Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

by Jonathan Allen

For decades, she’d worked so damn hard to address her deficiencies as both a policymaker and a politician. There were still rough edges on her, some of 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.

From the very beginning of the campaign, Hillary had met with preselected groups but tried to avoid chance encounters with voters who might heckle her. She took the same approach to members of the media, who sometimes relayed the concerns of voters to candidates. She was running a variation on a “Rose Garden” strategy—the term for an incumbent president who stays at home and uses the trappings of the office to campaign rather than getting out on the hustings. For years, she’d been in the bubble of elite circles in Washington, New York, and foreign capitals.

manager Kellyanne Conway would later put it: “There’s a difference for voters between what offends you and what affects you.”