BOOK REVIEW
Presidential contender has her own version of what happened in 2016
Hillary Clinton is disarmingly honest about what went wrong with her failed US presidential election campaign.
Hillary Clinton has written a book. Have you heard? Choice quotes have been seeping out for weeks, and I’ll admit that I reacted to one of them — “Now I’m letting down my guard” — as if the smoke alarm had started shrieking in my living room. Why believe her? In her previous books, she measured her words with teaspoons and then sprayed them with disinfectant.
Then again, we’ve been told over and over that Ms Clinton is very different in private. And she is now a private citizen. This distinction seems to have made all the difference.
What Happened is not one book, but many. It is a candid and blackly funny account of her mood in the direct aftermath of losing to Donald Trump. It is a post-mortem, in which she is both coroner and corpse. It is a feminist manifesto. It is a score-settling jubilee. It is a rant against James Comey, Bernie Sanders, the media, James Comey, Vladimir Putin and James Comey. It is a primer on Russian spying. It is a thumping of Mr Trump. (“I sometimes wonder: If you add together his time spent on golf, Twitter and cable news,” she writes, “what’s left?”)
It is worth reading. Winning the popular vote by nearly three million may not have been enough to shatter the country’s highest, hardest glass ceiling. But it seems to have put 2,864,974 extra cracks in Ms Clinton’s reserve.
In the run-up to the publication of this book, Democrats have been privately expressing their dread, fearing it will be a distraction and reopen old wounds.
I wonder if, after reading it, they will feel otherwise. Are there moments when What Happened is wearying, canned and disingenuous, spinning events like a top? Yes. Does it offer any new hypotheses about what doomed Ms Clinton’s campaign? No. It merely synthesises old ones; Ms Clinton’s diagnostics are the least interesting part of the book. Is there a full chapter devoted to her email, clearly intended to make her own closing arguments in this case? Yes. She can’t shake her inner litigator.
But this book is not just a perseverative recap of 2016. It is the story of what it was like to run for president of the United States as the female nominee of a major party, a first in US history. The apotheosis of Leaning In. Doesn’t this experience rate an account from Ms Clinton herself? Especially when, after sticking her neck out, the only place some people could envision it was in a stockade?
The best, most poignant parts of What Happened reveal the Hillary Clinton that her inner circle has assured us was lurking beneath the surface all along: a woman who’s arch but sensitive. She writes that she’s astonished whenever someone else is astonished to discover she’s human. “For the record,” she writes, “it hurts to be torn apart.” It stung when schoolmates in junior high teased her about “the lack of ankles on my sturdy legs”. It stung when they teased her about her glasses, too. She doesn’t even bother describing her reaction to the ticker of contumely that’s whirred above her head for most of her adult life, though she does write about how “incredibly uncomfortable” it was to be stalked on stage by Trump during the second presidential debate.
Far more controversial and complicated, surely, is the rest of What Happened, starting with Ms Clinton’s arguments about the role of misogyny and sexism in the election. It’s hard to buy the idea that she suffered disproportionately from charges of untrustworthiness or inauthenticity simply because she was a woman. Her husband was considered so eely that the tabloids christened him “Slick Willy”, and plenty of male presidential candidates (Mitt Romney, John Kerry) were regarded as catastrophically insincere. More persuasive is Ms Clinton’s contention that presidential politics, especially compared to parliamentary politics, favours arena-filling showmanship rather than the quieter, detail-oriented realism she prefers. (How many times has Ms Clinton been praised for being “a workhorse, not a show horse”?) And 2016 was nothing if not the year of the blusterer. One of the things that drove Ms Clinton bonkers about Bernie Sanders was that he always managed to outdo her proposals with something larger and less feasible. “That left me to play the unenviable role,” she writes, “of spoilsport schoolmarm.”
As her book’s title implies, Ms Clinton has her own version of what happened in 2016, and she eventually forces readers to reckon with it. She seems at once the best and worst possible person to carry out this assessment. But here, at any rate, is her bottom line:
Mr Comey’s letter of Oct 28, 2016, which notified Congress that he was reopening his investigation into Ms Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct State Department business, effectively ended her candidacy. (She leans heavily on various analyses done by data maestro Nate Silver to make her case.) Combine that letter with the full-saturation media coverage Mr Comey’s investigation had been getting all along, and then add to it Russian interference — fake news stories on social media, email hacks — and you have the perfect storm.
Ms Clinton also blames sexism, citing a 2014 Pew Research Center poll that showed just how few voters hoped to see a female president in their lifetime. She blames racism, too, which she considers inseparable from economic anxiety, because her courting of immigrants and voters of colour might have given the impression that she put their economic interests before those of disenfranchised whites. She believes that voter suppression in swing states, made possible by a ruling by the Supreme Court in 2013, also made a difference. So did the ever-present animus toward her, which remains, she writes, something she doesn’t fully understand.
It’s hard to say whether readers will buy these explanations. It’s possible that a more inspired candidate would have won the Electoral College, simple as that. Or that the Clinton brand was tarnished among black voters. Or that her campaign, despite its extensive networks and deep pockets, failed to detect that something on the ground was wrong. Or that she should have appeared in more rural areas. Or that she couldn’t find a better way to speak to the fears of the white working class — which she does admit, though she doesn’t think it cost her the election.
We’ll be arguing about these questions for decades, surely. But one thing we know for certain: history conspired against Ms Clinton. No non-incumbent Democrat has succeeded a two-term Democratic president since 1836, and 2016 was a year when voters were pining for change. Bigly.
In spite of that — in spite of everything — Ms Clinton still won the popular vote by almost three million. But it didn’t matter. What happened is, it wasn’t enough.