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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.
she wanted to show
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.
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.
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
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.
Former Texas agricultural commissioner Jim Hightower once said of George H. W. Bush that he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple.
In reality, the leaking and disloyalty were symptoms, not the cause, of the dysfunction in her first run for the White House. As
It was an issue that wouldn’t ever go away: Hillary was being advised by people who thought they knew her—she’d been in the public eye for most or all of their adult lives—but really didn’t have a feel for who she was at her core.
“The fact the government hasn’t worked in a couple of years is really altering both parties.
The one person with whom she didn’t seem particularly upset: herself. No one who drew a salary from the campaign would tell her that. It was a self-signed death warrant to raise a question about Hillary’s competence—to her or anyone else—in loyalty-obsessed Clintonworld.
The real answer: she’d become the candidate of minority voters on social justice issues while Bernie was hitting her as a corrupt, Wall Street–loving champion of the “rigged” financial system that took advantage of working-class voters. Whether she was perceived as hostile to working- and middle-class whites or just indifferent, it wasn’t a big leap from “she doesn’t care about my job” to “she’d rather give my job to a minority or a foreigner than fight for me to keep it.” She and her aides were focused on the wrong issue set for working-class white Michigan voters, and, even when she talked
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Even more astounding, the wife of the president who had won on an “It’s the economy, stupid” mantra was ignoring the core of the Clinton brand—robust growth that touched every American.
which sat in places she couldn’t see—like her blindness to conflicts of interest, her own preference for reality over political optics, her paranoia about political opponents, and her love of the dollar.
Hillary, who kept careful track of friends and enemies, wouldn’t look kindly on anything less than a full-throttle effort to drive black voters to the polls in Maryland.
But the fact that she’d had to push unions to whip up their members to vote was indicative of how little natural support she had in the ranks. The lack of enthusiasm for her candidacy among labor’s foot soldiers in Maryland should have been one of that day’s major warning signs.
Hillary was poised to become the first woman ever nominated for president by a major political party. Better yet, she was going to draw Trump—the clown prince of the Republican primary field—as a general-election opponent. Soon the increasingly popular Barack Obama would join her on the campaign trail and bless her as the natural heir to his historic presidency.
“He’s tapped into the real and understandable frustration that’s felt among working people,” AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka said that month.
Fundamentally, she was misreading the mood of the voters. Trump was winning primaries because he was a torch-bearing outsider ready to burn the nation’s institutions to the ground. Bernie was offering the same thing on the Democratic side, and he had flown in from off the political radar screen to give Hillary fits. In January 2016, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, a former Clinton White House aide and sometime critic of both Clintons, had beseeched Podesta to open Hillary’s eyes to the changing world around her. With Bernie and Republicans attacking her as an agent of the establishment and
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By ceding the reformer mantle to Sanders—and to Trump—Hillary was dismissing a whole world’s worth of evidence that she was running into the headwinds of history.
Bill Clinton didn’t have an impulse-control button. Everyone knew that. And still, this stood out as colossally high-risk and low-reward.
Still, the inescapable doom that shadowed Hillary’s campaign had reared its head again. On the day Obama would endorse her, and at the same time she was being let off the legal hook for her e-mail scandal, the FBI director affirmed she’d done something wrong—just nothing he could pin on her.
One of the clearest lines of distinction between a great political speech and a pedestrian one is the ability of the speaker to turn the peroration—the final run—into a big call for action.
As president, it was his job to safeguard the integrity of the political process.
But she also spoke to their fears, affirming American principles she worried Trump might not safeguard. “Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power and we don’t just respect that, we cherish it,” she said. “It also enshrines other things: the rule of law, the principle that we are all equal in rights and dignity, freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values too and we must defend them.”
On a phone call with a longtime friend a couple of days after the election, Hillary was much less accepting of her defeat. She put a fine point on the factors she believed cost her the presidency: the FBI (Comey), the KGB (the old name for Russia’s intelligence service), and the KKK (the support Trump got from white nationalists).
Hillary kept pointing her finger at Comey and Russia. “She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way,” this person said. That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up.
The closeness of the race brought into sharp relief the fundamental divide that ran deepest between Hillary’s advisers throughout the campaign. After a quarter of a century on the national stage, and as one of the most polarizing figures in American public life for much of that time, Hillary had alienated a significant portion of the electorate before she even launched her bid. It would be difficult to reset preconceived notions. “The big challenge of this whole race was there were so many voters who were ungettable,” said one high-level campaign aide.
Ultimately, it was a battle between those who believed that it was folly to think Hillary could show up in lower-population areas and change hearts and minds and those who believed, just as firmly, that politics and Hillary’s path to victory were fundamentally about doing just that. That elemental split hung over nearly every internal skirmish over strategy and tactics—from the hard-and-fast reliance on data and the development of her message to where she held rallies and whether she bothered to distribute campaign literature in swing states.
“We lost because of Clinton Inc.,” one close friend and adviser lamented. “The reality is Clinton Inc. was great for her for years and she had all the institutional benefits. But it was an albatross around the campaign.”
