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Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign Hardcover – Deckle Edge, April 18, 2017

by Jonathan Allen (Author), Amie Parnes (Author)

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

It was never supposed to be this close. And of course she was supposed to win. How Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump is the riveting story of a sure thing gone off the rails. For every Comey revelation or hindsight acknowledgment about the electorate, no explanation of defeat can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary's campaign--the candidate herself.

Through deep access to insiders from the top to the bottom of the campaign, political writers Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes have reconstructed the key decisions and unseized opportunities, the well-intentioned misfires and the hidden thorns that turned a winnable contest into a devastating loss. Drawing on the authors' deep knowledge of Hillary from their previous book, the acclaimed biography HRC, Shattered offers an object lesson in how Hillary herself made victory an uphill battle, how her difficulty articulating a vision irreparably hobbled her impact with voters, and how the campaign failed to internalize the lessons of populist fury from the hard-fought primary against Bernie Sanders.

Moving blow-by-blow from the campaign's difficult birth through the bewildering terror of election night, Shattered tells an unforgettable story with urgent lessons both political and personal, filled with revelations that will change the way readers understand just what happened to America on November 8, 2016.

Print length

480 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Crown
Publication date

April 18, 2017
Dimensions

6.64 x 1.48 x 9.53 inches
ISBN-10

0553447084
ISBN-13

978-0553447088
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Editorial Reviews

Review

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2017

“[A] compelling new book... It’s the story of a wildly dysfunctional and ‘spirit-crushing’ campaign that embraced a flawed strategy (based on flawed data) that failed, repeatedly, to correct course... The blow-by-blow details in Shattered are nothing less than devastating... In fact, the portrait of the Clinton campaign that emerges from these pages is that of a Titanic-like disaster: an epic fail made up of a series of perverse and often avoidable missteps by an out-of-touch candidate and her strife-ridden staff.”
—New York Times

“How did she lose? Providing that answer is the mission accepted by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in Shattered… They saw and heard far more than most of us, exploring deep inside ‘Clintonworld’ in search of the real story. And in these pages, they share enough of what they witnessed to enable us to reach our own conclusions… Allen and Parnes offer a first bridge beyond the journalism of the campaign year to the scholarship of the historians and other scholars who will process all this material for generations to come.”
—NPR

“Told largely through background interviews with campaign staff and a tangle [of] Clinton insiders, the book is a comprehensive chronicle of how her quest for the White House lurched and sputtered toward ignominious defeat… [Shattered is] richly reported.”
—TIME

"What Allen and Parnes captured in Shattered was a far more revealing portrait of the Democratic Party intelligentsia than, say, the WikiLeaks dumps. And while the book is profoundly unflattering to Hillary Clinton, the problem it describes really has nothing to do with Secretary Clinton. The real protagonist of this book is a Washington political establishment that has lost the ability to explain itself or its motives to people outside the Beltway... If the ending to this story were anything other than Donald Trump being elected president, Shattered would be an awesome comedy, like a Kafka novel—a lunatic bureaucracy devouring itself. But since the ending is the opposite of funny, it will likely be consumed as a cautionary tale."
—Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

“Just like Game Change and Double Down, Shattered comes filled with plenty of juicy behind-the-scenes stories about the 2016 election… Compiled from anonymous interviews with more than 100 sources 'up and down the ranks of the campaign,' Shattered provides a detailed timeline of how a 'winnable race' was lost.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“For those who like political autopsies, I recommend the new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Shattered.”
—Niall Ferguson, The Boston Globe

“This highly entertaining and fast-moving book provides an extensive analysis of what caused the failure of Hillary Clinton’s unwieldy and hugely expensive campaign to carry its highly favored candidate across the finish line.”
—The Washington Times

"This withering account of Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign... yields a great deal of backroom color... the Clinton campaign never had a clear picture of its own candidate or of what was coming."
—The New Yorker

“Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes' exegesis of how Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 US Presidential Election to—do I even have to say his name?—is a thorough and, at points, dishy behind-the-scenes look at what went so horribly wrong in a campaign that clearly thought they had it right.”
—Vice

“A riveting account of the final, dreadful hours of Clinton’s long pursuit of the presidency… Thanks to Allen and Parnes, we now know how Clinton reacted, at the moment she was supposed to become the first female president.”
—Denver Post

“[Shattered] sheds particular light on the painful turn of events on election night, as Clinton watched the returns deviate dramatically from the path her campaign had so confidently predicted… As the first take on Clinton’s doomed campaign, [Allen and Parnes] offer a behind-the-scenes view of the obstacles in her way—some familiar and others a consequence of the shifting American electorate.”
—The Guardian

“Hillary Clinton’s loss at the hands of Donald Trump last November is the single biggest upset in modern presidential politics. I’ve spent the intervening months trying to understand what Clinton’s defeat said about the electorate, about Clinton and about the campaign she ran. Now, there’s a book that does all of that for me!”
—Chris Cillizza, CNN

“In the last weeks before the election, the Hillary Clinton campaign did no polling… This is one of the thousand revelations in Shattered, the new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes that, for political junkies, redefines the word ‘juicy’ for our time… Allen and Parnes pile up headshaking detail after headshaking detail from the very beginning of her campaign to its end.”
—New York Post

“We’ve waited five months but we finally have the first thorough dissection of the mangled road kill that is the Hillary for president campaign. It’s called Shattered… It’s full of revelations about Clinton’s failed campaign.”
—Tucker Carlson, host of Fox’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight”

“Gripping.”
—ABC’s “Good Morning America”

“Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, the new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, is absolutely gripping reading, chock full of juicy reporting about the Democratic nominee’s campaign that you really wish you had read during the actual campaign.”
—The National Review

“Writing in a lively and fast-paced narrative, Allen and Parnes use their unparalleled access… to richly document what it felt like to be aboard the Clinton Hindenburg…”
—Vox.com

“Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign should be required reading for anyone planning to run a political campaign.”
—Columbus Post-Dispatch

"[Allen and Parnes] have written the best making of the president book since the genre was created by Theodore H. White in 1960."
—Newsmax

“An in-depth dissection of Hillary Clinton's second campaign for the presidency, a failure on many counts… this readable, endlessly fascinating autopsy by Roll Call columnist Allen and The Hill White House correspondent Parnes, who co-authored HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (2014)… A top-notch campaign examination. If, like so many others, you wonder what on earth happened in November 2016, this is all the explanation you need.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Shattered provides a sharp behind-the-news and behind-the-scenes palette of details for a campaign that, in retrospect, seemed preordained to fail, and fail miserably.”
—The Globe and Mail

About the Author

JONATHAN ALLEN is a national political reporter with NBC News. A winner of the Dirksen and Hume awards for his reporting on Congress, he was previously the Washington bureau chief for Bloomberg and the White House bureau chief for Politico.

AMIE PARNES is the senior political correspondent for The Hill newspaper in Washington and a CNN political analyst. She covered Hillary Clinton during the campaign and covers national politics.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

“Or I Wouldn’t Have Run”

Hillary clinton had a new rendezvous with destiny on her mind. Her motorcade sped toward Roosevelt Island on the morning of June 13, 2015. In a little more than an hour, she would officially kick off what she hoped would be a trailblazing, glass-ceiling-shattering campaign for the presidency. For most of the previous forty-eight hours, she had been trying to give a feel of historic importance to her first major address. It just wasn’t there yet.

She picked up the phone and called her chief speechwriter, Dan Schwerin. After two days of trading drafts with Hillary, after waiting through the delay of a power outage at her Chappaqua, New York, home, the bearded thirty-two-year-old with a signature chestnut pompadour was just about to board the tram connecting Manhattan to the East River island. He had stayed up all night, pulling together tweaks to the 3:30 a.m. version of the speech, and he looked hungover. Now, battling exhaustion and the sweltering heat, Schwerin pulled out his laptop one more time and sat down on the platform so that Hillary could dictate her final edits.

The key passage of the speech was an explanation of why she was running for president: “to make our economy work for you and for every American.” In the middle of that run—about how she would do it and who she would fight for—Hillary wanted to connect herself and her campaign to Franklin Roosevelt, the president who defined the aspirations of the Democratic Party and much of the nation for generations.

“Here on Roosevelt Island,” she said to Schwerin, “I believe we have a continuing rendezvous with destiny.”

He tapped the echo of FDR’s 1936 Democratic convention speech into his computer at 11 a.m. and took the next cable car to the island. Few would notice the last-minute change. The cluttered speech had become a testament to the aimlessness and passive-aggressive infighting that plagued the early stages of Hillary’s campaign. Hillary had tried to put together a team this time that would feature far less internal drama than her failed 2008 bid. Back then, big personalities had clashed openly, aired dirty laundry and strategy details in the press, and sometimes pursued their own goals at the expense of hers. In the intervening years, she’d assigned a lot of the blame for her loss to the warring inside her campaign. But that was hardly the only ailment from 2008 that she hoped to remedy. She hadn’t sold a vision for the country. She’d run away from being a woman instead of leaning into the unique aspect of her political story. To manage her campaign, she’d tapped a friend rather than the top pro. She’d let her husband run wild on the trail. And she had failed to take advantage of the latest technology to build a movement of grassroots supporters and donors.

From a strategic standpoint, she’d dumped millions of dollars into Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus, even though that only elevated the importance of her devastating third-place finish there. She’d gone on the attack against a better-liked rival whose platform more closely mirrored the values of the party’s base, creating a boomerang effect on her personal standing. Perhaps worst of all, she’d obsessed over winning the popular vote in big states rather than targeting the all-important delegates and superdelegates whose votes at the Democratic convention determined the party’s nominee.

But the idea burned into her mind as much as anything else was that she had lost because she’d hired people who put their own interests above getting her elected. The absence of palace intrigue on her opponent’s side—the “no drama Obama” campaign—was the kind of purpose-driven loyalty she pined for.

Over the next seven years, Hillary would rebuild her political organization while working at the State Department and the Clinton Foundation, punish those who had been disloyal to her, and prepare herself to mount a second bid for the most powerful job on the planet. When she conceded to Obama in 2008, she’d thanked voters for putting “18 million cracks” in the glass ceiling of the presidency. By the time she finished the 2016 campaign, she believed, that glass ceiling would lay shattered beneath her feet. And yet what Hillary couldn’t quite see is that no matter how she recast the supporting roles in this production, or emphasized different parts of the script, the main character hadn’t changed.

Huddled around a white table in the conference room of the Clintons’ midtown Manhattan personal office in the early spring of 2015, months before she would go to Roosevelt Island to deliver her first major address, the first hires of Hillary’s worst-kept-secret campaign outlined a plan to fly her to Iowa. They had pegged the Hawkeye State, where caucus-goers had doomed her first bid for the Oval Office, as the best spot for her kickoff speech. But Hillary didn’t like what she was hearing. She didn’t want to go big, at least not yet. And she didn’t want the first major address of what could be a history-making campaign to be set against a minimalistic backdrop like some farmer’s back porch.

To the chagrin of campaign manager Robby Mook, who would have to build a billion-dollar apparatus, Hillary had been dragging her feet about making things official. She understood that her team needed to start raising funds, hire more staff, and begin recruiting volunteers. But she also knew she had to be fully prepared for this battle. And she just wasn’t ready.

Mook, clean-cut with close-cropped brown hair and lively hazel eyes, was antsy. At one point, there was even discussion of his starring in a campaign-launching video announcing the formation of an “exploratory” committee. But Hillary was wary of repeating some of the major mistakes of her 2008 bid. She had rushed into her announcement that year to compete with Obama, and she had made it all about her: “I’m in it to win,” she’d said in her campaign-opening video. This time, she wanted to show she was listening to voters—talking with them one-on-one or in small groups and in informal settings (all with the knowledge that everything she did would be dutifully reported by a press corps hungry for nuggets from the trail).

“We’ve come so far under President Obama, but we have so many problems,” she told her advisers. “I want to make sure I’m the right person.” Given that everyone in the room had ostensibly been hired to run her campaign, and that some of them had been in on earlier discussions about the timing and logistics of her launch, no one believed she was really so ambivalent. But, sitting by a bank of three windows, twenty-seven floors above the bustle of Seventh Avenue, Hillary rendered a clear verdict on the Iowa kickoff plan: “No.”

She would go to Iowa in April, she said, but not to deliver a launch speech—and not in a private jet. She would drive, in a van, and try to find people along the way who weren’t expecting to run into her. After a quarter of a century locked inside the political bubble of the New York–to–Washington stretch of the Acela corridor, Hillary was eager to find out what people thought about the state of the country—and about her. She didn’t want to officially kick off the campaign until she’d had a chance to repeat what she’d done when she first ran for a New York Senate seat: gather information from voters. “She wanted to do that before giving a big speech and having a big event and saying ‘I have all this figured out,’ ” said one aide. “We didn’t have it all figured out.” Her big opening address would come at a location with more historic consequence, but for now, a “soft” launch could go forward—an upbeat video followed by the road trip.

The time would come for her to speak into the winds of history, but, as much as she knew Iowa wasn’t the place, she also knew that her moment hadn’t yet come. She’d been off the political battlefield for seven years. As secretary of state, she’d worked to win concessions in diplomatic back rooms across the world, but she didn’t have to worry about securing millions of votes. Barack Obama had been elected president and the Tea Party had risen in the time since she’d last been on the campaign trail as a candidate. The nation’s political bearings had shifted. And, if her 2014 book tour had taught her anything, it was that she was rusty as hell. Talking to voters, she hoped, would help her sharpen her political skills and develop her vision for the country’s future.

Obama had been relentlessly superb at telling voters why he was running for president and giving them a window into how he would govern. He was confident, cocky even, about his vision. Hillary, a modest, midwestern Methodist with a love of minutiae, was unshakably focused on the trees rather than the forest. This campaign would test the A student’s ability to adapt—to subordinate her nature to her need to win.

In preparing to campaign again, she studied Obama’s February 2007 launch speech in Springfield, the one he delivered on the steps of the Old State Capitol—the one that connected him with fellow Illinois state legislator Abraham Lincoln, who had freed the slaves in an act that set the first stone on Obama’s improbable path to the presidency. “She kept harkening back to Obama in Springfield,” said one of Hillary’s top advisers. “She had gone back to read that speech and how important it was for people as a marker of what he would do in the presidency. She viewed it as an important kind of road map for her governing principles and her actual plans to be president.”

In her mind, the first landmark address of what she hoped and believed would be a historic campaign couldn’t be about the politics of the moment, about tipping a few Iowa caucus-goers in her direction. It had to be about how she could reshape the nation from the Oval Office. For Hillary, a wonk in the best and worst senses of the word, that meant devising her policy agenda before she ever stepped to the podium. Most politicians understand that voters are looking for big, bold principles—easy-to-grasp concepts—and that the details can be filled in to fit them. For Hillary, policy is vision, and she would try to build a platform, program by program, into a blueprint for the country.

This prospect was actually a relief. It was more comfortable for her to sit in four-hour meetings at the conference table with her policy chief—the reedy, whip-smart Jake Sullivan—than to define herself by a small set of guiding principles and shape her policy ideas to fit them.

Hillary adored the thirty-eight-year-old Sullivan, enough to joke publicly about her confidence that he would someday be president of the United States. He had served Hillary as deputy chief of staff at State, a position from which he gradually vacuumed up all or parts of the jobs of several senior colleagues. Hillary appreciated both his competence and his ambition. His instincts on policy and politics matched hers. So she turned to him to run what she thought was the most important part of the campaign: the substance. That’s what bonded Hillary to her young protégé—they geeked out over policy—and it’s what she wanted at the heart of her first address to the voting public.

“This is her deeply held thing: elections should be about policy,” said one senior Hillary adviser. “There’s a textbook quality to her articulation of things.” That would make every step of narrative building its own form of excruciating drudgery. But it would soon seem like a minor nuisance for a campaign that was miserable even before it started.

In early March, just as she was planning to reintroduce herself to a nation that felt it knew her all too well with a video announcement of her campaign, the New York Times reported that Hillary had used an e‑mail address tied to a personal server at her family home in Chappaqua, to conduct official State Department business. The e‑mail story would bedevil her straight through Election Day, robbing her of the ability to create a positive narrative for her candidacy and, as one top adviser put it, returning to her like a cold sore. “You never know when it’s going to pop up,” this adviser said. “You think you’re over it and then [it pops]up again.”

At the time, it was impossible to know how long the e‑mail story would last and just how badly it would damage the campaign.

“Did you have any idea of the depth of this story?” campaign chairman John Podesta asked Mook when it broke.

“Nope,” Mook replied. “We brought up the existence of emails in research this summer but were told that everything was taken care of.”

“That’s reassuring,” Podesta shot back. “Yikes.”

“Yeah,” Mook responded. “This is going to be an interesting campaign. I’m in this zen place now where I’m focusing on the website and telling myself this is all background noise!”

For those who couldn’t bury their heads, praying for divine intervention was an attractive alternative. “I’m lighting candles in church all the time,” pollster John Anzalone told Mook.

When the e‑mail story first hit, Hillary’s aides were still trying to get a feel for one another. The crisis acted as a catalyst for infighting. Publicly, she was running a no-drama campaign. But behind the scenes, Hillary’s brain trust broke into tribes:

•The Mook Mafia, led by Mook; Marlon Marshall, his top lieutenant; Elan Kriegel, the data analytics chief; and Oren Shur, the paid media director

•The State Crew, led on the inside by Huma Abedin, the vice chairwoman; Jake Sullivan; Nick Merrill, the traveling press secretary; and Dan Schwerin, the chief speechwriter; with longtime Clinton advisers Cheryl Mills and Philippe Reines invisibly guiding Hillary behind the scenes

•The Consultants, led by Joel Benenson, the chief strategist; Jim Margolis, the ad-maker; and Mandy Grunwald, the longtime Clinton message maven

•The Communications Shop, led by Jennifer Palmieri, the communications director; Kristina Schake, her deputy; and Christina Reynolds, the research director, who had worked with Palmieri on the John Edwards campaign

At the start, Podesta was seen as a high-level troubleshooter. Short, wiry, and in his midsixties, the marathon-running former top aide to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had deep ties to every power center in the Democratic Party. He was supposed to play an adult-in-the-room role on the campaign, coordinating with Bill’s office, the White House, Democratic interest groups, and major donors. In theory, Podesta would provide air cover in Clintonworld, lessening the burden on Mook and allowing the campaign manager to focus on executing.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown; First Edition (April 18, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0553447084
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0553447088
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.69 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.64 x 1.48 x 9.53 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #590,268 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #133 in Women in Politics (Books)
- #636 in Elections
- #2,993 in Political Leader Biographies

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Jonathan Allen
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Jonathan Allen is an award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author who covers national politics for NBC News.
Formerly the Washington bureau chief for Bloomberg News and the White House bureau chief for Politico, Jonathan is a winner of the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for reporting on Congress and the Sandy Hume Memorial Award for excellence in political journalism. He has been a frequent guest political analyst on national television programs for the past 15 years and teaches a course on presidential politics at Northwestern University.
"Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won The Presidency" is his third book with Amie Parnes. Their first two books, "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign" and "HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton," were both New York Times bestsellers. "Shattered" reached No. 1 on the list.
Jonathan, who grew up in Silver Spring and Bethesda, Md., is a graduate of the University of Maryland and lives on Capitol Hill with his wife and two children. Before graduating from Maryland, he played baseball at St. Mary's College in Southern Maryland.
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"Dr. Z" Richard Zeile

Greek Tragedy

Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2019

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Begin with an admirable person, one with eminence, intelligence, and the ambition to do great things, yet flawed with hubris that, in the right configuration of the stars, leads to unexpected disaster. This is the story of the 2016 Hilary Clinton campaign. The subject is as fit as any Sophocles chose, and I envision the Candidate as protagonist, facing underestimated antagonists Bernie and Trump while a chorus of focus group voters comment on the action as scenes progress, with messengers bringing news off-stage of breaking scandals, email stories, and voting results. Greek tragedy was a distillation of human experience that reminded on-lookers that the world is not always what we think it is, and therefore do not second-guess the gods (Vox populi est vox deae).

Amie Parnes and Jonathon Allen have written an epic story of the fall of their heroine. I listened to the reading on 14 cd's by KImberly Farr and it was well-paced, clear, allowing the feeling to flow from authors' words rather than from the inflection of the reader. My one criticism was that Farr should have learned how to pronounce Ma-COMB county, Michigan, one of the crucial bell-weather counties in the election (her pronunciation made it sound like Macon county, which is in Georgia).

One reason I love history is that no fiction writer could come up with a story so filled with ironies and surprises. The Clinton campaign sought the best talent and assembled a team with experience and talent galore, but lacking the coherence needed for a fully functional (as opposed to dysfunctional) campaign. Veterans who approached politics as an art relying in part on intuition had difficulty understanding the data-driven approach of the millennials like Robby Mook. The latter always played the odds, but just as the odds are against rolling snake eyes, yet the occasional bet on this roll wins, beating the odds, just as, improbably, Trump won.

Parnes and Allen got the inside story on the Clinton campaign "on background," meaning that the people they spoke with were "off the record," and on the authors' promise not to use the material until after the election. The reason given is that the Clintons put great stock on loyalty and leaks would have been severely dealt with. This aspect of the campaign was entirely omitted from the Hilary Rodham Clinton (HRC) memoir, "What Happened." The Authors recount two occasions when HRC blamed her staff for problems that she had created, notably the email scandal for which she long refused to apologize, and later for the frustration arising from failure to get her message out through the media. These two instances were the only "blameworthy" actions reported on the part of the candidate, but they stemmed from a deeper problem of the candidate's inability to see that some of her difficulties were of her own making and character.

Some of the problems stemmed from her virtues. Loyalty to Huma Abedin, as well as that sense of justice that refuses to blame a woman for what her husband does, led HRC to keep her in the campaign's inner circle long enough for Huma's husband, Anthony Wiener, to embarrass the campaign twice, and in a manner that recalled embarrassing incidences from HRC's own history. HRC's interest in policy solutions, a strength in governing, became a weakness in campaigning as her positions were complex rather than emotionally compelling, and lengthy beyond an electorate conditioned by bumper stickers (boomers) and tweets (millennials).

Part of the campaign's ill-luck was the alignment of the stars, or rather, of the electoral mood. Both Right and Left had lost faith in the institutions of government to solve problems, and HRC found herself as the establishment candidate. This turned her experience and longevity from assets into liabilities. The attempt to remake and reintroduce herself reinforced the public perception of her as insincere, unreliable, secretive, and dishonest. Added to this was the embarrassing discovery that the more the public got to know her, the less they liked her.

"Shattered" brought out several factors of the 2016 election. First, the 24-hour news cycle meant that single stories, like Trump's dispute with the Hispanic judge, or the Access Hollywood tape, which would have destroyed a campaign in previous years, were eclipsed by new stories which took public attention from these incidents. On the other hand, dragged out/unresolved stories, like HRC's private email server, tended to stick in the public mind. Certain themes and associations reinforced one another, such as the Democratic National Committee's email hack, and campaign chairman John Podesta's hack. These reinforced HRC's "email problem" in the public mind despite the fact that they had little to do with each other. The Podesta email hack was released not all at once, but embarrassing emails were released each day for the last 30 days of the campaign to assure that there would be a developing story damaging to the Democratic campaign.

Another circumstance unique to the 2016 campaign was the absence, after the conventions, of bounce for either candidate for any positive story. Whenever the candidate was in the news, there was a negative effect in the polling, meaning that all progress was made by negative campaigning.

I am always fascinated by the ambiguity of human experience and the different strategies possible in winning a political campaign. HRC attempted to embrace the Obama coalition, winning among liberals, women, Blacks and Hispanics. But she wasn't liberal enough for the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, and her appeal to women and Blacks had the effect of driving working class whites away. In the end, the enthusiasm of Trump's supporters was enough to overcome the Democratic lock on enough rust-belt states to deliver a decisive, if close, electoral college victory. The gender-gap, which was viewed by the media as a Republican problem, turned into an asset as HRC turned off more male voters than she turned on female voters.

The one overall negative of the narration is the impression of inevitability as implied in the subtitle, "Inside Hilary Clintin's Doomed Campaign." It is difficult to avoid giving this impression when the end is known in advance. In a big campaign there are a number of opinions, and the laws of chance suggest that someone guessed right, or noticed the salient factors beforehand, when experts were all over the map. Such lucky guesses look, in hindsight, prescient, when they may have simply been, like Mr. Trump's election, luck.

England's King Alfred the Great said in the 8th Century that not a blind fate but a Divine purpose rules events. HRC identified herself with the Divine purpose, her personal mission of doing all the good you can, and her shattering the glass ceiling on behalf of American women. This dream was shattered and her campaign became the Titanic of American politics. Read Parnes and Allen's epic account of the players, events, and details.

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Observer

Damage Control

Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2017

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For what amounts to little more than a campaign mea culpa, the book has several levels. On one level, it is an unabashed slobbering over what it is that Hillary Clinton supposedly represents. Contrary to what might have been mistakenly reported as a hit piece on Clinton, the authors are definitely left-wing supporters of the Democrat Party, complete with selective memories. On another level, it is what I am sure is an accurate insider's portrayal of political pandering that is 99% of every Democrat Presidential Campaign, and that might be a conservative estimate. The problem is that they don’t see it as pandering much less see the nearly 100-year-old playbook that it is. They saw righteous indignation designed to roust the suckers one more time for the same promises that never materialize. But mostly this is a warning to the Democrat Party. Hillary wasn't The One. The third level is the expose' of ignorance infecting the authors as well as the campaign.

Like the characters in The Matrix waiting for Neo to champion their cause to rid the world of their machine masters, Democrats hang on to their 19th century ideas despite a 100% failure rate, because it is not the ideas themselves that failed, but rather the individual they trusted to create Heaven on Earth with them. Get the right guy or gal and voila (!), Utopia - with them in charge of course. Alas, despite wishin' and hopin' and thinkin' and prayin' Hillary wasn't up to the task. Their own polls showed the public perceived her as corrupt, dishonest, and a perpetual liar. So, nominate her! What could go wrong?

They seem oblivious to two facts: it was the ideas that were rejected as well as Obama's Administration, and Hillary is the prefect embodiment of those ideas: a woman made wealthy with the bribe money of donors, by peddling platitudes to poor people and the perpetually aggrieved, all the while condemning the wealthy for doing the very things she did and does every day. FDR (nearly 100 years ago) did this with his references to "My friends at the club," selling the idea to impoverished suckers that despite his fabulous wealth he was one of them. P.T. Barnum could only stand by and whistle with admiration. The Depression meanwhile lumbered on, but FDR kept winning by landslides and isn't that the ultimate goal?

The difference is FDR could pull it off. Hillary couldn't. Her campaign was shocked, shocked, by the success of a wild haired, brain-dead socialist with none of the conventional campaign machinery, or the money to match Clinton, Inc., and she ended up having to try to out-Santa Claus Bernie while pulling fast ones behind the scenes. This is what passes for "discussing the issues" on the political left.

During the primaries, Hillary had to testify in front of the Benghazi committee and the authors, their eyes overflowing with tears of admiration, tell us how St Hillary slew the incompetent dragon. They ignore her idiotic attempt to blame the attack on a video trailer, and her chilling and savage answer to questions about her blaming the attack on the trailer, "At this point, what difference does it make?" Well, while you sat around watching TV, four people, all of whom were your responsibility, were killed due to your incompetence and irresponsibility. That's the difference. But, how dare they question the Democrat Party's Queen of Hearts? She showed them. The public didn't forget.

Then there is the e-mail scandal. Hillary set up an illegal server, sent classified information over it, lied about it. Tried to hide it, and when she was backed into a corner, destroyed the electronic copies and turned over 55,000 pieces of paper that were impossible to search electronically. She couldn't figure out why that upset anyone. The smartest woman in the world was now saying "Elect me; I'm stupid." That the issue wouldn't go away was a constant source of puzzlement to the smartest woman in the world and her staff.

The authors correctly note, most likely unwittingly, that the campaign's problem was to make a nasty, narcissistic bitch appear to be Abe Lincoln, because deep down, she really was Abe Lincoln, St. Francis of Assisi, and the neighborhood's favorite Mom all rolled into one. They wanted to sell her s all of that by "discussing the issues." That would be OK if Hillary understood what issues most concerned the public and if she addressed them. But she thinks by promising free health care insurance, and free college tuition she is discussing economic issues. Giveaways/economics - same thing.

Her campaign staff kept asking her to explain to the public why she was running. What was her vision for America? How did she see the future? Her response is that is what she's been doing. Then why couldn't anyone articulate it? Because the United States of pandering to keep power isn't a strong selling point. The authors call her a "centrist." That is laughable. She is a hard-left power hungry extremist - nothing less.

Then there is the problem of how to make her likable. They knew! Discuss how her mother's struggles shaped her vision that no one could articulate. Hillary the pious would have none of that. She wouldn't "exploit" her mother's memory that way. Bullshit. She would tie her mother to the railroad tracks, if she thought it would get her elected. And her campaign had the poll data to prove lots of people believed it. But lose? No way. People steeled by their experiences don't hide in a bottle on election night refusing to face defeat by blaming everyone but themselves. Trying to make Hillary Clinton likable makes the task of cleaning the Augean Stables look like dusting the piano. That was also for the DNC to jot down for future reference. Bernie was crazy but likable: remember that.

The genuine issues, i.e. the lousy economy, Obamacare, Iran, weak military, growing threats from North Korea, shrinking middle class, horrid educational system, all pervasive corruption, an out-of-touch political class, etc. could all be laid on the doorstep of the current Democrat President and/or his party. They were the poster child for all of it. "Elect me; I'm just like them!" wasn't much of a strategy. And it was undermined by an economic illiterate playing the class envy card one day and Santa Claus the next.

She had to differentiate herself from the wild man from Vermont. So, the "discussing the issues," once again, became pandering to the victims' group du jour. One day it was women who weren't be paid the same as men (debunked), next it was worship the tiny LGBT group with a huge megaphone whose problems didn't approach those who no longer could afford health insurance, and of course the omnipresent "minorities" who, despite 50+ years of Democrat party promises were arguably worse off economically than they were before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Same old playbook, same old song, and ultimately the same old result. Never mind. She was their champion. Besides addressing the genuine issues could prove embarrassing. Better to create the image of the knight on the white horse than discuss real issues. As the book informs us over and over, the Clinton instinct is to destroy - not persuade. She was quite at home with the politics of personal destruction. So was Bill.

Hillary Clinton was (and is) a horrible candidate; that part the authors got right. What they missed is that she's a dinosaur who doesn't realize her kind is becoming extinct. The Democrat message is stale, and the groups they increasingly look to for support are a small number of bizarre malcontents whose avowed purpose is to rub the noses of middle America into their lifestyle because being left alone is never enough. That's another important part the authors missed. The victims' groups want political power and the money earned by others. Hillary was on board with that. She might has well have taken out a full-page ad in the NY Times telling the middle class to sit down, shut up, and fork over their money as long as they had some.

One of the more interesting conflicts in her campaign was between Bill Clinton and the campaign manager Robby Mook. A baseball reference might prove handy. Bill was the old-school hand shaking, baby kissing, arm twisting get out the vote type of politician. He would be batting average, slugging percentage, strikeouts type. Mook was the number cruncher/data analyzer or, in baseball terms the sabermetrics guy, who was more interested in maximizing turnout of the political base and let the data tell them where to put their resources rather than trying to persuade people not interested in her. As is typical in generational clashes each one distrusted the other and each would insist on doing things his way to no good end.

That Bernie Sanders could damage her with no money, no organization and a handful of off-the-wall promises that could never be kept, and that a political outsider, who struggles with the language, but nevertheless found the words that resulted in the electorate believing that he "got it," could beat her despite all her money and all her organization, should not result in the conclusion drawn by the authors, and aimed at the DNC: we need a better candidate. No, you need a better philosophy. One that doesn't attract power hungry, money worshipping megalomaniacs because it is set up to prevent them from obtaining power or, failing that, prevent them from exercising it should they temporarily obtain it. You know, like the one our Founders envisioned and enshrined into law. Yeah that one. Let the hero worshiping cults of personality stay in their banana republics, and let’s expand the system that brought more freedom, and more prosperity and more strength to protect those freedoms and that prosperity than anywhere else in the history of the world. It's time to re-embrace those principles not spit on them for personal gain. Hillary, Bill, & Bernie, your time has passed. Too bad the authors don't understand that. But they're mainstream journalists. Their time has passed, too.

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Andreas Titze

Tolles Wahlkampf-Buch!

Reviewed in Germany on November 3, 2023

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Unfassbar detailreiche und hochspannende Einblicke in die Clinton-Kampagne. Die Quellenlage ist absolut beeindruckend und der Wissensgewinn groß. Der Teil mit den Primaries hätte insgesamt etwas kürzer sein können, aber durch diese wenigen Längen kämpft man sich durch. Der eigentliche Wahlkampf ist spannend beschrieben, obwohl man ja weiß wie es ausgeht. Für Politiknerds ein echtes Vergnügen!

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crossbordershopper

LOCK HER UP

Reviewed in Canada on May 27, 2017

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If only more people read it. they would find out the real truth ahbout how the Clintons operate. Sje is a real eveil person and the USA should be glad she lost the election. "LOCK HER UP" is what the people deserve.

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roumache Nathalie

Intéressant

Reviewed in France on August 14, 2017

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Cette analyse est d'autant plus intéressante qu'en septembre sortira une autre analyse de cette campagne, mais cette fois, faite par Hillary Clinton elle-même. Intéressant de comparer les 2 visions.

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Kurian Kurien

Great book. Fast paced

Reviewed in India on June 15, 2017

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It's written so well and it's a definite page turner. It gives a definite insight into the inner workings of the Clinton world. A great read.

Tnwilk72

An excellent political book.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 10, 2017

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A fascinating insight into how modern politics works. If this book is to be believed then "Veep" is not far off the mark! The picture painted here is of a deeply flawed campaign on behalf of a deeply flawed candidate. Also, for me, it highlighted the inherent shallowness of modern politics. Style and personality are more important. At the time of the election I felt that Clinton had not made her policies clear whereas Trump's positions were very clear. For example, everyone, even people with no interest in politics, knew about the wall. This book explains how this bizarre situation happened - after all wasn't Hillary meant to be the consummate political insider? I am no fan of Hillary, but I did feel sympathy as she and her team wrestled with their main predicament: how to deal with the anti-politics mood of parts of the electorate. She was reluctant to attack Sanders, while attacking Trump only served to make the election about him (perhaps Teresa May should have noted this?).

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