The air cannon never fired their confetti. The glass ceiling never cracked, figuratively or literally. On election night at the Javits Center in New York, where Hillary Clinton fully expected to become the first female president of the United States, the mood went from wedding to wake.
Less than a month earlier, Clinton had warned in an interview: “I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse.” Her new book, What Happened, is a cathartic attempt to explain to a bewildered world how the “apocalypse” of President Trump came to be.
The memoir has already reopened old wounds among Democrats who insist it is time to look forward, not back, and unite in opposition to Trump. While some welcome Clinton’s attempt to offer an honest postmortem of one of the biggest upsets in American political history, others accuse the 69-year-old of putting her legacy at risk by reigniting a civil war within the party.
Congressman Jared Huffman, a Democrat from California, told Politico that Clinton was publishing her book “maybe at the worst possible time, as we are fighting some of the most high-stakes policy and institutional battles we may ever see, at a time when we’re trying to bring the party together so we can all move the party forward – stronger, stronger together.
“She’s got every right to tell her story. Who am I to say she shouldn’t, or how she should tell it? But it is difficult for some of us, even like myself who’ve supported her, to play out all these media cycles about the blame game and the excuses.”
The 494-page memoir will be published by Simon & Schuster on Tuesday 12 September, the same day Clinton starts a book tour with a signing at Barnes & Noble in Union Square, New York. The four-month roadshow will include, with grim irony, states she neglected and lost during the campaign. It is also said to include London and Cheltenham. Before any of that, excerpts have reached the public domain.
Clinton writes: “I go back over my own shortcomings and the mistakes we made. I take responsibility for all of them. You can blame the data, blame the message, blame anything you want but I was the candidate. It was my campaign. Those were my decisions.”
That said, after an election in which Clinton won nearly three million more votes than Trump but still lost, there is still plenty of blame to go around. She wonders whether a tougher response from Barack Obama to reports of Russian interference in the election might have made a difference. She scorns the suggestion from former vice-president Joe Biden that she did not campaign forcefully enough for middle-class voters. And she is predictably scathing about then-FBI director James Comey for his investigation into her private email server, including his late-October decision to issue a letter to Congress.
But the most divisive criticism is that of Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who ran against her from the left in the primary, drew huge crowds and gave her an unexpected scare. Clinton recalls that advisers often told her not to fight back against Sanders’ criticism for fear of alienating his supporters.
“President Obama urged me to grit my teeth and lay off Bernie as much as I could. I felt like I was in a straitjacket. Nonetheless, his attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s ‘Crooked Hillary’ campaign. I don’t know if that bothered Bernie or not.”
Acknowledging that Sanders campaigned for her in the general election, she adds: “But he isn’t a Democrat – that’s not a smear, that’s what he says. He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic party. I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were, too.”
The sharp comments signal an end to the uneasy truce that saw Sanders ask that Clinton be nominated by acclamation during the roll call vote at the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia. Speaking on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Thursday, Sanders, who turned 76 on Friday, responded: “Look, Secretary Clinton ran against the most unpopular candidate in the history of this country and she lost and she was upset about that. I understand that.
“But our job now is really not to go backwards. It is to go forwards, it is to kind of create the nation that we know that we can become. We have enormous problems facing us and I think it’s a little bit silly to be keeping talking about 2016.”
Some of his supporters are pushing back harder. Dave Handy, a Democratic strategist, said: “If she’s just saying this to sell books, it’s cheap and silly and going to reopen old wounds.
“If she legitimately believes this, I daresay we dodged an entirely different bullet [in the presidential election] because she’s out of touch with reality. It’s beyond insensitive. It’s slanderous, it’s disgusting, it’s disgraceful. It’s not just where the secretary is but where the sycophants are. They’re afraid to tell her the truth.”
Sanders delegates rallied to Clinton’s cause against Trump, Handy said, and sounded the alarm in areas where she was weak, only to be ignored by her data-driven campaign.
“As someone who voted for her in November, it’s disappointing for me now to see her conduct. It’s convenient to throw everyone else under the bus but, at the end of the day, you have to suck up your losses: John Kerry did it, Mitt Romney did it, Al Gore did it after he won and still didn’t become president. We need her to accept this loss is on her and step away. The Democratic party needs to move forward to greener pastures.”
‘Don’t distract the public’
Refighting the battles of 2016 is a nightmare for many Democrats facing the singularity of the Trump presidency and aiming to win back the House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections. Tensions persist between moderate, centrist Democrats and Sanders-style leftwingers, a divide that has also been characterised as identity politics versus economic populism. Clinton’s book looks set to add fuel to the fire.
Bill Galston, a former White House adviser to Clinton’s husband Bill, said: “I’m sure there are some Democrats who wish this book was not being published. The president is obviously flailing so, from a Democratic strategist point of view, let him continue to flail and don’t distract the public.”
Political memoirs always carry a reputational risk, Galston acknowledged, but he noted that an NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll this week showed only 30% of respondents have very or somewhat positive feelings about Clinton – six points fewer than Trump.
“It doesn’t strike me that anything she says now can make things appreciably worse,” he said. “As Janis Joplin used to sing, ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.’”
Clinton’s previous books include a 2003 memoir, Living History, published while she was a senator from New York, and Hard Choices from 2014, an account of her time as secretary of state. A prominent supporter, who did not wish to be named, said the publication of What Happened will be a net positive.
“She continues to be who she is,” the supporter said. “She can write about what Trump is doing and the fate of our democracy. If you don’t understand, you can’t move forward properly.”
Neil Sroka, communications director for the campaign group Democracy for America, doubted that the book will cause long-term damage.
“I take it at face value,” he said. “This is what Secretary Clinton thinks and it’s valuable to have her perspective but she is not the future of the Democratic party. The next generation of Democrats will be. I’m far more interested in what Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders think happened in 2016 and what is the best way forward.”
Sroka rejected talk of civil war. “I think it’s overstated. Anyone can go on Facebook or Twitter and see skirmishes.
“But overall people are focused on what the real problem is going forward and that is reforming the Democratic party and figuring out how we beat Donald Trump and Republicans in elections ahead.”
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