The New Yorker on Wednesday revealed the Hillary Clinton electoral victory cover that never saw the light of day.

The revered cultural magazine unveiled the magazine cover they would have released had Clinton won the presidential election last November. Titled “The First,” by French illustrator Malika Favre, the artwork promotes the magazine’s November 2017 interview with Clinton in which she discusses her controversial new memoir, What Happened.

“Over the past ten months, many Americans, regardless of how they voted, have contemplated what life would have looked like if Hillary Clinton had been elected President on November 8, 2016,” The New Yorker explained.

And, of course, Twitter had some thoughts on the art:</s>WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) - The State Department on Friday posted on its website a set of former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s emails that were related to a 2012 attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya.

The department is reviewing additional Clinton emails for later release. It said the Web address for the first batch of emails was: here

The site appeared to be loading slowly for many users, according to numerous posts by reporters on Twitter. (Reporting by Emily Stephenson)</s>Hillary Clinton’s visit to “The View” started with warm, long hugs, and ended with a gift.

The former Democratic presidential candidate entered the stage to Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger” and “The View” co-hosts’ eager greetings.

Whoopi Goldberg’s introduction was interrupted several times by cheers from the audience as Clinton took her seat.

Joy Behar expressed how shocked she was when Clinton lost the election.

“I was sure you were going to win” Behar told Clinton, to which Clinton responded to a laughing crowd, “So was I.”

“I went into mourning” Behar said, as the screen behind her showed the liberal host on election night wearing a black veil.

As the interview went on, Clinton and the women of “The View” commiserated over why the 69-year-old former Secretary of State lost the election to a man with zero political experience.

“I argue in the book, and I am pleased that other independent analysts have reached the same conclusion,” Clinton said. “I would have won if it wasn’t for [the Comey letter.]”

Clinton said it was only on election night that she realized she was not going to win.

“It was a shock…it wasn’t until that night that it really hit me,” Clinton recalled. “[Bill and I] didn’t cry that night… I write really painfully about what happened that night. I felt like I had to be strong for my family and my friends and my supporters and I hadn’t spent anytime thinking about a concession speech.”

Goldberg tried to make Clinton feel better by telling her no Democratic candidates have won back-to-back presidencies since 1948.

Behar butted in, “Well, you did win in fact,” and Clinton agreed saying, “I won the popular vote.”

The co-hosts also spoke out against those who criticize Clinton for staying married to Bill Clinton after his multiple affairs.

“I hear that people say ‘They have an arrangement.’ It’s called a marriage,” Clinton responded. “There have been a lot more happy days than sad or angry days, and I am very proud and grateful that I am married to my best friend.”

The “View” hosts cheered Clinton’s answer with chants of “Mind their own business” before presenting Clinton with a blazer that said “BACK UP” on it, referencing the Trump/Clinton debate where the GOP candidate roamed the stage and was sometimes shown behind Clinton.

The show’s conservative-leaning host, Jedidiah Bila, did hit Clinton with two questions that were borderline tough for the politician. Bila asked Clinton to respond to Democrats who dislike Clinton’s new memoir for looking too much at the past. She also asked Clinton about the leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee which revealed attempts to undermine Bernie Sander’s campaign in favor of Clinton.

You can find Sasha Savitsky on Twitter @SashaFB.</s>Hillary Clinton was a welcome guest on ABC’s “The View” Wednesday when the former presidential candidate sat down to discuss her new memoir “What Happened.”

Clinton walked onstage to Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger” where she was greeted with long hugs from the co-hosts of “The View.”

Whoopi Goldberg’s introduction was interrupted several times by cheers from the audience as Clinton took her seat.

Joy Behar expressed how shocked she was when Clinton lost the election.

Behar told Clinton, “I was sure you were going to win.”

Behar said back, “I went into mourning” as the screen behind her showed Behar on election night wearing a black veil.

You can find Sasha Savitsky on Twitter @SashaFB.</s>Is Hillary Clinton Right About Why She Lost?

In this week’s politics chat, we talk about Hillary Clinton’s new book. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Today’s chat topic: The media reaction to Hillary Clinton’s new book, released on Tuesday, “What Happened.”

We’re going to do this in two parts. First, we’ll talk about how the media has covered Clinton’s book. Then we’ll go through the various factors that Clinton points to in the book to explain her loss in 2016.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): So we’re covering the coverage of the coverage? Got it.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): We will tell you WHAT HAPPENED — no question mark.

micah: The headline for this will be WTF Happened!

OK, so first up: How would you describe the general coverage of Clinton’s book? As an opener (and Clare has talked about this): I’ve been struck by how much coverage there’s been of the very fact that she wrote a book.

But I’ll say again here: People who are out there saying that she should go quietly into the night are sort of being intellectually dishonest about what happens after campaigns. She was one of the major players in the election, she’s entitled to her telling of things, she is the Democrat who got more votes, so she represents a sizable ideological chunk of the party, etc. etc. etc.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): I expected there would be a lot of coverage. There are lots of reporters who covered her. Lots of opportunity for reporters who have slammed President Trump to now slam Clinton to show that they are balanced, will criticize both sides, etc.

clare.malone: Yeah, it’s totally fashionable to slam her on Twitter in a way that I do understand — she’s been around a long time, etc. But it’s out of whack.

natesilver: Are we talking about coverage of Clinton overall? Or, like, reviews of the book itself?

micah: Well, the latter has ballooned into the former, right?

natesilver: On the latter front, The New York Times published a review that was fairly gracious — considering that Clinton (mostly deservedly, IMO) criticized the NYT a lot in the book. Although, that review mostly sidestepped the media criticism parts of Clinton’s book, I think that this quote from Clinton — via Brian Stelter — gets at a key dynamic here:

micah: Clinton’s book may be a more accurate 2016 postmortem than most media postmortems.

Before we get to what the book itself lays out, though: How much of the “why won’t Clinton go away?” convo would be happening if Clinton were a man?

That has felt to me like it infuses a lot of the chatter surrounding the book.

clare.malone: Yeah, so I have some thoughts! Some of it has to do with political reporters explicitly; she’s been around a long time, it’s fashionable to hate her, etc. And I think she gets less respect from political reporters than say, John McCain or John Kerry did in the aftermaths of their campaigns. Female reporters play into this too.

But, in part, that’s because politics in general and political journalism in particular has a really … how you say? … masculine energy.

It picks up the inherent biases that we all have — women included — from being shaped in a patriarchal culture.

micah: I mean, Al Gore made a freaking movie after he lost and no one was like, “Why is he making this movie?” (At least, as far as I can remember.)

And Gore is a good comp because he too won the popular vote.

natesilver: There’s something about the overlap between Clinton being representative of the establishment — she is nobody’s idea of an underdog — and her being a woman that makes it especially tough for her.

perry: The “she should not write a book because she is distracting from the Democrats’ strategy” crowd is making such a dumb argument that it’s not really worth debating it.

micah: A lot of the criticism of the book goes something like “Clinton is blaming everyone else for her losing” instead of taking responsibility. Now, she very much does take responsibility for losing in the book. But she also points to other factors that helped Trump and hurt her.

natesilver: That criticism is such a dumb argument that it’s not really worth debating it.

To repeat the quote I linked to above, the media doesn’t want to debate the reasons for Clinton losing because it potentially makes them look really bad. Or some of them, anyway, since there was a lot of variation in how Clinton was covered from outlet to outlet.

micah: Let’s take this tweet from a Washington Examiner reporter:

clare.malone: It’s the tenor of these tweets that are the problem. Because, to use a favorite Nate Silver metaphor, it takes a lot of things to go wrong in order for a plane to crash.

micah: How dare Clinton do a reasonable postmortem on the 2016 election instead of nailing herself to a cross!

clare.malone: “Blame” vs. “causes of loss” are tonally different.

natesilver: Yeah. Tweets like these are implicitly (or sometimes explicitly) mocking Clinton for blaming all these other factors, apart from herself. And yet, if you look at the list — it’s a pretty darned good list! A lot of those factors were really important!

clare.malone: So, I used to be a fact-checker, and one of the things we would do when we would call around and make sure information was correct was include the context of a quote in a piece, give a person a fair shot at saying, “Hmm, that could be out of context.” And that’s what is really irritating about this kind of coverage — it’s really disingenuous to say she’s not taking responsibility AND it makes the discussion dumber and more boring.

But let’s go through each of the reasons for Clinton’s defeat listed in that tweet and answer this question: How big of a factor was this?

natesilver: Do we want to use a scale? Like 1 to 5?

perry: Can I reject the premise of this scale and propose my own? (kidding)

OK, first up: “The audacious information warfare waged from the Kremlin.”

There’s been some recent reporting fleshing out the extent to which Russia was playing a media game.

perry: 4. I feel like the whole Russian interference, the release of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s hacked e-mails was a huge factor in October. Maybe a 5 even.

clare.malone: There’s almost two levels to this, right?
• The effect that Russian interference/hacking/bots or whatever might have had on influencing disinformation to voters, etc.

micah: Yeah, we probably have to include the media’s amplifying effects for each of these.

clare.malone: I would agree with Perry that it was important from that email coverage angle.

natesilver: I’d say more like a 2.5 or a 3, on the Kremlin.

natesilver: It’s certainly hard to prove the connection, in part because it may have occurred in a lot of small ways, not all of which are necessarily uncovered yet.

Harry wrote about this in December.

clare.malone: I’m not sure that we know enough yet to know how influential the bots actually were in changing votes.

micah: But it being hard to measure doesn’t mean it didn’t have a big effect.

That’s some version of the availability heuristic, right? We’re assigning importance to the things we happen to be able to measure well.

natesilver: I mean, I agree. And giving it a 2.5 or 3 isn’t saying it’s nothing.

clare.malone: Now I’m interested to see what Nate gives a 5.

natesilver: I’m just saying — there are a lot of things that had a much clearer effect on the outcome.

natesilver: Some of which are also … problematic. Problematic in the sense of implicating other people’s judgment.

clare.malone: But this is the problem with numbers! (She says to numbers people.)

clare.malone: There are some squishy things that affected people in this election that we can’t quantify.

natesilver: Russia could have been a 1.5, or it could have been a 4.5. I suppose we don’t know. Maybe we’ll never know.

micah: Speaking of … next: “The unprecedented intervention in our election by the director of the FBI.”

natesilver: It was a big deal. And because it was a discrete event — it happened at one time — it’s relatively easy to measure.

There’s still a range of impacts, from maybe 1 percentage point of the national popular vote on the low end to 3 or 4 points on the high end. But you really have to twist yourself into a pretzel to conclude that the impact wasn’t large enough to cost Clinton the election.

clare.malone: I cosign with the above views.

natesilver: With that said, if the impact was only like 2 points in the polls — that was enough to swing a close election, obviously, but it also isn’t that large. Clinton’s gender could have had a larger impact, for instance. But that’s harder to quantify.

micah: We’ll get to that!

OK, next: “A political press that told voters that my emails were the most important story.”

For context, from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, here’s the amount of coverage of various topics on social media and top media outlets:

natesilver: Granted, this overlaps with the Comey letter. The Comey letter was a huge story in part because of the importance the press placed on “email stuff.”

clare.malone: It was important, in part because we have a media environment fed by social media that plays up the easily understood, salacious stories, and this was the salacious story for Clinton, although it obviously didn’t compare to the norm-busting GOP nominee.

Yeah, these things are all related. But I happen to think the Russia-related stuff (bots, Podesta emails) and Comey were more damaging than the controversy over Clinton’s private email server as secretary of state. She would have won, I think, if Podesta/Comey hadn’t revived the Clinton e-mail/scandal in the final weeks.

But I could be convinced otherwise.

natesilver: I don’t know. The email story completely dominated media coverage of Clinton.

Every week, it was the thing people heard by far the most about. Here’s a word cloud from Gallup of what people had read/heard the most about Clinton in the media from July 11 through Sept. 18 last year:

clare.malone: I would argue that it was the accelerant on an image problem Clinton already had, which is why I wouldn’t rate it a 5.

natesilver: But, Clare, I think a lot of that image problem was a self-perpetuating media narrative. We wrote about this way back in September 2015. It was apparent even back then.

clare.malone: Maybe you’re right, but this was an election cycle about crusty insiders vs. outsiders, and Clinton certainly falls into consummate insider camp, someone “above the rules.”

natesilver: She certainly doesn’t color strictly within the lines.

clare.malone: And that’s just because of years in the public eye, often not being viewed favorably — and, again, this is where you have to factor in some sexist societal views. But many critiques of her history in public life were also valid. We’re parsing here, I would note. I rate the emails as highly influential.

natesilver: Clinton has been viewed favorably at several points in her career. But usually they were points at which she didn’t threaten a man’s job or wasn’t otherwise being too ambitious.

natesilver: I’m just saying — there’s a lot of circular reasoning on the part of Clinton’s critics.

They’ll say, “She has a trust problem; therefore the public had a strong reaction to the emails.” But part of the reason that she has a trust problem is because stories are constantly framed as presenting a trust problem for her.

The Comey letter in October was a good example of this. Outlets jumped way out ahead of the story and presented it as “raising doubts” or “casting shadows” over her campaign even though it wasn’t clear what in the hell the letter was all about. It was a triumph of narrative over substance.

perry: I think we all agree about this. And my suspicion is that a lot of the bad coverage came from a desire to find a way to balance the sharp coverage of Trump with coverage that was negative about Clinton. The both-sides model of political journalism left you with 15 Trump scandals and 1 Clinton scandal, so you have to pump up the Clinton scandal/controversy/whatever to make up for that big gap since all of these outlets are obsessed with attacks from the right.

natesilver: Yeah, no doubt a lot of this stems from false equivalence.

clare.malone: Yessss … but can I say that Hillary Clinton also didn’t endear herself to a lot of “women in the center” when she made her first forays onto the national stage? She was not a very good “choice feminist” (the whole, “I suppose I could have stayed at home, baked cookies and had teas” thing), and I think, yes, people didn’t give her credit for evolving … but that’s just the breaks in public life. First impressions last.

natesilver: Basically, half the media’s problems in covering the election stemmed from actual liberal bias. And the other half stemmed from overcompensating for perceived liberal bias.

micah: Next: “Deep currents of anger and resentment flowing through our culture.”

natesilver: I’m not quite sure what that means — is she referring to racial resentment? The “deplorables”?

But Trump clearly became an effective conduit for people’s anger, so I have to give this one at least a 4.

clare.malone: I think it refers to that, but maybe also partisanship, right?

natesilver: Maybe that’s too low. Maybe it’s obviously a 5.

perry: 3? Those currents exist. I’m having a hard time seeing them as particularly unique or important to 2016, as opposed to being a part of every event in politics, Obama’s presidency, etc. Racial resentment may have gotten Trump the Republican nomination, but I’m not sure about the general election. (But again, I’m thinking this all through.)

micah: Let’s go to the next one!

natesilver: A 5 in the primary, but like a 2 in the general election. Here’s primary coverage from the Shorenstein Center:

perry: 3. If I were Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush, I would say 5.

Right. What Nate said.

clare.malone: Well Nate … howdya think he got to the general?

natesilver: That’s why I said a 5 in the primary!

micah: Trump also got far more news coverage than Clinton in the general, according to another Shorenstein study:

Though a lot of Trump’s coverage, just like Clinton’s, was negative:

clare.malone: The fact that Trump was Trump is more precisely what I’m talking about —

i.e., free coverage, but also a free pass when he says things about women, doesn’t release his taxes.

natesilver: I’m not sure the media’s constant focus on Trump was necessarily a bad thing for Clinton from day to day, although it did make it hard for her to drive a message. Slightly paradoxically, however, the fact that the media spent so much time focusing on Trump made it hard for anyone to focus on any one aspect of Trump’s behavior.

As you can see from the Gallup charts I posted earlier, people had lots of different feelings about Trump and heard lots of different negative stories about him. But none of them as persistently as Clinton and trust and emails.

micah: Next: “Fox News was turning politics into an evidence-free zone of seething resentments.”

natesilver: Yeesh. I guess like a 2.5? I think Fox News is pretty darn important to the history of American politics since 2000 or thereabouts. I’m not convinced they were particularly important in this general election, since they had a somewhat weird relationship with Trump.

perry: 2. Just if we are ranking things, I rank this lower. Fox’s highest-rated show gets 4 million viewers; more than 60 million people voted for Trump. There is a whole apparatus of Fox-like media that has the ethos of Fox, but if Fox closed tomorrow, that ecosystem would still thrive.

clare.malone: I think Facebook probably had more influence.

micah: Next: “Maybe it’s because I’m a woman, and we’re not used to women running for president.”

clare.malone: I’m sick of defending this, so someone else try.

natesilver: Shit, I was going to defer to you, Clare!

micah: I’ll happily do so. I’d rate this a 20, tbh.

perry: 4. I left this election thinking that many of the things said about Clinton would have been said, with different phrasing, about Elizabeth Warren, for example. Or any other woman.

micah: If you spent any time at Trump rallies, or watching Fox News, or reading the political web, or talking to voters at all, gender suffused EVERYTHING. You could see it in what people wrote on their signs, in the reasons they gave for disliking her, in the coverage of her speeches. It was implicit and explicit. Subconscious and conscious. I mean … good god.

micah: This is, again, an example of something that’s hard to measure, so people don’t talk about it enough.

But like … I’m as confident as I can be about anything that if not for misogyny/sexism, Clinton wins. It’s almost prima facie true. But there’s also lots of evidence for it.

natesilver: I’ll give a range of 2.5 to 5. I’m just not sure how to measure it. Which doesn’t mean it’s not important. Keep in mind that Clinton’s gender could have had some positive effects too — e.g., inspiring women to turn out. But obviously, the prior here is that it’s hard for women to advance, especially in traditionally male-dominated occupations, and no occupation has been more male-dominated than the presidency of the United States.

perry: I don’t think it’s worth ranking racism vs. sexism, but Obama, at least in 2008, was able to generate coverage that was not always infused with his race. He was inexperienced, but that was true and not really a racial critique. The things Clinton was criticized for (secretive, ambitious, untrustworthy, craven) were things that male politicians aren’t often criticized for.

perry: I want to emphasize, though, that I think a woman can be elected president, maybe as soon as 2020 and maybe in 2016 but for Russia/Comey.

clare.malone: It’s obviously a 5. And by the way, I would really urge men to think about the way that you interact with women on a daily basis as a stand-in for how you might have reacted to Hillary Clinton. Not even the women in your personal life, just take it professionally. How do you talk to women during meetings? Do you talk over them? Are you listening to what they actually say in meetings or just waiting to talk yourself? Do you take their ideas and fashion them as your own? Do you think their voices are kinda annoying sometimes because they remind you of a teacher? Are they always bringing up institutional sexism as part of the problem that they might face in day-to-day life? Do you secretly find that a little annoying to hear? It might be annoying to hear, but it’s annoying because it’s true!

Anyhow. It’s a 5. And by the way, lest anyone misunderstand me — this sexism applies to the portrayal of conservative female candidates as well. They get treated differently than men.

perry: And a 5 should be interpreted as America needs to do a lot of work on sexism — not that Democrats should run Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Tim Ryan, etc., in 2020. And I feel like there has been a bit of a move in the party toward the latter.

perry: If Biden was so electable, maybe he should get elected president instead of sniping about Clinton.

Second to last from that tweet: “The problems started with history. It was exceedingly difficult for either party to hold onto the White House for more than eight years in a row.”

natesilver: So, I’m gonna give this like a 4.25.

It’s not clear to me whether a party is actually at a disadvantage after holding the White House for two straight terms. But it’s certainly not at an advantage either, and Gore lost in 2000 under highly similar circumstances to Clinton.

perry: 3. I think this is generally true. But once the candidate was Trump, that changed the calculus a lot. Trump has governed like a traditional Republican in most ways. But it wasn’t clear that would be the case during the campaign.

natesilver: Fundamentally, the media treated the election as being Clinton’s to lose, but it wasn’t. She actually overperformed the consensus of fundamentals-based political science models by a point or two. Now, those models are very blunt instruments. But they’re worth something.

micah: OK, last one from the tweet: “There was also a ‘Clinton fatigue’ to consider.” Then I have two more quick ones (Bernie Sanders and not visiting Wisconsin).

perry: 2. This may have hurt Clinton in 2008 and in the Democratic primary in 2016. The broader electorate views her husband and his tenure pretty positively, though.

natesilver: I’m not sure about Clinton fatigue in particular, but I buy something to the idea that it was an anti-establishment/anti-incumbent climate. This is sort of tied in to the point above, actually, about it not being an advantage to run as part of the incumbent party once your party has been in power.

clare.malone: Yeah, the establishment vs. outsider zeitgeist was real.

natesilver: Also, it seems important to me that voters who disliked both Clinton and Trump — about 20 percent of the electorate — went mostly for Trump. That was worth a net swing of about 3 points to him, compared with if they’d split evenly.

Anyway, I’m giving this one like a 3.75.

clare.malone: And in that sense, she’s just been around too long if you’re, say, an Obama-Trump voter who’s telling people you’re voting for change to shake up the system.

natesilver: In practice what probably happened was: The environment was pretty neutral or maybe slightly negative for a Democratic candidate. Clinton was a below-average candidate, but not terrible. Trump was also a below-average candidate, but his weaknesses weren’t as much of a liability as the media assumed. All of those worked out to Clinton winning the popular vote, but only narrowly. And Trump benefited from the Electoral College, of course.

micah: OK, now two other “reasons Clinton lost” that have been bouncing around and which Clinton talks about in “What Happened.”

natesilver: Anything about Sanders in particular?

I’d basically say like a 2, though.

micah: His “system is rigged” argument against Clinton during the primary set Trump’s message up perfectly in the general.

That’s basically what Clinton says in the book.

perry: 1. I think Sanders was simply the vessel for criticisms of Clinton from the left, the media and Republicans that would have emerged anyway.

natesilver: I agree. On that particular point, you could go to like a 3 or a 3.5. Still, almost every candidate has primary opponents, and those primary opponents usually say a few things that wind up damaging their opponents. I don’t think what Bernie did or said in the aggregate was atypical.

clare.malone: I think that’s underrating it a little. I’d call it a 3.

natesilver: He could have stood down a little earlier, once the delegate math had become hopeless for him. That period — and all the arguing over superdelegates, etc. — seemed to give more resonance to the “system is rigged” arguments.

clare.malone: Without Sanders as the personification of a movement, an explicit anti-establishment foil to Clinton, I’m not sure those feelings would have been so directly expressed. They would have been there in the electorate, but more inchoately expressed.

natesilver: At the same time, like 80 percent of Sanders voters wound up voting for Clinton — which isn’t perfect but is fairly typical for a primary opponent.

Clinton’s Midwest strategy. In the book, Clinton says her campaign did not underinvest in the Midwest.

natesilver: So, I don’t totally buy that claim. Clinton definitely did underinvest in Michigan and Wisconsin (and Minnesota).

clare.malone: She also brings up outspending Obama in those states.

perry: If it is really about going physically to Wisconsin, I rank this a 1. She went to Pennsylvania plenty and lost there in a similar way to Wisconsin. If it is about writing off too many white working-class voters, then I think that’s more valid.

natesilver: Well, it wasn’t about the Midwest per se — it was about campaigning in too narrow a range of states. She could also have campaigned more in Colorado and Arizona, for example.

But in terms of evidence of this mattering? There’s very little of it, actually. There’s basically no relationship between how much the candidates campaigned in a state and how well they did there.

perry: I see their mistake in being too focused on certain kinds of voters (non-white, college-educated, suburban). That is what I came away thinking might be the case after reading the Jonathan Allen-Amie Parnes book. But her staff, when I talked to them, and maybe this is self-serving, said that Clinton visits to some areas in rural Pennsylvania turned off voters. Her campaigning more there would not have helped and may have hurt.

natesilver: Things like advertisements and rallies don’t move the needle all that much, in a race where the issues are as momentous as the ones being debated in 2016.

Also, the math doesn’t really check out. Even if Clinton had won Wisconsin and Michigan, that wouldn’t have been enough to win the Electoral College. She’d also have needed to win Pennsylvania or Florida, where she campaigned extensively.

Anyway, I give that one a 1.5. A good litmus test is that if a reporter says “But Wisconsin” when someone brings up another cause of Clinton’s defeat, that reporter doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

It seems like we thought most of these were real factors in Trump winning and Clinton losing?

natesilver: You might even say, Micah, that Clinton got closer to … The Real Story Of 2016 than most of the media’s postmortems have.

micah: So, to bring things full circle, the objections to Clinton pointing them out — in addition to taking responsibility herself — aren’t about substance, they’re about theater … or “manners” … or what Clinton “should” be doing?

perry: I think Clinton, like Obama, should do whatever makes her happy and keeps the checks coming in. And if that is a book, fine. In terms of the party moving forward, fair or unfair, I’m not sure people are listening to her.

natesilver: I’m repeating myself here, but a lot of the admonitions that Clinton is getting from the press are about the media pre-empting discussions that could make them look bad and call into question their editorial decision-making.

perry: We should talk about that. Why can’t The New York Times say “we covered Clinton’s e-mails too much”? The Times admitted at some point that the weapons of mass destruction coverage ahead of the Iraq War was bad. The paper survived that, and my guess is gained credibility from it.

It’s obviously true. They must know that.

We are hinting around about the media stuff so much here that we may want to get just to the issue. I think we are really saying the Times, Politico, NBC News, etc., can’t say “Clinton is right in some ways” without saying “we were wrong.” But journalists are supposed to be for truth, not defending themselves at all costs like businesses or politicians. I should note: I covered the 2016 campaign for NBC News. In my writing and television appearances, I was critical, at times very sharply, of how Clinton handled the email controversy. I haven’t gone back and examined all that coverage, but I’m generally of the view that I personally covered the Clinton e-mails too much.

micah: To that point, and not to end on a self-deprecating FiveThirtyEight brag, but we have a history of saying “we fucked up” when we fuck up. While painful in the moment, it’s really not that hard and has long-term benefits. It’s like eating salad.</s>Hillary Clinton Is 'Done,' But Not Going Away

Hillary Clinton's final campaign for office ended in a shocking defeat. But she isn't going quietly into the night.

"I think the country's at risk, and I'm trying to sound the alarm so more people will at least pay attention," Clinton told NPR.

That said, her career as a candidate is over.

"I'm done. I'm not running for office," Clinton said. But for those, including Democrats, who would like her to just go away? "Well, they're going to be disappointed," she said.

"I'm not going anywhere. I have the experience, I have the insight, I have the scars that I think give me not only the right, but the responsibility to speak out," Clinton said.

In her new campaign memoir, What Happened, and in interviews with Morning Edition's Rachel Martin and NPR's Tamara Keith, Clinton talks about her own failings, but she doesn't hold back on calling out sexism in American politics and heaping criticism on President Trump.

"I think he's being played," Clinton said of Trump, suggesting that he's given aid and comfort to Russia's Vladimir Putin and North Korea's Kim Jong Un. "I think he doesn't even understand the kind of strategic overview of what's happening in the world, and what we need to be doing to prepare, and so I'm gonna keep speaking out."

Asked if she is able to turn on the news without thinking, "What would I do in this situation?" Clinton responded with a laugh.

"No, I do it every single time! Look, I was prepared to be president. I had prepared and worked at it, and I go a little bit batty when I hear him say, 'Gee, this is a really hard job. Who knew health care was so complicated?' I did. No, I always am responding and reacting. Sometimes I yell at the TV even."

But Trump is the one in the Oval Office, not Clinton, and she offers a series of explanations for what she did wrong, in the book and in her interviews with NPR.

"I take ultimate responsibility for the loss," Clinton said. "I was the candidate. I was the person whose name was on the ballot. And I'll never get over that."

There was the private email server she used for official business while secretary of state, a cloud that hung over her campaign from start to finish.

"It was a dumb mistake. I think it was a dumber scandal, but it hurt," she said.

She also describes an inability to connect with the anger coursing through the electorate.

"I understood there was anger and fear and people were really unhappy because of what had happened in the financial crash. I understood all of that," Clinton said. "What I didn't — and I say this in the book — I didn't really do well is conveying how much I understood of that, conveying how I got the despair and the anger."

Clinton had plans — so many plans — for combating the opioid crisis, for helping people in coal country, for creating jobs through infrastructure spending and more.

"I talked about it, but I didn't really convey the emotional resonance," she said.

While Trump was sending a signal to voters by talking about making America great again, bringing back coal jobs and building a wall, Clinton's detailed plans didn't break through.

"The amount of time and effort we spent not only devising the best infrastructure plan you could imagine but figuring out how it was gonna be paid for, nobody cared," she said.

Meanwhile, she said, Trump tapped into something, even fed it.

His message was "discriminatory, it was bigoted, it was prejudiced," Clinton said. "And yet it fed into part of the electorate that just wanted to have a primal scream. They didn't like what was going on. They wanted something different. They weren't interested in what you could actually do, because clearly Trump hasn't done very much that he said he would do. But they really responded to his racial and ethnic and sexist appeals."

And while Trump started his campaign with a memorable line, Make America Great Again, Clinton said her team was headed into the general election trying to develop a theme that fit.

"I had three different very smart groups work independently, and I asked them, 'So what should be the theme of our general election?' And they each, amazingly, came up with the same slogan: 'Stronger Together.' Because what they argued, and what I believed, was that America does better when we're working together, when we're helping each other, when we're aiming toward a future of opportunity where we have broad-based economic growth that includes everybody, and where, yes, we stand up for human rights and civil rights," Clinton said.

But, asked to choose her biggest regret, Clinton didn't look inward.

"Losing is my biggest regret," she said. "And losing to someone who was not qualified and did not have the experience or the temperament to be president of the United States. That is my biggest regret."

Clinton deflected the question of whether another Democrat could have beaten Trump, saying, "Well, I don't think it's useful to speculate, because I was the nominee."

What if Joe Biden had been the nominee?

"Well, he wasn't. And you know he ran in '08, and he didn't run in this this time — if he wants to run in the future, he can do that," she said.

Comey, The Russians, Voter Suppression And Other External Forces

In an election decided by fewer than 100,000 votes in three states, Clinton argues any number of factors could have decided the election.

"I was on the path to winning, and I felt great about the three debates," Clinton said when asked about issues of trust that dogged her campaign. "And then unfortunately the Comey letter, aided in great measure by the Russian WikiLeaks, raised all those doubts again."

Less than two weeks before the election, then-FBI Director James Comey told Congress the Bureau would be revisiting its investigation into the handling of classified information in connection with Clinton. On Nov. 6, he said a newly discovered trove of emails did not change the FBI's recommendation that Clinton not be charged. Nevertheless, Clinton has repeatedly placed blame on this sequence of events for undermining her candidacy at a crucial moment.

WikiLeaks' release of thousands of emails allegedly tied to Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, is another frequent target of hers. The documents disclosed internal campaign deliberation about Clinton's private email server and excerpts from her Wall Street speeches. The campaign linked the release to Russia.

In the states Clinton lost, she argues voter ID requirements and other changes in the law made it harder for people who supported her to vote.

"In Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania in particular, as well as North Carolina, there was a concerted effort to suppress the vote," she said, recounting anecdotes about people whose identification didn't qualify them to vote in Milwaukee.

As for Russian interference in the election, Clinton thinks that in addition to the investigation being led by special counsel Robert Mueller, there should be an independent commission, like the 9/11 Commission.

"And if we don't come together as a country and with leadership from the White House and the Congress to combat it, to try to prevent it from happening again, we are really putting our democracy at risk," Clinton said.

She has been following the twists and turns of the Russia investigations and devotes a chapter of her book to the topic.

"We're only now finding out what we did try to warn people about starting last summer," Clinton said. But back then those warnings were often dismissed as a campaign trying to distract from the damaging revelations from the WikiLeaks emails. "And I think because it was so surreal — how, what do you mean the Russians are influencing our election? Now we know. Not only were they, they did. And not only did they, they will continue to do so."

Clinton devotes a chapter of her book to being a woman in politics, and in conversations with NPR, she had a lot to say about it. Clinton said it is clear some share of the electorate "is just not ready" for a woman to be president. "They just cannot imagine it, and they are resistant to it. And I want in this book to make it very clear that what happened to me was not just about me," Clinton said.

There were some voters who said they were open to a woman as president, just not that woman, in reference to Clinton. But she doesn't buy that a different female candidate would have had it any easier.

"Look, if you think it's just about me, you don't have to deal with it. ... OK, I lost, you know? Have a nice time walking in the woods. But if you think it's endemic as I believe it is, and that when a woman sticks her head up, she gets hit from both the right and the left by men who — primarily men — who do not want to accept the reality of a woman being a leader, an executive," Clinton said.

Her reference to men on "both the right and the left" isn't without purpose. In the book she has harsh words for supporters of Bernie Sanders, so-called Bernie Bros, who intimidated her supporters online to the point that they hid their feelings in private Facebook groups.

"I want people to understand sexism and misogyny are real," Clinton said. "They're real in business, they're real in politics, and people have to start standing up against it. And we have to equip young women to be able to ward it off and speak out, and we have to encourage men, particularly young men, not to buy into it. And we have to recognize there are deep stereotypes."

As to the claim from some Sanders supporters that Clinton ran with a sense of entitlement, she said, "I just totally reject that." Clinton called the criticism "off base."

Even after she clinched the nomination, she said, Sanders "just kept going, and he and his followers' attacks on me kept getting more and more personal, despite him asking me not to attack him personally. And you know, I really regret that. But now he's got a chance to prove that he's something other than a spoiler. And that is to help other Democrats. And I don't know if he will or not, but I'm hoping he will."

Out Of The Woods

Immediately following her election loss, Clinton returned home to Chappaqua, N.Y., and spent a lot of time hiking in the woods nearby with her husband, the former president, and their dogs.

"It was part of a process after the election to come to terms with having lost, and my personal disappointment in letting millions of people down. Also my fears about what a Trump presidency might mean for our country and the world," Clinton said, back in the woods for her interview with Keith. "So I had a lot to think about. And I think well when I'm walking. I sort of clear my mind."

That first day in the woods, she ran into a woman walking with her baby and dog. Her Facebook post spawned a meme, "HRC in the wild," and rapidly led to people looking for Clinton in the woods.

"One time we drove up here to go for a walk, and there were about a dozen people lying in wait, and I thought, 'OK we're gonna go somewhere more peaceful than that,' " Clinton said.

As the interview wrapped up, Clinton was approached by two women and a yellow Labrador.</s>Story highlights "I am done with being a candidate," she affirmed in an interview about the book

"There were plenty of people hoping that I, too, would just disappear. But here I am," she writes

(CNN) Hillary Clinton says she isn't running for office ever again, and her latest memoir is nearly 500 pages of proof.

"I am done with being a candidate," she affirmed in an interview about the book that aired on CBS Sunday Morning.

In Clinton's memoir, her third, she blasts other Democrats and spells out views that would make her unlikely to lead any future Democratic Party, in a frank manner that runs counter to her reputation as a cautious, calculated politician.

In addition to her biting criticism for her 2016 Democratic rival Bernie Sanders , she urges Democrats not to shy away from the politics around gun control, pushes them to keep their focus on both the Russia investigation and the economy and stresses the need to learn from her mistakes against Trump.

"Democrats should not respond to my defeat by retreating from our strong commitments on these life-or-death issues," she writes. "The vast majority of Americans agree that we need to do more on gun safety. That is a debate we can win if we keep at it."

Read More</s>Hillary Clinton’s final campaign for office ended in a shocking defeat. But she isn’t going quietly into the night.

“I think the country’s at risk, and I’m trying to sound the alarm so more people will at least pay attention,” Clinton told NPR.

That said, her career as a candidate is over.

“I’m done. I’m not running for office,” Clinton said. But for those, including Democrats, who would like her to just go away? “Well, they’re going to be disappointed,” she said.

“I’m not going anywhere. I have the experience, I have the insight, I have the scars that I think give me not only the right, but the responsibility to speak out,” Clinton said.

In her new campaign memoir, What Happened, and in interviews with Morning Edition‘s Rachel Martin and NPR’s Tamara Keith, Clinton talks about her own failings, but she doesn’t hold back on calling out sexism in American politics and heaping criticism on President Trump.

“I think he’s being played,” Clinton said of Trump, suggesting that he’s given aid and comfort to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. “I think he doesn’t even understand the kind of strategic overview of what’s happening in the world, and what we need to be doing to prepare, and so I’m gonna keep speaking out.”

Asked if she is able to turn on the news without thinking, “What would I do in this situation?” Clinton responded with a laugh.

“No, I do it every single time! Look, I was prepared to be president. I had prepared and worked at it, and I go a little bit batty when I hear him say, ‘Gee, this is a really hard job. Who knew health care was so complicated?’ I did. No, I always am responding and reacting. Sometimes I yell at the TV even.”

But Trump is the one in the Oval Office, not Clinton, and she offers a series of explanations for what she did wrong, in the book and in her interviews with NPR.

“I take ultimate responsibility for the loss,” Clinton said. “I was the candidate. I was the person whose name was on the ballot. And I’ll never get over that.”

There was the private email server she used for official business while secretary of state, a cloud that hung over her campaign from start to finish.

“It was a dumb mistake. I think it was a dumber scandal, but it hurt,” she said.

She also describes an inability to connect with the anger coursing through the electorate.

“I understood there was anger and fear and people were really unhappy because of what had happened in the financial crash. I understood all of that,” Clinton said. “What I didn’t — and I say this in the book — I didn’t really do well is conveying how much I understood of that, conveying how I got the despair and the anger.”

Clinton had plans — so many plans — for combating the opioid crisis, for helping people in coal country, for creating jobs through infrastructure spending and more.

“I talked about it, but I didn’t really convey the emotional resonance,” she said.

While Trump was sending a signal to voters by talking about making America great again, bringing back coal jobs and building a wall, Clinton’s detailed plans didn’t break through.

“The amount of time and effort we spent not only devising the best infrastructure plan you could imagine but figuring out how it was gonna be paid for, nobody cared,” she said.

Meanwhile, she said, Trump tapped into something, even fed it.

His message was “discriminatory, it was bigoted, it was prejudiced,” Clinton said. “And yet it fed into part of the electorate that just wanted to have a primal scream. They didn’t like what was going on. They wanted something different. They weren’t interested in what you could actually do, because clearly Trump hasn’t done very much that he said he would do. But they really responded to his racial and ethnic and sexist appeals.”

And while Trump started his campaign with a memorable line, Make America Great Again, Clinton said her team was headed into the general election trying to develop a theme that fit.

“I had three different very smart groups work independently, and I asked them, ‘So what should be the theme of our general election?’ And they each, amazingly, came up with the same slogan: ‘Stronger Together.’ Because what they argued, and what I believed, was that America does better when we’re working together, when we’re helping each other, when we’re aiming toward a future of opportunity where we have broad-based economic growth that includes everybody, and where, yes, we stand up for human rights and civil rights,” Clinton said.

But, asked to choose her biggest regret, Clinton didn’t look inward.

“Losing is my biggest regret,” she said. “And losing to someone who was not qualified and did not have the experience or the temperament to be president of the United States. That is my biggest regret.”

Clinton deflected the question of whether another Democrat could have beaten Trump, saying, “Well, I don’t think it’s useful to speculate, because I was the nominee.”

What if Joe Biden had been the nominee?

“Well, he wasn’t. And you know he ran in ’08, and he didn’t run in this this time — if he wants to run in the future, he can do that,” she said.

Comey, the Russians, voter suppression and other external forces

In an election decided by fewer than 100,000 votes in three states, Clinton argues any number of factors could have decided the election.

“I was on the path to winning, and I felt great about the three debates,” Clinton said when asked about issues of trust that dogged her campaign. “And then unfortunately the Comey letter, aided in great measure by the Russian WikiLeaks, raised all those doubts again.”

Less than two weeks before the election, then-FBI Director James Comey told Congress that the bureau would be revisiting its investigation into the handling of classified information in connection with Clinton. On Nov. 6, he said a newly discovered trove of emails did not change the FBI’s recommendation that Clinton not be charged. Nevertheless, Clinton has repeatedly placed blame on this sequence of events for undermining her candidacy at a crucial moment.

WikiLeaks’ release of thousands of emails allegedly tied to Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, is another frequent target of hers. The documents disclosed internal campaign deliberation about Clinton’s private email server and excerpts from her Wall Street speeches. The campaign linked the release to Russia.

In the states Clinton lost, she argues voter ID requirements and other changes in the law made it harder for people who supported her to vote.

“In Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, in particular, as well as North Carolina, there was a concerted effort to suppress the vote,” she said, recounting anecdotes about people whose identification didn’t qualify them to vote in Milwaukee.

As for Russian interference in the election, Clinton thinks that in addition to the investigation being led by special counsel Robert Mueller, there should be an independent commission, like the 9/11 Commission.

“And if we don’t come together as a country and with leadership from the White House and the Congress to combat it, to try to prevent it from happening again, we are really putting our democracy at risk,” Clinton said.

She has been following the twists and turns of the Russia investigations and devotes a chapter of her book to the topic.

“We’re only now finding out what we did try to warn people about starting last summer,” Clinton said. But back then those warnings were often dismissed as a campaign trying to distract from the damaging revelations from the WikiLeaks emails. “And I think because it was so surreal — how, what do you mean the Russians are influencing our election? Now we know. Not only were they, they did. And not only did they, they will continue to do so.”

Clinton devotes a chapter of her book to being a woman in politics, and in conversations with NPR, she had a lot to say about it. Clinton said it is clear some share of the electorate “is just not ready” for a woman to be president. “They just cannot imagine it, and they are resistant to it. And I want in this book to make it very clear that what happened to me was not just about me,” Clinton said.

There were some voters who said they were open to a woman as president, just not that woman, in reference to Clinton. But she doesn’t buy that a different female candidate would have had it any easier.

“Look, if you think it’s just about me, you don’t have to deal with it. … OK, I lost, you know? Have a nice time walking in the woods. But if you think it’s endemic, as I believe it is, and that when a woman sticks her head up, she gets hit from both the right and the left by men who — primarily men — who do not want to accept the reality of a woman being a leader, an executive,” Clinton said.

Her reference to men on “both the right and the left” isn’t without purpose. In the book she has harsh words for supporters of Bernie Sanders, so-called Bernie Bros, who intimidated her supporters online to the point that they hid their feelings in private Facebook groups.

“I want people to understand sexism and misogyny are real,” Clinton said. “They’re real in business, they’re real in politics, and people have to start standing up against it. And we have to equip young women to be able to ward it off and speak out, and we have to encourage men, particularly young men, not to buy into it. And we have to recognize there are deep stereotypes.”

As to the claim from some Sanders supporters that Clinton ran with a sense of entitlement, she said, “I just totally reject that.” Clinton called the criticism “off base.”

Even after she clinched the nomination, she said, Sanders “just kept going, and he and his followers’ attacks on me kept getting more and more personal, despite him asking me not to attack him personally. And you know, I really regret that. But now he’s got a chance to prove that he’s something other than a spoiler. And that is to help other Democrats. And I don’t know if he will or not, but I’m hoping he will.”

Out of the woods

Immediately following her election loss, Clinton returned home to Chappaqua, N.Y., and spent a lot of time hiking in the woods nearby with her husband (the former president) and their dogs.

“It was part of a process after the election to come to terms with having lost, and my personal disappointment in letting millions of people down. Also my fears about what a Trump presidency might mean for our country and the world,” Clinton said, back in the woods for her interview with Keith. “So I had a lot to think about. And I think well when I’m walking. I sort of clear my mind.”

That first day in the woods, she ran into a woman walking with her baby and dog. Her Facebook post spawned a meme, “HRC in the wild,” and rapidly led to people looking for Clinton in the woods.

“One time we drove up here to go for a walk, and there were about a dozen people lying in wait, and I thought, ‘OK we’re gonna go somewhere more peaceful than that,’ ” Clinton said.

As the interview wrapped up, Clinton was approached by two women and a yellow Labrador.</s>By David Weigel, (c) 2017, The Washington Post

Hillary Clinton was surrounded by women the moment she lost the 2016 presidential election. “Things had been going too well for too long” when, on the morning of Oct. 28, her spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri approached her and longtime aide Huma Abedin and said two words: Jim Comey. “I immediately knew it was bad,” Clinton writes in her memoir “What Happened.” There was a moment of mournful sisterhood as Abedin learned that the FBI was probing her husband Anthony Weiner’s computer, ensuring that the final week of the election was going to be about Clinton’s email server. “This man is going to be the death of me,” Abedin said of Weiner. Clinton gave her a hug.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first female presidential nominee of a major party — defeated by a man who even Republicans called a sexist — is, as she points out in the book, the frequent answer to Gallup’s question of who is “most admired woman in America.” Nonetheless, she was unable to break the presidential glass ceiling, and her defeat has been genuinely traumatizing for millions of women.

Locked out of the White House, she offers solidarity with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other women who are called shrill, or unlikable, because they want to climb the same ladder as men. “I wish so badly we were a country where a candidate who said, ‘My story is the story of a life shaped by and devoted to the movement for women’s liberation’ would be cheered, not jeered,” she writes. “But that’s not who we are.”

Her book finally takes on directly what has been muttered for years: That Clinton was often treated poorly simply because she was a woman.

It will be up to some other woman to carry on the battle, Clinton writes. She’s done with politics. Much of “What Happened” is a meditation on powerful women, a test-run for the speeches Clinton will give for the rest of her life. “I’ve seen women CEOs serve coffee at meetings,” she writes, “women heads of state walk tissues over to a sneezing staffer.”

But still Clinton cannot let that Comey moment go. She quotes Fox News clips, legal analysis and congressional testimony to conclude that she was wronged. She takes subtle pleasure in Comey being fired by Donald Trump six months later. She apologizes to the reader, who has to relive all of this. “It wasn’t healthy or productive,” she writes, “to dwell on the ways I felt I’d been shivved.”

It’s a perfect word, “shivved.” The Hillary Clinton of this bitter memoir resembles the shrunken, beaten Richard Nixon who told David Frost that he gave his enemies a sword and “they twisted it with relish.” Again and again she blames herself for losing, apologizing for her “dumb” email management, for giving paid speeches to banks, for saying she’d put coal miners “out of business.” She veers between regret and righteous anger, sometimes in the same paragraph.
• David Ignatius: While Trump takes the shots, Tillerson runs the offense
• George Will: Will Congress be stirred from its slumber?
• Other voices: Now is Paul Ryan’s chance to do more than talk about tax reform “I regret handing Trump a political gift with my ‘deplorables’ comment,” she writes. Then she lays out studies on voter biases from the University of Chicago and the Voter Study Group. Data amassed, Clinton clarifies: “Too many of Trump’s core supporters do hold views that I find — there’s no other word for it — deplorable.”

“What Happened” is a raw and bracing book, a guide to our political arena. Clinton, who came within less than 100,000 votes of the White House, recalls how friends urged her to take Xanax (she declined), how there “are times when all I want to do is scream into a pillow,” and how she had to restrain herself at snapping at a young woman who tells her after the election that she didn’t vote: “Now you want me to make you feel better?”

Democrats who once begged her to run for president now squirm when they’re asked about her. Clinton no longer cares; exiled to her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., she is liberated from the public eye and dismissive of the media which, in her view, maintains one rule book for every other candidate and a Necronomicon for her.

“Why am I seen as such a divisive figure and, say, Joe Biden and John Kerry aren’t?” she asks. “They’ve cast votes of all kinds, including some they regret, just like me? What makes me such a lightning rod for fury? I’m really asking. I’m at a loss.”

There has never been a candidate memoir like this, but there has never been a defeated contender like Hillary Clinton. Since at least 1999, when she leapt into the race for one of New York’s open Senate seats, the idea of a second President Clinton had loomed in our national consciousness. In 2004, superfans tried to draft her into the presidential race; in 2011, pollster Pat Caddell argued that “the Hillary moment” had come, and that Clinton could “step above partisan politics” if Barack Obama stepped aside. It didn’t happen.

The book is also sometimes corny, with quotes from “Hamilton” and details about the hot sauce she carries everywhere (Ninja Squirrel Siracha), suggesting that the Clinton who told young voters to “Pokemon-go-to-the-polls” really meant it. The aphorism “What does not kill us makes us stronger” is credited to both Friedrich Nietzsche and Kelly Clarkson. It is, perhaps, the only political memoir that takes time to thank Beyoncé for her support.

That approach to politics is part of “what happened.” The caterwauling about Clinton’s loss basically takes two forms – whether one event or gaffe could have reversed the election, and whether another candidate would have let the election even get close.

Clinton is convincing on the first point, citing Trump’s own strategists about how the election was lost before the Comey letter. She is all over the map on the second. It’s dishonest and unfair, she writes, to suggest that she ran a my-turn campaign that ignored economic issues.

She insists that the press, which she never has to deal with again, is to blame for that impression. It “often seemed bored” by the roundtables she held with voters, which she used “to guide the policies already being hammered out back in our Brooklyn headquarters.” Clinton charges that coverage of her campaign was dominated by emails; coverage of Trump’s, including start-to-finish live shots of his rallies, focused on the issues.

She is easier on Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who she credits for “understanding the political power of big, bold ideas,” than on Biden, who “campaigned for me all over the Midwest” then claimed Democrats never talked about his issues.

In a point-by-point debunking of the idea that she ignored the Midwest, Clinton chides the press for ignoring the substance of the Rust Belt tour that followed the Democratic National Convention. “The very same week that Tim [Kaine] and I were driving around Pennsylvania and Ohio, Donald Trump was picking a high-profile fight with the Khans, the grieving Gold Star parents,” she writes. “That sucked up all the oxygen in the media. … But it was also part of a pattern that over the long-term ensured that my economic message never got out and let Trump control the tempo of the race.”

The saga of the Khan family, Muslims in Charlottesville whose son joined the Army and died in Iraq, was compelling and harmful to Trump in the short term. It was also precipitated by the Clinton campaign. It had decided to bring the Khans onstage and elevate their issue; it delighted when Trump took the bait, burning up several news cycles. Two weeks before the election, it rolled out a 60-second ad in which Khizr Khan watched Trump on television and wept at the memory of his son.

Her campaign’s messaging, Clinton argues, would have locked up the election had Comey not intervened and sent suburban moderates scrambling. But she made a choice with that messaging. She did talk about jobs, but until the last moments of the campaign, Clinton and most Democrats were convinced that Trump was less vulnerable on traditional issues than on his frequent, insulting gaffes.

Clinton has more in common with Sanders than the book lets on. Both of them wanted to run substantive campaigns. Both of them resented a media that Trump seemed to understand intuitively, even if it was reporting on how this-or-that mistake was, finally, the end for him. Clinton spends two pages on the concept of a shared national resource fund, a concept barely discussed in the campaign – “we would call it Alaska for America,” a reference to that state’s practice of cutting checks to residents from the oil industry’s profits. The reader knows that this is dull; the reader, like Clinton, relies on media that prioritizes scandal and narrative over news. Trump, in the campaign and in power, never let go of the narrative; Clinton could never get her hands around it.

She admits that after her loss she didn’t want to go to the inauguration until George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter did. She arrived, and settled scores, making fun of a classless Rep. Jason Chaffetz (who would leave Congress after realizing it was no fun without Clinton scandals to probe). Amid the ceremony, she ran into incoming Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke who, as a congressman from Montana, had called her “the Antichrist.” Now she watched him blanch as she quoted the insult back to him.

“One thing I’ve learned over the years is how easy it is for some people to say horrible things about me when I’m not around,” she writes, “but how hard it is for them to look me in the eye and say it to my face.”</s>News outlets across the political spectrum are weighing in on Hillary Clinton’s new memoir ‘What Happened’ about her presidential campaign and her defeat.

The New York Times’ review admits there is nothing new about the campaign in the book, but it does tell a story of what it is like running as a female nominee for the president of the United States, “a first in American history.”

“It is worth reading,” writes Times critic Jennifer Senior. “Winning by the popular vote by nearly 3 million may not have been enough to shatter the country’s highest, hardest glass ceiling. But it seems to have 2,864,974 extra cracks in Clinton’s reserve.”

Clinton complains of misogyny and sexism and that she suffered disproportionately from charges of untrustworthiness or inauthenticity because she was a woman. Senior considers the arguments controversial and complicated, but accepts that presidential politics are about “arena-filling showmanship” rather than being a “workhorse.”

“I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions,” Clinton wrote, “while Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stocked Americans’ anger and resentment.”

The conservative-leaning Washington Examiner review thinks the book will keep the Democrats “divided and focused on the past.”

The Examiner’s W. James Antle III focused his review on Clinton’s attacks against Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), her rival for the nomination during the Democratic primaries.

“His attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s ‘Crooked Hillary’ campaign,” Clinton wrote of Sanders.

The Examiner agreed that she took “friendly fire from Sanders supporters” but argued that Sanders was “slow to attack her” and said he was “sick of hearing about her ‘damn emails’.”

Noting that Sanders turned into an unlikely hero for millennials, Antle argued that it was Sanders who was warning Clinton she wasn’t populist enough, and that she became a divisive figure within her own party.

The Guardian’s Sabrina Siddiqui and David Smith highlighted Clinton’s parallels between between Trump’s “war on truth” and the Soviet Union and George Orwell’s ‘1984’.

“Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism,” Clinton wrote. “This is what the Soviets did when they erased political dissidents from historical photos. This is what happens in George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered.”

“The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust,” Clinton added. “For Trump, as with so much he does, it’s simple dominance.”

Siddiqui and Smith found that Clinton “peppers the book with insults aimed at Trump” referring to him as “a clear and present danger” and remaking himself from a “tabloid scoundrel into right-wing crank.”

Clinton devoted a lengthy section of the book complaining about the lack of media attention toward reported attempts by Moscow to interfere with the presidential race. She has followed every twist and turn of the alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and accuses Russian President Vladimir Putin of being out to get her personally.

“Putin doesn’t respect women and despises anyone who stands up to him, so I am a double problem,” wrote Clinton and argues that Putin had developed a “personal vendetta” against her.

Clinton’s critics say she blames everyone but herself.

Fox & Friends ran a segment on Tuesday asking “Why can’t Hillary accept defeat and move on?” in which they argued that she blames the Russians, Comey, (former head of the FBI) Wikileaks, Facebook and misogyny, by interviewing Jonathan Allen about his book called Shattered: Inside the Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.

“She is putting out these excuses one after another that do nothing but refocus the blame on everybody but herself,” said media critic Lionel, of Lionel Media. He called Clinton’s account a “cotton candy matrix” and “a lattice-worked fiction.”

One of the reasons Clinton neglected the critical Rust Belt states is that she didn’t even handle her own polling, Lionel noted.

“Trump paid for the best polling there was. Polling is critical. She is so cheap…that she used these fraudulent polls that underestimated Republican voters that were put out to create the momentum that she was winning,” Lionel said, adding that Clinton can’t accept fault or apologize for “letting her people down.”
Hillary Clinton releases the book What Happened, a memoir about her most recent presidential campaign. Clinton has implied that she may not run again in 2020.