Shattered Illusions

[Chris]

Clinton and her campaign, according to a latest book, were a disaster from the get go.

Shattered Illusions

...Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, the new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, is absolutely gripping reading, chock full of juicy, revelatory reporting about the Democratic nominee’s campaign that you really wish you had read during the actual campaign. Alas, Allen and Parnes had to agree to save their best material for the book in order to receive the extraordinary access they were given. The authors are blunt about how what they observed of Team Clinton behind the scenes was completely different from what most of the public saw:

Over the course of a year and a half, in interviews with more than one hundred subjects, we started to piece together a picture that was starkly at odds with the narrative the campaign and the media were portraying publicly. Hillary’s campaign was so spirit-crushing that her aides eventually shorthanded the feeling of impending doom with a simple mantra: We’re not allowed to have nice things.

Wouldn’t it have been nice to know there was a “feeling of impending doom” inside the Clinton campaign last year?

It’s not that there was no coverage of the campaign’s infighting and stumbles. There just wasn’t much to suggest that the dysfunction of Clinton’s team would prove fatal, or even that it was worse than the usual clashing of egos in a high-stakes national race. The Trump campaign was usually portrayed as an out-of-control clown car, with feuding egos, bumbling incompetence, and campaign managers changing as regularly as Spinal Tap drummers. The Clinton campaign, by comparison, was perceived to be an experienced, well-funded, well-organized, well-oiled machine brimming with dozens of campaign offices in swing states and a proven ground game.

Except privately, the people running the machine had their doubts, and weren’t shy about sharing them with Allen and Parnes....

[AeonPax]

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Good Find. I also read this in regards to the book; Why Hillary Clinton Really Lost

[Chris]

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Good Find. I also read this in regards to the book; Why Hillary Clinton Really Lost

From your link liked this one:

In other words, Clinton – in some Nixonian fit of paranoia – violated the privacy of her senior advisers in her own mole hunt, a revelation that reflects on her own self-described “mistake” to funnel her emails as Secretary of State through a private server rather than a government one. As the Journal’s review puts it: “she didn’t want anyone reading her emails the way she was reading those of her 2008 staffers.”

[rcfieldz]

She's been roaring lately. Seems to be trying to get her followers all riled up again. She should be on meds.

[Chris]

She's been roaring lately. Seems to be trying to get her followers all riled up again. She should be on meds.

Think there were rumors of running again. As the truth comes out that will be less likely.

[Chris]

Another review, Ass-chewing and schadenfreude: Inside Hillary’s failed campaign:

...Clinton’s campaign, as Allen and Parnes render it, was a disaster before it even began in 2015. Just like when she ran against Barack Obama in 2008, Hillary was widely viewed as an establishment candidate, and her campaign struggled to put together a coherent message. Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau was brought in early on to punch up Clinton’s Roosevelt Island campaign-launch speech in June 2015 but left almost immediately, saying that the operation resembled that of John Kerry’s failed 2004 campaign: “...a bunch of operatives who were smart and accomplished in their own right but weren’t united by any common purpose larger than pushing a less-than-thrilling candidate into the White House.” The solution to Clinton’s persistent message problem was to bring in more (always Clinton-adjacent) speechwriters and strategists. Only Clinton could have known for sure why she wanted to be president, but she chose to let others decide for her. As one anonymous aide told Allen and Parnes, Clinton simply didn’t have a reason for running besides continuing the establishment politics of her predecessor.

The book portrays Clinton as a temperamental and often absent boss, obsessed with leaks, infighting, and backstabbing among her employees. Hillary thought “almost everything her own campaign had done [in 2008] was flawed and almost everything Obama’s had done was pristine,” and so this time around, she read through all her staffers’ emails to determine their relative loyalty. This move was devious but not exactly shrewd; the latter campaign contained just as much inner turmoil. Shattered is punctuated with frequent outbursts of shouted dialogue, especially coming from Bill Clinton. Bill yelled at campaign chairman John Podesta “loud enough to be heard through the walls,” he grew “repetitive and forceful” with campaign manager Robby Mook, and he yelled at the entire staff on several occasions. Hillary was more passive-aggressive — at one point during debate preparation she responded to constructive criticism from strategist Jake Sullivan with a demand that the two switch places. As Sullivan played her role, Hillary savaged his performance. “She was visibly, unflinchingly pissed off at us as a group,” an aide recalled.

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[resister]

She's been roaring lately. Seems to be trying to get her followers all riled up again. She should be on meds.

Maybe the same tranqs they sedated her with when the results came in

Seriously, that women is a witch!

[AeonPax]

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In the 2016 election, we had the choice of voting for two equal piles of poop. No matter which won, America loses.

[resister]

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In the 2016 election, we had the choice of voting for two equal piles of poop. No matter which won, America loses.

Hey! you misstyped 2012!

[AeonPax]

Hey! you misstyped 2012!

That jokes already tired.