Posted on 04/24/2017 12:13:34 PM PDT by TigerClaws
It does not take more than a few pages for journalists Jon Allen and Amie Parnes to arrive at what amounts to their thesis in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed 2016 Campaign, a new tell-all book built off years of reporting on the trail.
“[Clinton’s] campaign was an unholy mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority, petty jealousies, distorted priorities, and no sense of greater purpose. No one was in charge, and no one had figured out how to make the campaign about something bigger than Hillary,” Allen and Parnes write in the book’s introduction. “[But] no explanation of defeat can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary’s campaign — Hillary herself.”
Writing in a lively and fast-paced narrative, Allen and Parnes use their unparalleled access (more than 100 on-background interviews with top Clinton surrogates) to richly document what it felt like to be aboard the Clinton Hindenburg, as well as to argue that Trump’s victory was not inevitable, or the result of interventions from the FBI or Russia, but the result of campaign incoherence that went all the way to the top.
This thesis rests on two arguments that are fundamentally in tension. One is that the allegedly best and the brightest of Clinton’s campaign fell short because they failed at marketing an otherwise winning candidate — that unforced strategic blunders, factional infighting, and boneheaded investments torpedoed a Democratic nominee who, in the hands of some better staff, would have swept to the White House. Not incidentally, this has been the part of the book that’s gotten by far the most attention in the coverage surrounding its release last week — with Clinton aides defending themselves to Politico and Allen standing by his story on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show.
It’s also the least meaningful part of the book. The second main argument Shattered makes is that Clinton herself was a flawed candidate whom no campaign team could have saved. This argument hinges on the idea not that Clinton was failed by her staffers, but that she failed them by never articulating a political vision they could use to capture the public’s imagination. It is in uncovering proof of this second thesis where the book is both most persuasive and most arresting — and where its lessons for the Democratic Party are the most salient. The stories of team Clinton’s incompetence can be traced back to the candidate Hillary Clinton Campaigns In Key Swing States Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The Clinton campaign made several strategic decisions that have drawn heaps of scorn from the press. In the pages of Shattered, it becomes clear that their fundamental origin rested in Clinton herself.
Take their approach to winning Michigan. On the ground, Democratic politicians in Michigan like Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) were furiously relaying the message that union voters were turning on Clinton, that she needed to put field organizers on the ground as fast as possible, and that she hadn’t come out strongly enough against the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But back in Brooklyn, Clinton’s team was cautiously confident that Michigan would be hers.
And then it all fell apart — Bernie Sanders pulled off the upset in March 2016, a victory that resuscitated and extended his flailing campaign for months.
These details would replay themselves in almost exactly the same way less than nine months later. As Donald Trump honed his message on the Rust Belt, Clinton herself barely visited the region, and her staff withheld resources from its field operations in the Midwest — a choice that was denounced as “political malpractice” in many of the postmortems that followed the election.
We learn from Shattered that this is not because Clinton’s team ignored the blown Michigan primary. Just the opposite. Instead, Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, concluded from Sanders’s win there that the problem was not that Clinton had spent too little time in Michigan, but that she’d spent too much — that calling attention to the state would make clearer to voters that they should vote for her opponent.
Allen and Parnes write:
One of the lessons Mook and his allies took from Michigan was that Hillary was better off not getting into an all-out war with her opponent in states where non-college-educated whites could be the decisive demographic. In Michigan, they believed, Hillary’s hard campaigning had called attention to an election that many would-be voters weren’t paying attention to, and given Bernie a chance to show that his economic message was more in line with their views.
So Mook’s clique looked at the elevation of the Michigan primary — poking the sleeping bear of the white working class — as a mistake that shouldn’t be repeated. “That was a takeaway that we tried to use in the general,” said one high-ranking campaign official.
With hindsight, the decision looks like an inexplicable and unforced error. Aides told Allen and Parnes that they sent Clinton to Michigan only once (and not at all to Wisconsin) because they believed “to make the election a bigger deal was not good for our prospects.” When I shared this anecdote from the book on Twitter, a chorus of critics attacked Mook, with the National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar calling it a “mind-blowing” blunder.
But was it really? Allen and Parnes write that Clinton frequently acknowledged to her aides that she didn’t have the pulse of the electorate or understand the political currents. When she did campaign in Michigan, Clinton resisted condemning global free trade deals, and then drew criticism in the local press for her tepid answers. As easy as it is to mock Mook, he appeared to be in a real dilemma: Why go all out trying to talk to voters and persuade them if you yourself don’t believe your message can win them over?
“[Clinton] had complained to her communications team that her economic messaging sucked, and they’d told her to keep repeating it,” Allen and Parnes write. “But the problem wasn’t the way she was selling her economic plan; it was that the voters didn’t like her stance on the issue [free trade] that mattered most to them.” Shattered offers less-than-convincing arguments about campaign drama
What could be “bigger” to that campaign than the candidate?
That sums up how Hillary Clinton "runs" things.
In turn, Hillary Clinton can be summed up in one word; "evil". The two go hand in glove.
Thank god for Trump winning. No one else had the guts to fight. Hillary is and has always been a LOSER. She can accomplish anything. It is all Bill. Hillary just tags along. No ideas. No clue. She can even manage the corruption. She found a way to screw that up. Now the excuses are flowing. Hopefully she will fade away before they make her a Saint.
The real reason she & the DemocRATS lost is that the go along get alongs have come to realize that the big government Socialism does not work, and is designed for the Elite. Even the union folks are starting to get it.
It was a campaign based on it being “her turn”. She was presented as being the anointed one, America’s great maternal hope, the super liberal who could do it all. The campaign stops weren’t rallies, they were presentations on the president, only time separated her from her inevitable selection as POTUS.
And that’s what sunk her. When candidates don’t act like candidates ASKING for your votes, you’ve already lost.
The book also claims that after the 2008 campaign where she lost to Obama that she personally looked through her staff’s emails to find who was disloyal or spoke negatively about her.
This shows her paranoia and that she understand computers well enough that her claims of not even understanding the concept of ‘wiping’ of a server is nonsense.
She lied (big suprise).
I hope these people watch their backs. I don’t want them to commit Arkancide.
Well why wasn’t she 50 points ahead, you might ask.
Hellary lost because enough people in enough states realized she was a lying murdering traitor.
“That sums up how Hillary Clinton “runs” things. “
For her entire life she had ridden coat tails and political victory looked, from her seat in the back, easy. But the staff that made things happen was terrified of her. If she gave an order in the ‘90’s it most likely passed through Bill first. He made whatever happens happen. And, I think Bill was surrounded by more shroud people. All evidence indicates Hillary surrounds herself with “yes” people. When she was out on her own, running the show from the driver’s seat, she was unaware of how badly she was doing on all levels. That’s the problem with managers who stay isolated and can’t take criticism. They are isolated and get no corrective inputs. Is it any wonder they wander off into the political weeds?
OK... Now you’ve triggered me with that photo. Now I must go and watch some of my “election night porn” saved videos. They always cheer me up.
“No one else had the guts to fight”
There was one other that did.
Now we know why the Department of State was such a CF. She can’t manage anything, never could.
Please share with us!...................
I am glad to be of service.
Imagine her Presidency if her campaign was a train wreck.
I remember Pat Caddell going off on how bad a slogan "Im with Her!" was; it was months later until they changed it from that narcissistic slogan.
They believed their own BS! They believed their own fake polls and fake news. They believed their own lies; and shocker, on election day they were exposed.
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