Name: Alex Spurrier's review of Shattered by Amie Parnes
Item: Shattered
Rating: 4
Author: Alex Spurrier

Amie Parnes

Jonathan Allen

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER It was never supposed to be this close. And of course she was supposed to win. How Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump is the riveting story of a sure thing gone off the rails. For every Comey revelation or hindsight acknowledgment about the electorate, no explanation of defeat can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary's campaign--the candidate herself. Through deep access to insiders from the top to the bottom of the campaign, political writers Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes have reconstructed the key decisions and unseized opportunities, the well-intentioned misfires and the hidden thorns that turned a winnable contest into a devastating loss. Drawing on the authors' deep knowledge of Hillary from their previous book, the acclaimed biography HRC, Shattered offers an object lesson in how Hillary herself made victory an uphill battle, how her difficulty articulating a vision irreparably hobbled her impact with voters, and how the campaign failed to internalize the lessons of populist fury from the hard-fought primary against Bernie Sanders. Moving blow-by-blow from the campaign's difficult birth through the bewildering terror of election night, Shattered tells an unforgettable story with urgent lessons both political and personal, filled with revelations that will change the way readers understand just what happened to America on November 8, 2016.

Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

Shattered

Alex Spurrier

Bryan Alexander

Shattered is an odd book about the 2016 American presidential election. It's very easy to read, and hard to resist for anyone interested in American politics. It will bring that period back to mind for any reader who was paying attention at all. But it has a very, very limited focus, nearly that of a memoir, which limits its reach. It might help us understand what happened, slightly.

Let me explain. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes followed Hillary Clinton's campaign very closely, and obtained a large amount of on-background information (quotes without named sources). So this is a campaign book, something close to an insider's tell all. We don't get any Republican equivalent, and only a smidgeon of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Shattered zeroes in on the Clinton team right from the start and stays there throughout. Allen and Parnes are like embedded reporters, writing from that very precise position.

The book starts with Hillary Clinton assembling her staff and proceeds into the Democratic primaries. Her contest with Sanders takes up roughly 60-65% of Shattered, followed by the general election. It ends with her concession, followed by a short reflective coda. Along the way we learn about debate preparation, speech writing, convention planning, staff logistics, strategy and tactics debates, the conflict between data and intuition, etc.

There's something of an autopsy in the book, as the authors wrestle with causes of the Clinton defeat. They repeat claims made by Hillary Clinton and her supporters, blaming FBI director Comey, bad news media performance, Russian interference, Bernie Sanders, Wikileaks, a surprising electoral mood and an unprecedented opponent. Allen and Parnes offer another explanation. Because of the book's sourcing strategy, there's a great deal of anonymous dialogue. We don't get to know many people, but one figure looms very large as the single person most responsible for Clinton's defeat: Robby Mook, campaign manager and data hound. 

Throughout Shattered we see conflicts between his quantitative models and the qualitative instincts of old-school politicians. Mook won those fights and maintained his data-based strategy, which Allen and Parnes ultimately view as fatal to the Clinton campaign. Mook used his models to shift resources away from several key states. State-level campaign staff and local politicians complain throughout Shattered about being starved of money. In retrospect, such complaints coming from states Mook/Clinton/et al thought were solidly Democratic, but which turned to Trump, obviously look prescient and damning for the data-intensive approach. In fact, this explanation might sit well with more recent critiques of data analytics.

Some scenes and points struck me as useful or surprising. For example, I've long through Hillary Clinton was too secretive, dating back to her time as First Lady in the 1990s, but I hadn't heard some of these anecdotes. The famous video clip of Clinton falling ill on the way to a car had a stronger negative impact due to the campaign's multiple levels of secrecy and information management (317-8). We learn that various key players kept information back from the rest of the campaign, often for personal advantage, which seems to follow their principal's lead. Awkward management appears as a general theme.
 
Another interesting and related point was that Hillary Clinton often avoided crowds. For instance,[S]he didn't want to expose herself to unscripted interactions with voters, she wasn't getting much retail political information. From the very beginning of the campaign, Hillary had met with preselected groups but tried to avoid chance encounters with voters who might heckle her. She took the same approach to members of the media, who sometimes related the concerns of voters to candidates. She was running a variation on a "Rose Garden" strategy..." (237-8)I wasn't aware of the full extent of this strategy, but it makes sense of many events, including the campaign's tone deafness at key points.

We get a sense of frustration at misreading American at various points of the campaign. Perhaps most movingly is this passage from the primary campaign:Hillary unburdened herself to Moore. "I don't understand what's happening with the country. I can't get my arms around it..." 
It was a quandry that would plague her throughout the campaign. After nearly a year on the campaign trail, and hundreds of stops at diners, coffee shops, and high school gymnasiums and just as many roundtables with young professionals and millworkers, Hillary still couldn't figure out why Americans were so angry or how she could bring the country together...(145-6)This maps onto my understanding of 2016, and it was useful to see that sense fleshed out.

One detail surprised me. In at least one state, Michigan, local campaign reps and local officials actually wanted less of a Hillary Clinton personal presence, preferring instead direct mail and tv ads. "[T]he campaign feared that sending Hillary would actually backfire." (368) 

So much for the benefits of Shattered's approach. Its limitations mounted chapter by chapter. 
There is no real discussion of political ideology. Bernie's proposals aren't treated seriously, but are quickly dismissed (88); that Clinton herself might express an ideology other than wonkishness isn't explored. Criticisms of the Obama administration don't really occur beyond notes that Trump and to a lesser extent Sanders had them. There isn't much sense of HRC's support among people beyond the campaign, donors, and the Obama administration, which could speak to the candidate's isolation or the campaign's preference for data. In fact, the electorate is barely present, available only through the campaign's flawed gaze.

Politics is quite narrowly described here. I was surprised at the book's silence on The Emerging Democratic Majority (Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, 2002), as that is the locus classicus for the Democratic strategy of focusing on urban populations and racial minorities. That strategy appears only as a given in the book. More broadly, there is nothing about any other election in 2016, neither state nor national - which might, unintentionally, reflect a Democratic party too obsessed with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

This isn't a political analysis or a history so much as a kind of group memoir, a collective cry of frustration from a team that fought hard and failed. It may eventually prove to be one useful document for historians exploring the election. It might give Clinton supporters a bittersweet review of that campaign.

Alex Spurrier &
Shattered by Amie Parnes

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