Generally, as is often said, history is written by – and about – the victors.

And it’s certainly going to be the case that by the time Donald Trump leaves office, whenever and however that happens, there will likely have been as many words written about his Presidency and how he came to win it as those of Nixon, Kennedy or even Lincoln.

But as far as the 2016 election is concerned, easily as compelling a story as the victory is that of the manner of the accompanying defeat.

Just as Thomas Dewey’s iconic moment of failure in the 1948 election was immortalized through the Chicago Tribune’s erroneous headline  (even if for some people the visual embodiment of that defeat is their only point of reference for the otherwise successful and influential New York Governor), how Hillary Clinton came to lose a contest even her opponents expected her to win will long remain one of the most fascinating political tales of our time.

This recent book by Jonathan Allen (of Politico) and Amie Parnes (of  The Hill) – two of the reporters who followed the Clinton campaign the closest – tells the dramatic story of how the former First Lady lost in part simply because she wasn’t able to articulate a reason why she wanted to be President.

Her staff even considered testing a slogan: “Because it’s her turn.”

Salon called the book “the first must-read” of the 2016 election year and it’s an excellent insider account of a losing campaign that explains how Clinton was in many ways a mismatched candidate in a change election.

Where the story is probably at its most compelling is explaining in detail the relationship between the candidate and her key staff – and their own in-fighting (some have pushed back against this) – as the organization developed from preparing a rationale for getting in the race to deciding who was to blame for its failure.

The sources are mostly on background and not all those staffers clearly either spoke with the authors or embrace their characterizations. Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s Director of Communications, tweeted on the book’s release: “I don’t recognize the campaign depicted in Shattered. It was tough but we stuck together and all [are] proud of how hard our candidate fought.”

There’s significant insight into the candidate’s debate preparation – both for her primary face-offs against Bernie Sanders and in the general against Trump – and of course there’s the nagging, persistent effect of mistakes over the handling of the email server issue and Clinton’s reluctance to apologize in order to turn the page.

But along with the mis-steps, there are examples of Clinton’s brilliance as a personal politician. For example, in the account of how she was able to turn around Republican attacks over the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi – the book calls her performance in the much-hyped hearings as “an eleven-hour infomercial testimonial to her competence”.

 

Brutal

Matt Taibbi – whose own book about Trump, Insane Clown President is another great read, wrote in Rolling Stone that the book “brutalizes” the Clinton campaign organization. He argues that the importance of having this sort of public autopsy is that the sources for the book are still significant players in Democratic politics and in formulating the opposition to the Trump administration.

A couple of months ago, Clinton set up Onward Together, a political organization designed to encourage that opposition – its slogan: “Resist, Persist, Insist and Enlist.” So while she might never recede from politics and her favorite causes, as one of her friends puts it, in terms of seeking public office, that door has most likely closed.

Taibbi writes: “If the ending to this story were anything other than Donald Trump being elected President, Shattered would be an awesome comedy, like a Kafka novel – a lunatic bureaucracy devouring itself. But since the ending is the opposite of funny, it will likely be consumed as a cautionary tale.”

Clinton will eventually write about the campaign and its outcome herself. When she offered her first substantial critique in early May she pointed to FBI director James Comey’s intervention over the aforementioned emails as the decisive turning point.

“It wasn’t a perfect campaign – there is no such thing – but I was on the way to winning until …”  She probably didn’t need to say anything more.

For now, though, Allen and Parnes’ account – which has been optioned as a TV series – is as close as we’ll get to seeing behind the scenes of a campaign that eventually mirrored the broken expectations of Clinton’s supporters.

And the final page of Shattered is little short of heartbreaking in how it articulates unfulfilled aspiration – even its regret somehow managing to overshadow the extensive accomplishments of this remarkable public servant’s life.

Coming up on six months after his inauguration, President Trump’s support among his base and Republicans in general seems to be holding despite the vacuum surrounding his domestic agenda and various ongoing investigations.

As the timeline continues to emerge about the extent of the Russian government’s involvement in last year’s election, especially with this week’s revelations about meetings with Russians involving Donald Trump Jr and – crucially – Jared Kushner, the contrast between how politics is and how it was, to say nothing of the White House itself,  comes into greater focus almost by the day.

Obviously it’s all conjecture at this point, but it’s not unreasonable to speculate that had Clinton won, given the persistent, party-political polarization we’re currently enduring, we might just have been looking at a different President wrestling with different scandals.

But we’re not.

And, as unsatisfying as it would be, Mrs Clinton might yet have the last laugh – even if, ironically, when she actually chose to laugh during the campaign it was ridiculed as somehow contrived or unnatural; almost in the way that Obama’s tan suit or feet on the desk or reaching over the sneeze guard at Chipotle offended political sensibilities.

Isn’t it funny how our idea of what’s seen as “presidential” has altered so much in such a short time?

Shattered – Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign (2017) is published by Crown.

Also published on Medium.