Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

by Jonathan Allen

We were surprised, then, when Clintonworld sources started telling us in 2015 that Hillary was still struggling to articulate her motivation for seeking the presidency.

We expect that it will generate a feeling of righteousness, and perhaps a touch of sympathy, in those of you who don’t like her.

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.

“I am telling you right now that if there is any hint of trust issues with me, I am not taking this job,” she wrote.

There was a certain duality to Hillary’s vast political empire: while it was true that most of the voices inside and outside the campaign had something valuable to contribute, when taken together, they were cacophonous. Rarely did everyone agree on a particular course of action, and often the counsel Hillary got came with the baggage of the adviser’s agenda in maintaining

good relations with the candidate or trying to make a rival look bad.

The campaign was an unholy mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority, petty jealousies, distorted priorities, and no sense of greater purpose. No one was in charge, and no one had figured out how to make the campaign about something bigger than Hillary. Muscatine felt that the speech said nothing because it tried to say too much.

Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her. In fact, the more people she assigned to the task of setting the tone for her campaign, the more muddled her message became.

Her marching orders were to find a slogan and a message. The absence of any talk about her actual vision for the country or the reasons voters should choose her stunned some of the participants. “There was never any question, and no adviser prompted discussion of ‘why you, why now?’ ” one of them recalled.

Though some of Hillary’s aides were both competent and loyal, the candidate favored the latter over the former, which is one major reason the campaign’s gears often got stuck.

“Dan Schwerin isn’t the issue,” said one of Hillary’s top aides. “It’s the candidate herself.

Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale.

“I would have had a reason for running,” one of her top aides said, “or I wouldn’t have run.

“She didn’t want to run for president,” one person she spoke to at the time said. “She did not want to do it. She just concluded that no one else could win.

This may have sounded like the idea of running was thrust upon her by circumstance, but in truth, she had spent the years since her 2008 primary defeat building herself and her operation in anticipation of a possible second bid. The real question wasn’t whether she would begin campaigning but whether she would stop.

“How many staff are there?” she asked. “How many work for Ready for Hillary?” “About thirty,” one of her aides replied. “Every single one of them gets a job on my campaign,” Hillary decreed.

Smith e-mailed Podesta on April 10 to complain about the situation: “Just so you know, as of today, 6 of our people have been given jobs,” Smith wrote. “Today I have to lay off 17 people.”

“Whose bright idea was it to shut down Ready for Hillary?” he repeatedly asked Smith, knowing full well that it was Mook’s. But Mook, never a fan of Ready for Hillary and certainly in no mood to empower another organizer in his own campaign headquarters, sent a clear signal that RFH wasn’t really welcome in Brooklyn or anywhere else the campaign operated.

Once he’d extracted the group’s lists, which he thought had limited value, they were done.

Anthony Weiner, had quit the House after sending sexually explicit tweets to women and then lost a mayoral bid after revealing he hadn’t stopped sexting women he’d met online.

The Royal Huma Guard made it harder for Hillary’s senior- and midlevel aides to get time with the candidate, and that made it impossible to really know the woman they were selling.

“If I was running for president, I would want my staff to be able to reach me. If you can’t reach her, then Hillary becomes cardboard Hillary. You’ve never spent time with her. She never really knows what you do.

Much of this infighting might have been avoided had someone been given the authority to have the final say on matters large and small. But Hillary distributed power so broadly that none of her aides or advisers had control of the whole apparatus.

In April 2014, Bernie Sanders called liberal radio talk show host Bill Press to his Senate office for lunch. Both men, like many white liberals, had started with great hopes for Obama’s presidency but had grown disappointed. After watching the president come up short of implementing a full progressive agenda, Bernie couldn’t stand the idea of Hillary pulling the country back into the Clinton White House years.

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking,” Bernie replied. “I want to make sure that the progressive issues are front and center in the 2016 campaign. Hillary’s not going to raise them on her own. Somebody’s got to do it.

“I hate and detest these 30-second ugly negative ads,” he said. “I believe that in a democracy what elections are about are serious debates over serious issues—not political gossip, not making campaigns into soap [operas]. This is not the Red Sox versus the Yankees,” he said.

He placed several calls to Bill Clinton in the spring, hoping to get the former president—and onetime golfing partner—to offer an assessment of the race.

Trump asked Bill what to expect from a presidential campaign. It’s a big challenge, the former president confided. Your life will be laid bare. But Bill stopped short of advising Trump on whether or not to run. By that point—a call to the former president—the decision had surely been made. Trump had spent years laying the groundwork—he’d aborted potential campaigns in 2000 and 2012, helped lead the “birther” effort to delegitimize Obama, and spent countless hours courting high-profile media types in the run-up to his launch.

Aside from the occasional golf outing, contributions Trump had made to the

Clinton Foundation and Hillary’s Senate campaign coffers, and the Clintons’ attendance at his third wedding, Trump and Bill weren’t particularly close. Their daughters, Chelsea and Ivanka, had developed a relationship over the years of running in the same Manhattan circles, but there was no reason for Trump to call Bill, except to hear what the sage of the De...

where the comedian Sarah Silverman elicited cheers with her observation that “Bernie always seems to be on the right side of history.

Hillary went through with the interview on July 7, and it was a disaster. “People should and do trust me,” she insisted under a barrage of questions from Keilar.

One aide described Hillary as “staring daggers” at her questioner through the exchange.

But from a public relations perspective, the technicalities didn’t matter. Hillary had told the nation that she didn’t traffic in classified information, and government investigators put the lie to that assertion day after day.

For months, Hillary tried every approach but confession and contrition. That was killing her politically.

whether she’d wiped her server clean of the e-mails she hadn’t turned over to State in 2014, she turned flippant. “What, like with a cloth or something?” she asked, miming housework with her hand before ending the session with reporters.

Of course, Hillary should have been angry with herself. She’d taken actions that could have prevented her records from becoming public during a presidential run, and the maneuver had backfired badly. But Hillary instead turned her fury on her consultants and campaign aides, blaming them for a failure to focus the media on her

Hillary and Bill, who rarely visited, joined them by phone.

Hillary’s severe, controlled voice crackled through the line first. It carried the sound of a disappointed teacher or mother delivering a lecture before a whipping. That back end was left to Bill, who lashed out with abandon.

Eyes cast downward, stomachs turning—both from the scare tactics and from their own revulsion at being chastised for Hillary’s failures—Hillary’s talented and accomplished team of professionals and loyalists...

You haven’t buried this thing, the ruddy-cheeked former president rasped. You haven’t figured out how to get Hillary’s core message to the voters. This has been dragging on for months, he thundered, and nothing you’ve done has made a damn bit of difference. Voters want to hear about Hillary’s plans for the economy, and you’re not making that happen. Now, do your damn jobs.

“We got an ass-chewing,” one of the participants recalled months later.

Hillary came back on the line to close the lecture. It was hard to tell what was worse—getting hollered at by Bill or getting scolded by the stern and self-righteous Hillary. Neither was pleasa...

It was an astonishing moment—and one that would stick in the minds of Hillary’s aides for the rest of the campaign—for two reasons. First, Hillary was already inaccessible to most of her own staff, preferring to communicate through Abedin. So, a phone call featuring both Hillary and Bill was a real rarity. But more important, the scapegoating tone and tenor revealed that the Clintons were either living on another planet or at least having emotional and intellect...

Hillary’s aides didn’t need to wonder why her economic message wasn’t breaking through. It wasn’t rocket science. She hadn’t told the truth to the public about her e-m...

Back in mid-March, right after the story broke, 50 percent of Americans saw Hillary as honest and trustworthy, according to a CNN/ORC poll. By May, a clear majority of 57 percent thought she was not honest and trustworthy. That number wouldn’t drop through the summer, as Democratic primary voters continued to question her honesty in significant numbers.

That dynamic played right into the hands of Sanders, who held himself out as an honest change agent and tweaked Hillary here and there on her lack of transparency—a theme that hinted at the e-mail scandal, questions about the Clinton Foundation, and her refusal to release transcripts of the private paid speeches she’d given to Wall Street banks before the campaign. When Hillary had been advised by some allies not to speak to banks before the campaign, one confidant said, her response had been “They’ll hit us on something.

The e-mail story and the Wall Street speeches illustrated the contrast Bernie was trying to draw with Hillary—he was honest and she was corrupt—and they were giving ever more oxygen to a once-quixotic Sanders campaign.

Donors and allies furiously e-mailed and called everyone they could on the campaign to urge Hillary to apologize—with real, earnest contrition—to get control of a campaign spinning wildly off the rails. But Hillary thought that was a losing strategy because it wouldn’t end the saga. “I’ll apologize,” she said to her staff, “and then it’ll keep going.

“Her inability to just do a national interview and communicate genuine feelings of remorse and regret is now, I fear, becoming a character problem (more so than honesty),” Tanden wrote. “People hate her arrogant, like her down. It’s a sexist context, but I think it’s the truth. I see no downside in her actually just saying, look, I’m sorry. I think it will take so much air out of this.