Shattered Quotes

“Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her. In fact, the more people she assigned to the task of setting the tone for her campaign, the more muddled her message becam”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“She’d gone on the attack against a better-liked rival whose platform more closely mirrored the values of the party’s base, creating a boomerang effect on her personal standing. Perhaps”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Mook had chosen not to spend money on polling, to the great frustration of some of the campaign’s aides and advisers in key states. In Florida, Craig Smith, the former White House political director, and Scott Arceneaux, a veteran southern Democratic political operative, had begged Mook to poll the state in October to no avail. Mook believed it was a waste of money. He had learned from David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, that old-school polling should be used for testing messages and gauging the sentiments of the electorate and that analytics were just as good for tracking which candidate was ahead and by how much in each state. Plus, the analytics were quicker and much cheaper.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Hillary spoke of Dorothy Rodham, age eight, sitting on a train with her little sister on their way to live with family who didn’t want them. “I dream of going up to her and sitting next to her and taking her in my arms,” Hillary said, and telling her, “as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up to be a United States Senator, represent our country as Secretary of State and win more than 62 million votes for president of the United States.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Hillary—who had been the target of so much venom over the years and who had become a disciple of Obama’s data-driven campaign style—sided with a younger generation that heavily favored science over the art of politics.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Bill Clinton and many of the older generation of aides and advisers, believed it was a mistake to cordon her off from large swaths of the electorate. They understood the value of slicing and dicing voters to make efficient decisions, but they also felt that Hillary should be doing more to show that she wanted every vote. Some of them believed that instead of basing her campaign on Obama’s core coalition, she should have begun with the working-class whites and Latinos who fueled her 2008 run and built out.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Her approach, guided by Mook and informed by the demands of winning the primary, was to build a coalition focused on core strengths: African Americans, Latinos, college-educated whites, and women. But the more she catered to them, the more she pushed away other segments of the electorate.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Hillary had alienated a significant portion of the electorate before she even launched her bid. It would be difficult to reset preconceived notions. “The big challenge of this whole race was there were so many voters who were ungettable,”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“On a phone call with a longtime friend a couple of days after the election, Hillary was much less accepting of her defeat. She put a fine point on the factors she believed cost her the presidency: the FBI (Comey), the KGB (the old name for Russia’s intelligence service), and the KKK (the support Trump got from white nationalists).”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Let us not grow weary in doing good,” she said, paraphrasing Galatians 6:9, “for in due season, we shall reap if we do not lose heart.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Over the course of her life, no matter how good things got for her, she was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. When two-thirds of Americans had approved of her during her tenure as secretary of state, she’d known those numbers would plummet back to Earth once she became a candidate again.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Over the course of a couple of hours, they hammered out remarks aimed at comforting Americans who feared a Trump presidency. They went heavy on themes of constitutional protections and mentioned Muslim Americans and women and others who might feel targeted by the new president. The thrust, one Hillary adviser said, was “We stand with them and we see them, and the fact that we lost this election doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop fighting for them.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“. Bill was less reticent. He’d had a sinking feeling that the British vote to leave the European Union had been a harbinger for a kind of screw-it vote in the United States.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“In a private moment on the campaign trail, just a few days before the election, Hillary grew reflective about her relationship with the American public. “I know I engender bad reactions from people, and I always have,” she confided in an aide who was traveling with her on a swing through several battleground states. “There are some people in whom I bring out the worst. I know that about myself, and I don’t know why that is. But it is.” “That’s going to be one of the main problems you’re going to face as president,” the aide replied”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Trump had tapped into a vein in the electorate that Hillary couldn’t locate—and, just as important, that his much narrower focus within the Electoral College provided a viable path to victory.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Bill believed the push for Brexit—and its eventual approval by voters—showed a strong contempt for existing power structures that reflected the mood of the American electorate. You guys are underestimating the significance of Brexit, he told Brooklyn and his own advisers over and over.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Bernie really didn’t make any effort to explain realistic scenarios in which his agenda could be enacted. Obama worried about the costs of his proposals and their real-world impact.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Bernie’s entire campaign was a character assassination—a moral-high-ground argument that she was less pure than he was. Of course, that was true in the sense that she believed in moving forward by building political coalitions. 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.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“The more she became a candidate of minority voters, the less affinity whites had for her—particularly those whites who had little or no allegiance to the Democratic Party.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Whether she was perceived as hostile to working- and middle-class whites or just indifferent, it wasn’t a big leap from “she doesn’t care about my job” to “she’d rather give my job to a minority or a foreigner than fight for me to keep it.” She and her aides were focused on the wrong issue set for working-class white Michigan voters, and, even when she talked about the economy—rather than her e-mail scandal, mass shootings, or the water crisis in Flint—it wasn’t at all clear to them that she was on their side.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“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.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Biden was for the Iraq War before he was against it. And he was the Senate sponsor of the Clinton White House anticrime law that had led to the mass incarceration of young black men. In addition, he’d ushered Clarence Thomas onto the Supreme Court, spent the early part of his career in the Senate trying to end school busing, and represented perhaps the most business-friendly tax haven in the nation, Delaware, for thirty-six years.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“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.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“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.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“For Bernie, winning wasn’t the only thing. I’m a backbencher in Congress, he told Devine. I want to come out of this in a better position to push the issues I care about. He wanted a higher profile in the Senate if he ran and lost. “A presidential campaign, if done well, can accomplish that,” Devine replied.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“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.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Though she was speaking with a small group made up mostly of intimates, she sounded like she was addressing a roomful of supporters—inhibited by the concern that whatever she said might be leaked to the press.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“The campaign was an unholy mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority, petty jealousies, distorted priorities, and no sense of greater purpose. No one was in charge, and no one had figured out how to make the campaign about something bigger than Hillary. Muscatine felt that the speech said nothing because it tried to say too much.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“Hillary was fighting the last war. She did that with varying degrees of success. But the variable she couldn’t change was the candidate.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“guarded that information jealously to maintain his own power. Podesta was also wary of at least one member of Hillary’s State Crew. When the e-mail scandal first burst into the open, Philippe Reines, who had a rare direct line to the boss after running her media operations at the State Department and in the Senate, went to war with Jennifer Palmieri, the new communications director for the campaign, over how to respond. Reines, highly obsessive, ultraloyal to Hillary, and possessed of an acid tongue, pointed his finger at Palmieri when Hillary complained that deliberations about the timing of her first public remarks on the e-mail server were leaking to the media.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign