Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Reading Politics: What Happened, Shattered, and Fear

In the past few months, I have read What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, and Fear: Trump in the White House, by Bob Woodward.

As was the case with Fire and Fury, which I read earlier in the year, I wasn't really surprised by much in Fear. Any relatively sane person observing events since Trump's inauguration in 2017 would find the atrocities Woodward describes much as they expected. It's fairly easy to discern who Woodward's major sources were--Priebus, Porter, Bannon, Cohn, Dowd, and Lindsey Graham--and, of course, the story is thus filtered through their points of view. Porter comes across as more important and reasoned than I had previous thought him to be (with just a, you know, little violence against women problem); Kelly comes across as less focused and more hair-triggered than I had realized. And Lindsey Graham--good grief, he should really be voted out of office. Perhaps most noteworthy about the book is that it is the only book I've ever read that ends with the words "You're a fucking liar" (although John Dowd has denied ever saying or thinking that statement attributed to him).

Hillary Clinton's book was probably written too soon--before the shock of her defeat had fully worn off (if it ever will). She blames "what happened" primarily on the undue attention to the emails and the interference of James Comey, with some misogyny thrown in as well. One anecdote that gave me a sense that she still doesn't "get" her own failure to make the kind of connection with people that she wants is the story of meeting with Black Lives Matter activists. Even after time has past, she still doesn't seem to understand that they wanted her to listen to them, not share strategies with them about how to be effective.

Shattered presents a different perspective on "what happened." While the authors would agree that the email "scandal" and Comey's actions were significant in her loss, they see those events as playing into a larger story of people's distrust of the Clintons. They also find much to critique in her campaign, including an over-reliance on analytics (based on bad data) and the attempt to bring new areas into the Democratic tent (e.g., Arizona) rather than solidifying traditional Democratic strongholds, which she later lost. Ironically, the authors suggest that if the campaign had listened to "old pols" like Bill, she might well have won the election (and, of course, we do have to remember that she did win the popular vote).

One of the tidbits in Shattered that I found interesting was that the Clintons evidently place high premium on loyalty--which gives them something in common with Donald Trump. This has gotten me thinking about loyalty--how often do most adults think about whether someone is loyal to them? I don't think I've had that thought since my school days, which, trust me, were a long time ago. When I consider how someone has acted towards me (which I rarely do), I think about it in the same terms I use to evaluate any action: Does it adhere to important values or ethical standards? If not, was there a motivation behind the action that I can understand even if I don't agree? Thinking about loyalty to self seems very immature (or for educators of my era, very low on Kohlberg's stages of moral development or Gilligan's stages of ethical care).

So is this obsession with loyalty simply a quirk of these three (Bill, Hillary, and Donald) flawed people or a correlate of the ego required to run for high office or run a business empire or a defense mechanism when one operates in a cut-throat environment or something else entirely? I'm interested in what others think about this issue--and may be interested enough to do some digging to see if anyone has researched the question. But right now, I need a break from the dark side of human activities--perhaps a good murder mystery!

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