I’ve noticed that there have been a number of diaries suggesting that, somehow, Donald Trump won the election because Bernie Sanders did… something. That struck me as very strange! He wasn’t the candidate, and the candidate the Democrats did put forward massively outspent Trump and had the support of the entire party establishment.
But now I see I was wrong! There’s apparently a new book called “Shattered” that explains it all very clearly. The link is to a nice summary. Here’s some highlights:
Mook was insistent that the software would be revered as the campaign’s secret weapon once Clinton won the White House. With his commitment to Ada and the provided data analytics, Mook often butted heads with Democratic Party officials, who were concerned about the lack of attention in persuading undecided voters in Clinton’s favor.
Now, you might think that Hillary’s hand-picked campaign manager deciding to run a personality-based campaign and not bother with the industrial Midwest is just a kind of unforced error caused by over-confidence in a quantitative model. This is a known thing.
But if we think more carefully, we see that this is actually Bernie’s fault. His campaign was basically just a few economic policies, to the extent that he lost the primary. Mook and Hillary can’t be faulted for going in the opposite direction, and just ignoring states where Bernie over performed in the primary.
When Clinton replied, “Brianna,” Palmieri booked her on CNN with Brianna Keilar. It turned out that Clinton had actually meant “Bianna,” as in Yahoo! News’ Bianna Golodryga, the wife of Obama Budget Director Peter Orszag.
Again, this feels like comical incompetence. Why wouldn’t Hillary’s closest confidants just intuit that she would only work with the spouse of a revolving-door finance executive?
A deeper look shows Bernie Sanders at work once again. His focus on over-financializaton in the economy obviously scrambled Jennifer Palmieri’s brain.
While Bill Clinton had an obvious personal investment in his wife’s success, the campaign saw his image as a potential liability despite his past success in wooing working-class white voters, who wound up voting en masse for Mr. Trump.
Bernie Sanders is even so powerful that he managed to get Hillary to mis-asses how own husband’s utility on the campaign trail!
In the aftermath of her Democratic primary defeat in 2008, Clinton had an aide download the emails of all her staffers, according to the book. A staffer told the authors that Clinton wanted to know “who was talking to who, who was leaking to who.”
As a final illustration of the power of Bernie Sanders: eight years before he started running against Hillary, he was able to make her act in a way that basically guaranteed only dysfunctional types would want to work on her campaign.
So, there you have it: It wasn’t the message, or the messenger, or the execution. It was all the fault of Bernard Sanders.