Authors Detail Hillary Clinton's Stunning Defeat in 'Shattered"
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - The authors of the new book, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, talked with Chris Stigall on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT, revealing some of the behind the scenes details from Clinton's stunning defeat to Donald Trump and laying the responsibility at her feet.
Parnes said, looking back, that the outcome of the 2016 presidential election is still a bit surprising.
"She had a definite advantage, within just knowledge of how to run a presidential campaign and the infrastructure and the financial backing and the star power. When you saw Donald Trump, especially towards the end, post Access Hollywood tape, he didn't have many surrogates. Here, Hillary Clinton was with President Obama and Michelle Obama and her husband...How are they going to lose? She has all these people behind her and they seemed to be doing well. I don't think it was so much that the media chose to close it's eyes. It just seemed like the obvious thing."
Allen divulged that on the inside, there were cracks in the facade that Clinton's team could never fully come to grips with.
"People weren't willing to raise problems internally and they weren't able to raise problems externally, through the press, which means she was only hearing some of the problems that were going on in her campaign. She wasn't able to fully judge where things were. It's as if there were two different campaign worlds, the one we all thought we were living in and the real one where Hillary Clinton was in deep trouble and Donald Trump was in position to win."
Ultimately, he stated that he reason Clinton is not President today stems from mistakes she made along the way.
"You do have to place most of the blame on the candidate when the campaign fails. I think this book sees Hillary Clinton as a fully three dimensional character. There are positives and negatives. It's not really a value judgement about her personality but it does lay the majority of the blame at her feet. The basic analysis of the failure of this campaign is Hillary Clinton's failure to come up with a message, her inexplicable use of a private server, her speeches to Wall Street banks, all of those things set the stage for her to lose a campaign that was certainly winnable."
Parnes believes there is something in the book for everyone, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum.
"For Democrats, we wanted it to be, partly, therapy and, partly, how do we pick up the pieces and move on from here. For Republicans, I think, they're interested in learning what happened. I think a lot of people didn't expect to win and, clearly, Donald Trump pulled out this victory and they were curious about how it all went down."
