Hillary's last stand

Book review of 'Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign'

Shattered 

Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

Penguin Random House

799 pages; Rs 464

Donald Trump’s seven months in the White House reminds us almost daily of the quirks of the US electoral system that brought him to power. But notice this: Though many Americans – including some of his supporters, ironically – are ruing Mr Trump’s accession to the White House, few seem to be missing his defeated opponent Hillary Clinton, who won the popular mandate by a handy margin of 2.8 million votes. 

Instead, the left-leaning commentariat and Democrat supporters have mostly expressed a wistful yearning for her former boss and President Barack Obama. Increasingly, too, they’ve been courting Bernie Sanders, Ms Clinton’s defeated opponent in the Democratic primaries, and former vice president Al Gore, who also won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College to George W Bush in that fateful 2000 election. 

Shattered, an inside look at Ms Clinton’s shock defeat, could just as well have been titled Hubris. Hindsight, as the cliché goes, is 20/20 but the niggling doubts about Ms Clinton’s candidature never abated all through one of the nastiest presidential campaigns in recent memory. 

A year ago, Ms Clinton was expected to walk over the egregious Republican real estate millionaire as America’s first woman president. Yet, despite the turmoil in the White House, it is fair to say that more people regret Mr Trump’s victory today than Ms Clinton’s defeat. That’s an important distinction, and it explains why she, with her experience as Senator and Mr Obama’s first-term secretary of state, lost to someone as appalling as Donald Trump. 

A traditionally polarising figure across the Democratic base to start with, her campaign was burdened by doubts that Americans harbour about machine politicians from the get go. High-profile investigations into her use of a private email server for confidential State Department business and her close ties with Wall Street and the powerful Clinton Foundation were sticky issues that Ms Clinton needed to address early and upfront. Her failure to recognise these threats and the absence of a distinctive policy platform – especially one that constructively addressed the core concerns of a vocal minority – scarcely strengthened her cause.

Her biggest triumph in winning the nomination as the Democratic party’s first woman presidential candidate was leavened by the fact that she was, against all the odds, almost neck and neck with her Republican opponent in the opinion polls in the run up to polling day. If her platform had credibility for being politically correct (and vaguely Obama-eque), it wasn’t significantly more convincing than Mr Trump’s crudely dystopian, xenophobic and sexist crusade. That was the problem: For all her advantages and political nous, Ms Clinton’s appeal lay in not being Mr Trump.  

Authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes capture the problem neatly on page 154. As the battle with Mr Sanders intensified, her team struggled to come up with a credible campaign slogan. “Breaking Barriers” was a working title but hardly a compelling one. The difficulty was, as the authors point out, Ms Clinton “still wasn’t articulating a vision that could turn her from a candidate inexorably linked with the past into an avatar of the future. Tactically, she was doing what needed to be done to win delegates, the all-important if unsexy measure of success in presidential nominating contests. She was all science, no art.” 

Mr Sanders, on the other hand, was all art, no science, as was Mr Trump. Ironically, Mr Sanders’ flawed extreme-left ideology was no less seductive to the white, non-college educated (and mostly unemployed) voter that was flocking to Mr Trump’s untenable promises — raising one of those tantalising “What If” questions about the 45th presidency had he won the Democratic nomination. Mr Sanders also preyed on Ms Clinton’s ethical weaknesses, planting “doubts in the minds of even the staunchest Democrats” and opening the door for Mr Trump to coin the “Crooked Hillary” label that his base adopted with such relish. FBI chief James Comey’s revelations – the ones he later claimed made him so “nauseous” – administered the coup de grace to a campaign that was rarely stable. 

Mr Allen and Ms Parnes capture all this, pointing to excessive reliance on data analytics by her campaign manager Robby Mook that kept her out of touch with the pulse of many segments of voters. His granular number-crunching encouraged her to focus on minorities – which the Trump campaign was alienating – at the expense of her loyal white voter base, and to ignore battleground states such as Michigan, which was among the states in the “Blue Wall” that Mr Trump flipped on the way to his stunning victory. The authors describe the tensions between John Podesta, her “baby boomer chairman and millennial-style manager” as a result of differences over such basic campaign strategy.

Shattered is a conscientious piece of journalism that recaps with all the bells and whistles of insider info the details of Ms Clinton’s doomed campaign. The book does not match the quality of John Hellemann and Mark Halpern’s masterly Race of a Lifetime on Barack Obama’s extraordinary campaign but this is the closest we’ll get to dispassionate analysis before Ms Clinton’s own account, due soon, is published.