Hillary's "appallingly poor" campaign strategy

Think what you may of Karl Rove but there's no denying that the man knows politics. I think in this online conversation for the Washington Post he makes a great point about how Hillary's poor campaign strategy pretty much cooked her own goose from the start:

Karl Rove: I think it [her campaign strategy] has been appallingly poor. You pick out a critical example, her failure to contest the caucus states. In New Hampshire, 300,000 Democrats distributed 22 delegates to the convention. It took billions by all the candidates to contest that state. Idaho on the other hand gave out 18 delegates based on 20,000 votes and took probably tens of thousands from the Obama campaign.

Not only the caucus states, however. I still don't understand why she let Obama base his campaign on two things she could have taken away from him early on. The first theme was that he wanted to bring Republicans and Democrats together, but his thin record shows little evidence of this, while her record shows considerable efforts in the Senate. The other issue she let him get away with was to suggest the "fierce urgency of now" requires new leadership. She's been willing to jump in the middle of tough legislative fights, while Obama has been AWOL on most of these fights.

My theory is that she was afraid of the Netroots and how they'd react if she emphasized these centrist themes, and so she allowed him to get traction when it was her record, not his, that would have provided a firm foundation for these themes.

I think he makes a great point about New Hampshire.  Same goes for letting Obama off the hook. I think she underestimated him and his mainstream media allure from day one.  And when she finally remembered that she was actually competing against him (and not yet the republicans), it was too late.  All the subsequent attacks then seemed a little desperate, especially after McCain secured the GOP nomination. Obama became the candidate for change and she, rather ironically, became the typical, old, mud-slinging Washington bureaucrat.