Hillary Clinton in The New Yorker

Sharing this without having read the whole thing, but, since it is extensive, clearly it is a must read.

newyorker.com

Hillary Clinton Looks Back in Anger

By David Remnick

43-55 minutes

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She talks about Trump, Comey, collusion, “deplorables,” and the power of sexism.

The cover of the magazine’s post-election issue, had Clinton won. “I felt that I had let everyone down,” she recalls. “Because I had.”
Illustration by Malika Favre

Hillary Rodham Clinton, who, as she puts it, won “more votes for President than any white man” in American history, is not the first candidate to capture the popular vote but lose the election. She is the fifth. The Founders, for varying reasons, distrusted popular democracy. Southerners were wary of a challenge to slavery; others feared the emergence of a national demagogue. The Electoral College, Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Paper No. 68, would block the rise of a leader with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.” An extra layer of electoral deliberation, he thought, would also insulate the American system from a hostile hack from abroad—“the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.”

Andrew Jackson was the first to suffer this constitutionally enabled result of losing-while-winning, when he conceded the 1824 race to John Quincy Adams. Jackson, whose portrait now hangs in the Oval Office, charged that he had been undone by a rigged ballot. In 1888, Grover Cleveland lost in much the same manner to Benjamin Harrison, but then avenged his humbling four years later. Samuel Tilden fell to Rutherford B. Hayes, in 1876; and yet, after the baroque, months-long struggle inside the Electoral College, Tilden seemed almost relieved. Now, he said, “I can retire to private life with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people, without any of the cares and responsibilities of the office.”

In the ballot of 2000, Albert Gore, Jr., Bill Clinton’s Vice-President for eight years, won half a million more votes than the governor of Texas, George W. Bush. After losing the final battle before the Supreme Court, Gore soon departed Washington to brood in Nashville. He grew a beard. He grew fat. He seemed, at first, quite lost. When I visited him there, a few years later, he said he would eventually get around to confronting that bitter experience, just not yet. He never fully did so, certainly not at book length. Instead, with time, he shaved his beard, travelled the world giving lectures and making a documentary about climate change, and, in 2007, shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He made a fortune as an Apple director, a Google adviser, and a venture-capital partner. He found his way. And whenever someone brought up the election of 2000 he always remembered to lighten matters, saying, “You win some, you lose some, and then there’s that little-known third category.”

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What Might Have Been: President Hillary Rodham Clinton

In her memoir, What Happened, Hillary quotes these words by John Greenleaf Whittier.

"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: "It might have been!".

Hillary's supporters need no reminder. We live with the consequences of an election gone wrong. All Americans do.
The words come from this poem which, itself, deserves a spotlight for its commentary.

Maud Muller (1856)

John Greenleaf Whittier (17 December 1807 – 7 September 1892) was an American Quaker poet and abolitionist

 

 

• Maud Muller, on a summer's day,
  Raked the meadows sweet with hay.
  Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth
  Of simple beauty and rustic health.
• So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,
  And Maud was left in the field alone.
  But the lawyers smiled that afternoon,
  When he hummed in court an old love-tune.

• He wedded a wife of richest dower,
  Who lived for fashion, as he for power.
  Yet oft, in his marble hearth's bright glow,
  He watched a picture come and go:
  And sweet Maud Muller's hazel eyes
  Looked out in their innocent surprise.

• A manly form at her side she saw,
  And joy was duty and love was law.
  Then she took up her burden of life again,
  Saying only, "It might have been".

• Weary lawyers with endless tongues.

• Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,
  For rich repiner and household drudge!
  God pity them both! and pity us all,
  Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;
  For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
  The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

Our "might have been" is front and center this week with the release of Hillary's book and the ensuing book tour comprising TV appearances, press interviews, and appearances at book stores and public venues.

Here is a note on an upcoming interview in The New Yorker.

newyorker.com

 

If Hillary Clinton Had Won: The New Yorker Cover

The New Yorker

2-3 minutes

The cover “The First,” by Malika Favre.

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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. In at least one respect, we can now share a definitive answer. Above is the cover “The First,” by Malika Favre, that The New Yorker would have published had Clinton defeated Donald Trump to become the first female Commander-in-Chief.In next week’s issue, David Remnick speaks with Clinton about her new memoir, the campaign, her stinging loss, and its aftermath; their conversation touched on the former F.B.I. director James Comey, accusations of Russian interference, and the role of sexism in Trump’s victory.
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The New Yorker Endorses Hillary Clinton

Comment

October 31, 2016 Issue

The New Yorker Endorses Hillary Clinton

The election of Hillary Clinton is an event that we would welcome for its historical importance, and greet with indescribable relief.

By The Editors

Illustrations by Tom Bachtell

On November 8th, barring some astonishment, the people of the United States will, after two hundred and forty years, send a woman to the White House. The election of Hillary Clinton is an event that we will welcome for its immense historical importance, and greet with indescribable relief. It will be especially gratifying to have a woman as commander-in-chief after such a sickeningly sexist and racist campaign, one that exposed so starkly how far our society has to go. The vileness of her opponent’s rhetoric and his record has been so widely aired that we can only hope she will be able to use her office and her impressive resolve to battle prejudice wherever it may be found.

On every issue of consequence, including economic policy, the environment, and foreign affairs, Hillary Clinton is a distinctly capable candidate: experienced, serious, schooled, resilient. When the race began, Clinton, who has always been a better office-holder than a campaigner, might have anticipated a clash of ideas and personalities on the conventional scale, against, say, Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. Instead, the Democratic nominee has ended up playing a sometimes secondary role in a squalid American epic. If she is elected, she will have weathered a prolonged battle against a trash-talking, burn-it-to-the-ground demagogue. Unfortunately, the drama is not likely to end soon. The aftereffects of this campaign may befoul our civic life for some time to come.
If the prospect of a female President represents a departure in the history of American politics, the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, the real-estate mogul and Republican nominee, does, too—a chilling one. He is manifestly unqualified and unfit for office. Trained in the arts of real-estate promotion and reality television, he exhibi

ts scant interest in or familiarity with policy. He favors conspiracy theory and fantasy, deriving his knowledge from the darker recesses of the Internet and “the shows.” He has never held office or otherwise served his country, never acceded to the authority of competing visions and democratic resolutions.

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Media Mea Culpas: Journalists Ask "Is This All My Fault?"

Buzzfeed, not yet 10 years old, is on Donald Trump's blacklist.  The New Yorker, 91 years old, is not ... yet, but Trump has dubbed it "a failing magazine that no one reads."  Since it commenced endorsing presidential candidates as late as 2004 and all of those endorsements have gone to Democrats, it was probably already dancing on the edge of the wrath of the Donald.  Both publications have put forth mea culpas from former Trump acquaintances who felt the need to say something before the country embarks on a path to disaster.

McKay Coppins in Buzzfeed recounts that during the Detroit debate moderated by Fox News:

About 30 minutes into the debate, Kelly asked Trump to respond to a recent BuzzFeed News report about his position on immigration.
“First of all, BuzzFeed?” Trump said, waving an index finger in the air. “They were the ones that said under no circumstances will I run for president — and were they wrong.” My phone lit up with a frenzied flurry of tweets, texts, and emails, each one carrying variations of the same message: This is all your fault.

His fault!  Because of an unflattering article he wrote two years earlier that he and apparently others felt goaded Trump into making this run for the roses.

Tony Schwartz, whose name appears as co-author of The Art of the Deal and who shared in the profits, could no longer hold his silence on the fraud he helped perpetrate.  He told New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer:

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”
If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”

The two articles dovetail on the day when the Republicans open their national "dispersion."  A convention convenes members - brings them together.  This one is driving them away and apart.  "Convention" is oxymoronic and the event requires a different sobriquet.  Dispersion is the best I can come up with and fills a second bill since now begins the dispersion of the Trump image and message to the grand majority who have not followed the campaigns up until this point.

Both of these articles are must-reads.  They are on the long side and complex. But from his short-tempered testiness to his short attention span, from his mythomania to his self-serving mutability - it's all there in these articles.

Much of this will come as no surprise to Democrats, especially those who have been on board the Hillary bus from the beginning. The shallowness of character and purpose coupled with the profound level of underlying hostility - a clear and present danger -  at once shock and galvanize the reader to do everything possible to prevent Schwartz's prediction from being realized.