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I’ve always thought about policy in a very practical way. It’s how we solve problems and make life better for people. I try to learn as much as I can about the challenges people face and then work with the smartest experts I can find to come up with solutions that are achievable, affordable, and will actually make a measurable difference. For the campaign, I hired a policy team with deep experience in government and relied on an extensive network of outside advisors drawn from academia, think tanks, and the private sector. The crew in Brooklyn proudly hung a sign above their desks that read “Wonks for the Win.” They produced reams of position papers. Many included budget scores, substantive footnotes—the whole nine yards. It felt like a White House-in-waiting, which is exactly what I had in mind. I wanted to be able to hit the ground running, ready to sign executive orders and work with Congress to pass as much legislation as possible in my first hundred days in office. I also wanted voters to know exactly what they could expect from me as President, how it would affect their lives, and be able to hold me accountable for delivering.

Over the course of the 2016 race, I also came to better appreciate other ways of thinking about policy: as a window to a candidate’s character and a tool for mobilization.

Joe Biden likes to say, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” This is something I’ve always believed as well: that the policies you propose say a lot about your principles and priorities. You can evaluate a candidate’s childcare plan based on how much it will cost, who it will help, and whether it has a chance of passing Congress. But you can also see it as a window into the candidate’s heart: this is a person who cares about children and believes society has a responsibility to help care for the most vulnerable among us. The piece that perhaps I undervalued is that, from this perspective, the details of the plan may matter less than how it’s framed and sold to the public—in other words, the optics of it. I cared about the optics, but not nearly as much as I cared about the merits of the plans themselves, and it showed.

Policy can also be a source of inspiration. I don’t know how many Trump supporters really believed that he’d build a giant wall across the entire southern border and get Mexico to pay for it. But hearing him say it got them excited. You don’t have to like the idea to see that it gave them something to talk to their friends about, tweet, and post on Facebook. It was a rallying call more than it was a credible policy proposal, but that didn’t make it any less powerful—especially if voters weren’t hearing me talk about immigration or any of their economic concerns because of overwhelming coverage of emails.

These different ways of thinking about policy helped shape both the primaries and the general election in 2016.

From the beginning, I expected a strong primary challenge from the left. It happens almost every time, and it was clear this time that there was a lot of populist energy waiting to find a champion. Anger at the financial industry had been building for years. The Occupy Wall Street movement had helped shine a light on the problem of income inequality. And after years of biting their tongues about the Obama administration’s compromises, left-wing Democrats were ready to let loose.

Senator Elizabeth Warren was the name most often mentioned as a potential candidate, but I wasn’t convinced she was going to jump in. After all, she had joined all the other Democratic women Senators in signing a letter urging me to run. I’ve long admired Elizabeth’s passion and tenacity, especially her farsighted efforts to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2011, which has now returned nearly $12 billion to more than twenty-nine million Americans ripped off by predatory lenders, credit card companies, and other corporate miscreants. So before I announced my candidacy, I invited her to my house in Washington to take her temperature and see if we might be able to work together. I think we both were a little wary, but we approached each other with good faith, good intentions, and open minds. I came away convinced that if Elizabeth believed her views and priorities would be included and respected in my campaign, she might become my champion rather than my challenger. In our meeting, we talked about some of the issues she cares about most, including student debt and financial reform. Knowing that Elizabeth believes “personnel is policy,” I asked her to recommend experts whose advice I could seek. She gave me a list, and my team methodically worked through it, making sure our agenda was informed by the perspectives of people she trusted. Two friends we share in common—the political consultant Mandy Grunwald, who also worked for Elizabeth, and the former financial regulator Gary Gensler, who served as my campaign’s chief financial officer—helped us stay connected. Later, Elizabeth was on my list of potential choices for Vice President.

Elizabeth never joined the race, but Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialist Senator from Vermont, did. Even though I understood that a lot of Democratic primary voters were looking for a left-wing alternative, I admit I didn’t expect Bernie to catch on as much as he did. Nothing in my experience in American politics suggested that a Socialist from Vermont could mount a credible campaign for the White House. But Bernie proved to be a disciplined and effective politician. He tapped into powerful emotional currents in the electorate. And he was aided by the fact that the primaries began with the white, liberal bastions of Iowa and New Hampshire, his neighboring state. When a Des Moines Register poll in January 2016 found that 43 percent of likely Iowa Democratic caucusgoers identified as Socialists, I knew there could be trouble ahead.

Bernie and I had a spirited contest of ideas, which was invigorating, but I nonetheless found campaigning against him to be profoundly frustrating. He didn’t seem to mind if his math didn’t add up or if his plans had no prayer of passing Congress and becoming law. For Bernie, policy was about inspiring a mass movement and forcing a conversation about the Democratic Party’s values and priorities. By that standard, I would say he succeeded. But it worried me. I’ve always believed that it’s dangerous to make big promises if you have no idea how you’re going to keep them. When you don’t deliver, it will make people even more cynical about government.

No matter how bold and progressive my policy proposals were—and they were significantly bolder and more progressive than anything President Obama or I had proposed in 2008—Bernie would come out with something even bigger, loftier, and leftier, regardless of whether it was realistic or not. That left me to play the unenviable role of spoilsport schoolmarm, pointing out that there was no way Bernie could keep his promises or deliver real results.

Jake Sullivan, my top policy advisor, told me it reminded him of a scene from the 1998 movie There’s Something About Mary. A deranged hitchhiker says he’s come up with a brilliant plan. Instead of the famous “eight-minute abs” exercise routine, he’s going to market “seven-minute abs.” It’s the same, just quicker. Then the driver, played by Ben Stiller, says, “Well, why not six-minute abs?” That’s what it was like in policy debates with Bernie. We would propose a bold infrastructure investment plan or an ambitious new apprenticeship program for young people, and then Bernie would announce basically the same thing, but bigger. On issue after issue, it was like he kept proposing four-minute abs, or even no-minute abs. Magic abs!

Someone sent me a Facebook post that summed up the dynamic in which we were caught:

BERNIE: I think America should get a pony.

HILLARY: How will you pay for the pony? Where will the pony come from? How will you get Congress to agree to the pony?

BERNIE: Hillary thinks America doesn’t deserve a pony.

BERNIE SUPPORTERS: Hillary hates ponies!

HILLARY: Actually, I love ponies.

BERNIE SUPPORTERS: She changed her position on ponies! #WhichHillary? #WitchHillary

HEADLINE: “Hillary Refuses to Give Every American a Pony”

DEBATE MODERATOR: Hillary, how do you feel when people say you lie about ponies?

WEBSITE HEADLINE: “Congressional Inquiry into Clinton’s Pony Lies”

TWITTER TRENDING: #ponygate

Early in the race, in 2015, there was a day when Bernie and I both happened to be in the Amtrak passenger lounge at New York’s Penn Station waiting for the train to D.C. We talked for a bit, and he said he hoped we could avoid personal attacks, including on our families. I know what that’s like. I agreed and said I hoped we could keep our debates focused on substance.

Yet despite this pledge, as time went on, Bernie routinely portrayed me as a corrupt corporatist who couldn’t be trusted. His clear implication was that because I accepted campaign donations from people on Wall Street—just as President Obama had done—I was “bought and paid for.”

This attack was galling for many reasons, not least because Bernie and I agreed on the issue of campaign finance reform; the need to get dark money out of politics; and the urgency of preventing billionaires, powerful corporations, and special interests from buying elections. We both supported a constitutional amendment to overturn the disastrous Supreme Court decision in Citizens United that opened the floodgates to super PACs and secret money. I also proposed new measures to boost disclosure and transparency and to match small donor contributions, based on New York City’s successful system, which would help level the playing field for everyday Americans.

Where Bernie and I differed was that he seemed to see the dysfunction of our politics almost solely as a problem of money, whereas I thought ideology and tribalism also played significant roles. Bernie talked as if 99 percent of Americans would back his agenda if only the lobbyists and super PACs disappeared. But that wouldn’t turn small-government conservatives into Scandinavian Socialists or make religious fundamentalists embrace marriage equality and reproductive rights. I also was—and am—concerned about the Republican-led assault on voting rights, their efforts to gerrymander safe congressional districts, and the breakdown of comity in Congress. In addition to getting big money out of politics, I thought we had to wage and win the battle of ideas, while also reaching across the aisle more aggressively to hammer out compromises. That’s how we can start to break down the gridlock and actually get things done again.

Because we agreed on so much, Bernie couldn’t make an argument against me in this area on policy, so he had to resort to innuendo and impugning my character. Some of his supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, took to harassing my supporters online. It got ugly and more than a little sexist. When I finally challenged Bernie during a debate to name a single time I changed a position or a vote because of a financial contribution, he couldn’t come up with anything. 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. He certainly shared my horror at the thought of Donald Trump becoming President, and I appreciated that he campaigned for me in the general election. 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. He was right that Democrats needed to strengthen our focus on working families and that there’s always a danger of spending too much time courting donors because of our insane campaign finance system. He also engaged a lot of young people in the political process for the first time, which is extremely important. But I think he was fundamentally wrong about the Democratic Party—the party that brought us Social Security under Roosevelt; Medicare and Medicaid under Johnson; peace between Israel and Egypt under Carter; broad-based prosperity and a balanced budget under Clinton; and rescued the auto industry, passed health care reform, and imposed tough new rules on Wall Street under Obama. I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were, too.

Throughout the primaries, every time I wanted to hit back against Bernie’s attacks, I was told to restrain myself. Noting that his plans didn’t add up, that they would inevitably mean raising taxes on middle-class families, or that they were little more than a pipe dream—all of this could be used to reinforce his argument that I wasn’t a true progressive. My team kept reminding me that we didn’t want to alienate Bernie’s 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.

I eagerly looked forward to our first debate in October 2015. At last, that was a place where it would be appropriate to punch back. I held long prep sessions at my house to map out thrusts and parries with Jake, Ron Klain, Karen Dunn, and Bob Barnett, who played Bernie in our practice sessions.

I was determined to use this first debate with Bernie to go straight at the core differences between us. I wanted to debunk the false charge that I wasn’t a true progressive and explain why I thought Socialism was wrong for America—and that those two propositions were in no way contradictory. It was beyond frustrating that Bernie acted as if he had a monopoly on political purity and that he had set himself up as the sole arbiter of what it meant to be progressive, despite giving short shrift to important issues such as immigration, reproductive rights, racial justice, and gun safety. I believed we could and should fight both for more equal economic opportunities and greater social justice. They go hand in hand, and it’s wrong to sacrifice the latter in the name of the former.

As the date approached, the first debate took on added significance. Bernie was rising in the polls. Vice President Biden was considering jumping in the race. And I was set to testify before the Republican-created special congressional committee investigating the terrorist attacks in Benghazi. It seemed as if everything would come to a head during one week in October.

In the end, Biden bowed out. The Republicans swung at me and missed at the eleven-hour-long Benghazi hearing. And the debate went better than I could have hoped.

Beforehand, I was full of nerves but confident I had prepared as well as I possibly could and excited to finally stop biting my tongue and get in there and mix it up. I got my chance. Bernie and I clashed right out of the gate on Socialism and capitalism, whether Denmark should serve as a model for America, and what it means to be a progressive. “I love Denmark,” I said (and I do), but we aren’t Denmark. “We are the United States of America. It’s our job to rein in the excesses of capitalism so that it doesn’t run amok and doesn’t cause the kind of inequities we’re seeing in our economic system. But we would be making a grave mistake to turn our backs on what built the greatest middle class in the history of the world.” My defense of the American system of free enterprise may not have helped me with those self-identified Socialists in Iowa, but what mattered to me in that moment was saying what I believed.

The moderator, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, pressed me on whether I was really a progressive or just a squishy moderate or a shape-shifting opportunist. I explained that I had been consistent throughout my career in fighting for a set of core values and principles. “I’m a progressive,” I said, “but I’m a progressive who likes to get things done.” I thought that summed up my fundamental disagreement with Bernie fairly well.

Still, and this is important, Bernie deserves credit for understanding the political power of big, bold ideas. His call for single-payer health care, free college, and aggressive Wall Street reform inspired millions of Americans, especially young people. After I won the nomination, he and I collaborated on a plan to make college more affordable that combined the best elements of what we’d both proposed during the primaries. That kind of compromise is essential in politics if you want to get anything done. Then we worked together to write the most progressive Democratic platform in memory.

Bernie and I may have had different views about the role of policy—a road map for governing versus a tool for mobilization—but Donald Trump didn’t care about policy at all. He seemed proud of his ignorance and didn’t even pretend to come up with plans for how he’d build his wall, fix health care, bring back all the lost jobs in manufacturing and coal mining, and defeat ISIS. It was like he’d just wave a magic wand. He ridiculed me for taking the job seriously. “She’s got people that sit in cubicles writing policy all day,” he told Time magazine. “It’s just a waste of paper.” I kept waiting for reporters and voters to challenge him on his empty, deceitful promises. In previous elections, there was always a moment of reckoning when candidates had to show they were serious and their plans were credible. Not this time. Most of the press was too busy chasing ratings and scandals, and Trump was too slippery to be pinned down. He understood the needs and impulses of the political press well enough that if he gave them a new rabbit every day, they’d never catch any of them. So his reckoning never came.

Trump also refused to prepare for our debates. It showed. When we went head-to-head for the first time on September 26, 2016, at Long Island’s Hofstra University, he wilted under questioning and nearly had a full-on meltdown. He tried to turn it around by attacking me for not showing up fumbling and incoherent like he did. I wasn’t having it. Yeah, I did prepare, I said. “You know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be President.”

Later, Chuck Todd of NBC’s Meet the Press actually criticized me for being too prepared. I’m not sure how that’s possible—can you be too prepared for something so important? Does Chuck ever show up for Meet the Press and just wing it? The fact that I was up against Donald Trump—perhaps the least prepared man in history, both for the debates and for the presidency—made the comment even more puzzling. Were they so enthralled by his rabbit-a-day strategy that insults, false charges, and fact-free assertions were now the best evidence of authenticity?

I thought about that exchange often as I watched Trump’s first hundred days in office. I even allowed myself a little chuckle when he fumed, “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” He also discovered that foreign policy is harder than it looks. The President of China had to explain the complexity of the North Korea challenge to him. “After listening for ten minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” Trump said. Can you hear my palm slapping my forehead? Sometimes it seems like Trump didn’t even want to be President at all. “This is more work than in my previous life,” he told a reporter. “I thought it would be easier.”

I can’t help but think about how different my first hundred days would have been. A haunting line from the nineteenth-century poet John Greenleaf Whittier comes to mind: “For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’?”

Trump’s first major initiative was the Muslim ban, which immediately ran into trouble in court. Mine would have been a jobs and infrastructure package funded by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. He failed to start building his great, beautiful wall paid for by Mexico. I would have pushed for comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship. He appointed an Attorney General whose record on civil rights was so problematic, Coretta Scott King once warned that making him a judge would “irreparably damage” the work of her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I would have worked across the aisle on bipartisan criminal justice reform—there was a real opportunity there for progress. He tried to repeal Obamacare and strip health care away from tens of millions of Americans. I would have gone after the drug companies to bring down prices and fought for a public option to get us even closer to affordable, truly universal health care. He alienated allies like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, while embracing dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. What would I have done? There’s nothing I was looking forward to more than showing Putin that his efforts to influence our election and install a friendly puppet had failed. Our first face-to-face meeting would really have been something. I know he must be enjoying everything that’s happened instead. But he hasn’t had the last laugh yet.