Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Politics

480 pages, published April 18, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

A very timely book when I read it, Shattered is an insider’s account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Presidency during the 2016 election against Donald Trump.  How could she lose?  To Donald Trump of all people?  Hint:  it wasn’t just the James Comey revelations or Russian meddling.  Shattered takes the reader behind the scenes of a sure thing gone off the rails.  No explanation of defeat of this magnitude can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary’s campaign–the candidate herself.   Political writers Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes have reconstructed the key decisions and unseized opportunities, the well-intentioned misfires and the hidden thorns that turned a winnable contest into a devastating loss.  It shows how Hillary herself made victory an uphill battle, how her difficulty articulating a vision irreparably hobbled her impact with voters, and how the campaign failed to internalize the lessons of populist fury from the hard-fought primary against Bernie Sanders.

Quotes

“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.”

 

“Hillary’s campaign was so spirit-crushing that her aides eventually shorthanded the feeling of impending doom with a simple mantra: We’re not allowed to have nice things.”

 

“I don’t understand what’s happening with the country. I can’t get my arms around it,” Hillary confided. Moore just listened. “How do I get answers to this?” Hillary asked. It was a quandary that would plague her throughout the campaign. After nearly a year on the campaign trail, and hundreds of stops at diners, coffee shops, and high school gymnasiums and just as many roundtables with young professionals and millworkers, Hillary still couldn’t figure out why Americans were so angry or how she could bring the country together.”

 

“Running like an incumbent from the outset, Hillary had geared her whole campaign toward depriving any other Democrat of the institutional support necessary to mount a challenge, from donors to superdelegates. She wanted other Democrats to be afraid to run against her, or to support any would-be rivals.”

 

“But the idea burned into her mind as much as anything else was that she had lost because she’d hired people who put their own interests above getting her elected.”

 

“But more important, the scapegoating tone and tenor revealed that the Clintons were either living on another planet or at least having emotional and intellectual difficulty coming to terms with the reality that only Hillary was culpable and only Hillary could turn things around.”

 

“Nor was anyone empowered to both enforce Hillary’s will and tell her when she was wrong without fear of reprisal.”

 

“Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her.”

 

“All of the jockeying might have been all right, but for a root problem that confounded everyone on the campaign and outside it. Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale.”

 

“the summer of 2008, years before her private e-mail server became a campaign issue, Hillary learned about the power of digital snooping. At the time, she was conducting an autopsy of her failed bid against Barack Obama, and she wanted an honest accounting of what had gone wrong. So she instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign’s server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers.”

 

“Mook was already operating inside a framework first developed for Hillary by David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s longtime strategist, who had put together a preliminary memo for Hillary in December 2013. As Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, Plouffe had despised Clinton; that he was now advising her was an important signal of just how completely she would co-opt the Democratic establishment even before she began running.”

 

“Hillary’s aides didn’t need to wonder why her economic message wasn’t breaking through. It wasn’t rocket science. She hadn’t told the truth to the public about her e-mails, and she was under federal investigation.”

 

“Running like an incumbent from the outset, Hillary had geared her whole campaign toward depriving any other Democrat of the institutional support necessary to mount a challenge, from donors to superdelegates. She wanted other Democrats to be afraid to run against her, or to support any would-be rivals.”

 

“After the 2008 campaign, two of her aides, Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod, had toiled to assign loyalty scores to members of Congress, ranging from one for the most loyal to seven for those who had committed the most egregious acts of treachery. Bill Clinton had campaigned against some of the sevens in subsequent primary elections, helping to knock them out of office. The fear of retribution was not lost on the remaining sevens, some of whom rushed to endorse Hillary early in the 2016 cycle.”

 

“There was a certain duality to Hillary’s vast political empire: while it was true that most of the voices inside and outside the campaign had something valuable to contribute, when taken together, they were cacophonous. Rarely did everyone agree on a particular course of action, and often the counsel Hillary got came with the baggage of the adviser’s agenda in maintaining good relations with the candidate or trying to make a rival look bad.”

 

“She believed her campaign had failed her—not the other way around—and she wanted “to see who was talking to who, who was leaking to who,”

 

“No, Schale explained, Trump’s numbers weren’t just big, they were unreal. In rural Polk County, smack-dab in the center of the state, Hillary would collect 3,000 more votes than Obama did in 2012—but Trump would add more than 25,000 votes to Mitt Romney’s total. In Pasco County, a swath of suburbs north of Tampa–St. Petersburg, Trump outran Romney by 30,000 votes. Pasco was one of the counties Schale was paying special attention to because the Tampa area tended to attract retirees from the Rust Belt—folks whose political leanings reflected those of hometowns in the industrial Midwest.”

 

“In the end, though, this was a winnable race for Hillary. Her own missteps—from setting up a controversial private e-mail server and giving speeches to Goldman Sachs to failing to convince voters that she was with them and turning her eyes away from working-class whites—gave Donald Trump the opportunity he needed to win.”

My Take

I have always had a keen interest in politics and having closely followed the twists and turns of the 2016 election, I very much looked forward to reading Shattered.  I was not disappointed.  Given unprecedented insider access to Hillary’s campaign, authors and political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes weave a compelling tale of the unfolding disaster.  While everyone I know was shocked on election night that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton (and it wasn’t even that close), after reading Shattered, this result does not seem all that unlikely.  Trump had his problems, but Hillary had them too.  And apparently hers were bigger.