Joshua Green's recent piece, "Inside the Clinton Shake-Up" covers the events that precipiated the firing of Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle.

No one could have predicted Barack Obama’s sudden rise, though the Clinton campaign was slower to recognize it than most. Solis Doyle’s failure is another matter. As much as Clinton touts her own “executive experience” and judgment, she made Solis Doyle her campaign manager because of Solis Doyle’s loyalty, rather than her skill, despite a trail of available evidence suggesting she was unsuited for the role.

To understand how this happened, it’s helpful to know a bit about the history of rivalry and factionalism in Hillaryland. The self-mythologizing tale most often told by its inhabitants is that during Bill Clinton’s administration, while his advisers were leaking left and right as they jockeyed for primacy and influence, Hillary’s were fiercely loyal. “My staff prided themselves on discretion, loyalty, and camaraderie, and we had our own special ethos,” Clinton wrote in her memoir, Living History. “While the West Wing had a tendency to leak, Hillaryland never did.”

But when Clinton ran for a New York Senate seat in 2000, that began to change. Without the drama of Bill Clinton’s administration to occupy the media, the spotlight fell squarely on Hillary’s advisers, who now included not just the loyal White House cadre, but others who had been added to her team, like Penn and Dwight Jewson, an advertising consultant specializing in branding who had helped sell Doritos, Red Wolf Beer, and the Taco Bell Value Menu. The arrival of these outsiders complicated the ever-shifting pecking order in Hillaryland, suddenly putting it on full display and making it more consequential than ever.

Two notable insights into Mrs. Clinton's leadership style are evident. First of all, she rightly recognizes that skills developed in the private sector an be applied to politics, not the least of which are branding, marketing, and advertising. If you can convince people "quiero" the Taco Bell Value Menu, what can't you convince them to "queiro"? The second is that like the sitting president, she may value loyalty as much, or more, than demonstrated competence. And apparently, that choice - to "yo quiero loyalty over competence"- comes at a high cost.