Does Chris Cillizza have any idea what makes a good campaign a good one or a bad campaign a bad one?

No, it wasn't campaigning with beloved Project Runway presence Tim Gunn that made Christine Quinn's "the worst campaign of 2013." It was . . . well, you'll see.

by Ken

One of the things that made Tim McCarver such a great baseball announcer in his glory years as part of the New York Mets' TV broadcast crew was his informed and informative discussion of strategic decisions, by both managers and players, before pitches or while plays were developing -- you know, like having hitters take or swing away, or bunt, or hit and run, sending runners, issuing intentional walks, matching up pitchers and hitters, positioning defensive players, runners taking (or not taking) an extra base, fielders choosing which base to throw to or when not to throw at all, and so on and so on.

It was widely known that managers and players powerfully dislike McCarver for "second-guessing" them, but as he frequently pointed out, he didn't. He didn't like second-guessers either, but he explained that by getting his thought on the record beforehand or as the play was developing, he was speaking in real time, not after the fact. That's first-guessing, not second.

I found myself thinking about this when I read Chris Cillizza's washingtonpost.com disquisition this afternoon, "The worst campaign of 2013" (a follow-up to yesterday's best campaign of 2013). It is, I think, the very model of what makes professional political pundits such a revolting group, showing about as little understanding of or insight into what makes campaigns succeed or fail as it's possible to have.

The imbecility starts with an imbecilic list of "nominees": Barbara Buono, Elizabeth Colbert Busch, Ken Cuccinelli, Chris Quinn, and Anthony Weiner. The only legitimate candidate here, it seems to me, is Anthony Weiner, who really and truly shot himself in the foot every chance he got. But then, despite his brief poll whirl, he could never have been a serious candidate for the New York Democratic mayoral nomination, for the simple reason that he is, you know, Anthony Weiner.

Any pundit who wants to show how a better campaign would have changed the outcome for any of the others on the list is welcome to do so -- or, better, would have done well to do so while the play was still in progress. So, for example, a pundit who wants to jump ugly on Barbara Buono in her doomed campaign against America's Sweetheart, NJ Gov. Chris Christie, should remind us what thoughts he/she ventured at the time about what Buono might have done to stick a pin in the Bloated One, at a time when NJ voters showed no interest in hearing bad words about their Fat Fairy Prince. Or were said pundits too busy playing kissy-face with the FFP?

Or take "Cuckoo Ken" Cuccinelli, who despite being a stinking pile of psychotic fecal matter came within a hair's breadth of being elected governor of Virginia. True, it should have been an easy race for any normal Republican candidate against a pile of sludge like now-Gov.-elect Terry McAuliffe, but the Cuckoo Man took great pride in not being a normal Republican candidate, and didn't show much more interest in than talent for lying about the whackjob he is. And in a year when a startling number of state GOP pols refused to keep quiet about it, what would have been a smarter campaign strategy? If you think Cuckoo Ken ran such a dreadful race, riddle me how you as chief strategist would have managed to package him as not-Cuckoo Ken. Or, better, just shut the hell up.

Which is as nothing comparied with the treatment of the winner, NYC City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who went into the year as the odds-on favorite to succeed Emperor Mayor Mike as NYC mayor and wound up barely showing up in the results in the Democratic primary.

For once, the punditocratic campaign analysis seems to me reasonably sound. Yes, Quinn had spent a lot of years trying to position herself as the inevitable successor to the emperor-mayor. And yes (note: many more links onsite):

Then it all went wrong for Quinn. Rather than seeking a continuation of the Bloomberg Administration, Democratic primary voters turned against the Mayor and began to agitate for a major break from his style of leadership. Suddenly Quinn found herself strapped to the hull of a sinking political ship. While de Blasio was blasting Bloomberg's policies as favoring the one percent at the expense of the average New Yorker, Quinn was slowly but surely realizing that she needed to get out from under the Bloomberg blimp as soon as humanely possible.

(Make sure to check out the New York Times' awesome mini-documentary on Quinn's campaign -- "Hers to Lose".)

She tried to do just that by forcefully condemning Bloomberg's "stop and frisk" policy but that move was undermined by the fact that Quinn had previously said she would retain NYC police commissioner Ray Kelly, who had put that policy into action, if she was elected mayor.

The die was cast. Quinn was the status quo candidate in a change election. (The parallels -- and mistakes -- that Quinn made are strikingly similar to the missteps of Hillary Clinton's campaign against Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary.)  Wrote New York Daily News columnist Josh Greenman of Quinn's campaign:

When, rightly or wrongly, you're perceived as a wholly owned subsidiary of someone who's commanded the New York City stage for a dozen years, you are compromised.

And, given the electorate's increasingly restive mood, the Bloomberg association was compounded by Quinn's support from all three newspaper editorial boards -- which may well have given voters the sneaking suspicion that a fix was in.

Quinn made a very big bet in 2009 that Bloomberg's popularity would sustain all the way through 2013. That big a miscalculation -- and the anchor it became on her chances -- makes her a worthy pick for the worst campaign of the year.

So, what made the Quinn campaign 2013's worst was "a very big bet in 2009."

Wow! That means our pundit corps had four years to explain why the Quinn campaign would prove to be 2013's gravest wreck -- to point out how her giant miscalculation in 2009 would be an "anchor . . . on her chances." Surprisingly, given all the links larding Chris C's post, I don't notice any to "Fix"-posts from 2009, or from 2010, 2011, 2012, or from even so much as a day before the NYC mayoral primary on September 10, 2013.

I don't think Tim McCarver would be terribly impressed.

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