Diane's Reviews > Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

This is a good book for anyone who follows American politics.

Shattered tells the story of Hillary Clinton's campaign for U.S. president in 2016. As someone who voted for Hillary and was devastated by her loss, reading this book was akin to dumping a big bottle of lemon juice on a gaping wound. But, angst be damned, the insider stories were so interesting that I raced through it in two days. Like a lot of Hillary supporters, I'm still trying to understand what went wrong on Nov. 8. There is no one answer to that question, because it was a whole mess of problems.

In the postmortem, Hillary and her aides identified dozens of reasons she had lost: low African American turnout in some key areas; a boost in the white vote for Trump in suburbs, small towns, and rural areas; misogyny; the Comey letters; and the Russians ... From Hillary's perspective, external forces created a perfect storm that wiped her out.

The authors interviewed more than a hundred campaign aides and advisers for this book, and they granted anonymity to those who requested it. The result is a fascinating account of the 2016 election, month by month and state by state. I can recall all of the news events mentioned, and it was interesting to hear what was going on behind the scenes. I was especially intrigued by the strategy discussions, when the campaign staff was deciding where to send the candidate and where to spend money on additional resources. (This is where it's easy to start laying blame, in that Hillary didn't spend enough time talking with white working class folks.) The stories of the debate prep sessions were also great, and I enjoyed hearing how one adviser studied Trump's behavior and speech patterns (and even dressed like him) to help her prepare for the live debates.

Of course, the most heartbreaking scene was Election Night itself, and watching the Clinton team realize they didn't have enough electoral votes to win.

A nation of Democrats sat in stunned silence. They hadn't been warned. Hillary hadn't been warned. Even her pollsters had been in the dark, sidelined in favor of an analytics team that insisted she was poised to win.

High above Times Square, disbelief stifled the once-boisterous room. It fell quiet. A new reality took hold: Short of a divine reprieve, Hillary was going to lose. Donald Trump would be president. "No one saw this coming."

Another moving section of the book is hearing how Hillary decided to write her concession speech, and she made a choice not to attack Trump, but instead to focus on the future.

"It's not my job anymore to do this," she said, her voice growing more forceful as Chelsea nodded in agreement. "Other people will criticize him. That's their job. I have done it. I just lost, and that is that," she continued. "That was my last race."

Her speechwriters worked all through the night on a draft, and when they met again with Hillary on the morning of Nov. 9, she had more ideas about what she wanted to say.

Hillary told them she wanted to strike a new balance. She had come to the conclusion that her supporters needed to hear a message of inclusiveness in the face of Trump's victory ... The speech wouldn't be an enumeration of every subset of the country that Trump had offended or threatened during the course of the campaign. It would be more subtle than that. But, as one of her aides described it, the tone would be "graciously critical."

Hillary wanted another significant change. In one of the margins, she had drawn a circle with a cross beneath it — the symbol for women. She said she wanted to say something about the glass ceiling — that it would someday be shattered.

Reading this book reminded me of the excellent Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, which focused on the bonkers 2008 election between Barack Obama and John McCain. However Game Change spread its storyline among multiple campaigns — besides Obama and McCain, there were also insider details from the camps of John Edwards, Sarah Palin and Hillary. In contrast, Shattered focuses almost all of its attention on Hillary and her staff, with sidenotes on relevant actions from Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. This perspective allows the reader to really drill down and look at all of the challenges Hillary's campaign faced, which were legion.

Since November, I've read scores of articles on why Hillary lost, but I appreciated having this book that went step-by-step through the campaign, providing context to an election that was even more bonkers than 2008. Highly recommended for political readers.

My Big Takeaways From Shattered

* Hillary Clinton is an extremely smart and dedicated public servant — she can get deep into the nuances of policy and tries to understand an issue from every point of view — but she struggled to clearly articulate her message and vision for the country. This was one of the fundamental problems in her campaign.

* Hillary's campaign was run by an inexperienced manager, Robby Mook, who over-relied on faulty data analytics. He made some critical decisions that deeply hurt the campaign, such as not sending Hillary to key states and not spending enough money or hiring enough staffers on the ground.

* The Democratic Party failed to take seriously the anger toward the political establishment, as evidenced by the popularity of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Hillary and her team assumed they would have the same reliable voter demographics that Obama had in 2008 and 2012, and also had counted on the same white workers who had supported Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Both were faulty assumptions.

* While reading this book, I wondered if Hillary could have won if she had chosen Sanders as her running mate. I think that might have made a difference. There still would have been Russians hacking her email, of course, and the FBI's James Comey would probably still have written that controversial letter, but it's possible Sanders's supporters would have helped with voter turnout.

* All that said, the averages of history were against the Democrats. America typically runs like a pendulum, with the country swinging from the left to the right every 4 to 8 years. It is extremely rare for a political party to win three presidential campaigns in a row.

* In the end, I came away from this book admiring Hillary for her smarts and her hard work, and I believe she would have been a good president. But making stump speeches isn't her strong suit — she's more comfortable in small groups and running meetings. She has the intelligence and the compassion to be a leader, but Trump had all the sound bites and was better at shouting his message to his crowds. Hillary is a policy wonk and struggled to craft good sound bites. As one aide said, "There's a textbook quality to her articulation of things."

Favorite Passages
"When she conceded to Obama in 2008, she'd thanked voters for putting '18 million cracks' in the glass ceiling of the presidency. By the time she finished the 2016 campaign, she believed, that glass ceiling would lay shattered beneath her feet. And yet what Hillary couldn't quite see is that no matter how she recast the supporting roles in this production, or emphasized different parts of the script, the main character hadn't changed."

"Hillary broke one glass ceiling — becoming the first female nominee of a major political party — and forever put to rest the question of whether a woman could be seen as commander in chief. She collected nearly 65.9 million votes — more than any Republican nominee in American history, just 64,822 fewer than Barack Obama in 2012, and almost 3 million more than Donald Trump. And she did that while facing a set of trials and tribulations unlike any other in American campaign history: a partisan congressional investigation; a primary opponent who attacked her character; a rogue FBI director; the rank misogyny of her Republican rival; a media that scrutinized her every move while failing to get that Republican rival to turn over his tax returns; and even a Kremlin-based campaign to defeat her. 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."

"Her message wasn't getting through — even in the moments that weren't dominated by the e-mail scandal. The one thing Hillary could put her finger on was that her 2016 team wasn't doing any better of a job of figuring out how to connect her to the national sentiment. She was in a bubble, and so were the people around her. Together they had a feel for national politics from the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, when the public was less dissatisfied with the Democratic establishment's inability to solve their problems."

"Bill Clinton does not really get where the country is. He has this perception of politics which is very much like the 1990s," one of Hillary's advisers said in the midst of the primaries. "The fact that the government hasn't worked in a couple of years is really altering both parties."

"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. Amazingly, after having been the candidate of the white working class in a 2008 race against a black opponent, she was becoming anathema to them. Even more astounding, the wife of the president who had won on an 'It's the economy, stupid' mantra was ignoring the core of the Clinton brand — robust growth that touched every American."

"The debates served to reinforce the public perceptions of Hillary and Trump. She was more presidential, totally establishment, and super-rehearsed. He embodied change — for good and for ill. He could be genuine while lying; she came off as inauthentic even when she was telling the truth."

[on Election Night]
"Hillary was still surprisingly calm, unable or unwilling to delve into the details of how her dream was turning into a nightmare. 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. He'd seen the transatlantic phenomenon of populist rage at rallies across the country, and warned friends privately of his misgivings about its effect on Hillary's chances. Now his focus turned back to the international movement he'd seen gathering. 'It's like Brexit,' he lamented. 'I guess it's real.'"