Shattered On Hillary Clinton Being Responsible For Clinton’s Loss

While Hillary Clinton and her apologists have been blaming Russia, James Comey, misogyny, Bernie Bros, Stein voters, and even Barack Obama for Clinton losing, the recently published book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign confirms what has been obvious to objective observers: Clinton lost because of Clinton.  This excerpt from Shattered shows that even some in Clintonworld realized this:

From Hillary’s perspective, external forces created a perfect storm that wiped her out. In this telling, laid out in scores of interviews with Clinton campaign aides and advisers for this book, the media bought into an absurd and partisan Republican-led investigation into her e-mail server that combined with Bernie Sanders’s attack on her character and a conservative assault on the Clinton Foundation’s practices to sow a public perception that she was fundamentally dishonest. From there, Comey’s unprecedented public condemnation of her handling of the server, the Russian cyberattacks on the DNC and Podesta’s e-mail account, and new voter ID laws suppressed support for her. In a twist, Clintonworld sources said, Comey’s final exoneration of her enraged Trump backers and pushed them to the polls in droves. Along the way, they said, misogyny played a quiet role in turning men against her without an offsetting boost in support from women. Her most ardent defenders maintain that she nailed every major moment of the campaign. “Those debates were her. The Benghazi hearing. Her convention speech. Her getting off the mat in New Hampshire,” said one senior campaign aide. “She just does not give up.”

But another view, articulated by a much smaller number of her close friends and high-level advisers, holds that Hillary bears the blame for her defeat. This case rests on the theory that Hillary’s actions before the campaign—setting up the private server, putting her name on the Clinton Foundation, and giving speeches to Wall Street banks in a time of rising populism—hamstrung her own chances so badly that she couldn’t recover. She was unable to prove to many voters that she was running for the presidency because she had a vision for the country rather than visions of power. And she couldn’t cast herself as anything but a lifelong insider when so much of the country had lost faith in its institutions and yearned for a fresh approach to governance. All of it fed a narrative of dynastic privilege that was woefully out of touch with the sentiment of the American electorate.

“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.”

It is typical of Clinton’s campaign in public life to show outrageously poor judgement, and then to blame others for her mistakes. Of course the second view in the above excerpt is the accurate one, even if it barely touches on the reasons Clinton’s campaign was doomed due to having a terrible candidate who ran a terrible campaign.

I have previously posted excerpts from Shattered here,  here,  and here, and have discussed why Clinton lost in multiple additional posts. Also see the excerpt I have posted from Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus by Matt Taibbi on Hillary Clinton, which provides further insight into why Hillary Clinton should not have run for president in 2016 in light of the manner in which she used her political influence in an unethical manner to make money.

Donald Trump’s first 100 days have been a failure, but we must also keep in mind that he is in office because the Democrats offered an alternative whose dishonesty, corruption, and poor judgement negated Trump’s negatives during the campaign, allowing Trump to win.