The only person who believed Hillary Clinton’s book tour was just a book tour was Hillary Clinton.
Largely believed by all as a soft launch for a possible 2016 presidential bid, Clinton’s Hard Choices book tour has been mired by snafus, interrupted by disturbing revelations, and distracted by her publicly critiquing her old boss. #RookieMove
The only excuse to how Clinton’s once-inevitability has now become kind of-sort of-evitable was, as Joe Scarborough said on Morning Joe today, that Clinton and her team has been on an extended summer vacation.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: John Heilemann, who is around Hillary Clinton right now? Who is her team that tells her what to do or says what not to do? hHve they been on vacation this summer?
JOHN HEILEMANN: I think it's a great question because the answer is she does not right now have a campaign infrastructure. Id think one of the questions that will be asked in retrospect in this book tour which was a soft launch of a president campaign but not treated internally as such and so she was not, I think, extraordinarily well prepared for the kind of political questions she has faced. It is one of the biggest questions going forward for her is what is her team going to look like and there is a massive scrum of old become hands and Hillary Clinton hands and new Hillary Clinton hands and state department hands and all jockeying for position and that shakeout has not happened. She doesn't have a nucleus and she hasn't picked those people and she has to figure it out pretty soon. Right now, it's not chaos but a lot of people are trying to get -- claim some real estate in her orbit and until that gets clearer and until there is, like, someone who is actually in command and somebody is in charge of strategy and tactics there is going to continue to be, I think, this kind of ham handedness or whatever she has displayed.
One would think at least that the constant media blitz would result in respectable sales. It did not.