Patti Solis Doyle is Going to be the VP COS for the Campaign, Not Necessarily in the White House
BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
by Mark Karlin
Editor and Publisher
June 17, 2008
Almost the entire mainstream and Internet media has made the mistake of claiming that Patti Solis Doyle, a former Hillary Clinton loyalist and campaign manager who was fired, was appointed the Chief of Staff for the Vice President. Actually, she is the Chief of Staff for whomever the Vice Presidential candidate will be running with Obama, for the duration of the campaign.
In short, Doyle is not being appointed the Chief of Staff for the Vice President in the White House. Vice Presidents, once elected, choose their own Chiefs of Staff.
Why is a vice presidential chief of staff appointed now, before there is a vice presidential candidate selected? Simple, a campaign needs to build the infrastructure for the fall campaign: including scheduling, staffing, key states to focus on, etc. Once the candidate is selected -- and confirmed by the convention -- the man or woman has to hit the ground running. So you don't wait, in a well-oiled presidential campaign, for the candidate to be picked. You build the staffing structure and make it ready for the VP candidate from "day one" so to speak.
That's just smart, well-managed politics.
As for the choice of Doyle and whether or not it was a signal to Senator Clinton that she will not be the VP nominee, we wil let others weigh in on that -- as many have already.
But a noteworthy issue here is that the Obama campaign (likely through David Axelrod, who knows Solis from Chicago government, and has been talking about reaching out to her) has decided that Solis is a good manager putting their judgment about her ability at odds with the Clinton camp, who fired her for allegedly mismanaging the campaign.
When Solis was appointed to head her campaign, Clinton said of her: "I have complete confidence and trust in her as a person and as a professional. She was the natural choice for me when it came to picking someone to run this campaign." Solis, who is Mexican-American, was the first Hispanic to head a presidential campaign. Whether she was fired as the scapegoat for "Bill's Boys" -- particularly Mark Penn -- or for her own failings will be the subject of much debate in future "tell-all" books we are sure. Even during the Clinton campaign, charges and counter-charges about staff failings were being hurled about anonymously.
The Obama campaign is not in it to lose; it is, as Senator Clinton has said, in it to win. It would not pick Doyle merely to poke a finger at Clinton, as some of her supporters have suggested in news reports during the past 24 hours. Axelrod and Obama made the judgment that Doyle was the fall person for a failed campaign, but had unique front line skills in managing an election. That it may signal to Clinton that she will not be VP, or will have to run on Obama's terms with Obama's selected stafff for the campaign -- as we said -- others can conjecture upon.
Again, none of us can say who has made the correct judgment; but they are clearly polar opposities, given Solis' abrupt and allegedly acrimonious departure from the Clinton campaign.
But we can conclusively affirm that the Obama campaign would only select Doyle to manage the campaign of the VP candidate if they thought that she was the correct person to help him and his VP win. If a message is being sent to Clinton, it is secondary to that goal.
But once the campaign is over, given an Obama win, his VP -- man or woman -- will then decide him or herself who will be the White House Chief of Staff.
Just for the record.
BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
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