Hillary Clinton Doesn't Get It

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. Bush to get burgers. 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. These anecdotes suggest a fatal lack of awareness, an inability to see that she and her party may have grown out of touch. To the contrary, she says. She was the victim of forces beyond her control. Journalists, Russia, Bernie Sanders: These are a few of her least favorite things.

This book is precisely what her critics predicted it would be. What Happened suffers from stilted prose and insipid inspirational quotes, but that is par for the course for a political memoir. The real problem with What Happened is that it is not the book it needed to be. 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. 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.

When Clinton does discuss what went wrong, it's mostly to point fingers. Some accusations are valid: Sexism did factor into her negative public image and into her loss. She contributes astute observations about the specific difficulties that America's presidential system poses for female candidates. She correctly notes that well-funded right-wing actors have spent years weakening American democracy, and that a racist backlash to Barack Obama's presidency dogged her campaign and strengthened Donald Trump. The press did mishandle coverage of her email scandal, and James Comey's irresponsible actions helped slow her momentum at a crucial time.

But even taken together, these factors should not have been enough to cost her the presidency. 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. Clinton cannot admit that she--and her party--bear some responsibility for failing to stem this tide. Did you know she won the popular vote? She reminds us, multiple times. In What Happened, good fought evil, and evil won. It is a fairy tale. The great tragedy is that Clinton seems to think it is true.

Read the full article at The New Republic.