Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

by Jonathan Allen

Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her.

Right out of the gate, there was nothing quite like the aimlessness and dysfunction of Hillary Clinton’s second campaign for the presidency—

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

Hillary was in much less of a rush. She’d been amassing a fortune giving paid speeches to private companies, including Wall Street banks, and she didn’t see the need to prolong what would be a grueling campaign. She even told friends and advisers that she was reluctant about jumping in at all. “She didn’t want to run for president,” one person she spoke to at the time said. “She did not want to do it. She just concluded that no one else could win.” This may have sounded like the idea of running was thrust upon her by circumstance, but in truth, she had spent the years since her 2008 primary defeat building herself and her operation in anticipation of a possible second bid. The real question wasn’t whether she would begin campaigning but whether she would stop.

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.

After nearly a year on the campaign trail, and hundreds of stops at diners, coffee shops, and high school gymnasiums and just as many roundtables with young professionals and millworkers, Hillary still couldn’t figure out why Americans were so angry or how she could bring the country together.

But fundamental changes in the electorate eluded her grasp. She couldn’t find ways to connect with portions of the primary electorate that were driven to Sanders because he represented an all-out assault on the establishment thinking at the core of her being.