Guardian Review
Susan Bordo blames sexism for Clinton's defeat while Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes point to her campaign's incompetence The first thing I remember feeling about the 2016 US election was a kind of speechlessness. On 9 November, no one had any idea what to say in the bars and pubs in New York. Conversations could take place only in the form of mutual interrogation. No one had any declarative sentences to offer. The only consensus was that no one knew what happened. That consensus is now gone -- every woman on the street can riff on the Russians, James Comey and the creaky electoral system -- but the anxiety remains. The engine of all argument right now is a very bitter sort of fear we felt right after the whole thing blew up. I tried to remember this as I read these two lightning-quick, rather myopic books that tell us "the truth" about the Hillary Clinton campaign. To perhaps no one's surprise, they offer contradictory accounts of "what happened", though both are written from a left-liberal position. In The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, the feminist academic Susan Bordo lays the blame on sexism. Without apology, she owns her bias, speaking for Clinton supporters who felt that their candidate was warped by the press, turned into a cold, conniving, unpopular figure she really wasn't. Throughout Clinton's career, Bordo argues, she has been a "living Rorschach test of people's nightmare images of female power". In this vision, Donald Trump was not Clinton's true opponent; the real enemy was this phantom of Clinton herself. Bordo does give some lip service to factors other than sexism: "Unprincipled partisanship, irresponsible politics, and a mass media too absorbed in 'optics' to pay enough attention to separating facts from rumours, lies and speculation." But those are treated as secondary: if only people had seen Hillary for who she really was, they could not have helped but admire her competence and compassion; they could not have helped but vote for her. In Shattered, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes suggest that the problem was really inside the ramshackle campaign apparatus. They spent months of the campaign interviewing aides "on background", meaning that a source can't be identified, and promising that they would use none of the information they acquired until after the election. And so theirs is a standard campaign machine story, in which the reason for the loss can always be divined from within the loser's staff. "Hillary's campaign was so spirit-crushing that her aides eventually shorthanded the feeling of impending doom with a simple mantra: we're not allowed to have nice things." The implied nice thing here is a Clinton presidency, but Shattered 's writers don't exactly explain to us what would have been so nice about it. In their account, she's a disconnected, indifferent and exhausted leader who hid behind aides such as Huma Abedin. She is a bad manager as well as a bad communicator, a technocrat who placed her faith in the wrong data, a half-hearted politician who could not nail the delivery of a single speech. These two Hillarys don't map on to each other. Bordo assumes competence and inspiration where Allen and Parnes found none. The one place the books intersect is the idea of how unknowable Clinton is, even to the people who are obsessed with her. Neither book seems to have a full handle on just who she is; at most, both agree she is careful and reticent, it's just that one book faults her for it and the other argues it's understandable. Here, it's Bordo who's more than half right. She points out that Clinton's carefulness is the result not just of too many years as the wife of a powerful and philandering man, but of the "double bind" that many ambitious women find themselves in. I thought about this as I read aide after aide complain to Allen and Parnes that Hillary hadn't properly asserted herself in this or that situation. Even her announcement speech is deemed insufficiently ambitious. "She has to answer the why question," one aide grumbles to these reporters. "It's not because of her mother. Her mother's an inspiration, but that is not why. It has to sort of feel like kind of a call to action, a galvanising." Galvanising Americans, though, is chiefly done through shouting. They're a raucous people. They like to argue. And when a woman shouts, she isn't usually praised for it. She's condemned as aggressive and coarse. When she praises her mother, however, the room sighs and awws. Yes, it's sentimental and manipulative. And I understand that ultimately it didn't work for Clinton, that she lost in spite of all the campaign's attempts to style her as appropriately feminine, as appropriately interested in "love and kindness". But I have no doubt that if she had been a firebrand, she would have lost too. I don't think we yet live in a world that is prepared for a woman who is a truly straight talker. Yet there is something unsatisfying, even grating about the way Bordo's defence of Hillary smooths out every wrinkle. She dislikes Bernie Sanders for thickening the aura of corruption that hangs off the Clintons, so gives no lengthy consideration of his arguments about the nature of inequality in today's America -- though she agrees with them. When the time comes to address the topic of Monica Lewinsky, Bordo simply waves a hand: she's frustrated by the intrusion on "Bill's private life". This is one way to describe a powerful man seducing an intern, though not typically one you'd hear from feminists. Allen and Parnes have nothing particular to say about the afflictions America that faced in 2016. They're just here for the facts, ma'am, and if the facts happen to make for entertaining anecdotes, so be it. Clinton had a lot of trouble in her debate prep, in spite of the incredible lengths to which her adviser Philippe Reines went to imitate her opponent for the purposes of practice (the purchase of an ill-fitting suit; knee braces!). The wrong first interviewer was selected because the name "Bianna" was misheard as "Brianna". Clinton should have told more people she was feeling unwell when she contracted pneumonia and almost collapsed on a street in New York City. Except that the facts need balancing. It may indeed have all been a big mess at the Clinton HQ in Brooklyn. But it's hard to imagine that across the river in Trump Tower, it was all efficiency and coordination, a humming machine. Allen and Parnes don't have any insight into that building, of course; that wasn't the task they were charged with. The Trump campaign was shambolic, the chaos on full display. And with that in mind, one wonders how Allen and Parnes expected readers to take their loose argument, that the campaign was doomed from the start, at face value. Competence doesn't seem to correlate with electoral victory. And this is the crux. We have all the facts we can handle about the 2016 election. We were all obsessed, we hung on to every word, we couldn't look away. And yet asked to describe what happened, we still don't really know. We venture only guesses, and most of them only get at half the story. At the end of Shattered, we're told that Clinton has come to blame Obama, to feel that he should have revealed the alleged Russian plan to interfere in the election sooner. Perhaps she is right. But she's smart enough to know that it wasn't the only thing that lost her the presidency. - Michelle Dean.
Booklist Review
Millions of people (more than 65 million) were disappointed by Hillary Clinton's loss in the 2016 election. But for a certain subset of Hillary supporters, the result was particularly gut-wrenching. Women of Hillary's age understood viscerally how difficult and uncharted the societal journey had been for women growing up in the 1950s and '60s, and their support for Hillary had been combined with admiration for one of their own who withstood the blows and kept fighting. Bordo, herself in that subset of Hillary's contemporaries, focuses not just on Clinton's accomplishments but also on how difficult it was for her to move forward at all as animosity and backlash intensified, with Hillary becoming the symbol of all the changes that, in the minds of her opponents, had upended society. Writing personally and precisely, Bordo describes the frustrations she and others felt when younger women dismissed Clinton as establishment without knowing her history. Other key aspects of the campaign are addressed with equal insight: Bernie Sanders and his followers undermining Clinton; pundits raging against her shrill voice ; conspiracists turning pneumonia into Parkinson's; and FBI Director Comey dealing Hillary a decisive blow late in the campaign. Hillary haters, who are legion, will find little to agree with here, but this perceptive, thoroughly readable book will strike a chord with her supporters and prove enlightening to many others hoping to make sense of a contentious election.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2010 Booklist
