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February 4 - February 23, 2018
Hillary was fighting the last war. She did that with varying degrees of success. But the variable she couldn’t change was the candidate.
This is the story of how it all unraveled again for Hillary. 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. For many of Hillary’s millions of supporters, we know that it will leave you feeling shattered all over again.
Hillary, a modest, midwestern Methodist with a love of minutiae, was unshakably focused on the trees rather than the forest.
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. The
Though she was speaking with a small group made up mostly of intimates, she sounded like she was addressing a roomful of supporters—inhibited by the concern that whatever she said might be leaked to the press.
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.
For Bernie, winning wasn’t the only thing. I’m a backbencher in Congress, he told Devine. I want to come out of this in a better position to push the issues I care about. He wanted a higher profile in the Senate if he ran and lost. “A presidential campaign, if done well, can accomplish that,” Devine replied.
Make America Great Again”—ripped off from Ronald Reagan, and traced the decline of the country to the mid-1960s. Though he didn’t mention the Johnson era’s Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, or public subsidies for housing and health care, Trump’s dog whistle was just the right pitch to attract the support of white supremacists and nearly all-white crowds of thousands at his campaign rallies.
For both sides, Hillary was the perfect symbol of everything wrong with America. At times, Trump and Sanders would act as the right and left speakers on a stereo blaring a chorus on repeat: Hillary’s a corrupt insider who has helped rig the political and economic systems in favor of the powerful.
“Ah, Val, I’m just so darned bummed. All anyone wants to talk about is Donald Trump,” she says.
Biden was for the Iraq War before he was against it. And he was the Senate sponsor of the Clinton White House anticrime law that had led to the mass incarceration of young black men. In addition, he’d ushered Clarence Thomas onto the Supreme Court, spent the early part of his career in the Senate trying to end school busing, and represented perhaps the most business-friendly tax haven in the nation, Delaware, for thirty-six years.
Hillary met with a group of DREAMers at one of her campaign offices in Las Vegas.
“I’m going to do everything I can so you don’t have to be scared and you don’t have to worry about what happens to your mom or your dad or somebody else in your family,” Hillary said. “I feel really, really strongly, but you’re being brave, and you have to be brave for them too, because they want you to be happy, they want you to be successful, they don’t want you to worry too much. Let me do the worrying. I’ll do all the worrying. Is that a deal? I’ll do the worry. I’ll do everything I can to help, OK?”
“We know we’ve got work to do. But that work, that work is not to make America great again,” she said, ridiculing Donald Trump’s slogan. “America never stopped being great. We have to make America whole. We have to fill in what’s been hollowed out.
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.
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 about the economy—rather than her e-mail scandal, mass shootings, or the water crisis in Flint—it wasn’t at all clear to them that she was on their side.
The more she became a candidate of minority voters, the less affinity whites had for her—particularly those whites who had little or no allegiance to the Democratic Party.
Bernie’s entire campaign was a character assassination—a moral-high-ground argument that she was less pure than he was. Of course, that was true in the sense that she believed in moving forward by building political coalitions. Bernie didn’t work with anyone. He didn’t do it in the House. He didn’t do it in the Senate. His “coalition” on the campaign trail was almost entirely white and disproportionately male. Hell, he was only competitive in states where just a handful of people showed up for caucuses or large portions of the electorate were independents, not Democrats.
Bernie really didn’t make any effort to explain realistic scenarios in which his agenda could be enacted. Obama worried about the costs of his proposals and their real-world impact.
Honest Bernie was lying about dishonest Hillary.
Bill believed the push for Brexit—and its eventual approval by voters—showed a strong contempt for existing power structures that reflected the mood of the American electorate. You guys are underestimating the significance of Brexit, he told Brooklyn and his own advisers over and over.
Trump had tapped into a vein in the electorate that Hillary couldn’t locate—and, just as important, that his much narrower focus within the Electoral College provided a viable path to victory.
In a private moment on the campaign trail, just a few days before the election, Hillary grew reflective about her relationship with the American public. “I know I engender bad reactions from people, and I always have,” she confided in an aide who was traveling with her on a swing through several battleground states. “There are some people in whom I bring out the worst. I know that about myself, and I don’t know why that is. But it is.” “That’s going to be one of the main problems you’re going to face as president,” the aide replied. “Yep,” she said. “It is.”
Bill was less reticent. He’d had a sinking feeling that the British vote to leave the European Union had been a harbinger for a kind of screw-it vote in the United States.
Hillary winced. She wasn’t ready for this conversation. When she’d spoken with Obama just a little bit earlier, the outcome of the election wasn’t final yet. Now, though, with the president placing a consolation call, the reality and dimensions of her defeat hit her all at once. She had let him down. She had let herself down. She had let her party down. And she had let her country down. Obama’s legacy and her dreams of the presidency lay shattered at Donald Trump’s feet. This was on her. Reluctantly, she rose from her seat and took the phone from Huma’s hand. “Mr. President,” she said softly.
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Over the course of a couple of hours, they hammered out remarks aimed at comforting Americans who feared a Trump presidency. They went heavy on themes of constitutional protections and mentioned Muslim Americans and women and others who might feel targeted by the new president. The thrust, one Hillary adviser said, was “We stand with them and we see them, and the fact that we lost this election doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop fighting for them.”
Over the course of her life, no matter how good things got for her, she was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. When two-thirds of Americans had approved of her during her tenure as secretary of state, she’d known those numbers would plummet back to Earth once she became a candidate again.
And then the door opened to Clinton’s suite. A hotel server wheeled in a cart of sundaes, with sprinkles.
“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.”
“Let us not grow weary in doing good,” she said, paraphrasing Galatians 6:9, “for in due season, we shall reap if we do not lose heart.”
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.
“The press botched the e-mail story for eighteen months,” said one person who was in the room. “Comey obviously screwed us, but the press created the story.”
Hillary wasn’t in the room that day. But, in private conversations with top aides in the immediate days following her loss, she struggled with the question of why Obama hadn’t done more to apprise the public that the Russians had gone way beyond what had been reported. She wondered why the president hadn’t leaned harder into making the case that Vladimir Putin was specifically targeting her and trying to throw the election to Trump. “The Russia stuff has really bothered her a lot,” one of the aides said. “She’s sort of learning what the administration knew and when they knew it, and she’s just
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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,”
Her approach, guided by Mook and informed by the demands of winning the primary, was to build a coalition focused on core strengths: African Americans, Latinos, college-educated whites, and women. But the more she catered to them, the more she pushed away other segments of the electorate.
Bill Clinton and many of the older generation of aides and advisers, believed it was a mistake to cordon her off from large swaths of the electorate. They understood the value of slicing and dicing voters to make efficient decisions, but they also felt that Hillary should be doing more to show that she wanted every vote. Some of them believed that instead of basing her campaign on Obama’s core coalition, she should have begun with the working-class whites and Latinos who fueled her 2008 run and built out.
Hillary—who had been the target of so much venom over the years and who had become a disciple of Obama’s data-driven campaign style—sided with a younger generation that heavily favored science over the art of politics.
Comey’s unprecedented public condemnation of her handling of the server, the Russian cyberattacks on the DNC and Podesta’s e-mail account, and new voter ID laws suppressed support for her.
Worried about what her loss would mean for the big-ticket Obama policies, she instructed her aides to talk with White House officials about what could be done to protect the DREAMers, those undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, and key elements of Obamacare.
Hillary spoke of Dorothy Rodham, age eight, sitting on a train with her little sister on their way to live with family who didn’t want them. “I dream of going up to her and sitting next to her and taking her in my arms,” Hillary said, and telling her, “as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up to be a United States Senator, represent our country as Secretary of State and win more than 62 million votes for president of the United States.”
