arm to consciously remind them what they’ve done. Well, this has become HUGE. 5 millions bracelets and a book later, it’s still going.

Links:

• The bracelet web site and further information
• FAQ (frequently asked questions about how it got started, where the money goes, etc.)

Answering the question “how do we find happiness?” the Dalai Lama answered something like “stop doing all the things that make you unhappy.”

Complaining less is probably a good start.

Arthur C. Clarke, writer, visionary, and scientist, born 16 December 1917, passed away on Tuesday 18 March, 2008, at the age of 90. To quote the opening line from one of my favorite books by Clarke - Rendezvous with Rama - “Sooner or later it was bound to happen.”

Arthur C. Clarke wrote so eloquently, so clearly, and so creatively, that while he reached millions with his books and articles, it is a shame that more people haven’t read him, dismissing his works as just “science fiction”. But they’re really about so much more. They capture his hopes and dreams for future progress. His worries of potential catastrophes. He predicted many things that have come true. He conceptualized stationary satellites which provide so many great services today (television, phone, internet, GPS to name 4).

Clarke always kept busy, was always curious about so many things, and relentlessly searched for answers throughout his life. His writings in many ways are his speculations on answers to difficult questions about the future of humankind, whether and how we will venture into space to reach new frontiers, and the inevitable problems we will face.

One other work I must mentioned, is 2001: A Space Odyssey. He wrote this book and collaborated with famous and unique director Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay and movie of the same name. Both were milestones. The movie though made both very famous, and to this day still stands the test of time in its effects, painstakingly created, frame by frame, without the benefit of computer imagery. A story of our first contact with enigmatic alien intelligence and a computer named HAL on a huge spaceship that can’t allow the mission to be jeopardized by error-prone human astronauts.

Goodbye Arthur. You had a magnificent journey, and you will never be forgotten. Thank you.

Links:

• Wired magazine final interview with Arthur C. Clarke
• Final video message
• 1993 interview, also in Wired
• Obituary in The Times

After building a personal web site years ago and tweaking a bit here and there and adding a pretty weak blog and gallery tool I decided to jump to something a bit more robust. This is WordPress. Millions already blog with it so I thought I’d give it a try. It has a huge following with development ideas and tools, hopefully saving me lots of time and giving you something a bit nicer to look at! Sorry, I don’t think it will make me a better writer.