Monday, January 08, 2018

What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton

My book for January is What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The book spends a lot of time exploring the evidence of the Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election. Clinton organizes the information that has been bouncing around into a formable case.

She also spends a lot of time talking about FBI Director Comey and the use of her email server. Although Clinton admits that in hindsight it was a mistake, I understand why she used the private email server at the time. No one wants to carry multiple mobile devices... I just have a hard time judging how much this impacted how people voted. From my perspective, it is a red herring.

I haven't read a biography of Hillary or Bill. As a result, I found the information about Clinton's life interesting. The information looking inside the campaign was also engaging. Unfortunately, these are both very small parts of the book.

I have two other observations. First, I had forgotten how small Trump's electoral college victory was. It came down to 80,000 votes in three states: Michigan; Pennsylvania, and; Wisconsin. Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Second, it is amazing to read how much time Clinton's team put into briefing books and policy papers.

The book felt very stream of consciousness. I think that it could have been tighter and better organized. While I enjoyed the Kathy Tur book, this book was a forced march for me. This is not what I needed after Rooster Bar. I give it a "C+" at best. I don't recommend it.

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