A few weeks ago, pages were leaked from Hillary Clinton’s ghostwritten burn book, What Happened. On the basis of those excerpts alone, it became clear the failed candidate’s blatant attempt to salvage some of her besmirched credibility and mount the campaign for an inevitable 2020 election bid was going to be nasty. Like, really nasty. She made Trump out to be a gross, mouth-breathing pervert, but more controversially, she painted Vermont state senator Bernie Sanders as a renegade who opened the door for sexist criticism, and ran for no other reason than to disrupt the democratic party.
These pages, like everything else Clinton has said and done since she ceded victory to Donald Trump in November last year, make it clear that the one-time Secretary of State is keen to blame everyone but herself for her performance, and they speak to an arrogance and a duplicity that devastated her presidential bid in the first place. They are the words of someone obstinately refusing to face up to reality; the whimpered insults of a politician who has spent her career doing everything in her power to buck the assessment the public has made of her. The world might have changed since Trump took to power, but Hillary Clinton has not.
Campaign advisors were frequently walled off from Hillary, forced to go through her right-hand woman Huma Abedin rather than speak to her directly
For those acquainted with the recently released Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, a new work of non-fiction by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, the vitriol contained within Clinton’s literary facelift would have been anything but a surprise. After all, if there is one thing that Shattered makes blindingly clear, it’s that Clinton has always been eager to dole out blame; that her aim since 2008, when she lost the democratic primaries to Barack Obama, has been to devastate her rivals, lock in the support of the wealthy and the powerful, and, perhaps most importantly, punish anything she considers “disloyalty”.
So no, nothing in Shattered is necessarily surprising for those of us who have always assumed that Clinton, a relentless career politician who backed the Iraq war, opposed same sex marriage, took fossil fuel money, and supported the devastating anti-drug policies of her husband Bill, was a bad egg. What is surprising, however, is the breadth of the Clinton campaign’s dysfunction, revealed to Parnes and Allen via interviews with anonymous, bitter staffers.
Hillary’s aides celebrate when she manages to nail comforting a child on camera, but these moments of victory prove few and far between.
From the very opening chapter of their excellent book, as Clinton speeds towards Roosevelt Island in a motorcade, the authors make it clear that of all the questions Hillary pre-prepared answers to, “Why should you be president?” was not amongst them. And as Clinton grew more and more despondent throughout her campaign, thrown by Sanders’ surprising success and the fallout from the growing FBI investigation into her emails, the sense that the Clinton train had no conductor only grew more pronounced.
Worse still, Parnes and Allen make clear, was the cut-throat atmosphere within what they call “Clintonland”. Campaign advisors were frequently walled off from Hillary, forced to go through her right-hand woman Huma Abedin rather than speak to her directly, and even senior aides often only encountered the presidential candidate when she called through to admonish them. In one particularly memorable scene, Clinton’s campaign managers huddle around a mobile phone and listen in as the woman herself chews them out, speaking with all the clipped put-downs of a substitute teacher reining in a particularly naughty class.
In one particularly memorable scene, Clinton’s campaign managers huddle around a mobile phone and listen in as the woman herself chews them out.
Clinton spends as much of Shattered admonishing as she does campaigning. She lectures aides about not going hard enough against Bernie Sanders; about failing to properly suppress stories concerning her email scandals; about not giving her speeches the personal, emotive punch they so clearly lacked.
As Allen and Parnes note, “Hillary should have been angry with herself … but she instead turned her fury on her consultants and campaign aides, blaming them for a failure to focus the media on her platform. In her ear the whole time, spurring her on to cast blame on others and never admit to anything, was her husband. Neither Clinton could accept the simple fact that Hillary had hamstrung her own campaign.”
Shattered is a tragedy rather than a smear.
It is lacerating stuff – while Bill is painted as a sexist, ruddy- faced walking media snafu who frequently butted heads with Hillary’s top advisor Robby Mook, the presidential candidate herself is an arrogant, disingenuous robot who spent much of the campaign trying and failing to come across as a real, flesh and blood human being. Her aides celebrate when she manages to nail comforting a child on camera, but these moments of victory prove few and far between.
Not that Parnes and Allen are necessarily Sanders supporters, or luxuriate in the same kind of gleeful sense of satisfaction that has defined Trump’s response to the Clinton defeat. And for that reason, Shattered is a tragedy rather than a smear. The subtext is not, “it’s good Clinton lost, given how poorly she ran her campaign”, it’s, “god help us all.”
Indeed, hanging over the book like the bloody end that Macbeth meets, or the violence awaiting Hamlet, is the threat of Trump himself, and the untold destruction he has done since inheriting the presidency. There should be no pleasure gained from Clinton’s folly, Parnes and Allen seem to suggest. After all, that Clinton lost an unlosable election, and thus guaranteed the most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world fell into the hands of a madman, should fill us with nothing but heartache, and an emotion indistinguishable from honest-to-god grief.
Shattered is out now.
