The Book "Shattered" - Inside stories of Hillary's campaign

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"She had let him down. She had let herself down. She had let her party down. And she had let her country down."Obama’s legacy and her dreams of the Presidency lay shattered at Donald Trump’s feet. This was on her. Reluctantly she rose from her seat and took the phone."

Mrs Clinton then called Mr Trump, stating the two words that had seemed unthinkable to her supporters: "Congratulations Donald." "I’ll be supportive of the country’s success and that means your success as president," she reportedly said.

David Simas, the White House political director, called Robby Mook, Mrs Clinton’s campaign manager, to advise that Mr Obama "doesn’t think it’s wise to drag this out". As a Trump victory became beyond doubt, Mr Obama then called Mrs Clinton himself, telling her: “You need to concede.”She replied: "Mr President, I'm sorry."

Source - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/18/hillary-clinton-apologised-barack-obama-shock-election-loss/

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When he was on his deathbed, his face partially paralyzed, Beau reportedly pushed his father to make a final run for the Oval Office. His son’s request made him consider again the issue of whether to run, something he’d been weighing for months, if not years. “He was also being overlooked by the president whom he had faithfully served, a painful if silent rebuke. Obama and his aides refused to take sides publicly, and some still had no appetite to help Hillary. But few thought Biden, who would turn seventy-four the month of the 2016 election, was the right person to represent Democrats in the campaign.”

Biden knew that he would face considerable challenges raising money against Clinton, partly because many top Democrats were already committed to Hillary. He also knew it would be difficult to recruit top talent because Clinton had already engaged most of the party’s best operatives.

Source - http://nypost.com/2017/04/18/biden-was-crushed-by-silent-rebuke-from-obama/

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In the ad, Sanders would tout Clinton for her education, healthcare and minimum wage proposals. At the end of the script were the words: "I'm with her." “It’s so phony!” Sanders said. “I don’t want to say that.” Sanders did not use the slogan in the ad.  
 
The Clinton campaign eventually decided not to use the ad on television after learning that voters had some doubts about whether the Vermont senator fully supported Clinton. “People felt that it was him delivering his message, not Hillary’s,” said one Clinton aide familiar with focus group responses.

Source - http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/329224-sanders-on-im-with-her-its-so-phony

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“His feelings about her, which were less than positive, revolved around policy differences and revolved around her allegiance to an old form of campaigning relying on big money and the people who raise it for you,” a source close to Sanders told Parnes and Allen. “This kind of campaigning, of going to rich people and asking them for money and modulating your policies in a way that didn’t inspire people, that was a losing formula. In terms of him not liking stuff about her, that’s what he disliked the most.”

Sanders, who launched his campaign about a month after Clinton in early 2015, “couldn’t stand the idea of Hillary pulling the country back into the Clinton White House years," the authors said.

Source - http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/329228-sanders-felt-compelled-to-run-against-clinton-book

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Hillary was so mad she couldn’t think straight.She’d been humiliated in the Michigan primary the night before, a loss that not only robbed her of a prime opportunity to put Bernie Sanders down for good but also exposed several of her weaknesses.

And now, Jake Sullivan, her de facto chief strategist, was giving her lip about the last answer she’d delivered in the prep session. “That’s not very good,” Sullivan corrected. “Really?” Hillary snapped back. The room fell silent. “Why don’t you do it?”

Every time the Yale lawyer and former high school debate champ opened his mouth, Hillary cut him off. “That isn’t very good,” she’d say. “You can do better.” Then she’d hammer him with a Bernie line.
“We haven’t made our case,” she fumed. “We haven’t framed the choice. We haven’t done the politics.” “She was visibly, unflinchingly pissed off at us as a group,” said one aide who was in the room for the humiliating scene. “And she let us know she felt that way.”

This is because we made poor choices about where we traveled, she thought. She emailed Robby Mook to tell him she believed she’d spent too much time in the cities of Detroit and Flint and not enough in the working-class white suburbs around them. Months earlier, Hillary Clinton turned her fury on her consultants and campaign aides, blaming them for a failure to focus the media on her platform.

Source - http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/328405-clinton-campaign-plagued-by-bickering

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Months earlier, Hillary Clinton turned her fury on her consultants and campaign aides, blaming them for a failure to focus the media on her platform. In her ear the whole time, spurring her on to cast blame on others and never admit to anything, was her husband. Neither Clinton could accept the simple fact that Hillary had hamstrung her own campaign and dealt the most serious blow to her own presidential aspirations.

Hillary’s severe, controlled voice crackled through the line first. It carried the sound of a disappointed teacher or mother delivering a lecture before a whipping. That back end was left to Bill, who lashed out with abandon. Eyes cast downward, stomachs turning — both from the scare tactics and from their own revulsion at being chastised for Hillary’s failures — Hillary’s talented and accomplished team of professionals and loyalists simply took it.

There was no arguing with Bill Clinton. You haven’t buried this thing, the ruddy-cheeked former president rasped. You haven’t figured out how to get Hillary’s core message to the voters. This has been dragging on for months, he thundered, and nothing you’ve done has made a damn bit of difference. Voters want to hear about Hillary’s plans for the economy, and you’re not making that happen. Now, do your damn jobs.

You heard him, she admonished. “Get it straight.”

Source - http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/328405-clinton-campaign-plagued-by-bickering

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According to the account in “Shattered,” even former-Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau expressed frustration with the Democratic nominee’s campaign. Jon Favreau, brought in to help with the announcement speech -

“thought Clinton’s campaign was reminiscent of John Kerry’s, where he had gotten his start in 2004 — a bunch of operatives who were smart and accomplished . . . but weren’t united by any common purpose larger than pushing a less-than-thrilling candidate into the White House . . . Frustrated with the process and the product, Favreau dropped out.”

“Politicians, do not sound like you are reading a consultant’s script from an ad when you speak to your constituents,” Favreau said. “But also, don’t try to be cool. Because when you try to be cool, sometimes the results are even worse than being stiff.”“Bernie Sanders is the model, right?” Tommy Vietor, a former-Obama spokesman, asked.“Yes,” Favreau affirmed.

Source - http://www.salon.com/2017/04/18/its-so-phony-new-book-reveals-what-bernie-sanders-really-thought-of-hillary-clintons-campaign-message/

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“Look, I really just want to concede gracefully, wish him the best, thank everybody, and get off the stage,” Clinton said during a discussion with top aide Jake Sullivan. “This is not a moment for me to do more than that.”

“Everything you said, we’re going to do in the speech,” Sullivan told her. “But you have been saying for many months that he’s temperamentally unfit and that he would be dangerous, and if you meant it, you should say it.” He continued, “And you made a case that all these people’s rights and safety are in danger. If you meant that, you should say it.”

Clinton said that wasn’t her “job anymore.” “Other people will criticize him. That’s their job. I have done it. I just lost, and that is that,” she said. “That was my last race.”

Source - https://www.yahoo.com/news/hillary-clinton-reportedly-said-last-race-losing-election-152121491.html

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I bought the book and read a good bit of it last night.

Election night section was rather...uneventful. It really seems like it was a shock in the most extreme sense of the word. No panic, just utter disbelief.

They knew Ohio was gone about a week to ten days prior to the election and Michigan was very dicey. They still just couldn't believe he could actually pull it out.

Any other news not mentioned here? Don't know why they kept campaigning in Ohio instead of MI/WI when they knew Ohio & Iowa were likely gone !

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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. 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.

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.

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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."

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. "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."

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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.

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.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-on-the-new-book-that-brutalizes-the-clinton-campaign-w477978

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In the book, the authors describe how the campaign ignored the advice of Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, to reach out to communities that weren't already on board with Hillary Clinton's policies. "He thought, these eggheads don't really know politics. They don't understand persuasion," Allen said, adding that Bill Clinton wanted to go to suburban and rural areas where it was likely that Hillary Clinton wouldn't win the majority. "He knew there was some power just in showing up."

Allen said that in her 2008 presidential bid, Bill Clinton was blamed for asserting himself too much in the primary campaign's strategy and ultimately hurting her chances at the presidency and that this time around, he tried to stay behind the scenes "because he didn't want to be blamed for defeating his wife again."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/shattered-authors-bill-clinton-pushed-tone-hillarys-campaign/story?id=46974506

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Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta first drew up a list of potential vice-presidential nominees, dividing it into seven categories: “Latinos, female senators, male senators, African-Americans, high-ranking military officials, business leaders, and Bernie Sanders.” Sanders was never really on the table after their brutal primary battle, but choosing Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts had the potential to excite Sanders’ voters and other Democratic voters who still harbored lingering doubts about Clinton. So Clinton seriously considered Warren for the nomination until the last minute, but ultimately, according to Allen and Parnes, “Clinton wanted a governing partner, someone who saw the world in a similar way and could help her run the executive branch. She just didn’t know if she could trust Warren to be pragmatic and constructive.”

Then there was Obama, who saw Clinton as the heir to his legacy and resented Warren “for what he saw as demagoguing against him on economic issues and for wreaking havoc when he nominated banker Antonio Weiss as an undersecretary at the Treasury Department.” Clinton ultimately went with the man who had been Obama’s runner-up VP pick in 2008, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, even though “Kaine didn’t give her a state she couldn’t win on her own, add populist progressive flavor to the ticket, or excite anyone — including the candidate herself.”

http://ew.com/books/2017/04/24/shattered-hillary-clinton-campaign-book-revelations/

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“When Bernie delivered a speech to his delegates in a ballroom at the nearby Philadelphia Convention Center, they booed lustily when he spoke of his rival. Mook lost his temper. He picked up his phone and dialed Weaver. ‘What the  are you doing?'” wrote Allen and Parnes in Shattered. Mook and Weaver were both afraid the convention would turn into a Clinton protest, so they had a contingency plan. “About a week before the convention, they had put together a joint command operation behind the arena’s main stage. The boiler room, a big open space filled with long tables, folding chairs, and telephones, functioned as a nerve center from which the two camps could exert control over their delegates during the four-day program.” The room, which was filled with Clinton and Sanders aides, had a text communication list to alert all staff of potential problems during the convention. A leaked email revealed that the Clinton campaign completed a “unity check” on Sanders delegates to research the likelihood of them supporting Clinton. “No more war” chants from Sanders delegates were met with an orchestrated response of “USA” chants from Clinton delegates. Sanders signs were taken from Sanders delegates and their lights were shut off if they spoke out. The Clinton campaign forbade Sanders surrogate Nina Turner from introducing Sanders at the convention.

“The flash-speed communications network would turn out to be a major factor in transforming what was a tumultuous convention inside the hall into a unified one on television. That is, it looked a lot different to folks watching at home than it did to participants inside an arena with plenty of anti-Clinton Bernie delegates,” wrote Allen and Parnes.

The authors then went on to blame Sanders and his supporters for dividing the party, Allen formerly worked for a PAC run by Wasserman Schultz

http://observer.com/2017/04/shattered-bernie-sanders-supporters-convention-protests/

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Shattered to become a TV Series

Source - NYT