What Happened

Hillary Rodham Clinton “What Happened,” Simon & Schuster, 2017, 464 pp.

Hillary Clinton blames her electoral loss mostly on James Comey and his October 28 injection of her emails back into the election process, the election was only days away, November 8^th to be precise.  She does list many other factors including, Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, Mitch McConnell, The New York Times, the media as a whole, Bernie Sanders and his supporters, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, sexism, white resentment, and herself, specifically her comments on putting "coal miners out of business" and labeling her opponent's supporters as a "basket of deplorables." And, of course, how the 2016 election was marked by an unprecedented assault on our democracy by Russia and an opponent who broke all the rules.  Nevertheless, the election was decided by 77,744 votes out of a total 136 million cast. 

Every theory of why Hillary lost needs to be tested against the evidence that she was winning until October 28, when Jim Comey injected emails back into the election but the book does not decisively make this case for the three decisive states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio.  I believe the email issue was decisive but the book does not make the case. 

Addenda:

Below is from a Facebook posting that lists the mostly unsubstantiated claims that people find on the internet and swallow as truth.  This is what we can expect when a credible media is either absent or is not perceived as credible:

I still haven't figured out why she lost. Was it the Russian uranium deal? or was it WikiLeaks? or was it Podesta? Or Comey ? or was it a sexual predator husband ? or was a staff's husband Wiener immoral pictures ? was it subpoena violation? or was it the corrupt foundation ? or was it the congressional lies ? or was it the Benghazi bungle ? or was it pay for play ? or was it travel gate scandal ? or was it whitewater scandal ?  Or the Trooper Gate scandal ? Or was it the $15 million for Chelsea's apt bought with foundation money ? Or Comey's investigation ? Or her husbands interference with Loretta Lynch and the investigation ? Or was it stealing debate questions ? Was it forensically deleting 30,000 emails ? The secret server in her house? Was it the Seth Rich murder ? Was it calling half the USA deplorable ? Was it the underhanded treatment of Bernie Sanders ? Was it the Vince Foster murder ? The Jennifer Flowers assault ? The Jennifer Flowers settlement ? The Paula Jones law suit ? The $800,000 Paula Jones settlement ? The lie about taking on sniper fire ? The impeachment ? The 6 billion $ she "lost" when in charge of the state dept ? The 10 million she took for the pardon of Marc Rich ? Or was it because she is a hateful & lying?
Gee, I just can’t quite put my finger on it, but it seems to be right in front of me.

My Notes:

Pg. xiv:  Hillary received 65,844,610 votes, more than any candidate for President ever, other than Obama.  She states this is proof that the ugliness we faced in 2016 does not define our country.

Pg. 9:  Yale history professor Timothy Snyder writes in this book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, ‘To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.  If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.  If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.’  Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism.  This is what the Soviets did when they erased political dissidents from historical photos.  The trend didn’t start with Trump.  Al Gore wrote a book called The Assault on Reason in 2007 documenting the same abandonment of facts by George W.  (I have read both books and reported on them.)

Pg. 99:  Political coverage has to be about the horse race, but it’s become almost entirely about that and not about the issues that matter most to our country and to people’s lives.  That’s not entirely the press’s fault: the way we consume news has changed, which makes getting clicks all important, which in turn encourages sensationalism. 

Pg. 134:  Women leaders around the world tend to rise higher in parliamentary systems, rather than presidential ones like ours.  Prime ministers are chosen by their colleagues—people they’ve worked with day in and day out, who’ve seen firsthand their talents and competence.  It’s a system designed to reward women’s skill at building relationships, which requires emotional labor. Presidential systems reward different talents: speaking to large crowds, looking commanding on camera, dominating in debates, galvanizing mass movements, and in America, raising a billion dollars. 

Pg. 222:  Discussion of public policy accounted for just 10 percent of all campaign news coverage in the general election.  Nearly all the rest was taken up by obsessive coverage of controversies such as email.  Health care, taxes, trade, immigration, national security—all of it crammed into just 10 percent of the press coverage.  None of Trump’s scandals, from scamming students at Trump University, to stiffing small businesses in Atlantic City, to exploiting his foundation, to refusing to release his taxes as every presidential candidate since 1976 has done—generated the kind of sustained, campaign-defining coverage that Hillary’s email did.

Pg. 240:  Leading technologists in Silicon Valley warn that automation and artificial intelligence could be the first great technological revolution that ends up displacing more jobs than it creates.   Many economists say that advances in technology actually have displaced far more jobs than trade in recent decades.  They further predict that automation could put a third of all American men aged twenty-five to fifty-four out of work by 2050. 

Pg. 326:  Many Americans have lost faith in the institutions that previous generations relied on for objective information, including government, academia, and the press, leaving them vulnerable to a sophisticated misinformation campaign.  A lot of this was facilitated by a small group of right-wing billionaires—people like the Mercer family and Charles and David Koch.  More generally, the right spent a lot of time and money building an alternative reality.  Think of a partisan petri dish where science is denied, lies masquerade as truth, and paranoia flourishes. 

Pg. 336:  There is good reason to believe that despite repeated bankruptcies and even though most American banks refused to lend to him, Trump, his companies, or partners, according to USA Today, turned to wealthy Russians and oligarchs from former Soviet republics—several allegedly connected to organized crime. 

Pg. 350:  The Clinton’s have released their tax returns going back decades which show they have donated more than $23 million to charities and that they have not taken money from the Clinton Foundation as has been charged on the internet through Russian propaganda networks, RT and Sputnik.  According to a US Intelligence assessment, that one RT video alone was viewed more than nine million times, mostly on Facebook.

Pg. 366:  Fox gave a giant megaphone to voices claiming climate change was fake science, the falling unemployment rate was phony math, and you couldn’t trust Barack Obama’s birth certificate.  Ailes and Fox were so successful in polarizing the audience that by 2016, most liberals and conservatives got their news from distinctly different sources and no longer shared a common set of facts.  However, Breitbart News Network, backed by Robert and Rebekah Mercer and led by their advisor Steve Bannon, emerged to give Fox a run for its money with headlines like ‘Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy’, ‘Fact Check: Were Obama and Hillary Founders of Isis? You Bet’. 

Pg. 391:  Items impacting Hillary’s campaign: the rise of tribal politics in American and across the globe, the restlessness of a country looking for change, excessive coverage of Hillary’s emails, the unprecedented late intervention by the director of the FBI, the sophisticated misinformation campaign directed from the Kremlin, and the avalanche of fake news.

Pg. 453:  check out OnwardTogether.org