But she also casts Bernie Sanders in a major supporting role. Trump is Clinton’s principal villain, which is correct and sensible. The great tragedy is that Clinton seems to think it is true. In What Happened, good fought evil, and evil won. Did you know she won the popular vote? She reminds us, multiple times. Clinton cannot admit that she-and her party-bear some responsibility for failing to stem this tide. Subscribing to this theory means believing that Hillary Clinton was the victim of a perfect storm of unrelated events, that there is nothing to be learned from the election of a strongman who was part of an ethno-nationalist, revanchist tide that swept across the democracies of the Western world. It is written for her fans, in other words, and not for those who want real answers about her campaign, and who worry that the Democratic Party is learning the wrong lessons from the 2016 debacle.īut even taken together, these factors should not have been enough to cost her the presidency. It spends more time on descriptions of Clinton’s various post-election coping strategies, which include chardonnay and “alternative nostril breathing,” than it does on her campaign decisions in the Midwest. The real problem with What Happened is that it is not the book it needed to be. What Happened suffers from stilted prose and insipid inspirational quotes, but that is par for the course for a political memoir. This book is precisely what her critics predicted it would be. Journalists, Russia, Bernie Sanders: These are a few of her least favorite things. She was the victim of forces beyond her control. These anecdotes suggest a fatal lack of awareness, an inability to see that she and her party may have grown out of touch. These bookends are an early sign that there is something amiss in this much-anticipated tell-all of the 2016 campaign, which attempts-and fails-to offer a diagnosis of how Clinton lost an election to the most unqualified and most loathed presidential candidate in modern history. In the first hundred pages of What Happened, Hillary Clinton writes that she decided to run for office during a vacation with the designer Oscar de la Renta and that when she lost she received an invitation from George W.
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