53 Quotes by Jonathan Allen

Make America Great Again” – ripped off from Ronald Reagan, and traced the decline of the country to the mid-1960s. Though he didn’t mention the Johnson era’s Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, or public subsidies for housing and health care, Trump’s dog whistle was just the right pitch to attract the support of white supremacists and nearly all-white crowds of thousands at his campaign rallies.

After the 2008 campaign, two of her aides, Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod, had toiled to assign loyalty scores to members of Congress, ranging from one for the most loyal to seven for those who had committed the most egregious acts of treachery. Bill Clinton had campaigned against some of the sevens in subsequent primary elections, helping to knock them out of office. The fear of retribution was not lost on the remaining sevens, some of whom rushed to endorse Hillary early in the 2016 cycle.

Nor was anyone empowered to both enforce Hillary’s will and tell her when she was wrong without fear of reprisal.

Clinton’s aides didn’t know that batches of Podesta’s e-mails would be released day after day from October 7 until November 7, the last day before the election. Nor could they have imagined that the intelligence finding of Russian interference in the election would so quickly get drowned out by the combination of the Trump Access Hollywood video and the Podesta e-mails.

Her approach, guided by Mook and informed by the demands of winning the primary, was to build a coalition focused on core strengths: African Americans, Latinos, college-educated whites, and women. But the more she catered to them, the more she pushed away other segments of the electorate.

She’d gone on the attack against a better-liked rival whose platform more closely mirrored the values of the party’s base, creating a boomerang effect on her personal standing. Perhaps.

After years of watching adversaries comb through her public records for any hint of a scandal, and after accessing her own aides’ e-mails, Hillary well understood the danger of exposing her own private thoughts to scrutiny. And that was reason enough to want them shielded from political enemies, journalists, and the public.

Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her. In fact, the more people she assigned to the task of setting the tone for her campaign, the more muddled her message becam.

For both sides, Hillary was the perfect symbol of everything wrong with America. At times, Trump and Sanders would act as the right and left speakers on a stereo blaring a chorus on repeat: Hillary’s a corrupt insider who has helped rig the political and economic systems in favor of the powerful.