How She Lost

Hillary Clinton built a machine. The nation wanted a movement.

- Philip Elliot

From the start, there were things that were under Hillary Clinton’s control, and many, many things that never would be. She was a technocrat facing an America demanding revolution. She was a scarred but stalwart fighter in her third decade of battle, facing a new generation of enemies. Her instincts, oriented toward substantive debate, were in the words of one loyalist, “suboptimal” for a changing political scene in which voters were looking for attitude, not answers. When convinced she was right, she proved stubborn.

Yet there was potential for her and for history. No one hustled harder than Clinton, whose childhood Sunday-school lessons about the virtues of hard work and good deeds she had translated into a life in public service. She obsessed over details and demanded plans for everything, all the while being unfailingly kind to her allies and aides. And perhaps most appealing to the political professionals, she valued a well oiled campaign machine and recruited many of the people who built the one Barack Obama used in his two winning elections. It seemed, as she readied her campaign launch, the dysfunction that bedeviled her 2008 run for the White House had been exorcised.

So hundreds of Democratic operatives uprooted their lives, from the top-ranking leaders in the party who moved to New York for positions in the high-stakes, low-pay headquarters to the idealistic 20-somethings who registered only vague memories of Clinton’s time as First Lady or even her 2008 campaign. Aides who had launched the Obama campaigns shared offices, while others traded West Wing perches for cramped spaces and roommates. It was never going to be sexy, but it didn’t have to be. They were this generation’s best and brightest, matched with a trailblazer who was poised to become the first woman to earn the Oval Office.