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April 19 - April 25, 2017
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. “There’s one goal here: to win the fucking election for president,” said one source familiar with the speechwriting process. “It’s like do you want to win the goddamn thing or are we in junior high school again?”
blistering sun on a hot Saturday in mid-June, with a glare so bright she struggled to see the speech on the teleprompter
“That speech had a simple mission, which was a requirement,” said one source close to Hillary. “This was the chance to make a credible persuasive case for why she wants to be president. She had to answer the why question. It’s not because of her mother. Her mother’s an inspiration, but that is not why. It has to sort of feel like kind of a call to action, a galvanizing, ‘I’m bringing us together around this larger-than-all-of-us’ idea or cause, and I don’t think it did that. I don’t think it did either of those.” Some of Hillary’s aides
Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale.
was a classic high-end Washington power move. Fire everyone. Force people to reapply for their jobs. Those who remain know to whom they owe their allegiance. And use the new openings to bring in loyalists. That Mook wanted to burn down the DCCC and rebuild it in his image wasn’t a unique instinct. That he was playing Beltway power games this astutely so soon in life marked him as a much higher-level operative than the vast majority of his contemporaries—and most party elders, for that matter. By early 2014, when
Jen O’Malley Dillon.
First, O’Malley Dillon preferred a big formal staff with a strong leadership structure like what she’d helped build for Obama, but
But that structure, in which Mook had the only full view, would become a persistent point of contention for some veterans of Hillaryland and senior officials on the campaign.
the cold-eyed, self-serving strategists who build up themselves by building up one Clinton or both and the sycophants who prove their loyalty to a Clinton by devoting their entire lives to the family. Hillary wanted them to coexist. But Mook did not.
The lesson for Sanders in 2016 was clear: For every Democratic politician who endorsed Hillary and for every major donor who wrote her checks, there was a debt to be paid. Bernie could run without that baggage. Beholden
He didn’t understand why he’d need to hire press secretaries in each of the states instead of just one for the whole campaign.
That he could get ahold of Bill Clinton—even though it took repeated tries—was but one indication that he was exactly the insider he would claim, throughout the election, that he was not.
He ran on nostalgia, adopting a campaign slogan—“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. A similar dynamic was taking hold among liberals, who no longer found the “socialist” label affixed to Sanders to be so off-putting. In early August, he
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The debate over how to react was just one reason why Hillary was slow to get out in front of the story. She also didn’t want it to interfere with a Clinton Global Initiative event with Melinda Gates—a reminder of her blindness to the massive conflicts of interest created by the intersection of her presidential campaign, her government service, her philanthropic work, her pursuit of personal enrichment, and her husband’s various and sundry public and private activities.
the secrecy and the willingness to jeopardize everyone else’s interests in service of their own. Democrats fumed privately about Hillary’s recklessness—and yet, many of them also thought it was an overblown story.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the intense legal vetting of her remarks, she said things that turned out to be patently false—most notably that she never sent or received classified information through the e-mail address attached to her private server. Ironically, Hillary told her aides after the press
Hillary clearly didn’t intend to transmit classified information—a legal distinction that would become important when federal investigators considered whether to charge her with a crime.
In reality, the leaking and disloyalty were symptoms, not the cause, of the dysfunction in her first run for the White House.
But when it came to her own behavior—to the threat she posed to herself—she’d been incapable of gauging its gravity and reluctant to avail herself of the only option for fixing it. Too little, too late, she’d now tried to address it.
As the fog of summer was still clearing, when few people paid close attention to politics, the New York Times had just published a story about a coming Clinton campaign strategy shift. Hillary would “show more humor and heart,” the headline declared. In the piece, Clinton’s top aides—including Mook and Palmieri—admitted that there had been significant blunders made by the campaign, notably the months-long denial that there was a problem with her use of a private e-mail server. And that the American public perceived her as too robotic and aloof. But, they promised, the real Hillary would emerge
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One prominent Obama donor decried a campaign “being run by amateurs,” and couldn’t believe it would help manufacture a story about its efforts to alter the candidate’s persona to make her seem more authentic. “It was a joke.”
am not in favor of what I have learned about it,” she told Judy Woodruff of PBS. “I don’t believe it’s going to meet the high bar I have set.” She was conflicted enough about it that she didn’t come out so forcefully as to convince union leaders or voters that she would kill it. Instead, she looked like she was pandering to them—and not well. Still, she was staking out important ground in
She would try to blunt Sanders’s attacks by saying they were both progressives—and then pivot by asserting that she could actually enact her plans.
Here she was, six months into her campaign, having traveled the country, and she still didn’t quite grasp the underlying sentiments of the electorate. Sanders had tapped into feelings that she couldn’t access.
many of them didn’t like her hawkishness or her close ties to the financial services industry, which had plied her with campaign contributions and given her astronomical personal speaking fees.
It reminded Democrats that Hillary would go negative and do it dishonestly,
Having grown up in Arkansas, Bill understood that a major political player—a senator, a governor, or a former president—could bridge ideological divides by just showing up in small towns that never got much attention from elected leaders. He liked to go to small towns in northern New Hampshire, Appalachia, and rural Florida because he believed, from experience, that going to them and acknowledging he knew how they lived their lives, and the way they made decisions, put points on the board. Mook
Trump’s mastery of turning social media posts into twenty-four-hour reporting on his campaign echoed Bill’s instincts for getting free press. There was another
sidetracked from the message he wanted to deliver. But Bill thought it was important to get earned—free—media exposure in smaller places. He’d rather go to a small town in a state and get the local newspaper to cover his speech and the questions he frequently took in rope line interactions with voters and reporters.
In spirit this was the campaign she wanted to run, even though she didn’t love the catchphrase. In her mind, her whole life had been about public service, from helping poor families through the Children’s Defense Fund to high-level government jobs. It was ridiculous, she thought, that anyone could portray her as purely motivated by self-interest. What the hell had Bernie Sanders ever accomplished to improve the quality of anyone else’s life? He could talk until he was blue in the face about economic justice, but she’d fought for decades to even playing fields at the micro and macro levels.
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Where others worried about winning states, he was focused first on piling up delegates.
Odd-number districts were more valuable in Democratic delegate math because winning by a single vote would produce an extra delegate.
In an even-numbered district, a candidate might win by ten or more points and split the delegates with the
With so many of her friends up in arms, Hillary began to feel uncertain about Mook’s ability to get both the delegate math and the politics right. The narrative mattered too.
the mercenaries who had joined the campaign in hopes of finding jobs in the next administration, there was little percentage in getting on Hillary’s bad side. They also feared—appropriately—that unflattering words about Hillary or the strategy would be repeated at their own expense by those who hoped to gain Hillary’s favor.
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. She was committed to addressing her own weaknesses as a politician, but she didn’t always know how.
She was the only one with full visibility into all the component parts. Having
Hillary and her team didn’t pay enough attention to the fact that working-class progressives, particularly the white ones, were voting against her at alarming rates.
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.
His platform was fantastical, and it wasn’t nearly as well thought out as hers. Unlike Obama, whom she’d painted that way in 2008, Bernie really didn’t make any effort to explain realistic scenarios in which his agenda could be enacted.
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.
The challenge, even at that early date, was figuring out how to “create the drip-drip-drip to reinforce the existing narrative.”
The thing with the field operation—unlike a TV ad or a piece of mail, a field operation takes several weeks to build. And the people knocking on doors aren’t staff.”
It takes about two months to find and train talent for a state-coordinated campaign—which works on turnout up and down the ballot for the party.
To him, politics wasn’t just about finding people who agreed with you and getting them to the polls. He felt that it was important to talk to voters individually and get a real sense for what they were feeling. He also believed that a candidate could persuade voters with the right argument. And in pursuit of that, the on-the-ground feel for how hopes and
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.
hustings.
Bernie’s reservations about aspects of the administration notwithstanding, he’d always admired Obama’s cool handling of crises. It was a trait that eluded Bernie at times. He got fired up too easily over little things. Indeed, the rigors and stresses of the campaign trail put Obama’s skills into sharper relief for him. Now Bernie knew firsthand how hard it was to project composure on the big stage of national politics, where scrutiny from an opponent and the media exaggerated every Brooklyn-accented word and every finger jabbed in the air to emphasize a point. Obama made it look so damn easy.
He couldn’t understand what possessed Hillary to set up the private e-mail server, and her handling of the scandal—obfuscate, deny, and evade—amounted to political malpractice. He wanted his friend to win, and yet she was exhibiting, again, some of the very qualities that had helped him defeat her in 2008. It was a classic unforced Clinton error, and he couldn’t believe that she and the people around her had let it happen. When would they learn?
The flash-speed communications network would turn out to be a major factor in transforming what was a tumultuous convention inside the hall into a unified one on television.
