Problems in Clinton’s Iowa Campaign Overstated, But Still There

Two weeks ago today, I broke the story that Angelique Pirozzi, who was Sen. Hillary Clinton’s Caucus Director(responsible for overseeing the campaign’s field program in Iowa), was fired.

Cityview’s Civic Skinny took a little longer getting to it, covering it this week, but they overstate the problem a little bit, calling it a “revolving door”:

Pirozzi’s departure comes on the heels of the campaign’s former state director JoDee Winterhof getting demoted in favor of Teresa Vilmain, who consulted for Tom Vilsack’s short-lived presidential campaign. Clinton people tell Skinny that at least a half dozen field organizers — the supposedly smiling faces of the campaign — have also left recently. Skinny isn’t sure what to make of the revolving door.

I don’t know which campaign they were getting their information from, but the Clinton campaign hired Teresa Vilmain and made Winterhof a strategist and surrogate back in the first week of June, which mid-September isn’t exactly “on the heels of.” Civic Skinny also doesn’t mention that it was the right decision, because Vilmain is, by all accounts, one of the best political operatives in the state. And the Clinton campaign had just gotten started in early June, so Winterhof hadn’t had time to mess anything up even if she wanted to.

When the campaign keeps the old employee on in another role and announces her replacement immediately in a press release, it isn’t a stumble. But when a staffer gets fired and it takes two weeks to announce a replacement (David Barnhart was announced as Pirozzi’s replacement today), something went wrong.

Civic Skinny is right that morale is somewhat low in the lower ranks of the Clinton campaign right now, but let’s not ignore the other campaigns. This wasn’t the first time this cycle that a top-tier campaign has replaced its Caucus Director. And Clinton’s campaign is definitely not the only one that has lost “at least a half dozen field organizers”; at least three campaigns have.