Book of the week: A portrait of a cynical politician

Book review: Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed CampaignA damning account of Hillary Clinton's failed presidential campaign.

Dr Matthew Partridge
By
published
in Features

845-Book-3-100

Publish by Crown Publishing, £16.99

Buy at Amazon

This book opens with a telling story. It's the day of Hillary Clinton's announcement that she's going to run for president. Although she's essentially been running for office ever since Barack Obama was re-elected, she still hasn't settled on a final version of her speech. It isn't that the drafts her aides are coming up with are unsatisfactory; more that she just doesn't know why she's running.

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Over the next 18 months, this lack of a motivation complicated what should have been an easy victory. As a result, it took a long time for her to dispose of a primary challenge from a self-styled socialist (one of the big taboos in US politics) and she ended up losing the solidly Democratic states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. She made other big mistakes along the way: staff infighting, an extreme reluctance to spend the millions at her disposal, and a campaign manager who ignored what the people on the ground were telling him, were also big factors.

What makes the book so damming is that the authors haven't set out to write a hatchet job. In fact Allen and Parnes go out of their way to write a sympathetic account. They accept the Clinton team's complaints about the impact of leaked emails and even argue that the "Access Hollywood" tapes, which revealed Trump's sexism, were actually bad for Clinton, because they distracted people's attention from Trump's apparent endorsement of Russian hacking. Overall, the picture that emerges is one of a cynical, self-centred politician who didn't care that much about her core voters, thus allowing an even bigger fraud to win the White House.

Dr Matthew Partridge
Dr Matthew Partridge
Shares editor, MoneyWeek

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

Follow Matthew on Twitter: @DrMatthewPartri

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