Conor Ahern's Reviews > Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

This was really interesting but bleak. I'd recommend it to anyone who is interesting in finding out what went wrong from the inside of this campaign, and who can stomach it this soon after the doom it chronicles.

I watched this election with intense interest, first as someone excited about the possibility that a economic iconoclast like Bernie Sanders posed, and then horrified by the possibility that Donald Trump could become president. I never really felt strongly about Hillary Clinton either way--I frowned on a lot of her politics and her seemingly cautious approach to things in the primary, but thought she would be a very capable and even-handed president; I thought she herself was inspiring even if her leadership would likely be worryingly neoliberal. When Trump became the nominee, I clung to her by default, but I never grew to love her as a candidate. Sure, I phone banked for her every chance I got from her Brooklyn office, and yes I am a bit taken by identity optics narratives (though: queery whether things have gotten better for people of color in the United States since the first non-white president was elected...), but I only really got excited about a Hillary Clinton presidency insofar as she was the last bulwark against Republican lunacy.

Having read this book, I think that we can only really blame Hillary for this catastrophic and seemingly avoidable cataclysm of an election result insofar as she is responsible for picking the team that ran the election and the people who defined it. The role of sexism in this election is beyond question--a disgusting revelation about where we are as a nation despite our lofty rhetoric, and a vivid reminder of how much farther we have to go. And the media's complicity in furthering Trump's antics and approbating his childishness--harming our civic debate and eroding our norms for short term ratings boosts--is almost as appalling. But even given these X factors, this result was far from inevitable.

Aside from Hillary's own "scandals" (honestly--fuck anyone who thought that Hillary's emails were a legitimate reason to not vote for her and/or to vote for Trump) and the campaign's inability to handle them, data fetishists like (the aptly named) Robby Mook seem most to blame for this disaster. A mix of hubris and a preternatural focus on the numbers really seem to have doomed this campaign from the start.

Additionally, the book focuses heavily on the primary and the damage it may have inflicted on the general campaign. What I took away from it is just how arrogant and dismissive the campaign was toward the nearly equal number of Democratic primary voters who preferred another candidate, and one with a very different agenda. The fact that Elizabeth Warren was one of the final four VP candidates--the result of campaign aides insisting that this would be a way to mend relationships with the Bernie wing--and that they went with "duller than a year-old razor" Tim Kaine, really shows how arrogant, spiteful, or out of touch the whole group was. The worst is that Hillary took the blame for all of this, despite her openness to Warren as VP, her skepticism of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and her strong interest in economic justice for all, especially minorities and women, as expressed through her wonky and detailed policy positions.

In the end, I divided the major players into heroes, villains, and neutrals:

Heroes:

* Hillary & Chelsea Clinton
* Michelle and Barack Obama

Neutrals:

* Podesta
* Huma
* Bernie
* Kaine
* Biden

Villains:

* Mook
* Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
* Bill Clinton
* Comey
* Intransigent Bernie supporters (but only after he conceded the primary)

The inside story, really, is wild. It really me relive the rollercoaster, for better or for worse. I guess the worst part was reliving the awful night of when the terror of unreality set in; but happily, a mixture of incompetency, internal strife, and corruption have conspired to keep the impact at bay. At least for now. Let's hope the next campaign learns all the lessons it can from this book.