A much-awaited article on Hillary Clinton's ill-fated campaign says that her divided staff didn't serve her well, that she didn't make hard choices, and that she rejected her chief strategist's suggestion to go after Barack Obama on his "lack of American roots."

"Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence - on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to 'do the job from Day One.' In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles' heel," Joshus Green of The Atlantic magazine writes in the piece, which was posted online this evening and appears in the magazine's September issue.

"What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton's loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.

Green obtained a raft of internal memos, including one from strategist Mark Penn about going negative against Obama:

"All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light," Penn wrote. "Save it for 2050. It also exposes a very strong weakness for him - his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values. He told the people of NH yesterday he has a Kansas accent because his mother was from there. His mother lived in many states as far as we can tell - but this is an example of the nonsense he uses to cover this up."

Penn continued: "How we could give some life to this contrast without turning negative: Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back. Let's explicitly own 'American' in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn't. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let's use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let's add flag symbols to the backgrounds."