Hillary Clinton. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty)
Yikes! New Behind-the-Scenes Book Brutalizes the Clinton Campaign
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
21 April 17
'Shattered,' a campaign tell-all fueled by anonymous sources, outlines a
generational political disaster
here is a critical scene in Shattered, the new behind-the-scenes campaign
diary by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, in which staffers in the Hillary
Clinton campaign begin to bicker with one another.
At the end of Chapter One, which is entirely about that campaign's
exhausting and fruitless search for a plausible explanation for why Hillary
was running, writers Allen and Parnes talk about the infighting problem.
"All of the jockeying might have been all right, but for a root problem that
confounded everyone on the campaign and outside it," they wrote. "Hillary
had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn't really
have a rationale."
Allen and Parnes here quoted a Clinton aide who jokingly summed up Clinton's
real motivation:
"I would have had a reason for running," one of her top aides said, "or I
wouldn't have run."
The beleaguered Clinton staff spent the better part of two years trying to
roll this insane tautology - "I have a reason for running because no one
runs without a reason" - into the White House. It was a Beltway take on the
classic Descartes formulation: "I seek re-election, therefore I am...
seeking re-election."
If you're wondering what might be the point of rehashing this now, the
responsibility for opposing Donald Trump going forward still rests with the
(mostly anonymous) voices described in this book.
What Allen and Parnes captured in Shattered was a far more revealing
portrait of the Democratic Party intelligentsia than, say, the WikiLeaks
dumps. And while the book is profoundly unflattering to Hillary Clinton, the
problem it describes really has nothing to do with Secretary Clinton.
The real protagonist of this book is a Washington political establishment
that has lost the ability to explain itself or its motives to people outside
the Beltway.
In fact, it shines through in the book that the voters' need to understand
why this or that person is running for office is viewed in Washington as
little more than an annoying problem.
In the Clinton run, that problem became such a millstone around the neck of
the campaign that staffers began to flirt with the idea of sharing the
uninspiring truth with voters. Stumped for months by how to explain why
their candidate wanted to be president, Clinton staffers began toying with
the idea of seeing how "Because it's her turn" might fly as a public
rallying cry.
This passage describes the mood inside the campaign early in the Iowa race
(emphasis mine):
"There wasn't a real clear sense of why she was in it. Minus that, people
want to assign their own motivations - at the very best, a politician who
thinks it's her turn," one campaign staffer said. "It was true and earnest,
but also received well. We were talking to Democrats, who largely didn't
think she was evil."
Our own voters "largely" don't think your real reason for running for
president is evil qualified as good news in this book. The book is filled
with similar scenes of brutal unintentional comedy.
In May of 2015, as Hillary was planning her first major TV interview - an
address the campaign hoped would put to rest criticism Hillary was avoiding
the press over the burgeoning email scandal - communications chief Jennifer
Palmieri asked Huma Abedin to ask Hillary who she wanted to conduct the
interview. (There are a lot of these games of "telephone" in the book, as
only a tiny group of people had access to the increasingly secretive
candidate.)
The answer that came back was that Hillary wanted to do the interview with
"Brianna." Palmieri took this to mean CNN's Brianna Keilar, and worked to
set up the interview, which aired on July 7th of that year.
Unfortunately, Keilar was not particularly gentle in her conduct of the
interview. Among other things, she asked Hillary questions like, "Would you
vote for someone you didn't trust?" An aide describes Hillary as "staring
daggers" at Keilar. Internally, the interview was viewed as a disaster.
It turns out now it was all a mistake. Hillary had not wanted Brianna Keilar
as an interviewer, but Bianna Golodryga of Yahoo! News, an excellent
interviewer in her own right, but also one who happens to be the spouse of
longtime Clinton administration aide Peter Orszag.
This "I said lunch, not launch!" slapstick mishap underscored for the
Clinton campaign the hazards of venturing one millimeter outside the circle
of trust. In one early conference call with speechwriters, Clinton sounded
reserved:
"Though she was speaking with a small group made up mostly of intimates, she
sounded like she was addressing a roomful of supporters - inhibited by the
concern that whatever she said might be leaked to the press."
This traced back to 2008, a failed run that the Clintons had concluded was
due to the disloyalty and treachery of staff and other Democrats. After that
race, Hillary had aides create "loyalty scores" (from one for most loyal, to
seven for most treacherous) for members of Congress. Bill Clinton since 2008
had "campaigned against some of the sevens" to "help knock them out of
office," apparently to purify the Dem ranks heading into 2016.
Beyond that, Hillary after 2008 conducted a unique autopsy of her failed
campaign. This reportedly included personally going back and reading through
the email messages of her staffers:
"She instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign's server and download
the messages sent and received by top staffers. . She believed her campaign
had failed her - not the other way around - and she wanted 'to see who was
talking to who, who was leaking to who,' said a source familiar with the
operation."
Some will say this Nixonesque prying into her staff's communications will
make complaints about leaked emails ring a little hollow.
Who knows about that. Reading your employees' emails isn't nearly the same
as having an outsider leak them all over the world. Still, such a criticism
would miss the point, which is that Hillary was looking in the wrong place
for a reason for her 2008 loss. That she was convinced her staff was at
fault makes sense, as Washington politicians tend to view everything through
an insider lens.
Most don't see elections as organic movements within populations of
millions, but as dueling contests of "whip-smart" organizers who know how to
get the cattle to vote the right way. If someone wins an election, the
inevitable Beltway conclusion is that the winner had better puppeteers.
The Clinton campaign in 2016, for instance, never saw the Bernie Sanders
campaign as being driven by millions of people who over the course of
decades had become dissatisfied with the party. They instead saw one cheap
stunt pulled by an illegitimate back-bencher, foolishness that would be
ended if Sanders himself could somehow be removed.
"Bill and Hillary had wanted to put [Sanders] down like a junkyard dog early
on," Allen and Parnes wrote. The only reason they didn't, they explained,
was an irritating chance problem: Sanders "was liked," which meant going
negative would backfire.
Hillary had had the same problem with Barack Obama, with whom she and her
husband had elected to go heavily negative in 2008, only to see that
strategy go very wrong. "It boomeranged," as it's put in Shattered.
The Clinton campaign was convinced that Obama won in 2008 not because he was
a better candidate, or buoyed by an electorate that was disgusted with the
Iraq War. Obama won, they believed, because he had a better campaign
operation - i.e., better Washingtonian puppeteers. In The Right Stuff terms,
Obama's Germans were better than Hillary's Germans.
They were determined not to make the same mistake in 2016. Here, the thought
process of campaign chief Robby Mook is described:
"Mook knew that Hillary viewed almost every early decision through a 2008
lens: she thought almost everything her own campaign had done was flawed and
everything Obama's had done was pristine."
Since Obama had spent efficiently and Hillary in 2008 had not, this led to
spending cutbacks in the 2016 race in crucial areas, including the hiring of
outreach staff in states like Michigan. This led to a string of similarly
insane self-defeating decisions. As the book puts it, the "obsession with
efficiency had come at the cost of broad voter contact in states that would
become important battlegrounds."
If the ending to this story were anything other than Donald Trump being
elected president, Shattered would be an awesome comedy, like a Kafka novel
- a lunatic bureaucracy devouring itself. But since the ending is the
opposite of funny, it will likely be consumed as a cautionary tale.
Shattered is what happens when political parties become too disconnected
from their voters. Even if you think the election was stolen, any Democrat
who reads this book will come away believing he or she belongs to a party
stuck in a profound identity crisis. Trump or no Trump, the Democrats need
therapy - and soon.
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