Hillary Clinton Kept a 'Hit List' in 2008 Presidential Campaign

A dishy piece, at Politico, "Hillary’s Hit List":

As one of the last orders of business for a losing campaign, they [Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod] recorded in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet the names and deeds of members of Congress. They carefully noted who had endorsed Hillary, who had backed Obama, and who had stayed on the sidelines—standard operating procedure for any high-end political organization. But the data went into much more nuanced detail. “We wanted to have a record of who endorsed us and who didn’t,” a member of Hillary’s campaign team said, “and of those who endorsed us, who went the extra mile and who was just kind of there. And of those who didn’t endorse us, those who understandably didn’t endorse us because they are [Congressional Black Caucus] members or Illinois members. And then, of course, those who endorsed him but really should have been with her … that burned her.”

For Hillary, whose loss was of course not the end of her political career, the spreadsheet was a necessity of modern political warfare, an improvement on what old-school politicians called a “favor file.” It meant that when asks rolled in, she and Bill would have at their fingertips all the information needed to make a quick decision—including extenuating, mitigating and amplifying factors—so that friends could be rewarded and enemies punished.

Sounds so Nixonian. And frankly, we need more political reporting like this. Real politics. Real villainy.

Keep reading.

The piece is excerpted from Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes' forthcoming book, HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton.

Hillary will turn 69 on October 26, 2016, about 8 months younger than Ronald Reagan was when he was elected in 1980. Age won't be an issue in 2016 campaign, as long as Hillary's doctors give her a clean bill of health. Oh boy, it's going to be yet another doozy of a ride on the Clinton's rollercoaster.