Shattered Inside Hillary Clinton Doomed Campaign (Audible Audio Edition) Jonathan Allen Amie Parnes Kimberly Farr Random House Audio Books
Download As PDF : Shattered Inside Hillary Clinton Doomed Campaign (Audible Audio Edition) Jonathan Allen Amie Parnes Kimberly Farr Random House Audio Books
It was never supposed to be this close. And of course she was supposed to win. How Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump is the tragic story of a sure thing gone off the rails. For every Comey revelation or hindsight acknowledgment about the electorate, no explanation of defeat can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary's campaign - the candidate herself.
Through deep access to insiders from the top to the bottom of the campaign, 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. Drawing on the authors' deep knowledge of Hillary from their previous book, the acclaimed biography HRC, Shattered will offer an object lesson in 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.
Moving blow by blow from the campaign's difficult birth through the bewildering terror of election night, Shattered tells an unforgettable story with urgent lessons both political and personal, filled with revelations that will change the way listeners understand just what happened to America on November 8, 2016.
Shattered Inside Hillary Clinton Doomed Campaign (Audible Audio Edition) Jonathan Allen Amie Parnes Kimberly Farr Random House Audio Books
I generally don't read this sort of book but I thought this one would be interesting as 2016 was one of the few elections with a 'twist' ending. Also what made this book interesting was that it was written by people who were clearly enamored of their subject and had expected to write a coronation story about her, having previously written 'HRC' - a pre-campaign book singing her praises.To be fair to the authors, they lay the blame for her loss squarely on her. They sort of feel bad about it but their close access makes it obvious to them and they are objective enough to report it. The other main person held responsible is campaign manager Robby Mooks, who is so enamored with 'analytics' that he can't see the forest for the trees. The canary in the coal mine is Bill Clinton, who senses that his wife and her campaign are not connecting with the white working class, but is ignored by the team who consider him washed-up and out of date.
It would have been nice to have a book that also gave the story from the Trump side, but as these reporters didn't have that sort of access there, I am glad that they didn't try to shoehorn it in. That would have to be the subject of a different book.
I do notice a number of one star reviewers who seem to be Trump supporters. I really don't understand why as this book does not present a flattering view of Hillary Clinton at all and Trump himself is only seen through the eyes of the Clinton campaign and of course they don't think highly of him.
Overall, it's a book about entitlement, hubris and ambition for the sake of ambition. I very much enjoyed it.
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Shattered Inside Hillary Clinton Doomed Campaign (Audible Audio Edition) Jonathan Allen Amie Parnes Kimberly Farr Random House Audio Books Reviews
I just finished Shattered Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign. Like a number of other reviewers, I found it interesting and informative--and also biased. Someone has noted that the bias is perhaps natural, given the source of much of the authors' information, but as I read I found myself questioning some of the characterizations. For instance, the authors frequently assert that Bernie Sanders went "negative" in his campaign while Hillary was high-mindedly trying to talk about the issues. My recollections of the campaign don't tally with that, and I wasn't initially a Sanders supporter (disclosure--I became one during the debates--what sealed the deal for me was the Michigan debate, which the authors reference, noting that for many it reinforced a perception that HRC would do and say anything to win).
Book detail about the inner workings of the campaign are interesting, but I find what the book omits equally intriguing. There are no references to any of the dirty tricks the Clinton campaign and its supporters employed in winning the primary. There's no mention of inappropriate Clinton campaigning (or at least voter-influencing) at polling places in Massachusetts. There's no mention of the media shut-out of Sanders during the primary, no acknowledgement that the large crowds he drew were anything more than a cheap trick.
While the book definitely presents information from the Clinton perspective, there is enough information to allow discerning readers to reach their own conclusions--the repeating issues of emails are dealt with extensively, and while the prevailing tone is that they were simply a tool for destroying the Clinton candidacy, the authors do note that to a degree they were a tool that Clinton herself handed her opponents.
The Wikileaks releases are interpreted as Russian interference in an American election. I would tend to agree--but again, those emails were a self-inflicted wound; had the DNC and the emails on the Podesta account not revealed what there's some justification to call corruption and inappropriate party bias, they would have been ineffective. The authors remind us that the Clinton campaign and the DNC was the victim of a cyber attack, and that's very true, and it needs to be addressed. However, the effectiveness of that attack was directly related to the corruption and mean-spiritedness of the correspondents--those emails paint a very different picture of who was "victimized" in the campaign.
Perhaps the biggest question I'm left with after reading this is one that the campaign repeatedly asks itself, and never really manages to answer--perhaps because the principal characters in this book seem to lack any ability to see themselves from any perspective but their own--is the central question that lies of the heart of any discussion of the Clinton political machine, and the Clintons themselves Why is it that so many people see HRC as corrupt, dishonest, and untrustworthy? I've omitted some of the other accusations that seem more rooted in misogyny than in behavior, but perhaps this book casts some light on those three, at least.
The authors note that HRC's speeches to Wall Street for large sums of money, given at a time when a presidential run and the issue of purchased influence were both strong possibilities, led many to see her as corrupt. While she responded angrily to the question, angry responses are not proof--and it's very possible to find enough political stances she's taken to offer substance to the question. While Politifact ranks her as one of the more honest politicians, it was hard to watch her sometimes-flippant, evolving, and contradictory versions surrounding her email server without seeing her as duplicitous. The book notes this--and goes on to point out that the results of the initial investigation revealed a number of her statements to be falsehoods. The above-cited example from the Michigan debate, where she falsely characterized a Sanders position in a way calculated to destroy his credibility provides another example. The Clintons may not be more dishonest than other politicians, but that's not to say that the perception of dishonesty is unearned. Again, the authors note this, but then shy away from the implications of it.
At the end, the authors speculate that perhaps a quarter of a century in public life had so firmly set the Clintons' images in the electorate's minds that no amount of "reintroducing" and "rebranding" was going to change the way people saw them. While we may not know HRC the person--and to a great degree this book doesn't really change that--we have good reason to know HRC as a public figure. Her public life is real and discoverable, for good or ill. This book adds a great deal of context to that public figure. In the context of the book, HRC's back story is quite possibly the elephant in the room, and the reason the authors describe her campaign as "doomed." I find that a mischaracterization. "Doom" implies that some overwhelming external force acted against her to deprive her of the presidency. If the authors are correct, and her campaign failed not because the candidate couldn't find an effective "brand" but because of actions that grew out of who she was as a person, perhaps the election result was not a failure of the system, but the system working. (I really hate to write that, because I'm finding TrumpWorld to be a confusing and sometimes frightening place.)
In short--while there's definitely bias both in what information is included and how it's interpreted, the book nevertheless offers a fascinating glimpse into an organization that wanted to be secretive, but couldn't quite pull it off. It's a reminder that public lives are led in the public eye, and that a huge part of the Sanders appeal was his lifelong commitment to the same principles on which he campaigned, and that our deepest wounds are those for which we have ourselves provided the weapons. I'd recommend this book be read with an open, analytical mind, as a part of a broader reading program that offers other perspectives.
Written by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Shattered Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what happened, and more importantly, what went wrong, with Clinton's 2016 presidential run. Allen and Parnes interviewed almost everyone involved with both the Clinton and the Sanders campaigns as well as a number of people in the Trump campaign and as a result the book offers a breath-taking panorama of the 2016 election in terms of how things unfolded for Clinton and how they ultimately fell short.
Here's a sample of the kind of insight you'll find in the book
"By ceding the reformer mantle to Sanders -- and to Trump -- Hillary was dismissing a whole world's worth of evidence that she was running into the headwinds of history.... Instead of shifting, she was locking in a general-election strategy based on the assumption that the 2016 electorate would look a lot like those of the previous two elections. Having defeated Bernie's surge, Hillary was reassured that the national political firmament would hold.
--Interestingly, both Bill and Hillary were paying attention to British politics. In 2015, when conservatives thrashed the liberal Labour Party, Hillary confided in aides that former prime minister Tony Blair had predicted to her that the left would lose if it ran a 'base' election. She appeared to worry about being drawn too far to the left, rather than seeing the conservative takeover as an affirmation of nationalistic populism. Bill believed the push for Brexit - and its eventual approval by voters -- showed a strong contempt for existing power structures that reflected the mood of the American electorate. You guys are underestimating the significance of Brexit, he told Brooklyn and his own advisers over and over. He'd come to power by tapping into similar frustrations in 1992, convincing voters that a reasonably good economy was swirling down the drain - and that he was the only guy who could fish it out and revive it. Bill had a better feel for the working stiff, whether American or British, than anyone else in Hilary's orbit. He knew that, and he felt like he was being heard. But he couldn't figure out why Hillary and her team weren't executing.
--...Throughout the primary, he'd report back from the field on what he was hearing at campaign events and from friends across the country. Mook's response was always a variation on the same analysis the data run counter to your anecdotes. Bill liked data, but he believed it was insufficient To him, politics wasn't just about finding people who agreed with you and getting them to the polls. He felt that it was important to talk to voters individually and get a real sense for what they were feeling. He also believed that a candidate could persuade voters with the right argument. And in pursuit of that, the on-the-ground feel for how hopes and fears were motivating voters was invaluable.
--For Mook and the Brooklyn number crunchers, it held little value. Hillary, the policy wonk, leaned heavily toward hard evidence too. And, because she didn't want to expose herself to unscripted interactions with voters, she wasn't getting much retail political information. From the very beginning of the campaign, Hillary had met with preselected groups but tried to avoid chance encounters with voters who might heckle her. She took the same approach to members of the media, who sometimes relayed the concerns of voters to candidates. She was running a variation on a 'Rose Garden' strategy -- the term for an incumbent president who stays at home and uses the trappings of the office to campaign rather than getting out on the hustings. For years, she'd been in the bubble of elite circles in Washington, New York, and foreign capitals. Whether or not she understood their concerns, she was literally out of touch with voters.... they weren't talking to and hearing from actual people at events."
Highly, highly recommended.
I generally don't read this sort of book but I thought this one would be interesting as 2016 was one of the few elections with a 'twist' ending. Also what made this book interesting was that it was written by people who were clearly enamored of their subject and had expected to write a coronation story about her, having previously written 'HRC' - a pre-campaign book singing her praises.
To be fair to the authors, they lay the blame for her loss squarely on her. They sort of feel bad about it but their close access makes it obvious to them and they are objective enough to report it. The other main person held responsible is campaign manager Robby Mooks, who is so enamored with 'analytics' that he can't see the forest for the trees. The canary in the coal mine is Bill Clinton, who senses that his wife and her campaign are not connecting with the white working class, but is ignored by the team who consider him washed-up and out of date.
It would have been nice to have a book that also gave the story from the Trump side, but as these reporters didn't have that sort of access there, I am glad that they didn't try to shoehorn it in. That would have to be the subject of a different book.
I do notice a number of one star reviewers who seem to be Trump supporters. I really don't understand why as this book does not present a flattering view of Hillary Clinton at all and Trump himself is only seen through the eyes of the Clinton campaign and of course they don't think highly of him.
Overall, it's a book about entitlement, hubris and ambition for the sake of ambition. I very much enjoyed it.
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