What happened: Hillary’s view
Hillary Clinton’s book, What Happened, is one of the few books in America that you must read if you’re to understand just how dire politics in America has become. It is a brilliant book and a tragically beautiful story. There are parts that should have been cut (the chapter on the day in the life of Hillary is for a magazine, not this book, and the end needed to end much more quickly), but the whining and criticism that the book has received is really astonishingly wrong. To have written this book so quickly after the disaster of November 8 is not just unimaginably difficult but critically important. We need to understand its truth, now.
Most of the tabloid criticism of the book suggests the book is an effort to shift blame elsewhere. That is complete bs. It is difficult to imagine any author more directly and completely accepting responsibility directly — and not just once, but throughout. Clinton recognizes her own maddeningly frustrating (to her, and all of us) weaknesses. She acknowledges them openly and repeatedly, without drawing the obvious comparison (“yea, but compared to?”). This is not a book that holds any self-criticism back. Hillary knows that, but for Hillary, Hillary would have been president.
But obviously, “but for” lots of other reasons, too. This was an election decided by 77,000 votes in three states. Obviously, any number of things could have shifted the result fundamentally. She spends considerable and careful time (this is not a criticism; this issue needs attention) unpacking the various issues that may have been responsible for the 77k. Each of them alone could have been enough to flip the result. Yet without doubt, the two she focuses on at the end of this section — Comey and the Russians—are the most important, both to the election, and going forward.
The Comey account is clear and correct. It was a catastrophic error of judgment for Comey to raise the email issue again — without any good faith basis for believing the found emails raised any new issue—just weeks before the election. There’s some chatter (not in this book but elsewhere) that Comey was heading off a rogue wing of the FBI doing something even worse. In the end, if true, that may be his best defense. But on the account Clinton offers here—fair, calm and complete—there is no defense. Clearly, had he done what any prosecutor in his position would have done—nothing—Clinton would be President. (I know that people resist this conclusion — even supporters of Clinton. But the data are pretty overwhelming. This was an October surprise election, where the surprise came from the one entity that ethically and constitutionally should have played absolutely no role at all.)
The Comey error, however, is not the most serious, systemically. It was wrong, but this sort of thing is not going to happen again. The more serious, systemically, is the Russians. Clinton pulls together the most complete account of what we know or should believe, and the story is truly terrifying. Terrifying, not just for what the Russians did — which is terrible enough—but more for how pathetically the public, meaning journalism, reacted.
I remember having precisely the same reaction as the journalists did when I read of these allegations before the election — yea, right, the Russians are stealing the election. But it wasn’t my job to be investigating the leads, and what they showed. That was the job of journalists, and in this way, and a million other ways, the most terrifying bit of the Clinton account is just how pathetic journalism in America has become.
Sussing out and reporting—clearly and honestly, and in proportion to the other “scandals” that captured the media’s obsessions—the suggestion of involvement with the Russians was a job that we needed some reliable institution in America to perform. That isn’t the job of a campaign — no one would believe such allegations coming from a campaign. It was probably the job of the Obama Administration, though its credibility suffers the same structural weakness as the Clinton campaign’s would have. Had this been the Bush administration warning about Russians trying to flip the election against Obama, that would have been heard and believed. The Obama Administration was probably right that its fears would have rendered political.
Yet it was certainly the job of journalism. And in this respect—and a few others—the field proved itself to be catastrophically incompetent. The failure to make Americans aware of the serious and credible threat from the Russians, the failure to help America understand the completely insignificant issue the email “scandal” was (stories about the so-called email scandal were by far the #1 issue reported on for Clinton during the campaign), and the failure to do the basic job of presenting the candidates to the public with competence (through the debates and town halls) all point not to some fluke, but to something fundamental. We are missing something essential to the DNA of a functioning democracy, and it’s not obvious there’s any way to fix it.
There are lots of ways to frame what we’re missing, but at bottom, it all ties to the weakness of relying on commercial media to provide America with what America needs to perform its democratic function. Commercial media does what it does for a simple reason — to make money. In the insanely competitive market of American media today, that means that practically every decision it makes about what to cover and whom to cover is a function of whether it advances its own commercial objective. Not directly, but soon enough. No producer is passing the list of stories to be covered on the evening news by the advertising department. But in the discipline of ratings reporting, and the judgments executives make, it is clear to everyone what stories should be covered because it is clear to everyone what stories will sell.
It’s not clear American democracy can survive commercial media. It is clear that if it is, then something fundamental has got to change. The only consequence for bad political reporting is better Nielsen ratings. Somehow our politics needs to migrate out of a system with such perverse incentives.
But the book is much more than an effort to refight the war for those 77k votes. The account of sexism in American politics may well be the best there is. And the picture of Clinton as policy-wonk-in-chief is both compelling and again, tragic. This is her central feature: How is it most have no clue about this bit of her character?
There are blind spots. Ok, maybe at least one. Early in the book, Clinton writes:
When you know why you’re doing something and you know there’s nothing more to it and certainly nothing sinister, it’s easy to assume that others will see it the same way. That was a mistake.
This is a perfect account of her — or anyone’s—own psyche. Yet if true, it is a perfect indictment of a campaign. Because of course, no one could have “assum[ed] that others” saw Clinton in the way Clinton and her staff saw Clinton. Everyone in that campaign must have known that way too many in America were incredibly suspicious of her. That suspicion was partly her fault, partly not. The obliviousness to the how dancing with big money would be read is truly astonishing. But the consequence of the never-ending attack on her integrity by Sanders, and then Trump was completely predictable. What Clinton faced was an enormous trust gap. And the fundamental question for the campaign should have been, how do we address that gap? What do we do to negate it? How do we convince America that we — certainly more than Trump—want to remake the corruption of DC? How do we become the reformers, at a time when Americans desperately wanted reform?
This fact — that Americans desperately wanted reform — is the single most denied fact of DC insiders in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Yet right in the middle of the 2016 campaign, the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland found Americans (both Democrats and Republicans) more dissatisfied with their government than at any time in polling history. (pdf) Overwhelmingly, whether Democrat or Republican, Americans believe their government does not represent them. Overwhelmingly, whether Democrat or Republican, they believe it represents special interests rather than the general public. Overwhelmingly, they believed their “representative democracy” was corrupt because it did not “represent” — at least them. And yet the campaign did nothing fundamental to address this fundamental fact about us.
As I watched the campaign, this fact convinced me that she didn’t care about reform — really. Even though her platform on this issue was the most progressive of any major candidate, including Sanders, the fact that she could never make it central to her message convinced me she either didn’t see it or didn’t care about it. Glenn Greenwald’s charge that she was invoking the “Citizens United defense” in response to Sanders’ attack seemed to signal just what her values were. Even her book lists reform nowhere on the top issues the Democrats should pursue. Again and again, the issue is acknowledged, but when it comes time to write a plan, it is as if the challenge is simply to convince an America that already believes in government.
This is the core mistake — not just of Clinton, but of too many in the Democratic Party. America is with Reagan—“Government is not the solution. Government is the problem”—not because they believe, like Reagan, that the private market can solve every public problem, but because they believe their government is fundamentally corrupt. They see taxes as a waste — not because the poor don’t deserve help, but because they believe the government is not helping anyone except itself. Most don’t support the idea of supporting government because most believe government doesn’t support them. Government serves the “special interests,” so wonky papers declaring “we’re from the government and we’re here to help” are just the lead balloons of modern American politics.
There are many lessons Clinton learned. There is extraordinary wisdom and insight that her book teaches us. But I fear that this point is still lost on too many on our side. That blindness leaves the field wide open for the party of no — no taxes, no immigration, no health care, no (more) social security, no protection for privacy, no network neutrality, no family planning, no dreamers.
If we’re to counter the party of no, we need to give America a reason to believe there is good in yes. And we will only do that when we convince them that their government works for them—and not the funders, and the lobbyists, and the corporations that they spend so much time keeping happy.
If we fixed democracy first, we might create a world in which the wisdom of the wonks could be heard again. In this world, their wisdom is the cue: eyes, roll, utter with contempt, “yea right, the government is going to fix that…”
