| WHAT HAPPENED Hillary Rodham Clinton New York: Simon & Schuster, September 2017 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-5011-7556-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-5011-7556-4 | 494pp. | HC | $30.00 | |
America knows what happened to Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016: she lost the election for the presidency to Donald John Trump. A great many Americans, however, do not understand the reasons for her loss very well. This book is her explanation — and a thorough explanation it is.
Those reasons include: a disproportionate amount of attention by the media on her emails and her private email server, the subjects of an FBI investigation; a corresponding neglect of policy questions; the barrage of gaffes, insults and lies from Trump which meant no one of his offenses would linger in the public mind (unlike those emails); the public mention by FBI Director James Comey, two weeks before the election, that new emails had been discovered1 (they turned out to be unimportant); and the pervasive Russian intrusion via hacking and social-media propagandizing in favor of Trump.
The 2016 election was, to a degree never before seen in America, a cascade of untruths from Trump and from the Republican side generally.2 Mrs. Clinton observes:
Many people, both Republicans and Democrats, insisted after this book was published that never once in its pages did Hillary Clinton accept any blame or accountability for losing the election.
That is flat-out wrong. I counted 19 instances where she does so, and I expand on this elsewhere. Here, I'll only quote what she says on page 386.
"I blamed myself. My worst fears about my limitations as a candidate had come true. I had tried to learn the lessons of 2008, and in many ways ran a better, smarter campaign this time. But I had been unable to connect with the deep anger so many Americans felt or shake the perception that I was the candidate of the status quo." – Page 386 |
"Listening to Trump, it almost felt like there was no such thing as truth anymore. It still feels that way." – Page 8 |
And she is not alone in feeling that way. Many observers described the same behavior, as well as noting its corrosive effect on the processes of democracy. She quotes history professor Timothy Snyder, who writes in On Tyranny:
"To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis on which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle." – Page 9 |
Indeed, "spectacle" is a word that aptly describes the 2016 Republican campaign. But if spectacle in the 2016 campaign reached levels of seismic absurdity heretofore unknown in America, it was not without its foreshocks. The GOP has rejected substance and relied on show and sophistry for decades, preferring to run a permanent campaign for their party instead of governing by means of bipartisan cooperation as was once traditional.
This long-standing Republican penchant for putting party before country is deplorable. Yet there are deeper defects in our democracy these days. The deepest is a sense of malaise on the part of citizens, many in the midwest: a sense of having lost their share of both economic well-being and political influence to the "coastal elites." Part of this feeling of betrayal is justified, part is not. The Democrats too, in my opinion, deserve some criticism for not having planned as astutely or fought as effectively as they might have. But there is no doubt in my mind that the major miscreants belong to the GOP, the self-proclaimed "party of personal responsibility."
Back to my assessment of Hillary Clinton's book. It's well written and contains few errors. In it she recounts many details of her life and the events of elections she took part in, revealing in the process the people3 and influences that shaped her outlook. When it comes to the confounding factors of the bizarre 2016 election, she makes a good case for their influence. As I mention above (and expand on in a linked page), she straightforwardly owns up to her own mistakes along the way. She also spends enough time discussing policy issues like abortion and guns to remind us of how good a grasp of them she has — and how unfortunate it was that the media largely failed to cover such topics.4 Finally, she shows us how she will remain involved: not by running again (I'm fairly sure) but by serving as a mentor for younger candidates. I judge the book a very honest and inspiring account by a woman who takes the welfare of her country seriously — and who keeps going.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.