I bring this up because Jonathan Martin's story about Jon Huntsman's dysfunctional presidential campaign in Politico is all about the violence -- in this case, the internecine warfare between Hunstman's longtime friends and his campaign manager John Weaver

John Weaver, naturally. The man has a perverse gift for making enemies and dividing campaign staff. He did the same thing with the John McCain campaign before he left, getting in some huge personal feud with Rick Davis and running a vastly over-budget campaign before getting the boot with the McCain Campaign on the verge of collapse.

I can commend Huntsman for relying on the AEI for his position papers. I myself wrote position papers for John Anderson on the Middle East and urban planning [!?!] because my FSO experience taught me to write about virtually anything. I did speeches for Mondale in '84 under Madeleine Albright.

Political campaigns are largely driven by strong personalities at the very top of the campaign, many of whom are professional grifters who often put their own advancement ahead of the candidate's. Weaver sounds like one of these.

As far as running the State Dept., Albright was the Foreign Policy chief for Mondale's campaign and then made somewhat of a hash of being SecState, especially with her trips to the North Korean mini-Stalin to give him a billion bucks to STOP him from building nukes---but that's another story.

Hillary Clinton is ready to be Obamandias' second Veep if he can jettison Joe Biden, whose mouth runs far faster than his diminishing mental faculties.

I'd bet Buffett et al wished they'd gotten a white paper on Obamanomics before signing on.....

Addressing Dan's point about assuming a well run campaign equals managerial skill in government, I have always found this to be a completely bizarre assumption for two reasons:

First is that the ultimate goals are obviously different. There's no reason to think a professional football coach and a high school principal could effectively switch places even if they were both good leaders.

Second, and far more important, is that a campaign ends with only one winner. Most campaign staffers (at the presidential level) are career politicos who will need to sell themselves to a new candidate once the next election comes along. That means that once they see the writing on the wall they have an incentive to use the media as a personal PR firm to make sure prospective bosses absolutely know the failure of the campaign can't be blamed on THEM.

We see this all the time, it's the reason why the airing of the losers dirty laundry in the press is practically as predictable as election day. (See Newsweek's coverage of the Kerry and McCain campaigns for examples)

McCain?

I worked on the campaign side of politics until my mid thirties. I still am involved but not on the paid professional level. I did not not see the Real Clear piece but read the Politico link here.

Weaver was absolutely correct in erupting over the botched announcement. I was an advance man for presidential and vice presidential candidates and trained by people who had worked at the highest levels in our party. Reading the article, it was easy to predict the titles of the four poor people who were axed. You are competing for the highest stakes so amateur hour is definitely not acceptable. It is obvious that Fischer and the candidate's dad have the entirely wrong skill sets to evaluate and correct problems in a presidential campaign. I tell people I really wanted out of political consulting because I could close my eyes and pick out the different roles including best friend/nit wit who thinks he's an expert, the candidate's family spouse who think that negative ads and other "unpleasant" aspects of politics should be exorcised from this particular run for office, and the altruistic local staffer in way over their heads. They usually believe that course of action will move voters but base it on personal feelings rather than any remote concept of survey research or even anecdotal evidence to support their quaint notions. They also believe the pros from Dover are malevolent monsters who are dragging down their hero.

Huntsman got into the fight (and that is what a nomination process at this level is) very late. The talent pool of operatives has to be light at this stage of the game so you have people who may have been great crowd builiders as part of a team leading the team. The amount of planning and preparation by the communications/scheduling/advance shop required to pull off a multistate presidential announcement demands serious abilities and committment not in evidence in this tale of woe.

There is also an incredible level of tension that sometimes manifests itself with f-bombs and anger. I bet Weaver has a sign in his office that changes daily displaying the number of days until Iowa. The rank amateurs such as Fischer don't understand that "civility" won't get the blown camera shot (which was the object of the exercise) back and that there is no time to repair this type of damage. Weaver did and if he did not display frustration and anger there would be something really wrong with him.

The most important thing I learned about Huntsman is that he is having trouble raising money which means he is toast. He is not well positioned to ride a wave or movement within the party so the best he can hope for is either VP or Secretary of State. His religion works against him especially if Romney wins because that would most likely be too exotic to win the election. Unfortunately, these dark underlying prejudices still permeate the American electorate.

Remember Bismark and sausage? This flurry of media attention on a sinking ship regarding Huntsman's future is a glimpse inside the butcher shop but will have negligible impact on Huntsman's future outside of this race. Also, don't think for a minute that this is at the same level of backbiting and high stakes open warfare as the Clinton '08 campaign. That was the major leagues and this definitely Double A ball stuff. When you have former presidents for the family/spouse role and five million "Friends of Bill and Hillary", that is the real deal. It sounds in the Huntsman case that Fischer, the old man and wifey should have got on the plane to Saudi Arabia and flown off to Mecca! They'd have more fun there than they are going to in the next few months on the Huntsman train wreck!

Not really care about what to do with this matter ~ politic sucks anyway.

The most important thing I learned about Huntsman is that he is having trouble raising money which means homeimprovement he is toast. He is not well positioned to ride a wave or movement within the party so the best he can hope for is either VP or Secretary of State.