(chiming music) - Want to welcome you to this lecture on the Maxwell School State
of Democracy Lecture Series. This is the last lecture that we'll be holding in the
series for this semester, the fall semester but please stay tuned for our programs coming up in the Spring. My name is Grant Reeher and I'm the Director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute, which coordinates these events. On behalf of Syracuse University, I would like to acknowledge with respect the Onondaga nation, the indigenous people on whose ancestral land we now sit. Before I introduce our speakers, I want to issue some thanks. First to the Dean's Office for supporting this series. For technical support I want to thank the Information and
Computing Technology Group, in particular Tom Fazio. Thanks as always to Kelly
Coleman and Sunju Raybeck. They work in the Campbell
Public Affairs Institute and they helped to put
together these events. I have a few reminders for you. First, if you haven't already done so, please silence your cell phones, your smartphones. It looks like some of you
had not already done so. (audience chattering) Second, when we get to the
audience Q and A portion of the program this afternoon, I'd like to ask you to wait
for me to recognize you. If you'd like to ask a question raise your hand. Wait for me to recognize you and then also wait of the microphones that will be going around
to be passed to you. That's so everybody can hear you and that you're part of our livestream and also as I've said before, please give the microphone back when you are done asking your question. Then third, following the talk, as we always do, we'll have reception outside in the foyer where there will be refreshments and we can continue the conversation that we begin here. Now we turn to the topic at hand, and to our two speakers. It's been said that journalism is the first rough draft of history. And if that's the case, then when it comes to the
2016 presidential election and in particular the Clinton campaign, Jonathan Allen and Armie Parnes have polished up that draft a bit and resubmitted it to us as a book. Their book's provocative title is Shattered: Inside Hillary
Clinton's Doomed Campaign. Now obviously, reads differently
for different people. From political thriller
to gruesome horror story but regardless of that, there's a lot of material
in there for us to reponder and reconsider now looking back. They'll be doing some of
that with us here today. Speaking about the book but also pivoting off of the book to make some observations about what's happened since and to try to tease out
some lessons and meanings. It's not the first time that they've trained their sustained
attention on Hillary Clinton. They also published a
bestselling biography of Clinton a few years before titled, HRC: State Secrets and the
Rebirth of Hillary Clinton. Jon Allen is a national political reporter for NBC News' digital unit. He's a former Washington
bureau chief for Bloomberg and a former White House
bureau chief for Politico. Amie Parnes is senior political
correspondent for the Hill and a regular CNN political analyst. Between them they have a wealth of prior reporting experience. I can tell you we had a smaller meeting with some of the undergraduate
students earlier today and Amie told a very moving story about her coverage of the events of 9/11 when she was in New York on the day. Our format for today will be that Amie and Jon will speak for a little bit. Then we'll move right on
to the audience questions. We won't have faculty response. I think that makes more sense given that there's two of
them here speaking today. I know that a lot of you are going to want to ask questions. Then we'll return to the
State of Democracy tradition with a reception that
follows outside in the foyer and again we'll have refreshment there but the book Shattered will also be available for purchase and Amie and Jon are happy to sign that
for you if you like. Amie and Jon, welcome
to the Maxwell school and the floor is yours. (audience applauding) - Thank you Grant. Thank you to everyone for being here. Thank you to Syracuse University and to, was it Onondaga nation, on whose turf we're on. Thank you also to the nation. I think what we're gonna do is talk to you a little bit about what we were trying to
accomplish with this book in terms of telling a story
about the 2016 election. A little bit about what we think would be interesting for
you that's inside of it. Some of the conclusions, because there's been a lot
of talk about what happened and certainly Secretary Clinton came out with her own
book called What Happened. And also... - What Happened. - I'm sorry, yeah, not question mark. Just What Happened. (audience laughing) Punctuation is important. Then finally, is that better? - [Audience] Yes. Then finally maybe talk a little bit about where we see the electoral battlefield heading into the midterms and into 2020. I guess I'll start a little bit with what we were trying to
accomplish with this book. The way that we thought about it. How it came together and then I'll turn it over
to Amie to talk a little bit about some of the
conclusions that we reached and what we think really happened. No question mark. Because we talked to a lot of, we talked to a lot of people heavily involved in the campaign. Our conclusions are
based on our interviews with the people that
worked on the campaign, outside of the campaign, and Democratic circles, in the Republican world and the Trump world, so we really feel this is their story and that's what we came at this book with as an idea. We first signed up to do it in early 2014. We started reporting in late 2014. We made a very early decision that we were going to allow everyone who spoke to us, to speak to us anonymously because we thought that we wouldn't get people to tell us what was going on in real time honestly if they felt like or maybe even not in real time, maybe even after the fact, if they felt like somebody in power would be in a position to take retribution against them for what they said. A lot of these people
joined the Clinton campaign with the idea that they were going to be working for the next President
of the United States. If they thought that they
were gonna say something to us that would come back later to bite them, and cost them a job, they would be less likely
to tell us the truth. We also believed they would be more likely to tell the truth if we promised them that nothing would come out before the campaign was over. They felt like they could potentially negatively affect the outcome, they might not talk honestly to us. Those were two of the sort big concessions we made as reporters and we felt like that was the way we were gonna get the real story and the way to double check what people were telling us was to talk to as many as we possibly could. We talked to more than
100 sources for this book. Many of them repeatedly. A lot of them at the upper
levels of the Clinton campaign. The other thing we really wanted to do was tell a story about the campaign that took the reader into the room, behind the scenes. Into the rooms where decisions were made and explain how Secretary
Clinton made decisions. Explain why she made
the decisions she made. Allow people to see as much of the debate that went on between her and her advisors and among
her advisors as possible. We wanted people to be able to live this campaign from chapter to chapter, from primary to primary, from debate to debate, as though it was happening right now. Even though people would know the outcome, we wanted them to be able to forget that while they were reading this and feel that sort of political thriller that Grant was talking about before. To live with the campaign as
it's ups and downs happened. The rollercoaster of tremendous joy at the big primary victories and unbelievable defeat, actually through a lot of the campaign. One of the things that we were told was a mantra of the campaign staffers was, "We're not allowed to have nice things." Because they believed every
time something good happened, there was another shoe that would drop and it would be something that was very difficult to deal with and something that could
overwhelm the good news. Of course, one of the
great examples of this is October 7th, 2016, which is the day on which
the Access Hollywood video of Donal Trump leaked. There were three things that happened in quick succession on that day. One was the US intelligence community came out with a
determination that Russia had hacked the DNC, for a lack of a, that's the short version of it. 17 US intelligence
agencies basically saying Russia was the culprit in
the hacking of the DNC. Within a couple of hour the
Access Hollywood video comes out and then about 30 minutes after that, the first of John Podesta's emails are released by Wikileaks. An incredibly momentous day and if you're the Clinton campaign you watch these two really positive things for your campaign happen, right. Donald Trump... I'm sorry, first the Russians have interfered in the election and the case that the Clinton campaign was making at the time was that Donal Trump was encouraging
the Russians to do that, if not completely in collusion with them. The second thing is the
Access Hollywood video where he brags about
sexually assaulting women, whether or not it's true. I mean I've been in a lot of locker rooms, I've never heard anybody brag about sexually assaulting women. Men say a lot of terrible
things in my life, never has anyone boasted about it. Like this is a good thing. It was an incredible moment
in our nation's culture and politics and history. Both of those things the Clinton
campaign looks at as good and then boom, the third thing comes out and it's gonna be this month long trickle of John Podesta's emails that get released and become an anchor on the campaign. They sort of felt like that all along. That there was, every time there was good news there was bad news that
came along with it. We wanted people to be
able to take these rides. We wanted them to understand what it felt like to be working on this campaign. Of course when we started we didn't know it that it was gonna be so dark and ominous. In fact, about a month before the election we got on the phone with our editor and he said, you know
you guys have a problem. We had turned in a bunch of chapters that dealt with the primaries and the early part of the campaign. Said you guys have a problem and we're like, what's the problem? He said, "This book is
so ominous and foreboding "and she's gonna win. "How are you gonna
reconcile these things?" There was just dead silence
on our end of the phone. 'Cause we didn't know
how to reconcile that. Because we hadn't put it all together. We were going chapter by chapter and we knew that there were all these sort of difficult things that they were trying to overcome and in some cases they did and in other cases they didn't. We didn't have that
perspective that he did of having read all those chapters sort of front to back. He was really concerned that we had this dark book that sounded like she was gonna lose and she was gonna win. Finally, we sort of came
together with something like we'll cross that bridge when we come to it and then we scrambled to think about like how are we gonna deal with this. Because there are some serious problems the way she's running her operation. We sort of determined, well that's gonna be a significant piece of this book will be how is this gonna be, how do you spin this forward into what will plague her administration? You know, what are the things she did well on the campaign trail that will help her and what are the things that she did poorly that will plague her in an administration if in fact she wins. But we did end up having to go back and tear up stuff we had written because we really had just been doing it sort of in real time like I was saying. Then, just one other thought on the idea of really taking people inside the room. After the election we had this real devotion to one sort of guiding principle which was we really want to tell people what happened on election night. We thought the question that's gonna be hardest to answer that people are gonna
least want to talk about because it's so painful in
the wake of the election. So raw for the people that were working on Clinton's campaign was we really want to get in there and give a tic-tock. If we aren't able to do that we will have failed. That's something everyone's
gonna want to read and by the way, if you buy the book and you skip to that chapter, we will not blame you because everyone does.
(audience giggling) I think we were successful in getting you behind the scenes to see what it was like going from certainty of victory to oh my god we're losing to oh my god Donald Trump
is gonna be president to oh my god the Obama legacy is done and walking through
those moment to moment. The only thing that we put out before the book came out and it was after the election, so it kept with the promises that we made not to report
before the election. We did put out one story that President Obama had
called Secretary Clinton to urge her to concede as quickly as possible on election night before she was ready to do it. We did that largely because we heard somebody else was gonna report it.(laughing) We scrambled over Thanksgiving weekend. It went out under Amie's byline in her newspaper, The Hill, but we scrambled to make sure we didn't lose that scoop. I think if you read that chapter, it's indicative of the work that we tried
to in all other places. To take you into rooms where Bill Clinton sitting
screaming at the television in Iowa on caucus night because he can't stand the
reporting that he's hearing about how this is just like Hillary Clinton losing Iowa in 2008 and he thinks it's much different than her losing Iowa in 2008 and by the way she probably gonna win. He can't stand what he's hearing from Wolf Blitzer and the others. You know people...
- Sitting there in leather gloves. He's sitting inside a hotel room in leather gloves. - If you couldn't here that. He's sitting inside a hotel room, screaming at the TV. He's got leather gloves on, which is just so odd. (audience laughing) It's cold in Iowa outside, so at some point he's gonna
be leaving the hotel room but he's nowhere near actually leaving and he's just sitting there with his leather gloves and screaming at the TV and then screaming at aides. Screaming at John Podesta. Then firing questions at Hillary's Iowa director. I mean, you know, the intensity and the passion is, I think, there throughout this book. If you're interested in
what happens on campaigns beyond the sort of broader question of why Hillary Clinton
didn't win the election, I think we were successful in getting you really
deeply behind that curtain. I'm gonna let Amie talk a little bit about some of the broader
conclusions we reached. - I know everyone here probably has an opinion on why she lost and how she lost. There's the Russia conclusion, which continues to dominate the headlines every single day. There's James Comey,
the former FBI Director, who we like to point out was definitely a factor but he would not have been anywhere near the story had Hillary Clinton not used a private email server. That point is sometimes lost upon people when you think about well, he interfered over the summer, and then he came back less than two weeks before the election and as Secretary Clinton likes to say, she think, she believes that he is one of the reasons why she lost, if not one of the biggest reasons. I think our conclusion is, we've concluded that when
you win by 70,000 votes, any one factor, obviously, can make the ultimate decision and can sway the election but I think there have been lots of, we concluded that there was largely a messaging problem that
she had from the start. Were she from the very
beginning of her campaign is speaking on Roosevelt Island and she's giving your standard
Democratic stump speech. She's not really explaining
why her, why now. This is something that
we didn't even conclude, this is something that
people internally told us. She brought on all these speechwriters and advisors to help her kind of cultivate her message and conclusions that they reached were basically that she didn't
have a reason for running. We talked to someone at the very, after the election, who essentially said just that. The source essentially said, I would have had a reason for running or I wouldn't have run. This is a very senior
advisor on her campaign. There are other factors. Bernie Sanders plays a major factor and we can talk about how Bernie Sanders, the news of yesterday that came up about what Donna Brazile admitted, the former DNC Director, about how the DNC essentially might have tipped the scales in favor of Hillary Clinton. But Bernie Sanders at the same time that Donald Trump has risen, is essentially continuing
to hammer home the message that you can't trust Hillary. That she is in the pockets of big banks. Then there are other, there's smaller things. There's a major likeability factor. One of the most underreported stories I think of this entire campaign was the fact that millennial women, many of you who might be in this room, did not ultimately feel
the need to support her. I found this very really fascinating as I was doing my own reporting, my own daily reporting
separate from the book, because I assumed as a woman that most young women would want to see a woman president. Ultimately I think I was wrong. I think a lot of people
came around ultimately and supported her but there were a good unknown number of them
who stayed home that day or voted for Donald Trump because they just didn't like her enough. And so I think that, and then there are self-inflicted wounds that she brought upon herself. Like she, as I mentioned earlier, did use a private email server, did use private email. She gave paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and never really saw a reason for, when people wanted an explanation she couldn't really give one for why she was doing that. I think there were lots
of factors obviously that played a role in this. What am I forgetting? There were many, many others. - I think there were a lot of factors that one could look at and point to as you were saying as determinative when you're talking about 70,000 votes over three states but I mean our basic conclusion is what Amie is saying. Which is Hillary Clinton didn't know why she was running for president and if you read her own book, which just came out recently, it says that she ran for president because she thought she'd be good at it. Which is not a reason for other people necessarily to vote for. It's isn't a reason about what
she's going to do for them. Her slogan, I'm With Her, is about her and whether people like
Donald Trump or not, his message was very clearly and cleanly about what he was going to be a tool for people to do. That was to bring America back home from foreign entanglements, to cut down on trade deals, to build a wall between the US and Mexico. Whatever you think of that, I think it was a pretty
clean and clear agenda. I don't think anybody
had any question about what it was he was promising to do. Whether or not he has followed through on all those promises. For her one of the moments in the book that I think
is most poignant is she's flying on a plane with Minyon Moore, who's a longtime friend and Democratic operative. Clinton has just lost
the New Hampshire Primary and not just lost, she's gotten destroyed in it by 24 points or something like that. A state where she has won in 2008 and Moore is brought on
to the campaign trail basically as a friend. As a confidant. Hillary's in a bad frame of mind, she's upset, she's a little bit confused and so the campaign brings Moore out to sit with her and be her friend basically
on the campaign trail. She says to Moore and I'm paraphrasing here, 'cause I haven't looked at the book in the print in many months, but she basically says to Moore, I can see that there's
anger in the country but I don't really understand it. I can't get my arms around what's going on in the country right now. It seems so telling that somebody who's running for president is acknowledging that she doesn't understand what the shift
in the national sentiment is and what it means for what she should be doing with her campaign. That she's not able to take
advantage of the changes and the way the American public
is viewing it's governments and viewing it's political parties and viewing it's leaders and capitalizing on that. We saw that throughout
the entire campaign. We saw a candidate who truly believed in throughout her entire life in the ability to make change
from within the system. We saw her in 2008 talk
about Lyndon Johnson doing that as President as a contrast against Martin Luther King being an activist, outside the system and it hurt her in 2008, but that's the way she thinks. The President of the United States is the one who gets to make the change because they're inside the system and yet a lot of people on the right and a lot of people on the left were saying this isn't working. The people who get there
to change the system from inside become insiders and they don't change the system, the system changes them. Her inability to grasp that, her ability to see that the anger and not understand how to channel it, really contrasts with what Bernie Sanders was able to do in the Democratic primary and what Donald Trump was able to do on the Republican side. Interestingly, she still only lost by 70,000 votes over three states. About a fifth of Donald Trump's voters said they didn't think he
was fit to be president. Which tells you that she failed to make the case for herself effectively. That there were people that were willing to vote against Donald Trump, who went and pulled the level for him. Is that kind of where you were headed?
- Yes, it was and I think the larger point too is A she should have crushed him and that's what's missing in all of this. Because people often tell us well she won the popular vote, granted, but she lost by 70,000 votes and that's only 70,000 votes and we often say, yeah but this is Donald Trump. A man who was bragging
about assaulting women and in any other election, he would have been destroyed just on that. She wasn't able to convince the people where it mattered in the
electoral states that mattered that she was the right person and there where plenty of people who supported President Obama who then went and supported Donald Trump. I think that's a key moment and also the fact that this
was the year of the outsider and you look what happened overseas and you look at Brexit and you look what happened in France. This was the mood of the world really, not just domestically but
what people were craving. People didn't want the same
old same old in Washington, they wanted to mix it up. She wasn't really the right
candidate for the moment and I think that also hurt her, apart from a major liability. People often told me, these are Democrats who
talked to us for the book and talked to me separately in reporting, you know they never know with the Clintons what shoe is gonna drop and I think people were always a little bit weary of well what else is coming. What else is she hiding? Why are we even talking about emails? Why are all these new
developments happening every single day. I think that ultimately, you know they were like little drops but I think overall made this whole thing contributed to a larger ocean and a bigger problem for Hillary Clinton. - I appreciate that you did
not mix your metaphor there. (laughing) The drops and the ocean that was, it's good stay with the water. I think maybe we'll
talk a little bit about sort of where the party sin... I also wanna just, for what it's worth, we're talking a lot about
why Hillary Clinton lost and so that has this sort of in and of itself, like I see some like
unhappy faces out there and it seems very heavy to people who were supportive of her and I would just note a couple of things from our experience. Outside of ourselves and our editor, the first person to read this book was the copy editor at
the publishing house. We didn't know what people were gonna think when they read it and then the copy editor
said to us, we asked. She'd read through and done all the line editing and you know very sort
of intense micro stuff and we were like, what did you think of it? 'Cause we're like
looking for some feedback and she said, "It was cathartic." So if I see unhappy faces from
Clinton supporters out there, just to let you know the copy editor thought it was cathartic. - [Amie] Also we should add that there are republicans that you and I have both spoken
to over the last year, well six months, since
the book has come out and they've read the book and they actually found
themselves rooting for her. - In places. (audience laughing) Not overall, but they would like kinda get lost and be like, oh and they're
like following along. - I thought that was really interesting. And also, I think just to, not to pat ourselves on the back, I think this is a book that Spike Lee, over to the left, and Rush Limbaugh, over the right, both liked and have raved about. I think as journalist we tried our best to not take a side. We're old school
journalist who don't really root for one side or the other. We just try to tell the story. In telling the story, we're telling the story of not just the people who
witnessed the campaign or who were volunteers on the campaign but on the upper tiers of the campaign and what they went through and this is their story. I think we're proud of the fact that we tried to tell a really honest and compelling story and that it appealed to
both the right and the left. - And now for the crystal
ball portion of the event. We're gonna talk a little
bit about where we think, where we think the two
parties are right now and what the sort of future holds for them and a little bit about
the Donna Brazile book that just came out, or the excerpt that just came out of the Donna Brazile book. I share an agent with
Donna Brazile. (laughing) So I hope she sells lots of books. (audience member laughing) - [Amie] And then we'll
open it up to questions 'cause we can talk all day long. - I think one of the
really interesting things over the course of the last, trying to do my math here, but basically over the course
of the last 15 years or so, has been this sort of dissolution of the two national political parties. I think the biggest factors in that were not intended but the combination of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that changed the way that money came in to parties and limited soft money to parties and the set of Supreme Court decisions that are sort of shorthanded
as Citizens United, which allowed that soft
money to go to outside groups in sort of unlimited fashion and allowed them to come into play. So what you got is the
parties are a lot weaker, have less ability to
control who candidates are, and I know people will make the argument that the Democratic Party anointed Hillary Clinton and she didn't win any votes and Bernie Sanders was destroyed because the Democratic National Committee was in Hillary Clinton's camp. I would argue with that assertion. Obviously Donald Trump came in and upended the Republican Party. He was not the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th or 15th choice of
establishment Republicans to be the nominee of the Republican Party. He was the 16th or 17th choice, somewhere around Bobby Jindal. (laughs) So, what we saw was a really wealthy guy with a national profile, who was able to come in and sort of hijack a party. Hijack is a loaded word but I just mean he was
able to take over the party and use it's shell for
sort of his own purpose. You can do that now and to some extent Barack
Obama was able to do that. He did a good job of straddling, right the outsider-insider thing. He had enough of the insider people in his side to help and frankly the Democratic Party at that time was still standing as a structure a lot more solidly than it is right now. But we now live in an age were the parties really aren't able to control who the candidates are anymore, for better or worse. Probably some better and some worse. I think that you'll see that trend continue along those
lines in Senate races. We're seeing that with the
Bannon primary challenges to Senate Republicans. You know, what you need is a connection of very wealthy benefactor and activist who will follow where that benefactor wants them to go. So somebody with a lot of money and a bunch of activists can really go outside the party system and in fact sometimes use the party against the candidates who've
been elected to office. Basically, our country is not really happy with it's governance right now. There are different reasons for that. On the Left I think the... On the left I think people want to see government take a bigger role and they want to see a bigger distribution of wealth, or I'm sorry, a more even
distribution of wealth. I think on the Right you see people want smaller government and more liberty from the government and a greater distribution of wealth. Which is really interesting. We're watching this play
out in the tax fight in Washington right now. The Republican leadership had to put out a tax bill that they felt looked like it was helping
working class folks and not helping the very wealthy, even though there are provisions in it that help the very wealthy. When they talked about
individual tax rates, they kept the top one at 39.6%, 'cause they didn't want to take a political hit inside their own party. That's anathema to
Republican tax ideology, because what's happened is the Republican party voters are more populist today
than they used to be. We saw that in the victory of Trump and we've seen it with
these Bannon primaries. I think it's interesting
to watch this sort of dissolution of the two political parties. I don't know how long that lasts and I don't know if at some point there's a swing back. Maybe Grant can talk about that more with a probably better sense of the history of parties and political processes and legislatures and things. We are sort of entering this phase, or have entered this phase of a transformation on both sides and we're seeing it on both sides. I would make the argument
that there's no such thing as the Democratic Party right now. There is no leader of the Democratic Party and there is no center of
gravity in the Democratic Party. Democrats are sort of doing
for themselves right now. They're looking out for themselves. You can see it in some of the C-Y-A that happened after the last election. You can see it in some of the fundraising that goes on. Nobody's giving money to the Democratic National Committee, at all. Part of that is that Tom Perez is a lackluster chairman and part of it is nobody thinks the Democratic National
Committee deserves their money. They would rather give it to individual candidates or maybe it give it to a Senate or House committee in hopes of getting some power at that level. I will turn over to Amie for a minute to talk a little bit about were she sees this going, particularly on the Democratic side, cause that's what you're
covering right now. - It is and I think things
are pretty dire right now and it's hard to see because as I was telling a
group of students earlier, reporters in the country right now are focused on Donald Trump and there's some much news
happening on that side. But on my new Beat, on the rebuilding of the Democratic Party you're seeing that people
are unhappy as Jon said. They don't want to donate money, they feel lost, the party doesn't know
if it's shifting left or staying center. A lot of people are trying to figure out what issues they can run on that will bring in more voters. I think this is, I'm curious to see how this all shakes out because I agree with you in that there is no center of gravity right now in the Democratic Party. People have been trying
to get President Obama, former President Obama to come back in and play a role and he's hesitant to do that because he wants new power, fresh blood to bubble up and he feels like the more he's out there, the more his voice is out there that a he's gonna be a foil to the Republican party, which he doesn't want to be. And he's also preventing new leaders and that's sort of what
2016 taught us I think. One of the lessons is that the parties wanted someone new. They wanted someone to
shake up the system. They didn't want the same old, same old. So I think, you know this leads us into
the Donna Brazile story, which broke yesterday. There was a lot of
consternation about that story because what it did was it gave the Bernie Sanders
supporters ammunition, for lack of a better word, and to say this election was rigged and the party was never for us and it supported Hillary Clinton. What it's doing right now is it's dividing these factions
of people even more so. Someone told me yesterday, it was like pouring, and this was a former Hillary aide said, "This is like pouring buckets of salt "on the wound right now." Because we're still trying to find out, we don't have an identity right now. We're still trying to rebuild. We're kind of licking our
wounds from what happened still. This is not helpful. And so I think that's
what I'm curious to see. I think you're right in that people are, I talked to few donors recently who don't want to come anywhere near the Democratic Party. They're just supporting candidates, individual candidates
but not the larger party. They want to see what happens first. One source that Jon and I talked to recently called Tom Perez, the Democratic Chair, an intern and I think that's... - [Jon] And that was a compliment compared to some of the other
things people are saying. - It's true. The Democratic Party's
story would be getting a lot more traction right now had it not been for the
constant Russia headlines and Donald Trump and Paul Manafort. Cause it's a massive
story happening right now. A lot of people ask us after publishing this book, well who's next, who's coming up? I think that remains to be seen. I think there could be a case for someone like Kamala Harris, who's trying to position herself as like the female Barack Obama. There other people that could come up. We were talking earlier about mayors. Mitch Landrieu the mayor of New Orleans is a name that comes up as kind of a dark horse candidate but he's a guy who's from a red state, who's doing new and exciting things, I think in his state. He's kind of getting a lot of attention. He addressed the
Confederate statues issues even before it was an issue. I think what the party is wanting more and more is someone new and someone who can, can kind of go back to the roots of what it means to be a Democrat. I don't know if you guys saw recently, but Al Franken had released a video which every Democrat
has been talking about kind of behind the scenes lately and it went viral but it was basically what
it means to be a Democrat and why he's a Democrat and how his, I believe
it was his mother-in-law, went to school on a Pell Grant and conversations that really haven't been had in a long time and how the party has lost it's way. I think right now you're seeing more and more of those conversations being had. - Was checking to see, I though Claiborne Pell was a Republican but I could be wrong. Anybody remember Claiborne
Pell, right Allen. Sometimes Democrat and Republican are confusing in Rhode Island. Yeah, we should open it up. The one think I was just
gonna add to what you said is when we see Donna Brazile's book come out and we see Hillary
Clinton's book come out, we see these moments were
they take over the spotlight, it's a great point that
Amie makes which is that the Democratic inferno is not seen until somebody comes out and sort of forces it into the news and then delays like the
repair of the Democratic Party. Right, so Trump takes all the attention, Democrats are still
fighting amongst themselves at a low level and somebody thrusts them into the news just to see how badly they're doing from a new book, or a new excerpt or something and it doesn't allow them to
get past the 2016 election. And we will see that continue
I think for some time. - We should also add
that the Republican Party is also in shambles right now. (audience laughing) - Right. - I mean, that's obvious but I mean the actual party apparatus is not doing well. I think all of that is being overshadowed by the leader of the
Republican party right now, who is Donald Trump. But I think if you look at both parties, they're both kind of in misery. They're both kind of
fighting for who they are and fighting to find their identities. I'm curious to see how that shakes out and if Donald Trump has an opponent in the primary. You think he will, but anyway we should open
this up to questions. - [Jon] Oh yeah, and if right now you can troll 35% of the country you win. This what we've learned. - I'm gonna ask the
first question actually and then we'll take
questions from the audience. There's one that I want to make sure that you address because the two of you emphasized the problem with Hillary Clinton's message and lack thereof as what you saw as one
of the biggest things that was lacking and what perceived, so this isn't your job but just put the hat on for a second. What would have been the message? Give me the message that
she should have put forward? - I'm not a very good political operative. (audience laughing) which is the first thing a smart reporter would admit too. I may not be a smart reporter but I've figured out how to at least approximate one. I think basically she should have identified two or three issues that she felt were
resonant with the country and used them to explain her philosophy and what
she would do for the public and she didn't do that. She was, Amie likes to tell this story. There was like a wall
in her Brooklyn office and it had the words at the top of it Hillary is for and then it had Post-it Notes with all the things Hillary was for and there were like
hundreds of Post-it Notes. Somebody, a Democratic operative, who saw that said, "If
you're for everything "you're not for anything." I think it was very difficult for people to figure out what it was she was campaigning for, other than herself. It could have been almost
any two or three issues but I think she really
needed to sort of condense and make it about what it is that I'm promising to deliver
to the American public. And look, that stuff can change when you get into office. I mean, Barack Obama didn't start out the 2008 campaign thinking to himself, I'm gonna be the guy that finally delivers more affordable healthcare. That wasn't his motivating issue, but by the time he got
to the general election, he had to communicate with Democrats, and certainly by the
time he got into office it was a huge priority for him because that was the priority of the party that nominated him and got him elected president. - Okay, okay, so try to call
on two people at a time. Here's one hand up here and we'll get this gentleman
here in the tie in the back. We'll start here and
then we'll go up there. - I'm Nodira Azizova. It works. Sociology department of Maxwell School. Thank you so much for your
interesting presentation. As a person who is interested
in women empowerment I just want to ask one small question. No doubt Hillary Clinton is a very bright and strong woman on political
arena in a global scale and for me it's very difficult to be leader in your own family to consolidate all efforts and all members in your family and of course it's very hard to consolidate the majority
of your country on high level. I'm just curious what is your special motivation and what is your support behind the scene that was visible through during this debate from debate campaign, very long election marathon, which requires a lot of personals, not only
intellectual abilities, but also spiritual abilities and also a lot of support from others. What was your motivation? What was your inspiration, which we don't know? Do you touch upon this
question in your book or not? - Our motivations personally? - [Nodira] Yeah, personal. - We don't have motivations. (audience giggling) We don't. - Well I don't know if
that's exactly true. I think what she means ... - [Grant] Are you asking for
the candidates motivation or their motivations?
- or my? - [Nodira] I'm asking about the Hillary Clinton's motivation. - Oh, Hillary Clinton's ...
- Yeah, okay. - [Nodira] She did a
tremendous job, right, during this election campaign when she was working
through debate to debate. The whole scale, what was your motivation? What did you see? Like what motivates you
to be a great leader, like a woman leader. Who could do this? Like you imagine about
the female solidarity. - Right. - [Nodira] But I didn't
see the female solidarity in a big scale. - No. - [Nodira] So this is a question and this is a big problem
for female solidarity also. - At some level, like any other politician
who seeks the presidency, Hillary Clinton was interested in power and there's a certain amount of ego that goes with the idea that you would be the best
president of the United States. That's true of any candidate. I think the way that she
justifies it to herself, the way she thinks about it is that she has been blessed with, and she's a very deeply religious person, who sometimes talks
about it but not a lot. Who believes that she's been
blessed with a lot of talent and a lot of opportunities and a lot of platform and believes that she should give back. That she has a responsibility
of public service. It's very tied to her Methodist faith and particularly John Wesley, the founder of the Methodism. This idea as she said during the campaign to do as much good for as many
people as you possibly can. I think that in her mind
that is her big motivation. I think that it is difficult to look at it from an outside perspective without also seeing a hunger for power in that. That part of that is a justification for that natural hunger to be in charge and as she said in her book she believes she'd be the best
person to have that power. - But I think you still see her kind of wrestle with that idea because she talked about it recently and in her book, she said you know I came to
the debates more prepared. I prepared. And you saw that because
she is at heart a student and she's not a phony politician in the way people just you know react and give you talking points. This is a woman who knows
the minutia of policy and when you learn this in our first book, she will quiz her aides and make sure that they give her exactly what she needs to know and if she's not satisfied and her thirst for knowledge is, you know continues, she will ask for more. She will always be the
smartest person in the room. I think that you see some of that. She felt like if she
was the smartest person, if she was the most prepared person, that she would ultimately win. She would win the debates. She would win the election. And you still see her kind of coming to terms with that. How could I lose to this guy? I came in, I was prepared, I prepared. You know you saw that in the way they prepared for their debates. He didn't really prepare that much until the very end, until he saw that she was actually holing up in a hotel room for days on end and canceled campaign events and didn't do anything except stay there and you know practice for these moments. That wasn't what the American public, it wasn't good enough for some reason. It's not what the mood of the American, it's not what people were craving. I think it's fascinating that she's still kind of grappling with that a bit. The fact that she felt like
she was the smartest person and that she could have done the best job. I don't know if that answers
your question at all but I... And I agree with Jon. I think that she feels like she is, she's always pulled in. That people want her to run. She wants people to draft her into running which is why she said she
ran for Senate in New York. She said that again when we sat down with her for our first book, she essentially admitted to us that she wants people to feel, she wants to feel drafted. She wants to be part of a movement and I think she is, she feels like she is a public servant and she's there to do good and not anything else. - Gentleman up here and
then we'll get two more. - Excuse me, thank you. So you guys identified, so sorry, you guys have identified a lot of these self-inflicted wounds that she did throughout the campaign and then kind of talked
about it afterwards that I'm sure people on her campaign staff had to have recognized it and did they come forward? And was it listened to? If not, was it because
of just like you said because she had that aura of
the smartest person in the room or the culture or people there just, not be retribution against, or did they think they're
just gonna win anyways? So what's the difference
of changing thinks. - All of the above. No, I think that, first of all I think unlike a lot of politicians who
rise up to a high level, I don't believe that thinks she's the smartest person in the room to the exclusion of other people having intelligent things to say. I think that, that's actually an admirable
quality in a leader, that she does sometimes listen
to other people she respects. However, the people who work for her are not necessarily those people. I think there was a combination of people being afraid to
raise problems with her and not having access to her. As we report in the book, she stopped at one point and actually for a long
period in this campaign trail, having like one-on-one conversations with her campaign manager and she basically demoted him internally without changing his title and raised up a bunch of other people and kind of put him on
a committee of leaders that she would talk to
on the phone and stuff. I think that there was a combination of people being afraid to tell her that's she's doing something wrong in the event that she was going to win, which they all thought the was and might seek retribution against her. Certainly within the campaign structure there were people who felt like when they raised problems, Robby Mook the campaign manager, would seek retribution against them. Would you know take away their staff, or their title. So there was some fear and I also think to some extent when people did get to were they were not listened to, up to and including her husband, President Bill Clinton, who kept saying you gotta send me out to go try to persuade
people on your behalf and you've got to go out and try to persuade people because one of the things we dive into in the book, and I don't want to get into it here 'cause it can be boring and mind boggling, basically her team got very steeped in the use of data analytics to determine all kinds of decisions. Where to send surrogates, and which voters to try to touch and all sorts of decisions were made based on these data analytics
that were coming in. She was pretty married to that and her husband was like, you guys, like the campaign is not making effort to persuade people who don't agree with her, that they should agree
with her and vote for her. The reason the campaign didn't do that is it's more expensive to get somebody who doesn't agree
with you to agree with you and then get them out to vote than to find somebody who agrees with you and just get them out to vote. And so, they were making decisions based on the idea that it was
more efficient to do that, at least in part. And Bill Clinton was like, this is crazy. We should go out and make our case. He was used to doing that
on the campaign trail. Going out and talking to people who didn't agree with him and winning them over one by one and even when he didn't win people over, he might soften their opposition or it might be reported in the newspaper that he was in the town and other people might read that and decide to vote. He was saying, look we gotta be doing this in a more traditional, political way of doing persuasion and the campaign was saying no. She wasn't listening to him. You know, she had a plan and she stuck with it and she lost. - Can we get this woman here in the and then all the way in the center this gentleman right here
in the middle of the seat. Give him, go ahead. - I think that the description
that you've given to us is an extremely interesting one from the perspective of
elections in the past. Have to say to you that it doesn't take into account the dynamics that were developed through
the Russian intervention and I want to speak to that particularly in relation to Hillary Clinton because what I think
you have to see is that if in fact Hillary Clinton
won the popular vote there must have been many people who voted for her as president but who were voting down ticket for the Republicans in
order to prevent her from being whatever it was, was being put into their mind she would be if she were president and so what you need to look at is the subversion of the total American political system by the Russians in the last election and no mechanism within the country to be able to defend against it. And I would say to you
that Hillary Clinton's plans were clearly laid out and would have been very effective had there not been the
undercurrent always, which was obviously a Republican way of doing things and the way they wanted to
see her being undermined but I would say that
the Russian intervention would probably at the beginning didn't expect that they would actually not have Hillary Clinton as president but were damn sure they wanted to make a situation were
she could not be successful worked very well and unless you look at the election from the perspective of
what is coming up now you really can't, you know because spent a lot of time talking about what Hillary did or what she didn't do but it really isn't that, that's the crux of the issue in relation to the way the country thinks about her. - Do you want to? - You can try. - I think that, first of all we knew before election day that the Russians were
intervening in our election. 17 US intelligence agencies came out with a report that said Russia was behind the DNC hacks. We saw President Trump, now President Trump, go out on the stump and encourage Wikileaks to release information damaging to Hillary Clinton or anybody who could hack
to her email to do it. Between those things, whether you get to the
point of collusion or not, you could see that Russia was involved and you could see that Donald Trump and Roger Stone and others, were encouraging that kind of activity and Hillary Clinton went on a debate state and made the case to the American public. She said Donald Trump you're a puppet of the Russian government. This was not a press aide
from her campaign saying it. It was not somebody from an outside group making the allegation, it wasn't an anonymous background source in a newspaper trying to, you know wreak havoc, this was the candidate for president of the Democratic Party standing on stage accusing the Republican candidate of being a puppet of Russia. The American public got to hear that case. They hadn't heard all the details that we've seen since then but they got to hear that case and they had a lot of evidence about it and they voted for Trump anyway. Obviously, as we've said before, with 70,000 votes you
could point to anything and say that it's possible that it was determinative. I think the Russian are doing a lot to try to disrupt the American society. That it's much larger
than just the elections but the elections certainly
was a piece of it. It appears that they were making some sort of effort to infiltrate the Trump circle. I can't draw conclusion cause I'm not in the intelligence briefings. I haven't heard all of the evidence but certainly there was, it looks like an effort to
recruit some of the people who were or claim to be
close to Donald Trump. The effort to manipulate the election does not necessarily equal success in manipulating the election and what we don't have evidence of is voting machines being changed. What we have evidence of is or at might some point have evidence of is propaganda reaching American voters. Whether that propaganda
is done by the Russians or by somebody else, I mean I don't know. It's hard to prove like what is the thing
that makes one voter vote in a certain way. I'm not sure we'll ever have like a quantitative
ability to analyze that but what I do know is
what Amie said before which is Hillary Clinton should never have been in a position
to lose to Donald Trump. It should never have been in a place were tens of thousands
of votes in a few states. Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, those are not states that
should have been close. We're learning more about
the Russian intervention but I think any voter
that was paying attention knew that there was this effort and the argument from
the Clinton campaign was, and one of the reasons you
shouldn't vote for Donald Trump is that the Russians
are trying to elect him. That was not successful. - I would argue that they
failed to make that case well because as Jon said, we knew about it. 17 intelligence agencies had said that. They had ample opportunity and debates to make that case but you might recall that after one debate they focused on the woman who they
called Ms. Housekeeping. - [Jon] Alicia Machado, say her name.
- Alicia Machado. (laughing) but that was the campaign talking point in the following week post that debate. When Russia was already a known quantity, she could and the campaign could have made a decision to actually, it was. - [Audience Member] So I'm just saying we had no idea of what the intention. - We knew that they were trying to ... - [Audience Member] We didn't know the extent of the infiltration. - Of course. - [Audience Member]
Nor did the population. - Yeah, we didn't know the extent of it but we knew that they
were involved is my point and that to me is, a foreign government
involved should be enough to get anyone's attention and I think a lot of people internally actually see that opportunity as a missed opportunity. The fact that they
focused on something else and not kind of hammering home a point that Russia was involved and that Russia was trying
to sway the election. - [Jon] And we hope
you'll read the chapter Red October in the book. - Let's get this gentleman here. - [Young Man] First of I'd like to thank you guys for coming on and speaking at Syracuse. It was great. I don't think that I'm
alone in saying that election night was quite a night. Entertaining for some and not so much for others but on that night one
image popped into my mind and it's in a bunch of history books of then President, or incumbent Truman holding up the newspaper saying Dewey defeats Truman. Of course, I don't know if
that was the New York Times, calling the election before they got the results
- Dispatch or something. - [Woman] Chicago Tribune - Chicago.
- Tribune. - [Young Man] Oh it was Chicago. But it was that idea that so many of these places were already calling the election for Hillary probably months before the election and my question is how were the polls so wrong and do you guys touch on those polls and how that affected the election. Do you guys talk about that in your book? - We do talk about that a bit. Their internal polling was even wrong because if you recall, they were trying to expand the map. They weren't going, they had originally scheduled an event with President Obama
in Wisconsin for instance, and that event was scrapped because of the tragedy in Orlando. But she never went there. Because the campaign's internal polls were telling them we're good here. We're good in Michigan. We're good in Pennsylvania. And they were trying to
go to places like Utah and Arizona, in fact she went to Arizona in the final days. Which tells you where the campaign was. They never, ever thought
that were in trouble in these blue states. I think, we were following
obviously network polls and their polling and up until the final
hours of the campaign, we were both talking to people who do polling for them and they were saying, no we're good. We feel good. They were feeling good and it wasn't until the final... I was at the Javits Center that night in a filing room for reporter. I was like furiously sending messages to people trying to figure out what was going on. You know my editor was
like what's happening. Do you have any sense of what the campaign is feeling right now? We got an email from a very
top official in the campaign who essentially said we gave
up on traditional polling in the final weeks of the campaign. They were relying, as
Jon said, on this data and they didn't see these certain places. They just, for whatever reason, they never saw it coming. This is what the source told us, "We never saw it coming." I think there's a lot to be learned in terms of polling and lessons learned there but I think, you know, there's something to be said also for people who weren't admitting that they were Trump supporters or Clinton supporters in
this particular election because I think they were both kind of contentious figures. But I think a lot of people will be studying what happened and how the networks got it so wrong and how the internal polling was so wrong in the years to come. - We also have in the
book for the first time, the contents of a memo that one of Hillary
Clinton's long time advisors sent to the campaign in, I want to say it was like
April or May of 2016, during the tail-end of the primaries, which basically said Donald Trump could win the presidency and one of the things you ought to do is add three or four points to
his side in any poll you see. That basically this advisor was saying, the polling is under
counting Trump's strength all across, and this isn't a pollster, it's just somebody who's watching what was going on in the primary polls. Somebody who had some friends
in the Republican Party and just had a sense that there was, you know an under count of Trump support. But he said add a few points to Trump and he turned out to be right but they didn't really listen to him. They sort of, the campaign leadership
treated people like that as though they were like kind of old-school soothsayers or something... - Even internal Republican polling was indicating in the final
days that they were seeing actually an increase, an uptick in support
- They were seeing tightening in the Republican polls. They were doing a better, they could see the Midwest getting closer and in some cases they held back on telling reporters what they were seeing because they thought the reporters wouldn't believe them. Minnesota was gonna be really close and like if anybody had said that publicly they would have been laughed at but as it turned out, was it like one or two points
in the end in Minnesota. I mean that's not a state that Republicans should win given the sort of basic
make-up of the state. - Other folks? Danielle here and someone else here. This gentleman in the back here. - Hi, thanks so much
for coming to Syracuse. It's so great to have you here. So, I want you to step back a little bit and talk for a minute about the legacy of Hillary Clinton and how you think your book fits into or conforms to or challenges the notion, the narrative around Hillary
Clinton as a fighter. So, if you remember in the first debate when they were asked to say one
nice thing about each other, Trump said when she gets beaten down, she gets back up and fights. How do you look at the
insights in your book as kind of consistent to what people have said about
Clinton for many, many years or challenging that? Whether she will get up and fight again in the future? Sort of the broader perspective about the legacy of Clinton. - We've always drawn that conclusion. I think that she was a fighter. I mean, in our first book, HRC, we talk about that quite a bit. How here's a woman who has been beaten, and beaten and beaten and then loses this brutal 2008 primary against a guy who came out of nowhere. And even then people were thinking how does she do it. How does she come back? How does she even get up the next day. She thought she was gonna win. She was beaten by this neophyte and then she has to go work for him. So, what's that like? I think on a human level, I think we can all relate to that. We've all fought battles. We've all lost battles and I think a lot of
people in the first book kind of related to the humanity of it. I think one of her biggest
things will be that she, I think her legacy is gonna be that she is a fighter and that she does kind of, I wanted to call our first
book The Phoenix in fact, because I feel like every time she takes a massive fall, she rises even higher. I think that is an
admirable trait for her. I think post-election, what I'm hearing from a lot of Democrats, that they're frustrated with her. That she refuses to go to the sidelines. That she wants to constantly make the case for why she
lost the election over and over again before even her book tour. There's a sense of frustration there. A lot of people are telling me, well why doesn't she take a cue from President Obama and just come up when she needs to come up and make her issues known when it matters. And so there's a sense of frustration now that not only has she done that repeatedly but now she's on this book tour that is her essentially
hurting the Democratic Party because it is pulling the Democratic Party back to 2016 instead of letting it kind of rebuild. I think there's some of that. I don't know how permanent that is or if that's just kind of what people are feeling right now. I don't know if you
agree with that or not. - Let me just start with, I hope you don't mind me saying this, Amie's a single mom and I'm a parent, I have two kids with my wife. I always think to myself, how is it that Amie deals with like her job, and the books and her kid is sick, and she's the one that
her child depends on and life's like many crazy
things coming at her, like how does she do all these things and then you think about somebody who's on that level
were they're doing that and they're getting knocked
down publicly all the time and with the exception of Twitter, I don't think people
say vile things to you, but if you're Hillary Clinton every time you walk out in public somebody is screaming
something vile at you and if you see a pin or a t-shirt at a convention that's for the other party, it's something that's awful about you. You just get beaten over and
over and over again in that way and you keep coming back. Like to your point, I think not only does
Donald Trump admire that but when you talk to people
about in the Clinton campaign what did voters respond to about her it was that. It was that she kept
getting up off the mat. I think that's a part of her legacy but I think more broadly what I would say about her legacy is that someday a woman will become
president of the United States and in her inaugural address or maybe on the night
she wins the election, certainly if it's a Democrat she will talk about
standing on the shoulders of Hillary Clinton and she will be right. That the nomination
ceiling has been broken or shattered. She will be right that Secretary Clinton walked a tightrope, tried to walk the tightrope that I think, I imagine certainly
every woman in this room who's been in the professional
world for a long time has had to walk. To be tough enough but not too tough. To be just right in a boardroom or just right in their negotiations over their next job and had to do that at this very sort of extremely public level. She's a trailblazer in a
pathbreaking generation of women. Wasn't the first generation of women to go to college or to be in the professional world but certainly in terms of
the sides of her generation, she's basically at the
beginning of the baby boom. So many professional women really changing society in a lot of ways and changing the way that our culture views families and that our culture views the empowerment of women in gender roles. Being in that position was always a struggle for her. In 1992 she talked about not just sitting home and baking cookies and got a tremendous backlash for that. She and her husband ran as
two for the price of one, which created, which was good in a Democratic primary but created a backlash
in the general election. I think that part of her legacy is that the next set of women who are running for president, and by the way people are talking about Elizabeth Warren, they're talking about Amy Klobuchar, they're talking about Kamala Harris, they're talking about Kirsten Gillibrand. When was the last time you had three or four women named as potential presidential candidates
in the next election. When I look at what's the
legacy of Hillary Clinton, I think the legacy of
Hillary Clinton is in a way, you know not to get too biblical on you but in a way to be the
sort of Moses character of women in politics who can see the promised
land to the presidency, but isn't able to get there herself. And someday, somebody help me with this. Is it Aaron that takes over for Moses. (audience laughing) Someday somebody else
will be that Aaron figure. I'm bad at biblical analogy but someday somebody else will get there and she will have been a big part of that and she will have been a big part of that as something she has done on her own. She took those shots and had she won the presidency, there would always be that question of how much was her husband responsible for her
winning the presidency. I don't think anybody would say her husband is solely responsible for her losing the presidency and certainly you can see that she took those shots that I think cleared a
way for the next set. - [Grant] This one in the back. - At the risk of being the
guy answering the question of women empowerment while I sit next to my co-author.
(audience laughing) - Okay, so you guys touched upon new blood in the Democratic party. So my question for you guys is, do you think that new blood
comes from within side the party or kind of like the Republicans did, like this outside source. Whether it's Mark Zuckerberg or a political article I read possibly Theo Epstein, the GM of the Cubs, possibly being an option really. - [Jon] That would be a data
analytics driven campaign. (audience laughing) So I was just curious what you guys though the next step was for
this new blood coming up. - I think it could be all of the above. We were talking earlier about how the pendulum could swing back after Donald Trump because he's this guy who wasn't a politician and how people might be thirsty for someone who is a
little more Washington, who is a little more seasoned. Who has those relationships, can make deals, unlike our deal maker
president. (laughing) But I think that a lot of people, it's hard to predict and I think the biggest
lesson I learned personally in 2016 was to stop making predictions. Because no one, no one,
no one would have seen, if you would have told me a year ago today that Donald Trump would be president, I would have thought you were the craziest person in the room and here we are. So I've learned not to do that. (laughing) - [Grant] Probably have time
for one more question here. We got this woman right here. - You start
- Wait, wait for the microphone please, thank you. - You started to touch on it, couple questions ago. I mean certainly her
campaign made mistakes and the Russians didn't help but why is it so many other countries, Western countries, third-world countries, have had women leaders and I feel that a fair part of the explanation is the American people were not ready for a women president? And I don't understand why. - I think that it was, first of all she won the popular vote. So I think the country was kind of, I would say, make the case, was ready for a women president. But I think they weren't ready for her. That plays on the ready
for Hillary thing (laughs) but I don't think she
was the right candidate. I think she had too
many likeability issues. I mean you look at what Republicans are doing today. They're using her as a foil. This is a woman who is no
longer in public office and I just did a story this week about how they're launching
inquiries into her still. They feel like she was
hiding this uranium deal that they're constantly talking about. I mean I think she, sadly, had too much baggage and too many likeability issues and they're tried to fix it. There were so many moments
during the campaign were her aides realized they weren't appealing to people and so they tried to roll
out likable Hillary Clinton. They even telegraphed that. There was a New York
Times piece that said, after Labor Day weekend here comes funny, lively Hillary Clinton, which - 10% off. (audience laughing) - Which I think ultimately was a problem. When we talk to people
internally about that they called it an unforced error. They realized that she
was struggling so much to win over people, that they were trying to
do all these new things and they were trying to put her on Ellen DeGeneres countless times and you know having Jimmy
Fallon touch her hair and try to you know expose
all these different things and for whatever reason it didn't work. But I think Jon's right, the fact that we are
talking about other women is a positive sign to me that she was a trailblazer to help other people who might not have those particular issues finally
shatter the glass ceiling. - I also think that
when you talk to voters and this is true of men and women, although in different measures, when you talk to voters, there are voters who would absolutely not vote for a women and there are voters who would almost vote for any women. That there sees such a positive and this tend to be more women than men but not entirely true, and then there are a lot
of people in between. There's a gray scale right of your willingness to vote for a female presidential candidate and what I found over time is, or what I've sort of
concluded over time is the job of a candidate, whether it's that issue or other issues, is to overcome the bias of people who think that whatever
the characteristic is as a handicap. So if you look at President Obama, 12% of the country is African-American. He's an African-American President. There are certainly some people who voted for him who didn't think to themselves when they woke up in the morning I want to vote for a
presidential candidate because he's black, right. So maybe some people did, but certainly a lot of people didn't. There are people who voted him, who also voted for Donald Trump. There are people who voted for him whom some people in this room would consider intolerant or racist, but what President Obama was able to do was I think get a lot of people who certainly didn't see his race as a huge positive attribute, a huge reason to vote for him to vote for him for other reasons. I think had Secretary Clinton been able to do that with people who were somewhat willing to vote for a female candidate but not necessarily excited about it, perhaps she would have done better. - Jon you invoked my political science background
at one point earlier. I'll channel it now and say the parliamentary
system helps that question. But let me just thank the two of you for first all your presentation and for your book and for in particular I think during the Q and A, putting on display the fairness and the evenhandedness that you obviously have when you were writing the book. I really appreciate that. So thank so much. - Thank you, thank you all (audience applauding)
