Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

This narration of Hillary Clinton’s loss, written by two authors sympathetic to her, provides the very long division, from before the start to the end of the presidential campaign, of an insider’s close look at the minutiae that contributed to that “tragic” outcome. (That word “tragic” provides the lens through which the authors look, as there are those who would say it was “fortuitous”.) This 400+-page tome hammers home the points that Hillary’s campaign staff was both tone deaf and overly focused on analytics, to the exclusion of providing necessary resources on the ground in state after state, and, perhaps the biggest flaw, Hillary Clinton failed to clearly articulate her vision for her presidency. Couple those factors with the mistake of having the wrong staff members making major strategic decisions and the outside forces working against Hillary (Russia, the FBI, Congress and the Benghazi and e-mail server issues), and you have the formula which, according to the authors, brought Hillary down. The elephant in the room, though, was Hillary herself. Her personality, character, judgment and history worked against her. After 24 years on the national stage, Hillary was a known quantity. No voter needed to be confused about who they thought she is, as she has an entrenched reputation for being cold, aloof and secretive; for being less than honest; for being slow as molasses to face up and ‘fess up when caught; and for choosing the wrong side to defend when faced with evidence of being married to a sexual predator. Yet Hillary Clinton thought she could play the American public against itself, certain that it would never choose her bombastic, egotistical, impulsive, unpredictable, lewd and crude opponent over measured, prepared and qualified her. Clearly this was a no-brainer. But it wasn’t. In the end, the slow drip of 24 years of watching this very careful candidate led enough voters to cause the electoral college to turn away from her and risk it all on a more unknown quantity. The inexorable pull against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election seems inevitable, according to Shattered. It lays out the downhill course step by step. If you are interested in every last detail about what should be Hillary Clinton’s last race, you want to read this book. If that would be too much information, then take a pass. I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.