Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign

Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes – 2017

It’s not top-drawer political writing, but Allen & Parnes’ book is the first substantial postmortem on last year’s presidential election.  It’s neither a hatchet-job on Clinton nor a puff-piece, which gives it some validity.  Its origins are interesting: for a year, the pair had privileged access to almost every key player in Clinton’s campaign because both the authors and their sources all assumed that the result would be a flattering behind-the-scenes portrait of Hillary Clinton fulfilling her destiny.  Once she lost, however, the book wasn’t scrapped and the participants were now less-than-excited about the prospect of seeing their candid criticisms of each other in print.  The consequence of this is that almost every single source is on background, unnamed.  Shattered chronicles the painfully inept Clinton campaign that not only failed but will go down in history as the one that delivered unto us the trainwreck presidency of Donald J. Trump.  Anyone with their ear to the ground knew that Hillary Clinton was probably the worst of all possible candidates for the Democrats to run in 2016; a year rife with voter disdain for run-of-the-mill politicians from both parties and a general rise in populism.  The Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party leadership did not have their ears to the ground, though.  Instead, they were lazily confident that the election was a no-brainer and they therefore had no special obligation to listen to voters, change their ways, or do anything except proceed on the theory that it was “Hillary’s time.”  The main thrust of the book concerns the fact that the campaign was exclusively reliant on data analytics derived from a state-of-the-art algorithm that directed resources to likely Clinton supporters instead of reaching out to voters who needed convincing.  I admired that the authors resisted blindly accepting Clinton’s belief that the facts that led to her defeat were all external – a coalition comprised of the FBI, the media, sexism, alt-right “deplorables,” etc. – and instead lay the blame solely at her door.  She put together an enormous, multi-tiered team of advisers with divergent ambitions and no clear leader, none of whom ever came up with ways to combat the core disconnect with working-class people that has always characterized Clinton’s career in the public eye.  One detail that is particularly interesting and ironic in light of daily Trump news is that Clinton and her team ranked the mainstream media high on their list of villains who turned the electorate against her by focusing on juicy stories – like the email scandal and WikiLeaks – instead of the issues.  All in all, the book is fascinating, if a little bogged down in minutiae about day-to-day ups-and-downs during the primaries.  But my main complaint about it is its adherence to what I call the “Bob Woodward brand of journalism,” in which, due to their dependence on protected sources, the authors must appear to be reading individuals’ minds on nearly every page.  Little clues are dropped frequently, implying that it should be fairly easy to determine who the sources are for various bits of information, which is a game that is probably fun for political junkies but does not lend itself to being taken seriously in the long run as history.