The Terrible Trifecta

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign – Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (Crown)

Let me be perfectly clear right from the start; there are three reasons why Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 Presidential election and they have nothing to do with Russia, James Comey, hacking or any of the other myriad excuses she has trotted out.

They are:

1. She is a TERRIBLE candidate – she and her billion dollar campaign failed to articulate one compelling reason to vote for her.

2.She ran a TERRIBLE campaign – with all of the money she had available she was done in by too many loyalties pulling her in too many directions

3. She is a TERRIBLE person – lies, corruption, secret deals, cover-ups, pandering, money grubbing for her and her families own ends, I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

The authors of Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign – alleged journalists, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes easily surrendered any hint of integrity in exchange for access to the campaign. I think it’s a fairly safe bet that the pair had a wholly different book in mind when they started this process, believing they would be able to offer up a firsthand account of “history”.

The first rule of running for office, whether you are running for dog catcher, school board, Congress or President, is that you need to be able to clearly and concisely articulate the reason why you are running and why people should vote for you. You need to be able to do this in 45-60 seconds; the classic elevator pitch, or you will not win. And the alleged “smartest women in the world” could not do this! It does work to say there are all kinds of wonky, white papers on my website that you can check out to learn more about me.

The book points out the fixation Hillary has with being first…with being the one to “break the glass ceiling”. This was a style over too much substance campaign highlighted by the fact that the campaign chose the three decades old Javits Center and its glass ceiling for its “celebration” on election night. The voters sent a clear message, that being a women, was simply not enough of a reason to put Hillary back into the White House.

The internal conflict of the campaign detailed in the book really highlights the torn loyalties that Hillary and the Clinton’s have to their sycophantic followers and insiders. She desperately wanted to run a more modern campaign so she gathered many of the folks involved with electing Barack Obama and brought them on board for this run. The problem was she kept around a lot of the old hands from Bill Clinton’s Presidency, her New York Senate run and her time at the State Department.

While the old guard could spout policy 24/7, they really didn’t have a clue how to run a national race, so conflict became the routine. Even the guy who is so often cited for his political campaign savvy, Bill Clinton showed that his instincts were two decades out of sync with running a campaign for the White House.

So take the awful combination of a terrible candidate, terrible campaign and terrible person; tack on the endless string of scandals; the do as I say not as I do big money speeches to Wall Street, the money grubbing, Benghazi lies, and on and on, and history gets thrown out the window! If you followed the election, there is much new here to wade through 482 pages of this stuff.