“The Great Revolt” by Salena Zito and Brad Todd

Donny Deutsch. former CNBC program host and regular guest on MSNBC, says people who voted for President Trump are “like Nazis.” Actor Peter Fonda tweets that the President’s young son should be kidnapped and turned over to pedophiles (he apologized after a huge uproar). Comedian Kathy Griffin displays the President’s head and eventually apologizes (sort of). The President himself regularly tweets any number of true, untrue, half-true, and who-the-heck-knows-what’s-true things every day.

Welcome to what passes for public and political discourse in 2018 America. There’s no question that the 2016 presidential election is still creating a major upheaval in American politics and society. 

Salena Zito and Brad Todd considered what happened and took a deep look at the five states where the election was won for Donald Trump – Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa. All five voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2016. And they went deeper that statewide results – they went into the counties that flipped from Obama to Trump, and many by large margins. And unlike most mainstream media reporters, they didn’t parachute in from New York or Los Angeles the day after the election, interviewed a few people, and then left. They stayed around, and they talked with people, often I their own homes. They talked with their families and friends, too.

The result of their work and research is The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.

They didn’t find Nazis, unless a lot of Nazis voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2016. In fact, they didn’t find a “typical” Trump voter at all. What they did find was that people who voted for Donald Trump in the counties in those five states could be broadly classified into seven groups, and, because one of the authors is with an opinion research firm, they gave the groups catchy titles.

The seven are “Red-Blooded and Blue Collared,” “Perot-istas,” “Rough Rebounders,” “Girl Gun Power,” “Rotary Reliables,” “King Cyrus Christians,” and “Silent Suburban Moms.” The chapter on each includes interviews with representative people. 

Salena Zito

I don’t live in one of those five states, but I recognized every single person they talked with. I know people just like them; I have family members just like them; I go to church with people like them. 

And while these groups and the people are markedly different, certain common themes clearly emerged. They don’t trust big corporations. They don’t trust the national and even the local news media. They believe Barack Obama, even though they voted for him, led the country in the wrong direction, and especially when it came to national defense and security and the economy. Many of them own small businesses, and they watched their medical insurance costs skyrocket with Obama care while big corporations were exempted. They saw a playing field tilted against them and the communities they live in and love. They believed they were disdained by the economic and cultural power centers on the coasts. And they saw Hilary Clinton offering more of the same.

Their concerns ran so deep that they could look at Trump’s vulgarity, antics, crazy statements, and tweets and say, yeah, they’re bad, but maybe he’s the one who will blow up what needs to be blown up.

Brad Todd

The authors consider these groups, and then they look at the broader implications of what happened in 2016, and what that means for the future. 

Zito, a native of Pittsburgh, worked for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for 11 years. She joined the New York Post in 2016 and is a political analyst for CNN and a reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. Todd is the founding partner of OnMessage, Inc., a national Republican advertising and opinion research firm. 

The Great Revolt tells the story of 2016. It suggests that none of the people the authors talked with have changed their minds since the election, and that national mainstream media coverage of Trump – contrary to what journalists and editors might think – is only reinforcing their beliefs. 

As a nation, we have moved into uncertain and uncharted waters.

Top illustration: the U.S. electoral map after the 2016 presidential election. 

“Shattered” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

I started reading Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign and quickly found myself paying close attention to the numerous accounts of the presidential candidate’s interactions with her speechwriter, Dan Schwerin. Perhaps it was because corporate (and a little political) speechwriting has been such a large part of my career. Perhaps it was because the accounts, as chronicled by authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, rang so true to my own experience.

Perhaps it was because I worked for a wide array of executives, a few of whom shared character traits in common with Clinton.

After reading the book, here’s my understanding of Clinton and her speechwriter. She liked him; he was a fine speechwriter. She worked him tirelessly; he believed in the candidate and was willing to work long, thankless, hours. But she was never really satisfied with his work, because he seemed unable to articulate why she was running for President of the United States.’

There was a good reason for that, one that went right to the heart of why Clinton ultimately lost the election. The candidate herself could never articulate why she was running for President. “I’m the most experienced and competent candidate ever” was not a compelling campaign narrative. “It’s time we broke the glass ceiling for women” was also not a reason.

That wasn’t the speechwriter’s fault.

Allen and Parnes take the reader on a highly detailed, in-depth tour of the Clinton campaign, from the time before the announcement that she was a candidate all the way to the post-election remorse and recriminations. I didn’t for a minute doubt that they themselves were Clinton supporters, but this book is not a flattering kiss-up to the candidate. Instead, it is a clear-eyed view of what happened and why. And other factors built on her inability to articulate her reason for being in the race in the first place.

Clinton was determined to avoid the mistakes she believed her team had made running against Barack Obama in 2008. She was so consumed with this that she ended up making many of the same ones, because she missed the essential nature of those mistakes in 2008.

The campaign relied heavily on data analytics – perfected by the Obama campaign teams in 2008 and 2012 – and less on traditional polling. They likely should have relied on both. Data analytics misled them in Florida, Wisconsin, and Michigan, until it was too late to do anything about it.

The candidate and the campaign team first missed and then misunderstood the huge wave of populism that rose like a monster from the political deep. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both rode that wave. Both Sanders and Trump were able to articulate clearly why they were running for the country’s highest office. And both Clinton and her team saw but seemed unable to deal with the revolt of the American working class, especially in the Rust Belt.

The campaign team and the candidate assumed the “narrative of the blue wall” – and believed that states that had gone Democratic in recent elections would continue to do so. The Sunday before the election, warning lights were flashing full tilt in the Rust Belt, and the response was too little and way too late.

The ruthless power struggles within the campaign team, by the paid consultants, and by the DNC were all factors.

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

The perceptions of the Clinton political empire played a role – the Clinton Foundation and its acceptance of money from all comers; the speeches she made to groups like Goldman Sachs; the hovering presence of Bill Clinton, who always believed he knew better than the campaign team. Sometimes he was right. Sometimes he was wrong, like when he met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch at the Phoenix airport.

Clinton went into the campaign hobbled by the ongoing media coverage of her private email server used for State Department business. And once Wikileaks started the release of the hacked John Podesta and Democratic National Committee emails, most people conflated those emails with Clinton’s server problems.

FBI director James Comey playing popup-head with “We’re ending the criminal investigation of Clinton, no indictment but she did a bunch of illegal things,” “We’re reopening the investigation,” and “We didn’t find anything after all” was also a significant factor.

All of this, and the details of the primary campaigns and the general election, form the narrative of Shattered. Donald Trump plays a small role in this story. Clinton’s campaign team had never run into a candidate like him before, not to mention some of his wild statements and antics (like inviting four alleged women victims of Bill Clinton to one of the presidential debates). But the authors clearly see the reasons for Clinton’s defeat not so much explained by Trump as by the significant failings of the candidate and her campaign team.

Allen is an award-winning journalist with a long political reporting pedigree, including Politico, Bloomberg News, and Roll Call. He’s currently the head of community and content at Sidewire and an adjunct professor at Northwestern University. Parnes is senior White House correspondent for The Hill and has also written for Politico. She has previously reported on the 2008 and 2012 election cycles. Allen and Parnes are also the co-authors of HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Rodham Clinton (2014).  

Dan Schwerin, the speechwriter

The authors rely a lot on unnamed sources (like “a senior campaign official”), but they explain why and how they managed that. The account of the Clinton campaign in Shattered has the ring of truth. And while the authors don’t cover much beyond the two days following the election, there is much here that points to what happened in the months afterward – the shock of the defeat, the rage it engendered, and the “Russia interfered with our election” narrative. Among others.

And I keep thinking about Schwerin, the speechwriter, struggling to write his candidate’s speeches in the context of a vicious campaign, constant crises upending finished speeches, sniping from the campaign team, Obama’s people, the consultants, the DNC, and the candidate herself. Of all the people covered by this book, he’s the one – the only one – that garners my sympathy.

Shattered is an absorbing book, but if you’re not a political junkie, it does require some stamina to get through the detail. But there’s a reason for that – the explanation is in the details.

Top photograph: a Hillary for President campaign poster.

Are we reliving the 1850s?

Extreme language. Excessive and constant use of apocalyptic terms and phrases. Violence. Every news event turned into political opportunism. Positions hardening into unyielding rock. Courts overturning popular votes. Political opponents demonized. Political parties fracturing, and third parties rising.

Welcome to the 2010s 1850s.

The 1850s were a tumultuous decade. It began with what many thought a hopeful sign in the ongoing battle between the free and slave states, the Compromise of 1850, which, among other things, attempted to manage new territories belonging to the United States. The compromise resolved a several-year political standoff that followed the Mexican-American War.

Whatever good feeling resulted from the compromise didn’t last long. A series of events began to punctuate sectional discord.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriett Beecher Stowe’s novelistic account of slavery, was published in 1852.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854, and set aside the Compromise of 1850 in favor of a concept called popular sovereignty, extolled by Stephen Douglas (among others). The North reacted almost violently to the idea of a possible extension of slavery, as did the South to slavery being possibly precluded. The Whig party was destroyed in the South; Southern Whigs moved to the Democratic party. Northern Whigs would eventually be folded into the new Republican Party. Kansas and Nebraska became literal battlefields.

In May 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts gave a speech in the Senate, which he called his “The Crime Against Kansas” speech. He was an unbending abolitionist, and gave no quarter, attacking the Franklin Pierce Administration, the South, and slavery. He singled out Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina for a particular target. Butler’s nephew, Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, was so outraged that he went to Sumner while he was seated to his desk and beat him with a cane until Sumner was bloody and unconscious. Sumner would not return to the Senate for three years. Brooks was censored by the House and resigned, but was reelected almost unanimously. Until his sudden and unexpected death a year later, Brooks was celebrated by many for upholding the honor of the South.

T

Dred Scott

he Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court in 1857 was hailed by the South and outraged the North, breathing additional life into the abolitionist movement.

And John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry (then in Virginia and now West Virginia) in 1859 was seem by the South as what the abolitionists were really up to – an armed takeover.

The screaming rhetoric, the accusations, and the political impasse came to a head with the election of 1860. Amid a crowded field of candidates and parties, Abraham Lincoln was elected with a majority of Electoral College votes and less than 40 percent of the popular vote. A short month after his inauguration, Americans were literally at war with each other.

John Brown

History doesn’t repeat itself. I hope. But here in the 2010s, we’ve become accustomed to the news media-inspired designations of red states and blue states. An event like the killing of 49 people at a gay club in Orlando is defined as either an Islamic terrorist act or prime evidence for gun control, and proponents of both scream past each other. The lunacy extends to the highest levels of the government, when the Justice Department releases transcripts of the killer’s telephone calls and “redacts” them to remove any possible support for the Islamic terrorist narrative. (A day later, the department released the “unredacted” version.)

It’s an election year. The screaming past each other is getting worse. Donald Trump says anything that comes to his mind, and we now have Senator Elizabeth Warren relishing her assigned role of attack dog for Hillary Clinton. If that was the extent of it, it wouldn’t be so bad.

But we have the millions on social media. The yelling that pours from newspaper editorial pages. The think tanks on the right and left. The Republican elites unhappy with Trump. The Sanders supporters unhappy with Clinton and believing the primaries were stolen. Third parties rattling their sabers. 

Yes, we can say it’s politics. That’s what they said in the 1850s.

Top illustration: A drawing of Brooks attacking Sumner in the U.S. Senate, 1856.