"After the primary loss in Michigan, Hillary needed answers from her team about what they planned to do to make sure she didn't get blindsided again. It was hard enough running against Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, the Republican National Committee, the FBI, the House Benghazi Committee, and the national media - plus slippery-lipped Joe Biden on any given day - without her own team screwing things up. 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."
Thus wrote political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in their book "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign," a book that simultaneously confirms the suspicions of Hillary Clinton's political opponents and surprises them as to how right they were and how much they didn't know. Democrats who opposed Hillary's candidacy for their party's nomination feared - and Republicans hoped - that her own liabilities would doom her presidential ambitions, but "Shattered" presents a candidate and a campaign far more flawed than anyone ever realized.
The book makes clear that Hillary Clinton was a troubled candidate who set out to win by default. She cornered all of the top Democratic campaign experts and donors to clear the field of challengers for the party's nomination, refused to acknowledge any Democrats who did challenge her (and played mind games with Vice President Joe Biden to discourage him from running), and failed to present a solid reason for why anyone should vote for her. But what is really eye-opening is how the campaign unfolded. Both Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill are depicted as being cut off from reality and vindictive toward their critics within the party, and Hillary in particular comes across as being cold and heartless toward her own staff. Campaign staffers, meanwhile, knew she was beatable and susceptible to being defeated by Donald Trump, yet they avoided communicating their concerns to the candidate out of fear of being seen as disloyal. Hillary was astonishingly tone-deaf to warning signs of her vulnerability, such as on her e-mail issues and suspicions that she felt "entitled" to be the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee. She saw her problems with white working-class voters - the same voters she'd courted in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries against Barack Obama - and made no effort to reach them, preferring instead to focus on minority voters and women. And for all of her efforts, she failed to anticipate the rise of Bernie Sanders and how Trump would exploit the same weaknesses in Hillary's campaign that Sanders did.
"Shattered" depicts a campaign more animated by data and analytics than by actual voter outreach - so much, that entire states like Michigan and Wisconsin (which Hillary lost to Trump) were taken for granted in the general election. Campaign manager Robby Mook tried to run an efficient, lean operation that emphasized the Democratic base rather than persuasion. But Martin and Parnes keep coming back to Hillary as her own enemy (but not her worst). One memorable tidbit is about how she was prepared to undermine U.S. Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland in his bid for the Senate when it became apparent that blacks were more likely to vote for his primary opponent, former Representative Donna Edwards, who is black, and because of the unions' ambivalence for her and their support for Van Hollen. "Who gives a f--- about Chris Van Hollen?" she said. Hillary feared that too many union votes would help Bernie Sanders in the concurrent Maryland presidential primary. (Van Hollen won his primary in Maryland, as did Hillary.) But there was another reason she was ready to undermine Van Hollen; the Clintons kept a Nixon-like list of disloyal Democrats to punish for their apostasy, and Van Hollen (who was elected to the Senate) was one of their worst offenders. This is one of many eye-opening stories, such as the preponderance of American flags at the Democratic convention to hide anti-Hillary delegates from TV cameras and concerns that Hillary was working too hard during the general election campaign when she should have been resting, opening her to concerns about her stamina.
"Shattered" isn't a perfect book, though; it downplays Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz's role in tipping the scales for Hillary (though the account of her lust for power made my jaw drop!), and the influence of third-party presidential candidates is completely overlooked; Libertarian Gary Johnson gets only one mention and Jill Stein doesn't even get that much. But Martin and Parnes validate a lot of long-held suspicions about Hillary's deficiencies as politician and what ultimately made her unelectable. The fly-on-the-wall accounts of campaign strategy alone are worth the time to read this page-turner.
Hillary Clinton is putting out her own campaign memoir in September 2017, with the infantine and obvious title "What Happened." You don't need to read her memoir, because, in "Shattered," Martin and Parnes will tell you exactly . . . what happened.
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