Shattered

SHATTERED: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign

JONATHAN ALLEN and AMIE PARNES

Crown Publishing, 2017, 464 pages

The reason she lost the 2016 US Presidential election, Hillary Clinton told a friend, was because of ‘Comey, the KGB and the KKK’. The alliteration was clever but Clinton was as clueless in her self-diagnosed political post-mortem as she was about the country she wanted to govern - ‘I don’t understand what’s happening with the country … How do I get answers to this’, she demanded of her political aides.

As the political journalists, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, recount in their story of Clinton’s election campaign, the Democratic candidate “couldn’t figure out why people were so angry” about the Washington political establishment. Clinton, the very embodiment of that establishment’s values, was blind to the reality and deaf to the mood of the quite un-establishment American people, to the lives of those who didn’t rock up to her $100,000-a-head, A-List celebrity fund-raising dinners, or attend her quarter-million-dollar speeches to Wall Street bankers, or those losing their jobs or wages to cheap imports or cheap migrant labour, or losing their kids’ college places to Affirmative Action students, or losing their community safety and social cohesion to alien cultures.

Her campaign team laboured with Stakhanovite intensity to “workshop the authenticity of the candidate” (“more humour and heart, less robotic and aloof”), to manufacture a political vision for her, to craft for hours at a time every ‘spontaneous’ tweet, to resuscitate lifeless campaign slogans, to produce endless drafts of write-by-committee speeches, and to intensively rehearse debates with Trump doubles. They had, however, nothing to work with. Clinton remained the candidate of the status quo, the “Washington insider who helped rig the political and economic systems in favour of the rich and powerful” compared to the fresh Republican upstart.

Although Clinton didn’t help her own cause with her arrogant sense of self-entitlement to the job of President as both a Clinton and as a woman (what she saw as her ‘rendezvous with destiny’), and with her uninspiring, bland rhetoric, the fundamental problem was not the messenger but the message. Whilst Trump was scoring big against factory-shuttering ‘free trade’, costly and counterproductive neocon wars, policy favours for corporate political donors, and, above all, immigration, Clinton, whose ‘dream’ was for ‘open borders and open trade’, was mired in a stale Democratic politics which was deeply unpopular with a majority white working class which was bearing the harsh brunt of Democrat-supported neo-liberal, capitalist globalisation flavoured with the Democrats’ fetish for multiculturalism.

In response to Clinton’s failure to connect with the white working class, she embraced identity politics with increasing fervour, courting her new voting bloc of minorities (blacks, Latinos, migrants, refugees, Muslims, the various hues of the LGTBQI rainbow, etc.). This reorientation from class warriors to Social Justice Warriors was enough to see off her dogged Democrat Presidential nomination rival, the old, class-talking white male, Bernie Sanders, in what was fast becoming the Black and Latino Party, but the switch to identity politics did not cut the ice in the bigger contest against Trump who energised large numbers of white workers, “serving up red meat to angry voters” across the country, especially in those bits where Clinton didn’t go, like the ‘fly-over’ states of the once-thriving, industrial Mid West.

Relying heavily on ‘data analytics’, Clinton won enough important delegate battles inside the Democratic Party during the nomination race but lost the political war in the broader electorate because white workers, whose demographic critical mass still mattered, were the one ‘identity’ group that had no place in the new Democratic Party of Hillary Clinton. The candidate of ‘Inclusion’ who declared she wanted to be a president ‘for all Americans’ was actually promoting exclusion and division. Clinton had become “the candidate of minority voters on social justice issues” who dismissed Trump voters as a racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, misogynist ‘basket of deplorables’.

Clinton’s election failure came from the Democrats’ rejection of class politics. She lost the battle of ideas and policies against Trump by spurning his base – the white working class. Despite Trump’s personal scandals, repetitively obsessed over by a hostile establishment media, his electoral base stuck with him because Candidate Trump had the better policies for them – Trump promised to save your job, protect your living standards and preserve your community but Clinton would simply deliver more of the same policies that had sacrificed white workers to her globalisation agenda and ‘Diversity’ veneration.

All of these essential insights into the Democrats’ political failure can be mined from the book but a lot of slurry is produced in their extraction. The book is a. establishment media insiders’ account of Washington insider politics and is thus packed with insider minutiae (personality clashes, internal skirmishes, mechanics of campaigning, etc.) much of which was of little substantive political interest then and is even less so now.

Nevertheless, the book has the virtue of not falling into line with the Left’s post-election, fault-finding which, as Clinton herself put it, blamed ‘a perfect storm of external forces’ (the FBI email investigation, ‘Fake News’, populist demagoguery, unbridled racism, Russia, etc.) for her loss. The election result should, rather, stand as a template of the corrosive effects of the triumph of identity politics over class politics.