A column I posted here recently brought to my attention this book about the 2016 Clinton campaign.

I do very little but read and sleep these days and am always on the hunt for material, entertaining, enlightening, educational, interesting or as many of these as possible. There are a lot of articles posted online, some of which meet these requirements, but I’m always looking for more.

It turns out this book is available on Kindle, and I had some promotional credits, so I thought I would have a go at it. It arrived within minutes yesterday morning. I read it in one day.

I have despised the Clintons for decades. I thought it was terrible mistake to oust GHW Bush in favor of these low life grifters, and still do.

The book details the people around the Clintons in the campaign, their roles, their fights, power struggles, mixed strategies, miscues, jealousies, gotchas, as they went through the campaign, first the primaries where a heretofore obscure Senator not even Democrat, Bernie Sanders, drove them nuts with a completely unanticipated strong showing in quite a few races before finally falling short, causing a great deal of anxiety and no small cost. The candidate herself was a significant part of the problem in many ways.

Trump had to be easier, right? No experience, had antagonized many in the party with his uncouth style, inability to ignore an attack, the experienced pros reluctant to come work for a sure loser. Trump was doing everything on the cheap, very little media buys.

Then the big shocking disappointment!

All this is spelled out in good detail, and I must say I enjoyed reliving it. Maybe that makes me a bad person.

Jallen, what is the name of the book of which you speak? I would like to enlighten myself.

quote:

Originally posted by wreckdiver:
Jallen, what is the name of the book of which you speak? I would like to enlighten myself.

It is in the thread title. Sorry.

Here is a somewhat more elegant review.

A new book reveals that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was way more dysfunctional than we realized.
Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, the new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, is absolutely gripping reading, chock full of juicy, revelatory reporting about the Democratic nominee’s campaign that you really wish you had read during the actual campaign. Alas, Allen and Parnes had to agree to save their best material for the book in order to receive the extraordinary access they were given.

The authors are blunt about how what they observed of Team Clinton behind the scenes was completely different from what most of the public saw:

Over the course of a year and a half, in interviews with more than one hundred subjects, we started to piece together a picture that was starkly at odds with the narrative the campaign and the media were portraying publicly. 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.

Wouldn’t it have been nice to know there was a “feeling of impending doom” inside the Clinton campaign last year?

It’s not that there was no coverage of the campaign’s infighting and stumbles. There just wasn’t much to suggest that the dysfunction of Clinton’s team would prove fatal, or even that it was worse than the usual clashing of egos in a high-stakes national race. The Trump campaign was usually portrayed as an out-of-control clown car, with feuding egos, bumbling incompetence, and campaign managers changing as regularly as Spinal Tap drummers. The Clinton campaign, by comparison, was perceived to be an experienced, well-funded, well-organized, well-oiled machine brimming with dozens of campaign offices in swing states and a proven ground game.

Except privately, the people running the machine had their doubts, and weren’t shy about sharing them with Allen and Parnes.

In Shattered, we learn that ten speechwriters, consultants, and aides had a hand in writing Clinton’s announcement speech, which unsurprisingly turned out to be a long, muddled mess. Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, briefly brought in to help, concluded that the speech (and by extension, the whole campaign) “lacked a central rationale for why Hillary was running for president, and sounded enough like standard Democratic pablum that, with the exception of the biographical details, could have been delivered by anyone within the party.”

Quite a few people knew that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was a paper tiger.

We learn that Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, chose not to spend money on polling, relying instead on analytics surveys. “In Florida, Craig Smith, the former White House political director, and Scott Arceneaux, a veteran southern Democratic political operative, had begged Mook to poll the state in October to no avail. Mook believed it was a waste of money.” (Clinton’s campaign spent $563 million during the cycle.) Bill Clinton reportedly told one aide the Friday before the election that Florida was “in the bag.” Trump won the state by about 100,000 votes out of more than 9.4 million cast.

We learn that Clinton’s Wisconsin volunteers lacked basic resources such as campaign literature to distribute while door-knocking. “What is the point of having a hundred people on the ground if you’re not giving them any of the tools to do the work?” asks one unidentified “veteran Democratic organizer familiar with the Wisconsin operation.”

We learn that in late October, after FBI director Jim Comey’s letter indicating the bureau had reopened the investigation into Clinton’s e-mails, longtime aide Jake Sullivan “believed there was a reasonable chance Hillary would lose the election, and he began pressing Mook and others to abandon efforts to expand the Electoral College map in favor of locking down states that added up to 270.”

In other words, quite a few people knew that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was a paper tiger. Loyalty to the Clintons (and fear of retribution) kept them from speaking publicly and honestly about it. It must have been a great relief to these frustrated, frightened Clinton staffers to vent to Allen and Parnes, knowing their words wouldn’t risk influencing the outcome of the election. Allen and Parnes, on the other hand, knew that the public was getting, at best, a seriously incomplete portrait of the state of the race and the election dynamics, and they acknowledge the uncomfortable position this put them in:

We made one decision early on in our process that proved crucial in allowing us access to key players even at times when most of the media was walled off from Hillary and her senior staff. We agreed to conduct all of our interviews on background, which provided anonymity to our sources. That gave them an extra sense of security on the off chance that we broke a vow that we observed throughout our reporting: none of the material would appear before the election. . . . The trade-offs enabled us to get an extraordinary look at the last, tumultuous chapter of the Clinton era.

If the journalists with the best access to the front-running campaign hadn’t had to save all of their best material for a post-election book, maybe the results of the 2016 election wouldn’t have been so stunning.

Link

When I want to relive those moments, I just go to YouTube to watch the media reaction compilation videos from election night. Never fails to lift my spirits. I usually watch before bedtime, then I get a great night's sleep, and in the morning, I wake up and Hillary is still not president. Helps me get out of bed with a pep in my step.

I wonder about some of this stuff. Yeah, it's kind of interesting, but it's anecdotal. Does anyone really think a single vote was going to be changed in 2016 by knocking on doors and handing out brochures? Did any Clinton supporters suddenly switch to Trump when Comey reopened the investigation?

I think Trump's eking out slim victories in battleground states was purely a result of his outworking everyone, ignoring experts and Clinton's unlikeability factor being just higher than Trump's. Her campaign staff's gaffes did not send anyone to Trump.

quote:

Originally posted by ChicagoSigMan:
When I want to relive those moments, I just go to YouTube to watch the media reaction compilation videos from election night. Never fails to lift my spirits. I usually watch before bedtime, then I get a great night's sleep, and in the morning, I wake up and Hillary is still not president. Helps me get out of bed with a pep in my step.

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
A column I posted here recently brought to my attention this book about the 2016 Clinton campaign.

I do very little but read and sleep these days and am always on the hunt for material, entertaining, enlightening, educational, interesting or as many of these as possible. There are a lot of articles posted online, some of which meet these requirements, but I’m always looking for more.

It turns out this book is available on Kindle, and I had some promotional credits, so I thought I would have a go at it. It arrived within minutes yesterday morning. I read it in one day.

I have despised the Clintons for decades. I thought it was terrible mistake to oust GHW Bush in favor of these low life grifters, and still do.

The book details the people around the Clintons in the campaign, their roles, their fights, power struggles, mixed strategies, miscues, jealousies, gotchas, as they went through the campaign, first the primaries where a heretofore obscure Senator not even Democrat, Bernie Sanders, drove them nuts with a completely unanticipated strong showing in quite a few races before finally falling short, causing a great deal of anxiety and no small cost. The candidate herself was a significant part of the problem in many ways.

Trump had to be easier, right? No experience, had antagonized many in the party with his uncouth style, inability to ignore an attack, the experienced pros reluctant to come work for a sure loser. Trump was doing everything on the cheap, very little media buys.

Then the big shocking disappointment!

All this is spelled out in good detail, and I must say I enjoyed reliving it. Maybe that makes me a bad person.

That's not what makes you a bad person.



This is video crack. NSFW language

quote:

Maybe that makes me a bad person.

There've been so many ups and downs that it's hard to see any harm in thoroughly enjoying the ups. At the same time, the Clintons have gotten what they've wanted so often, no matter how badly that served the country, that it's kind of fascinating to walk through the process of the national electorate deciding that they'd had enough of it.

quote:

This is video crack. NSFW language
[FLASH_VIDEO]<iframe frameborder="0" height="408" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nkPIpb8wAXk" width="725"></iframe>[/FLASH_VIDEO]

Yes that is a true gem.

Someday the Young Turk video will get old.

But not today.