Book Review: Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (2017)

Cover of Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, 2017.

Journalist Jonathan Allen

Journalist Amie Parnes

In their 2017 book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes set out to answer the same question that Hillary Clinton’s 2017 book examined: what happened? Allen and Parnes were granted almost unlimited access to Clinton’s campaign throughout the primary and general election campaigns, with the understanding that the information they were privy to would not be put in print until after the election was over. What they found was lots of dissent and turmoil within Clinton’s campaign, as rival factions of advisors battled it out to capture Clinton’s ear.

Allen and Parnes also found a candidate who could not sum up in an elevator speech why she was running. As the book opens, Clinton is about to officially announce her candidacy. However, the speech she is about to give has gone through major revisions by multiple people. Allen and Parnes write: “But Hillary still struggled with the question of whether she was running for Bill Clinton’s third term, Obama’s third term, or her own first term.”(p.13) I think the authors have an excellent point. Throughout the campaign, Clinton’s message was essentially: “The last eight years have been great. And I will do things slightly differently to make them even better!” That’s a more difficult intellectual position to articulate than Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, who were both essentially shouting, “We gotta change everything!” 

Allen and Parnes also wrote that “Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her.” (p.13) “Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale.” (p.18) I think that was the problem with Clinton’s candidacy. It was unclear why she was running, other than that it was finally her turn—after it had already seemed to be her turn in 2008, before Barack Obama spoiled everything. 

It’s a bit heavy-handed to say that Clinton’s campaign was “doomed,” especially since she actually won over 2.8 million more popular votes than Trump, but the authors paint a picture of a candidate and a campaign staff with no clear focus. As the authors write of Hillary, “In her view, it was up to the people she paid to find the right message for her—a construction deeply at odds with the way Sanders and Trump built their campaigns around their own gut feelings about where to lead the country.” (p.138)

Campaign manager Robby Mook’s parsimonious ways come in for a lot of criticism in the book. Mook had just skeleton organizations in many states, and state campaign workers were constantly badgering the national staff for more resources. Clinton raised $1.4 billion dollars, according to The Washington Post. So why was there a need to economize at all? If $1.4 billion dollars isn’t enough money to run an effective Presidential campaign, then how much more money do you need?

Mook was also one of the staffers most enamored of the campaign’s analytics modeling—which proved in retrospect to be extremely flawed. Bill Clinton was always pushing the campaign to reach out more to working-class white voters, but Mook’s repeated refrain was that the data didn’t match Bill’s anecdotes. Well, someone was wrong, and it wasn’t the former President. (p.237) An internal Clinton memo warned that 3-4 points should be added to Trump’s poll numbers. This savvy piece of advice might have caused Clinton’s team to reflect on their strategies, but it seems to have gone unheeded. (p.228)

Clinton’s analytics team was in favor of trying to boost turnout among the Democratic base, rather than trying to change the minds of undecided voters. This leads to another difficult issue the Clinton campaign faced—most people had probably made up their minds about Hillary Clinton back in 1992. One Clinton aide said, “The big challenge of this whole race was there were so many voters who were ungettable.” (p.397)

I think Clinton’s team took it for granted that they would get every single vote that Obama got in 2012, plus lots more votes from women. That obviously proved to be a huge mistake, as the so-called “Blue Wall” did not hold. According to exit polling, Clinton got 54% of the votes of all women, down from Obama’s 55% in 2012. In addition, Clinton’s numbers were down compared to Obama’s in 2012 among African Americans, Asians, and Hispanic/Latinos. Although the authors don’t touch upon this in the book, third parties may have played a role in Clinton’s defeat as well. Nationally, 5.9 million people voted for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein. That's 4.3% of the vote. Clinton lost Michigan by 11,000 votes. Gary Johnson got 172,000 votes in Michigan, and Jill Stein got 50,000. In a race with so many close states, those third parties may have made a difference. 

While it’s impossible to pin the reason for Clinton’s loss on any one factor, Shattered does an excellent job of going behind the scenes in Clinton’s campaign to reveal the problems they faced. If you’re interested in politics, it’s a fascinating, if frustrating, read.

Book Review: Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose, by Joe Biden (2017)

Book cover of Promise Me, Dad, by Joe Biden, 2017.

Joe Biden, Vice President from 2009-2017.

In December, I heard former Vice President Joe Biden speak at the Orpheum Theatre about his new book, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose. It was an emotional evening, as Biden spoke about his son Beau’s death from brain cancer. That’s the main subject of Promise Me, Dad, but readers also get glimpses into Biden’s duties as Vice President, and Biden’s thinking as he ultimately decided not to pursue the Democratic nomination for President in 2016.

Promise Me, Dad is that very rare thing—an amazingly honest book written by a national politician. But then I think Joe Biden is an amazingly honest person. What you see is what you get with him. Promise Me, Dad is also a very moving book. Biden clearly had a very close relationship with Beau, and I can’t imagine how hard it was for him to watch Beau slowly be weakened by an awful disease. Even though there was little hope, Beau Biden signed up for every experimental treatment that was out there, hoping for a miracle. 

The book also sheds light on Biden’s relationship with Barack Obama, and it becomes clear that they developed a very close friendship. As Biden said about the memes that celebrate his friendship with Obama, “They’re basically all true.” However, Biden originally told Obama no when Obama wanted to vet him for Vice President. When Biden was very close to saying yes to the Vice Presidency, he said to Obama, “I want to be the last guy in the room on every major decision. You’re President. I’m not. I get it. But if it’s my experience you’re looking for, I want to be the last guy to make the case.” (p.64) 

One of the best anecdotes in the book is Biden’s meeting with Vladimir Putin. This was during the period when Putin was Prime Minister, rather than President, due to term limits. As they were meeting in Putin’s office, Biden turned around and was suddenly face to face with Putin. He said, “Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes. I don’t think you have a soul.” Putin replied, “We understand each other.” (p.95) 

A key passage in Promise Me, Dad, is when Biden describes his own political philosophy: “I believe all politics is personal, because at bottom, politics depends on trust, and unless you can establish a personal relationship, it’s awfully hard to build trust.” (p.129) Biden demonstrates that again and again in the book, as he details his relationships with foreign leaders, and his attempts to build trust with them. 

Will Joe Biden run for President in 2020? He’ll be 77 years old in 2020, and 78 years old on January 20, 2021—that’s older than Ronald Reagan was when he left office in 1989. But you never know, and as Promise Me, Dad shows, Joe Biden is a man who just keeps going when he’s facing adversity.

Book Review: It's Even Worse Than It Looks, by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein (2012)

Paperback cover of It's Even Worse Than It Looks, by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, 2012.

Why is Congress so gridlocked? Why can’t anything get done in Washington D.C.? Political scientists Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein attempt to answer those questions, and others, in their excellent 2012 book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism. Mann and Ornstein are both non-partisan political analysts, so they don’t have a partisan axe to grind, but they do place much of the blame squarely on a Republican party that has moved much farther to the right, and has refused to work with President Obama at all. 

In the Introduction, Mann and Ornstein write:

“One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier-ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” (Mann and Ornstein, p.xxiv) 

I think Mann and Ornstein have hit the nail on the head. I’m a liberal Democrat, so I have my own biases, but from where I stand, it’s not that the Democrats are getting any more liberal, it’s that the Republicans have taken a sharp turn to the right. Liberal and moderate Republicans are an endangered species, if not outright extinct. Nelson Rockefeller, who was something of an outsider in the Republican Party during his own lifetime, wouldn’t be able to find a place inside the Republican Party in 2014. Republicans have demanded a stifling orthodoxy of all their members, and the insurgent Tea Partiers have made sure that anyone not toeing the line will see a primary challenge from the far right. 

Republicans have made it very clear from day one of Obama’s Presidency that they were just waiting out the clock, and wouldn’t lift a finger to help him. This has hurt our country, as the Republican party has not offered any ideas of its own, but just turned into an obstructionist faction. Of course, it’s natural for the party opposing the President to not just roll over and give the President what he wants, but Republicans have taken obstructionism to a whole new level. The Republican party of 2014 doesn’t have an agenda beyond just opposing Obama’s policies. What do they stand for? It’s a question the party has to ask itself. If they keep only appealing to old, rich, straight white men, they won’t win any more Presidential elections.  

Part of the problem with gridlock in Congress is that our political system is designed to be hard to change. It’s meant to be difficult for a simple majority to completely override the minority party. And while that might be a good thing in the long run, it also means that it’s extremely difficult to get anything done in the short term.

Mann and Ornstein also discuss other problems facing contemporary politics, like the proliferation of Super PACs and unregulated money that has poured into the political system since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010. Stephen Colbert has often highlighted the absurdity of the rules surrounding Super PACs by forming his own Super PAC in 2011, “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow.” Colbert deftly showed how much of the money going to Super PACs is untraceable, and how the contributors’ identities remain secret. 

Fortunately, lest you get too depressed by Mann and Ornstein’s compendium of the political madness of the 2010’s, the authors also have a long section of the book in which they propose solutions to some of these maladies. Some of their solutions are modernizing voter registration to increase turnout, which Republicans have been overwhelmingly against, making Election Day a holiday, and making voting compulsory. They also mention doing away with mid-term elections, which would be a great idea, as turnout in the 2014 mid-terms was a pitiful 36.4%, the lowest since 1942. Changing to open primaries would be a great idea to get candidates for office that are more moderate, since they would have to appeal to more people than just the base of their own party. Another solution Mann and Ornstein suggest is limiting the number of filibusters in the Senate, which would greatly increase the amount of floor time available for debate. 

It’s Even Worse Than It Looks is an excellent look at the politics of today, and I would recommend it to anyone wondering why Congress is so ineffective.

Book Review: "Who Stole the American Dream?" by Hedrick Smith (2012)

"Who Stole the American Dream?" by Hedrick Smith, 2012.

Hedrick Smith

Hedrick Smith’s 2012 book “Who Stole the American Dream?” is a powerful look at the way things have shifted against the middle class over the last 40 years in America. It’s an important book that everyone interested in American politics or economics should read. 

Hedrick Smith is a veteran journalist who worked for The New York Times for 26 years. While he was with the Times Smith was a part of the team that broke the Pentagon Papers story and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971. In 1974 Smith won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his stories reporting from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. His work in the Soviet Union was the basis for his 1976 best-seller “The Russians.” Smith’s other books include “The Power Game,” his seminal study of political power in Washington, D.C., “The New Russians,” and “Rethinking America.” Since retiring from The New York Times, Smith has produced many documentaries for PBS. 

I was an intern in Hedrick Smith’s office during the fall of 2001. While I was there I helped work on Smith’s documentary “Rediscovering Dave Brubeck,” which I would highly recommend to any jazz fan. While I interned at Hedrick Smith Productions, I saw first-hand Smith’s tireless work ethic and his dedication to journalism. He’s won two Pulitzer Prizes, but he’s not just resting on his laurels.

Smith’s reporting for “Who Stole the American Dream?” is deep and incisive. He weaves the threads of his story together very well, writing in clear prose that is easy to understand. The book covers a lot of ground, but Smith excels in presenting the reader with the most relevant points in each chapter. The book is separated into short sections that make for quick reading.

Smith does a great job of showing how many government policies over the last 40 years have favored the rich at the expense of the middle class and the poor. As Smith writes in the Prologue:

“This book sets out to describe how, over the past four decades, we came to this point-how we became two such polarized and dissimilar Americas, how the great economic and political divide affects the lives of individual Americans, and how we might, through changed policies and a revival of citizen action, restore our unity and reclaim the American Dream for average people.” (Prologue, p. xix) 

In the first chapter, Smith stresses the influence of the Powell Memorandum, which was a call by lawyer Lewis Powell in 1971 for increased activism of business to strength their position and influence within government. At the time, Powell was a corporate lawyer, but a few months later he would be named to the Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon. The Powell Memorandum was written to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and it was not meant for public consumption at the time. The memorandum said, in part, “Business must learn the lesson…that political power is necessary.” (P.7) During the 1970’s business interests would take Powell’s message to heart as they began to lobby Congress in much greater numbers than ever before. 

Smith then chronicles how the middle class grew and flourished in the decades following World War II, and how the middle class’s earnings have stagnated over the last 30 years. As he writes, “…while productivity was rising close to 3 percent a year, hourly wages of the average worker, adjusted for inflation, were essentially flat, the same in 2011 as in 1978. Three decades of getting nowhere.” (P.73)

But while the middle class has been treading water for 30 years, the wealthy have been getting richer and richer, as compensation for CEOs of companies has skyrocketed over the last 40 years. Smith writes, “In the 1970s, the Federal Reserve reported that chief executives at 102 major companies were paid $1.2 million on average, adjusted for inflation, or roughly 40 times an average full-time worker’s pay. But by the early 2000s, CEOs at big companies had enjoyed such a meteoric rise that their average compensation topped $9 million a year, or 367 times the pay of the average worker.” (P.59) CEOs certainly have a right to be well compensated for their work, but the way their pay has skyrocketed is outrageous. CEO stock options have also skyrocketed in the last few decades. The thought is that CEOs will do a better job of leading the company if they have more of a stake in that company. Which is rather ridiculous, as pure self-interest will keep a CEO doing their job as best they can. The suggestion that CEOs need the extra incentive provided by stock options to do the best for their company is absurd. 

Smith also writes about Congress, and how politicians are more beholden to special interests than actual voters. The reality of politics today is that money buys you access to a politician, and access gets you influence. And since special interests are contributing more to PACs than middle class and lower class voters, the special interests have more influence than ordinary voters. Gun control is a recent example of an issue where the majority of people want action, but Congress was unable and unwilling to do anything substantive on the issue. The will of a majority was thwarted by a powerful minority. 

Smith details how Congress used to work in the 1950’s and 1960’s, as politicians from both parties would frequently work together to craft legislation. Compromise was essential, and there were more moderate politicians in both parties. In contrast, Congress now is extremely dysfunctional, and is barely able to pass any kind of legislation. Compromise has become a dirty word. Filibusters, and the threat of them, have become much more common. Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution says of the Senate: “In the 1960s, about 8 percent of significant legislation was subject to delaying tactics like filibusters or holds. It is now about 70 percent. Obstructionism is now the hallmark of the Senate.” (P. 322) 

 While it’s true that Democrats have become slightly more liberal, it’s also very true that the Republican Party has shifted steadily to the right since the 1960’s. Moderate Republicans are now an endangered species. One of the key moments in the Republican Party’s shift to the right was the 1964 nomination of Barry Goldwater as the Republican candidate for President. Smith and other authors have highlighted this turning point as the moment when the right wing started to take over the party. Even though Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide, it was the moment when the right wing first asserted itself. When moderate Republican Nelson Rockefeller was booed by Goldwater supporters at the 1964 convention, it marked the beginning of a huge change in the Republican Party. 

In Part 4 of the book, Smith discusses many of the things that have caused the middle class to lose their wealth, from the subprime mortgage crisis, to Wal-Mart and other companies moving good jobs overseas. There was a time when companies were actually concerned about the welfare of their employees. Now the focus is often only on the bottom line of the balance sheet.

“Who Stole the American Dream?” is a book that should make you angry. It should make you think about what’s happened in the country over the last 40 years, and how the wealth disparity in this country is growing larger and larger. You should get indignant about the status quo as you read this book. My high school Social Studies teacher Mr. Anderson would always say to us “Be indignant!” He wanted us to have a reaction to current events, and Hedrick Smith wants us to have a similar reaction to his book.

In the final section of “Who Stole the American Dream?” Smith focuses on possible solutions to the problem and how we can rebuild the middle class. None of the solutions he proposes are easy, and none of them will be a quick fix. Some of them require direct citizen action. It might not be easy, but there are ways that we can change things in this country and take action to help rebuild the middle class. 

Personally, I think that Hedrick Smith hit the nail on the head with “Who Stole the American Dream?” He accurately diagnoses many of the maladies that plague our country today. He describes how we’ve gotten there over the last 40 years, and what can be done to change it. We would all do well to listen to him.