If you're running for office, you really want your communiciations director to be at least respected by the journalists it is his or her job to manage. Hillary Clinton's flack was the oft-sweatered Howard Wolfson, who, it turns out now, was universally reviled. We already told you about how Vogue's Julia Reed called Wolfson "the most charmless human being on the planet." But Reed was not the only one who announced her hatred for Wolfson after the campaign ended! The Economist, while often subtly snide, is rarely so openly hostile as they were in their recent obit for the Clinton campaign:

The Clinton machine only exaggerated this problem. Mrs Clinton surrounded herself with familiar faces from her White House years-people like Mark Penn, her chief strategist, Terry McAuliffe, her chief fund-raiser, Howard Wolfson (one of the least helpful spokesmen this newspaper has ever encountered) and, of course, her husband.

Ouch. That is really not like them!

So now it can be told: the entire newsmedia turned against Hillary Clinton because they could not stand dealing with her communications director. Amusingly they also all hated her chief adviser Harold Ickes AND her chief strageist (slash pollster!) Mark Penn. But for some reason poor dumb Wolfson is the one they're all beating up on. Because Penn and Ickes give better quote, probably? Which is another reason Howard was a terrible flack. Sigh.

Let a thousand buck-passing stories of how the disintegration of the Clinton campaign was the fault of her coterie of incompetent aides bloom!