The fall of the House of Clinton

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: for building a community of fired-up supporters. Mr Obama’s small donations proved to be a renewable resource, as supporters could give several times, up to a maximum of $2,300. Mrs Clinton ran out of cash.

The Clinton machine was also too stuck in the 1990s to see how radically the political landscape was changing around them. Here Mr Penn—the campaign strategist who helped to mastermind Bill Clinton’s re-election triumph in 1996—was particularly culpable. Mr Penn underestimated Mr Obama’s appeal. He relied on the techniques that had served him well in 1996—microtargeting small groups of voters (he even published a book during the campaign on “microtrends”) and emphasising Mrs Clinton’s middle-of-the-road credentials. But this was a big-trend election—and the biggest trend of all was changing the status quo in Washington.

These strategic errors probably doomed the campaign from the first. The Clintonites were so confident of an early victory that they spent money like drunken sailors (one of the biggest beneficiaries of all this spending was Mr Penn’s own political consultancy). The campaign was all but bankrupt by late January—though Patti Solis Doyle, the campaign manager, failed to tell her boss the bad news—and the Obama campaign outspent them two or three to one on Super Tuesday, February 5th. The machine was so confident of victory in the big states such as California,

Ohio and Pennsylvania that it failed to plan for the smaller caucus states, or for the primaries and caucuses that were to follow immediately afterwards.

Mr Obama was thus given free rein to rack up huge victories in places like Virginia. After Super Tuesday, Mr Obama scored a series of 11 wins in a row. Without those, he would never have secured the nomination.