What Happened

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Since November, more than two dozen women—of all ages, but mostly in their twenties—had approached me in restaurants, theaters, and stores to apologize for not voting or not doing more to help my campaign. I responded with forced smiles and tight nods. On one occasion, an older woman dragged her adult daughter by the arm to come talk to me and ordered her to apologize for not voting—which she did, head bowed in contrition. I wanted to stare right in her eyes and say, “You didn’t vote? How could you not vote?! You abdicated your responsibility as a citizen at the worst possible time! And now you want me to make you feel better?” Of course, I didn’t say any of that.

These people were looking for absolution that I just couldn’t give. We all have to live with the consequences of our decisions.

After that first day of laying low, I started reaching out to people.

ever. I knew

that putting off those conversations would only make them harder to have later on. And I badly wanted to thank everyone who had helped my campaign and make sure they were holding up okay under these circumstances.

By far my favorite New York City performance was way off Broadway: Charlotte’s dance recital. It’s enchanting to watch a bunch of squirming, giggling two-year-olds trying to dance in unison. Some are intensely focused (that would be my granddaughter), some are trying to talk to their parents in the audience, and one girl just sat down and took off her shoes in the middle of everything. It was lovely mayhem. As I watched Charlotte and her friends laugh and fall down and get up again, I felt a twinge of something I couldn’t quite place. Then I realized what it was: relief. I had been ready to completely devote the next four or eight years to serving my country. But that would have come with a cost. I would have missed a lot of dance recitals and bedtime stories and trips to the playground. Now I had those back. That’s more than a silver lining. That’s the mother lode.

That’s why faith—the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen—requires a leap. It’s because of our limitations and imperfections that we must reach out beyond ourselves, to God and to one another.

Those rooms were full of purposeful energy.

I ran for President because I thought I’d be good at the job. I thought that of all the people who might run, I had the most relevant experience, meaningful accomplishments, and ambitious but achievable proposals, as well as the temperament to get things done in Washington.

I already knew how it felt to lose. Until you experience it, it’s hard to comprehend the ache in your gut when you see things going wrong and can’t figure out how to fix them; the sharp blow when the results finally come in; the disappointment written on the faces of your friends and supporters.

This isn’t easy or fun. My mistakes burn me up inside. But as one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, says, while our mistakes make us want to cry, the world doesn’t need more of that.

The truth is, 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. Many problems don’t have either/or answers, and a good decision today may not look as good ten or twenty years later through the lens of new conditions. When you’re in politics, this gets more complicated. We all want—and the political press demands—a “story line,” which tends to cast people as either saints or sinners. You’re either revered or reviled. And there’s no juicier political story than the saint who gets unmasked as a sinner. A two-dimensional cartoon is easier to digest than a fully formed person.

For a candidate, a leader, or anyone, really, the question is not “Are you flawed?” It’s “What do you do about your flaws?” Do you learn from your mistakes so you can do and be better in the future? Or do you reject the hard work of self-improvement and instead tear others down so you can assert they’re as bad or worse than you are? I’ve always tried to do the ...

Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stoked Americans’ anger and resentment. I was giving speeches laying out how to solve the country’s problems. He was ranting on Twitter. Democrats were playing by the rules and trying too hard not to offend the political press. Republicans were chucking the rule book out the window and working the refs as hard as they could. I may have won millions more votes, but he’s the one sitting in the Oval Office.

I felt that deep sense of confidence that comes with rigorous preparation. Like accepting the nomination, these debates were a first for me. The pressure you feel when you’re about to walk onstage is almost unbearable—almost, but not quite. You bear it by working hard to get ready. You bear it by having good people by your side. You bear it by not just hoping but knowing you can handle a lot, because you already have. At least, that’s what always worked for me.

I never figured out how to tell this story right. Partly that’s because I’m not great at talking about myself. Also, I didn’t want people to see me as the “woman candidate,” which I find limiting, but rather as the best candidate whose experience as a woman in a male-dominated culture made her sharper, tougher, and more competent. That’s a hard distinction to draw, and I wasn’t confident that I had the dexterity to pull it off.

But the biggest reason I shied away from embracing this narrative is that 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. Maybe it’s because we take this story for granted—yeah, yeah, the women’s movement happened, why are we still talking about it? Maybe it’s too female. Maybe it’s at once too big (a sweeping historical shift) and too small (just another middle-class Midwestern girl finding her way in the world). But I do think it’s special. It’s not a typical political narrative, but it’s mine.

None of these experiences made me retreat from my beliefs. But I’ve never really been naïve again. Not much surprises me anymore. Throughout the 2016 campaign, my staff would come to me wide-eyed. “You’ll never believe what Trump said today. It was vile.” I always believed it. Not just because of who Trump is but because of who we can be at our worst. We’ve seen it too many times to be surprised.

Think how often you’ve heard these words used about women who lead: angry, strident, feisty, difficult, irritable, bossy, brassy, emotional, abrasive, high-maintenance, ambitious (a word that I think of as neutral, even admirable, but clearly isn’t for a lot of people). The linguist George Lakoff both identified this problem and embodied it when he said about Senator Elizabeth Warren, “Elizabeth has a problem. She is shrill, and there is a prejudice against shrill women.” How about we stop criticizing how she speaks—which is just fine, by the way—and start paying attention to what she has to say about families and the economy? We’re also called divisive, untrustworthy, unlikable, and inauthentic. Those words ring powerfully for me. As the campaign went on, polls showed that a significant number of Americans questioned my authenticity and trustworthiness. A lot of people said they just didn’t like me. I write that

Sheryl shared another insight: that women are seen favorably when they advocate for others, but unfavorably when they advocate for themselves.

Gender hasn’t proven to be the motivating force for women voters that some hope it might be.

Something I wish every man across America understood is how much fear accompanies women throughout our lives. So many of us have been threatened or harmed. So many of us have helped friends recover from a traumatic incident. It’s difficult to convey what all this violence does to us. It adds up in our hearts and our nervous systems.

I saw you speak for the first time as a small girl. My mom took me, and helped me up to stand on a fence and held me by the back of my overalls because I kept trying to wave to you and cheer you on. I was so ecstatic to hear such a smart woman speak, and I’ve never looked back. You never let that version of me down. I read your history as I got older, and then I got to see more speeches and read your writings. You never let down the older versions of me either.

I don’t believe any of us gets through life alone. Finding meaning and happiness takes a village. My friends have been my village. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Solutions are going to matter again in politics. Democrats must be ready when that day comes.

It’s hard to compete against demagoguery when the answers you can offer are all unsatisfying. And years of economic pain provided fertile ground for Republicans’ cultural and racial appeals. Union membership, once a bulwark for Democrats in states like West Virginia, declined. Being part of a union is an important part of someone’s personal identity. It helps shape the way you view the world and think about politics. When that’s gone, it means a lot of people stop identifying primarily as workers—and voting accordingly—and start identifying and voting more as white, male, rural, or all of the above.

Whether it’s updating policies to meet the changing conditions of America’s workers, or encouraging greater mobility, the bottom line is the same: we can’t spend all our time staving off decline. We need to create new opportunities, not just slow down the loss of old ones. Rather than keep trying to re-create the economy of the past, we should focus on making the jobs people actually have better and figure out how to create the good jobs of the future in fields such as clean energy, health care, construction, computer coding, and advanced manufacturing.

I wish it were that easy. But it’s not. So I’m going to try to explain how I understand what happened, both the unexpected interventions that swung the race at the end, and the structural challenges that made it close to begin with. You don’t have to agree with my take. But counter with evidence, with a real argument. Because we have to get this right.

Here’s another misguided argument. Some of the same people who say that the reason I lost was because I didn’t have an economic message now insist that all Democrats need to do to win in the future is talk more about jobs, and then—poof!—all those Trump voters will come home. Both the premise and conclusion are false. Yes, we need to talk as much as we possibly can about creating more jobs, raising wages, and making health care and college more affordable and accessible. But that’s exactly what I did throughout 2016. So it’s not a silver bullet and it can’t be the only thing we talk about. 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.

How are we supposed to love our neighbors when we feel like this? How are we supposed to find the grace that Tillich says comes with reconciliation and acceptance? How can we build the trust that holds a democracy together? Underneath these questions are ones I’ve been wrestling with and writing and speaking about for decades.

And, practicing “radical empathy” means more than trying to reach across divides of race, class, and politics, and building bridges between communities. We have to fill the emotional and spiritual voids that have opened up within communities, within families, and within ourselves as individuals. That can be even more difficult, but it’s essential. There’s grace to be found in those relationships. Grace and meaning and that elusive sense that we’re all part of something bigger than ourselves.