A new book details the trials and tribulations of Clinton’s failed second bid to become the first woman president. “It was like standing on a beach and seeing a slow-moving tsunami from the middle of the ocean moving towards you, and you never move,” Jonathan Allen said in a recent interview with Yahoo! News.
Allen is the co-author of “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.”
Allen says that Clinton refused to accept that populism was, in fact, a dominant trend. He writes that Clinton was virtually blind to how populism fueled Brexit and was taking hold as a global force.
Indeed, former President Bill Clinton seemed to deny Brexit up until the Clinton camp’s doomsday. Following the former secretary of state’s defeat on election night, the Arkansas democrat said of his wife’s loss, “It’s like Brexit … I guess it’s real.”
It was real enough to hand the presidency to Trump, who was publicly shamed for saying if you’re wealthy, women let you “grab them by the p***y” in the middle of a campaign to hold America’s highest office.
In a great reveal, Allen discloses that following Clinton’s loss to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the New Hampshire primaries, Clinton demurred, “I don’t understand what’s happening in this country.” Perhaps that’s not the ideal position to be in when you’re running for president.
Clinton not only failed to grasp the basic reality of populist sentiment but also actively suppressed the idea that the ideology might pose a challenge. “This is somebody who fundamentally believes in the establishment,” Allen says.
The concept that Americans would vote for someone who promised to disrupt politics as usual confounded the presidential hopeful. It was “too hard for her to grasp” that widespread popularity of anti-establishment candidates would tip the scales and “sort of burn down” a framework that she believed in.
The candidate’s incapacity or unwillingness to pick up on populism as a trend caused her to lose ties with white, working-class voters, Allen noted.
