# Shattered ![rw-book-cover](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51nT5lSR0JL._SL200_.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[Jonathan Allen, Amie Parnes]] - Full Title: Shattered - Category: #books ## Highlights - And yet what Hillary couldn’t quite see is that no matter how she recast the supporting roles in this production, or emphasized different parts of the script, the main character hadn’t changed. ([Location 148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=148)) - she wanted to show ([Location 161](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=161)) - Obama had been relentlessly superb at telling voters why he was running for president and giving them a window into how he would govern. He was confident, cocky even, about his vision. Hillary, a modest, midwestern Methodist with a love of minutiae, was unshakably focused on the trees rather than the forest. This campaign would test the A student’s ability to adapt—to subordinate her nature to her need to win. ([Location 181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=181)) - Most politicians understand that voters are looking for big, bold principles—easy-to-grasp concepts—and that the details can be filled in to fit them. ([Location 192](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=192)) - The campaign was an unholy mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority, petty jealousies, distorted priorities, and no sense of greater purpose. No one was in charge, and no one had figured out how to make the campaign about something bigger than Hillary. Muscatine ([Location 322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=322)) - Though some of Hillary’s aides were both competent and loyal, the candidate favored the latter over the former, which is one major reason the campaign’s gears often got stuck. ([Location 353](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=353)) - Former Texas agricultural commissioner Jim Hightower once said of George H. W. Bush that he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. ([Location 885](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=885)) - In reality, the leaking and disloyalty were symptoms, not the cause, of the dysfunction in her first run for the White House. As ([Location 1181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=1181)) - It was an issue that wouldn’t ever go away: Hillary was being advised by people who thought they knew her—she’d been in the public eye for most or all of their adult lives—but really didn’t have a feel for who she was at her core. ([Location 2449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=2449)) - “The fact the government hasn’t worked in a couple of years is really altering both parties. ([Location 2483](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=2483)) - The one person with whom she didn’t seem particularly upset: herself. No one who drew a salary from the campaign would tell her that. It was a self-signed death warrant to raise a question about Hillary’s competence—to her or anyone else—in loyalty-obsessed Clintonworld. ([Location 2968](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=2968)) - The real answer: she’d become the candidate of minority voters on social justice issues while Bernie was hitting her as a corrupt, Wall Street–loving champion of the “rigged” financial system that took advantage of working-class voters. Whether she was perceived as hostile to working- and middle-class whites or just indifferent, it wasn’t a big leap from “she doesn’t care about my job” to “she’d rather give my job to a minority or a foreigner than fight for me to keep it.” She and her aides were focused on the wrong issue set for working-class white Michigan voters, and, even when she talked about the economy—rather than her e-mail scandal, mass shootings, or the water crisis in Flint—it wasn’t at all clear to them that she was on their side. ([Location 2987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=2987)) - Even more astounding, the wife of the president who had won on an “It’s the economy, stupid” mantra was ignoring the core of the Clinton brand—robust growth that touched every American. ([Location 3003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=3003)) - which sat in places she couldn’t see—like her blindness to conflicts of interest, her own preference for reality over political optics, her paranoia about political opponents, and her love of the dollar. ([Location 3323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=3323)) - Hillary, who kept careful track of friends and enemies, wouldn’t look kindly on anything less than a full-throttle effort to drive black voters to the polls in Maryland. ([Location 3785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=3785)) - But the fact that she’d had to push unions to whip up their members to vote was indicative of how little natural support she had in the ranks. The lack of enthusiasm for her candidacy among labor’s foot soldiers in Maryland should have been one of that day’s major warning signs. ([Location 3791](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=3791)) - Hillary was poised to become the first woman ever nominated for president by a major political party. Better yet, she was going to draw Trump—the clown prince of the Republican primary field—as a general-election opponent. Soon the increasingly popular Barack Obama would join her on the campaign trail and bless her as the natural heir to his historic presidency. ([Location 3812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=3812)) - “He’s tapped into the real and understandable frustration that’s felt among working people,” AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka said that month. ([Location 3872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=3872)) - Fundamentally, she was misreading the mood of the voters. Trump was winning primaries because he was a torch-bearing outsider ready to burn the nation’s institutions to the ground. Bernie was offering the same thing on the Democratic side, and he had flown in from off the political radar screen to give Hillary fits. In January 2016, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, a former Clinton White House aide and sometime critic of both Clintons, had beseeched Podesta to open Hillary’s eyes to the changing world around her. With Bernie and Republicans attacking her as an agent of the establishment and an avatar of the status quo, Greenberg argued, Hillary had to make political reform a central part of her campaign. ([Location 3927](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=3927)) - 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. ([Location 3940](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=3940)) - Bill Clinton didn’t have an impulse-control button. Everyone knew that. And still, this stood out as colossally high-risk and low-reward. ([Location 4135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=4135)) - Still, the inescapable doom that shadowed Hillary’s campaign had reared its head again. On the day Obama would endorse her, and at the same time she was being let off the legal hook for her e-mail scandal, the FBI director affirmed she’d done something wrong—just nothing he could pin on her. ([Location 4188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=4188)) - One of the clearest lines of distinction between a great political speech and a pedestrian one is the ability of the speaker to turn the peroration—the final run—into a big call for action. ([Location 4958](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=4958)) - As president, it was his job to safeguard the integrity of the political process. ([Location 6381](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=6381)) - But she also spoke to their fears, affirming American principles she worried Trump might not safeguard. “Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power and we don’t just respect that, we cherish it,” she said. “It also enshrines other things: the rule of law, the principle that we are all equal in rights and dignity, freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values too and we must defend them.” ([Location 6503](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=6503)) - On a phone call with a longtime friend a couple of days after the election, Hillary was much less accepting of her defeat. She put a fine point on the factors she believed cost her the presidency: the FBI (Comey), the KGB (the old name for Russia’s intelligence service), and the KKK (the support Trump got from white nationalists). ([Location 6510](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=6510)) - Hillary kept pointing her finger at Comey and Russia. “She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way,” this person said. That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. ([Location 6518](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=6518)) - The closeness of the race brought into sharp relief the fundamental divide that ran deepest between Hillary’s advisers throughout the campaign. After a quarter of a century on the national stage, and as one of the most polarizing figures in American public life for much of that time, Hillary had alienated a significant portion of the electorate before she even launched her bid. It would be difficult to reset preconceived notions. “The big challenge of this whole race was there were so many voters who were ungettable,” said one high-level campaign aide. ([Location 6554](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=6554)) - Ultimately, it was a battle between those who believed that it was folly to think Hillary could show up in lower-population areas and change hearts and minds and those who believed, just as firmly, that politics and Hillary’s path to victory were fundamentally about doing just that. That elemental split hung over nearly every internal skirmish over strategy and tactics—from the hard-and-fast reliance on data and the development of her message to where she held rallies and whether she bothered to distribute campaign literature in swing states. ([Location 6570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=6570)) - “We lost because of Clinton Inc.,” one close friend and adviser lamented. “The reality is Clinton Inc. was great for her for years and she had all the institutional benefits. But it was an albatross around the campaign.” ([Location 6593](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01JWDWP6W&location=6593))