Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

by Jonathan Allen

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

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 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.

The president of the United States, and all the Democratic officials below him, were now embroiled in the kind of scandal that reminded them of exactly what they didn’t like about the Clintons: the secrecy and the willingness to jeopardize everyone else’s interests in service of their own.

It was the latest round in a running debate over how to handle the rise of Sanders. Bill and Hillary had wanted to put him down like a junkyard dog early on. She’d let him get too far without a punch already, she thought. Instinctively, the Clintons wanted to pound on rivals—whether campaign opponents, congressional Republicans, prosecutors, or women who had accused Bill of sexual misconduct.

Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, a longtime Clinton supporter who sat behind her during much of her Benghazi testimony, and other members of the CBC dialed up top campaign aides to tell them black voters wouldn’t turn out like they did for Obama without a full push by the campaign. Lee was a gadfly in

Congress whom most people just wrote off as crazy. But some of the other callers were taken more seriously.

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.

As Donald Trump took control of the Republican race, one of Hillary’s longtime advisers circulated a memo. The very top read “FACT: Donald Trump can defeat Hillary Clinton and become the 45th President of the United States.” Hillary, the memo went on to say, should not “underestimate his capacity to draw people to the polls who normally do not vote.” That could “tip the scales in key states (and put certain states in play that would otherwise be more

safely Democratic),” the adviser wrote, adding that in assessing polls, “I’d routinely add three or four points to whatever they say about his support.”

The official announcement of her vice presidential running mate was one of the days on the calendar that Hillary should have been able to count on as a Yale lock for excitement, enthusiasm, energy—and relentlessly positive press coverage. Instead, as she made her way toward Florida International University in Miami for what should have been a squeaky-clean event, more controversy was brewing.

Hillary was in danger of getting drowned out by her own party’s blemished national chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The day before this Saturday rollout, WikiLeaks had released a trove of damaging internal DNC e-mails that suggested anti-Bernie bias on the part of Wasserman Schultz and her aides. A cyberattacker going by the alias Guccifer 2.0, a name that would crop up again later in the campaign, claimed credit for swiping the e-mails and giving them to WikiLeaks.

As much as Sanders saw Wasserman Schultz as a semisecret agent for Hillary, the Clinton campaign didn’t like the DNC chairwoman much either. “Hillary genuinely likes Debbie. I

think she’s the only one in the orbit who does,” one Democratic source said early on. “The campaign does not like Debbie.”

She and her team felt good about getting some separation, but the numbers also should have been a red flag. After pouring tens of millions of dollars into the states, watching Trump insult nearly every imaginable group other than white men, and pulling off a convention that could easily have melted down, the Republican nominee was still well within striking distance. The failure to put Trump away would become all the more apparent as Hillary’s advantage evaporated over the next six weeks.