‘What Happened’: Hillary Clinton reveals details of the 2016 election in new book

Former Democratic Presidential candidate in the 2016 election, Hillary Rhodam Clinton has not taken her loss in the Oval Office pursuit slightly, she’s taken a long time to reflect on the cause of her defeat, her regrets and the possible silver-lining in her legendary aspiration.

Her thoughts and everything which ensued was well documented in her new book “What Happened,” her chronicle of a surprisingly unsuccessful presidential campaign.

She also had herself to blame for the acclaimed hypocrisy and double standards she feels she endured from the media, Republicans and even some Democrats who have criticised what they call a lackluster campaign.

• Her regrets and pride

Clinton said, “I’ve spent part of nearly every day since November 8, 2016, wrestling with a single question: Why did I lose? Sometimes it’s hard to focus on anything else. I go back over my own shortcomings and the mistakes we made. I take responsibility for all them.”

She proudly boasted in her author’s note that she soundly defeated Trump in the popular vote, winning 65,844,610 votes, nearly 3 million more than her opponent.

“More votes than any candidate for president has ever received, other than,” she wrote.

• The missed opportunities

Despite her popular vote exploit, she also acknowledged she could have had a stronger message and spent more time in battleground states.

Referring to Michigan and Wisconsin where Trump claimed shocking wins, she said, “I suppose it is possible that a few more trips to Saginaw or a few more ads on the air in Waukesha could have tipped a couple thousand votes here and there”.

Clinton who said she didn’t see the loss coming, never traveled to Wisconsin, which was won by the Republican party for the first time since 1984.

“We had 133 staff on the ground and spent nearly $3 million on TV but if our data (or anyone else’s) had shown we were in danger of course we would have invested more. I would have torn up my schedule, which was designed based on the best information we had, and camped out there,” she lamented.

• The media impact

Also like Trump, Clinton frequently targeted the media which she claims treated her unfairly.

“Trump should have reported his performance as an in-kind contribution,” referring to NBC’s “Commander in Chief Forum,” where she and Trump both did separate interviews with moderator Matt Lauer, and blasted the news anchor for his focus on her email controversy.

“Later there were rumours ginned up by fake news reports that I was so mad at him I stormed off stage, threw a tantrum, and shattered a water glass. While I didn’t do any of that, I can’t say I didn’t fantasise about shaking some sense into Lauer while I was out there” – she used the Lauer episode to hammer the media’s fixation with her email debacle from her time as secretary of State.

• Her personal confession

“I made a mistake with my emails. I apologised, I explained, I explained and apologised some more,” she wrote in the book. “Yet, here we were, after all these months, and after the FBI finished its work, at a forum supposed to be about the security of our country, and to balance the fact that Trump was going to have a hard time answering even the most straightforward questions, we were spending our time on emails.”

She didn’t blame over-confidence for her loss, nor put blame on her staff. “I’ve been a part of a lot of campaigns going all the way back to 1968, and this was the most collegial and collaborative I’ve seen. So how did it go? Well, we didn’t win. But I can say with zero equivocation that my team made me enormously proud,” she wrote.

• The Joe Biden effect

Clinton took a little swipe at Democrats like former Vice President Joe Biden, who has been critical of her on the heels of the campaign, saying the party “did not talk about what it always stood for, and that was how to maintain a burgeoning middle class.”

“I find this fairly remarkable, considering that Joe himself campaigned for me all over the Midwest and talked plenty about the middle class,” Clinton says in the book. “Also, it’s just not true. Not even close.”

• Obama’s advice

The former Senator acknowledged the piece of advice that President Obama gave her throughout the campaign that she needed more message discipline, and he was right.

“My advisers had to deal with a candidate — me — who often wanted something new to say, as opposed to repeating the same stump speech over and over. In addition, more than in any race I can remember, we were constantly buffeted by events from the email controversy, to WikiLeaks to mass shootings and terrorist attacks.”

• The Russia rhetoric

Clinton will never spare Russia for its meddling in the election nor would she hide the impact it had on her loss. She also berated James Comey, the former FBI Director for his decision days before the election to briefly reopen an investigation into her use of a private email server.

In defense of her blame on Russia and Comey, she said, “Many in the political media don’t want to hear about how these things happened and how these things tipped the election in the final days. They say their beef is that I’m not taking responsibility for my mistakes, but I have and I do again throughout this book.

“Their real problem is they can’t bear to face their own role in helping elect Trump, from providing him free airtime to giving my emails three times more coverage than all the issues affecting people’s lives combined,” she wrote.

“If it’s all my fault, then the media doesn’t need to do any soul searching. Republicans can say Putin’s meddling had no consequences. Democrats don’t need to question their own assumptions and prescriptions. Everyone can just move on. I wish it were that easy but it’s not,” she added.

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