Why Did Hillary Lose a “Sure Thing?” PART II

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign (cont’d from last week, which was posted on Sept. 20th). I am purposely skipping over Chapter Three because it is primarily about Bernie Sanders and I prefer to concentrate on Hillary.

Sanders and Clinton in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

ONE DEBACLE: Two servers would’ve worked

“In the summer of 2008, years before her private e-mail server became a campaign issue, Hillary learned about the power of digital snooping.

She wanted an honest accounting of what had gone wrong. So she instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign’s server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers.”

“She held meetings in Washington to assess what had gone wrong. The men and women she met with, apparently unaware that she had access to their e-mails, were amazed that a woman who had been traveling the country in pursuit of the presidency had such a detailed grasp of the machinations at the campaign’s command center in the Washington suburbs.”

News of her private e-mail surfaced in the New York Times on March 2, 2014 and, later that year, her lawyers handed over 50,000 pages that were connected to her official duties. The server scandal went on and on until in a NBC interview she said, “I should’ve used two accounts. That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility.”

That was too little, too late.

ON THE MOVE: Hillary heads for Super Tuesday

The next couple of chapters (five and six) focus on Joe Biden and Hillary’s appearance on Saturday Night Live which she aced. Now we’ll move on to “the summer months of 2015 were as punishing for Hillary in Iowa as they were nationwide. She kept trying every possible route to get out from under the weight on her e-mail scandal.”  

“Early on, Hillary had been told by an old Clinton friend, Terry Shumaker,  ‘everybody knows who you are but nobody knows who you really are. People don’t know what makes you tick.’ It was ironic that a woman who had been on the national stage for a quarter of a century, who had lived the triumphs of victory and the tragedies of defeat and humiliation in public, could still seem inaccessible to so many Americans – even her supporters.”

After a whisker-thin win in Iowa, Hillary moved on to New Hampshire, where she was “at her wit’s end when it came to her messaging – dismayed by the campaign’s lack of inspiration. Here she was, a year into her campaign and about to get trampled by Bernie, the socialist and “Breaking Barriers” was the best her staff could come up with.” [Remember what I said? On the page, before it’s on the stage.]

Moving on through chapters seven, eight and nine (where Hillary reached out to black voters in southern states and entered the sixth Democratic presidential debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) we are now at chapter ten that the authors have titled, Turning the Corner.

THE SOUTH: She torched Bernie

“Hillary won Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Those Super Tuesday states, full of people of color, delivered what she had projected: a convincing victory that allowed her to take control of the race for the nomination for the first time.

One of the things that the book Shattered does extremely well is show the tremendous amount of ENERGY that has to be expended to run for president of the United States (along with money, traveling, planning, marketing and coming up with a killer concept, theme or slogan – call it what you will). In 2016 I heard time and time again from New Yorkers, “This is going on too long. Will this election stuff ever end?”

What lay ahead could not be imagined. 

READ MORE NEXT WEEK.

Shaun Nelson-Henrick

Also in Blog