What Happened

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Now when people ask how I’m doing, I say that, as an American, I’m more worried than ever—but as a person, I’m doing okay.

I will always be grateful to have been the Democratic Party’s nominee and to have earned 65,844,610 votes from my fellow Americans. That number—more votes than any candidate for President has ever received, other than Barack Obama—is proof that the ugliness we faced in 2016 does not define our country.

When the most powerful person in our country says, “Don’t believe your eyes, don’t believe the experts, don’t believe the numbers, just believe me,” that rips a big hole in a free democratic society like ours.

Nobody psychoanalyzed Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or Bernie Sanders about why they ran. It was just accepted as normal. But for me, it was regarded as inevitable—people assumed I’d run no matter what—yet somehow abnormal, demanding a profound explanation.

For years, the foundation and CGI had been supported by Republicans and Democrats alike. Independent philanthropy watchdogs CharityWatch, GuideStar, and Charity Navigator gave the Clinton Foundation top marks for reducing overhead and having a measurable positive impact. CharityWatch gave it an A, Charity Navigator gave it four stars, and GuideStar rated it platinum. But none of that stopped brutal partisan attacks from raining down during the campaign.

everyone’s flawed. That’s the nature of human beings. But our mistakes alone shouldn’t define us. We should be judged by the totality of our work and life.

Sadly, Trump’s strategy works. When people start believing that all politicians are liars and crooks, the truly corrupt escape scrutiny, and cynicism grows.

Before 2016, we’d never elected a President who flagrantly refused to abide by the basic standards of democracy and decency.

Over the years, my relationship with the political press had become a vicious cycle. The more they went after me, the more guarded I became, which only made them criticize me more.

To make sure we built the most diverse team ever assembled by a presidential campaign, I brought in Bernard Coleman as the first-ever chief diversity officer, made sure women were half the staff, and hired hundreds of people of color, including for senior leadership roles.

This isn’t an either/or choice. You need both data and good old-fashioned political instinct. I’m convinced that the answer for Democrats going forward is not to abandon data but to obtain better data, use it more effectively, question every assumption, and keep adapting.

I tend to treat journalists with caution, and I often feel like they focus too much on the wrong things. I understand that political coverage has to be about the horse race, but it’s become almost entirely about that and not about the issues that matter most to our country and to people’s lives. That’s something that has gotten increasingly worse over the years. That’s not entirely the press’s fault: the way we consume news has changed, which makes getting clicks all important, which in turn encourages sensationalism. Still, they’re responsible for their part.

storytelling requires a receptive audience, and I’ve never felt like the American electorate was receptive to this one. I wish so badly we were a country where a candidate who said, “My story is the story of a life shaped by and devoted to the movement for women’s liberation” would be cheered, not jeered. But that’s not who we are. Not yet.

Again, I wonder what it is about me that mystifies people, when there are so many men in politics who are far less known, scrutinized, interviewed, photographed, and tested. Yet they’re asked so much less frequently to open up, reveal themselves, prove that they’re real.

Don’t we want our Senators and Secretaries of State—and especially our Presidents—to speak thoughtfully, to respect the impact of our words?

President Obama is just as controlled as I am, maybe even more so. He speaks with a great deal of care; takes his time, weighs his words. This is generally and correctly taken as evidence of his intellectual heft and rigor. He’s a serious person talking about serious things. So am I. And yet, for me, it’s often experienced as a negative.

It’s another variant on the impossible balancing act. If we’re too composed, we’re cold or fake. But if we say what we think without caution, we get slammed for it.

The Puritan witch hunts may be long over, but something fanatical about unruly women still lurks in our national subconscious.

We have to remain a big tent, but a big tent is only as strong as the poles that hold it up. Reproductive rights is central to women’s rights and women’s health, and it’s one of the most important tent poles we’ve got.

We need our politics to resemble our people. When the people who run our cities, states, and country overwhelmingly look a certain way (say, white and male) and overwhelmingly have a shared background (wealthy, privileged) we end up with laws and policies that don’t come close to addressing the realities of Americans’ lives. And since that’s a basic requirement of government, it’s a pretty big thing to get wrong.

These reactions aren’t innate. Men aren’t naturally more confident than women. We tell them to believe in themselves, and we tell women to doubt themselves. We tell them this in a million ways, starting when they’re young. We’ve got to do better. Every single one of us.

More than anyone else, it was Chelsea who helped me to see that my stance on same-sex marriage was incompatible with my values and the work I had done in the Senate and at the State Department to protect the rights of LGBT people. She impressed upon me that I had to endorse marriage equality if I was truly committed to equal human dignity,

Other developed nations don’t have this problem. They have commonsense laws to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. Those laws work. They save lives. The United States has made a cruel choice as a country not to take simple steps that would help prevent—or at least lessen—this epidemic.

Wayne LaPierre helped make the NRA one of the most reactionary and dangerous organizations in America. Instead of being concerned with the interests of everyday gun owners, many of who support commonsense safety protections, the NRA has essentially become a wholly owned subsidiary of the powerful corporations that make and sell guns. Their bottom line and twisted ideology are all that matters to them, even if it costs thousands of American lives every year.

I thought it was a no-brainer that if you’re too dangerous to get on a plane, you’re too dangerous to buy a gun!

This oversimplifies the issue. Personally I'm for greater gun control, but I found this particular issue problematic: not everyone on the no-fly list should be on it and it is very difficult to challenge one's inclusion on it.

Democrats should not respond to my defeat by retreating from our strong commitments on these life-or-death issues. The vast majority of Americans agree that we need to do more on gun safety. This is a debate we can win if we keep at it.

Change might be the most powerful word in American politics. It’s also one of the hardest to define. In 1992 and 2008, change meant electing dynamic young leaders who promised hope and renewal. In 2016, it meant handing a lit match to a pyromaniac.

The decline of serious reporting on policy has been going on for a while, but it got much worse in 2016. In 2008, the major networks’ nightly newscasts spent a total of 220 minutes on policy. In 2012, it was 114 minutes. In 2016, it was just 32 minutes.

Later, Chuck Todd of NBC’s Meet the Press actually criticized me for being too prepared. I’m not sure how that’s possible—can you be too prepared for something so important? Does Chuck ever show up for Meet the Press and just wing it? The fact that I was up against Donald Trump—perhaps the least prepared man in history, both for the debates and for the presidency—made the comment even more puzzling. Were they so enthralled by his rabbit-a-day strategy that insults, false charges, and fact-free assertions were now the best evidence of authenticity?

when any barrier falls in America, for anyone, it clears the way for everyone. When there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit.”

Rosenstein was right about the email investigation, and Comey was wrong. But Trump was wrong to fire Comey over Russia. Both of those statements are true. And both are frustrating.

The Times’s argument was that using personal email reinforced the narrative that I had a penchant for secrecy, but I’ve always found that charge odd. People know more about me and Bill than anybody in public life. We’ve made public thirty-eight years of our tax returns (thirty-eight years more than a certain someone), all my State Department emails, the Clinton Foundation tax returns and donors, medical information—yet we were secretive?

That’s an important point to keep in mind, because it often gets lost amid the intense focus on potential criminal acts. Even without a secret conspiracy, there was plenty of troubling pro-Putin behavior right out in the open.

Here’s a particularly stark way of understanding the impact: Even if Comey caused just 0.6 percent of Election Day voters to change their votes, and even if that swing only occurred in the Rust Belt, it would have been enough to shift the Electoral College from me to Trump.

I believe that, in the end, the debate between “economic anxiety” and racism or “cultural anxiety” is a false choice. If you listen to many Trump voters talk, you start to see that all these different strands of anxiety and resentment are related:

The right to vote is the foundation of our free society, and protecting that right is the single most important thing we can do to strengthen our democracy. Yet in state after state, Republicans are still at it.

Democrats have to continue championing civil rights, human rights, and other issues that are part of our march toward a more perfect union. We shouldn’t sacrifice our principles to pursue a shrinking pool of voters who look more to the past than the future.

Democrats must make the case that expanding economic opportunity and expanding the rights and dignity of all people can never be either/or, but always go hand in hand.

Before the election, it felt as if half the people were angry and resentful, while the other half was still fundamentally hopeful. Now pretty much everyone is mad about something.

Why is the burden of opening our hearts only on half the country?