فصل 80

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Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.

—John F. Kennedy Why

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 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.

I also think about the strong headwinds we faced, including the rise of tribal politics in America and across the globe, the restlessness of a country looking for change, excessive coverage of my emails, the unprecedented late intervention by the director of the FBI, the sophisticated misinformation campaign directed from the Kremlin, and the avalanche of fake news. Those aren’t excuses—they’re things that happened, whether we like it or not.

I think about all that, and about our deeply divided country and our ability to live, work, and reason together.

And that’s all before I finish my morning cup of coffee. Then it starts over again.

In the spring of 2017, I was asked by thoughtful journalists such as Nicholas Kristof, Christiane Amanpour, Rebecca Traister, and Kara Swisher to reflect on what happened in 2016 and what lessons all Americans—and Democrats in particular—can learn from my defeat.

This is an important discussion to have. It’s not only about the past—not by a long shot. After successfully interfering in one presidential election, Russia will certainly try to do it again. And Democrats are engaged in a vital debate right now about the future of our party, which turns in no small part on the question of what went wrong in 2016 and how to fix it.

Here’s an example of the sort of questions I was getting:

“Could the campaign have been better?” Christiane Amanpour asked me. “Where was your message? Do you take any personal responsibility?”

“I take absolute personal responsibility,” I replied. “I was the candidate. I was the person who was on the ballot.” Then I explained that while we didn’t run a perfect campaign, Nate Silver, the widely respected statistician who correctly predicted the winner in 49 states in 2008 and all 50 in 2012, has said that we were on our way to winning until Jim Comey’s October 28 letter derailed us. You can agree or disagree with that analysis, but it’s what Silver’s data said.

The reaction to my interviews was negative, to put it mildly.

“Dear Hillary Clinton, please stop talking about 2016,” wrote one columnist in USA Today. CNN, still stuck in false equivalency mode, declared, “Clinton, Trump can’t stop airing their 2016 grievances.” And one New York Daily News columnist decided the appropriate response was: “Hey, Hillary Clinton, shut the f— up and go away already.” Seriously, they printed that in the newspaper.

I understand why some people don’t want to hear anything that sounds remotely like “relitigating” the election. People are tired. Some are traumatized. Others are focused on keeping the discussion about Russia in the national security realm and away from politics. I get all that. But it’s important that we understand what really happened. Because that’s the only way we can stop it from happening again.

I also understand why there’s an insatiable demand in many quarters for me to take all the blame for losing the election on my own shoulders and quit talking about Comey, the Russians, fake news, sexism, or anything else. Many in the political media don’t want to hear about 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.

Other candidates who have lost the presidency have been allowed—even encouraged—to discuss what went wrong and why. After John Kerry lost the election in 2004, he quite reasonably said that the release of a tape from Osama bin Laden a day before the election had a significant effect on the outcome of the race. The press was interested in what he had to say. They want me to stop talking.

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. So I’m going to try to explain how I understand what happened, both the unexpected interventions that swung the race at the end, and the structural challenges that made it close to begin with. You don’t have to agree with my take. But counter with evidence, with a real argument. Because we have to get this right.

Here goes.